Is That What People Do?

by Robert Sheckley

  “And you threatened me,” Myra said.

  “Not really. I said I wouldn’t be responsible for the consequences. I was really referring to my sanity. For days after that I thought about you. Suddenly I realized I had to see you. Absolutely had to! So I came here, hid the ship—”

  “And walked around dressed as a Scarb,” Jameson sneered.

  “Not at first,” Edward said. “After I saw you, I guess—well, I guess I fell in love with you. I knew then that if you stayed on Coelle—practically next door, astronomically—I could find the strength to stay on Kerma and finish my book. But I saw that this Jameson fellow was trying to scare you off. So I decided to scare him off.”

  “Well,” Myra said, “I’m glad we finally have met. I enjoyed your book so much.”

  “Did you?” Edward said, his face brightening.

  “Yes. It inspired me to live on Coelle. But I’m sorry to hear it was all a fraud.”

  “It wasn’t!” Edward cried. “The hermit thing was my agent’s idea, but the book was perfectly genuine, and I did have all those experiences, and I did feel those things. I like being away from civilization, and I especially like having my own planet. The only thing wrong...”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, Kerma would be perfect if only I had one other person with me. Someone who understands, who feels as I do.”

  “I know just how you feel,” Myra said.

  They looked at each other. When Jameson saw that look, he moaned and put his head in his hands.

  “Come on, friend,” Olson said, dropping a sympathetic hand on Jameson’s shoulder. “You’re trumped. I’ll give you a lift back to Earth.”

  Ross nodded vaguely, and started to the door with Olson. Olson said, “Say, I imagine you folks will be needing only one planet before long, huh?”

  Myra blushed crimson. Edward looked embarrassed, then said in a firm voice, “Myra and I are going to get married. That is, if you’ll have me, Myra. Will you marry me, Myra?”

  She said yes in a very small voice.

  “That’s what I thought,” Olson said. “So you won’t be needing two planets. Would one of you care to lease your mineral rights? It’d be a nice little income, you know. Help to set up housekeeping.”

  Ross Jameson groaned and hurried out the door.

  “Well,” Edward said to Myra, “it isn’t a bad idea. We’ll be living on Kerma, so you might as well—”

  “Just a minute,” Myra said. “We are going to live on Coelle and no other place.”

  “No!” Edward said. “After all the work I’ve put into Kerma, I will not abandon it.”

  “Coelle has a better climate.”

  “Kerma has a lighter gravity.”

  Olson said, “When you get it figured out, you’ll give Transstellar Mining first chance, won’t you? For old times’ sake?”

  They both nodded. Olson shook hands with them and left.

  Arnold said, “I believe that solves the mysteries of the Skag Castle. We’ll be going now, Myra. We’ll return your ship on drone circuit.”

  “I don’t know how to thank you,” Myra said.

  “Perhaps you’ll come to our wedding,” Edward said.

  “We’d be delighted.”

  “It’ll be on Coelle, of course,” Myra said.

  “Kerma!”

  When the partners left, the young couple were glaring angrily at each other.

  VI

  When they were at last in space, Terra-bound, Gregor said, “That was a very handsome job of detection.”

  “It was nothing,” Arnold said modestly. “You would have figured it out yourself in a few months.”

  “Thanks. And it was very nice of you, speaking up for Edward the way you did.”

  “Well, Myra was a bit strong-minded for me,” Arnold said. “And a trifle provincial. I am, after all, a creature of the great cities.”

  “It was still an extremely decent thing to do.”

  Arnold shrugged.

  “The trouble is, how will Myra and Edward solve this planet problem? Neither seems the type to give in.”

  “Oh, that’s as good as solved,” Gregor said offhandedly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why, it’s obvious,” Gregor said. “And it fills the one gaping hole in your otherwise logical reconstruction of events.”

  “What hole? What is it?”

  “Oh, come now,” Gregor said, enjoying his opportunity to the utmost. “It’s apparent.”

  “I don’t see it. Tell me.”

  “I’m sure you’ll figure it out in a few months. Think I’ll take a nap.”

  “Don’t be that way,” Arnold pleaded. “What is it?”

  “All right. How tall was Jameson’s electronic Scarb, the one that frightened Myra?”

  “About nine feet.”

  “And how tall was Edward, disguised as a Scarb?”

  “About six feet tall.”

  “And the Scarb we saw in our bedroom, the one we shot at—”

  “Good Lord!” Arnold gasped. “That Scarb was only four feet tall. We have one Scarb left over!”

  “Exactly. One Scarb that no one produced artificially, and that we can’t account for—unless Coelle actually is haunted.”

  “I see what you mean,” Arnold said thoughtfully. “They’ll have to move to Kerma. But we didn’t really fulfill our contract.”

  “We did enough,” Gregor said. “We decontaminated three distinct species of Skag—produced by Jameson, Olson, and Edward. If they want a fourth species taken care of, that’ll be a separate contract.”

  “You’re right,” Arnold said. “It’s about time we became businesslike. And it’s for their own good. Something has to make up their minds for them.” He thought for a moment. “I suppose they’ll leave Coelle to Transstellar Mining. Should we tell Olson that the planet is really haunted?”

  “Certainly not,” Gregor said. “He’d just laugh at us. Have you ever heard of ghosts frightening an automatic mining machine?”

  THE HELPING HAND

  Travis had been fired from his job that morning. Boring and low-paying though it had been, it had given him something to live for. Now he had nothing at all, and in his hand he held the means of cutting short a futile and humiliating existence. The bottle contained pellis annabula, a quick, sure, and painless poison. He had stolen it from his former employer, Carlyle Industrial Chemicals. PA was a catalyst used to fix hydrocarbons. Travis was going to fix himself with it, once and for all.

  His few remaining friends thought Travis was a neurotic attention-seeker because of his previous suicide attempts. Well, he would show them this time, and they’d be sorry. Perhaps even his wife would shed a tear or two.

  The thought of his wife steeled Travis’s resolution. Leota’s love had changed into an indifferent tolerance, and finally into hate—the sharp, domineering, acidic sort against which he was helpless. And the damnable thing was that he still loved her.

  Do it now, he thought. He closed his eyes and raised the bottle.

  Before he could drink, the bottle was knocked out of his hand. He heard Leota’s sharp voice: “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “It should be obvious,” Travis said.

  She studied his face with interest. Leota was a large, hard-faced woman with a gift for never-ending beastliness. But now her face had softened.

  “You were really going to do it this time, weren’t you?”

  “I’m still going to,” Travis said. “Tomorrow or next week will do as well.”

  “I never believed you had it in you,” she said. “Some of our friends thought you had guts, but I never did. Well, I guess I’ve really put you through hell all these years. But someone had to run things.”

  “You stopped caring for me a long time ago,” Travis said. “Why did you stop me now?”

  Leota didn’t answer immediately. Could she be having a change of heart? Travis had never seen her like this before.

  “I’ve misjudged you
,” she said at last. “I always figured you were bluffing, just to annoy me. Remember when you threatened to jump from the window? You leaned out—like this.”

  Leota leaned from the window, her body poised over the street twenty stories below. “Don’t do that!” Travis said sharply.

  She moved back in, smiling. “That’s funny, coming from you. Don’t tell me you still care?”

  “I could,” Travis said. “I know I could—if only you and I—”

  “Perhaps,” Leota said, and Travis felt a flash of hope, though he barely dared acknowledge it. Women were so strange! There she was, smiling. She put her hands firmly on his shoulders, saying, “I couldn’t let you kill yourself. You have no idea how strongly I feel about you.”

  Travis found it impossible to answer. He was moved. His wife’s strong, caring hands on his shoulders had moved him inexpressibly—straight through the open window.

  As his fingers missed the sill and he fell toward the street, Travis heard his wife calling, “I feel enough, darling, to want this done my way.”

  THE LAST DAYS OF (PARALLEL?) EARTH

  When the end of the world was announced, Rachel and I decided not to break up after all. “What would be the sense?” she asked me. “We will have no time to form other relationships.” I nodded, but I was not convinced. I was worried about what would happen if the world did not end, if the great event were delayed, postponed, held over indefinitely. There might have been a miscalculation concerning the effect of the Z-field, the scientists might have been wrong about the meaning of the Saperstein Conjunction, and there we would be, Rachel and I, with our eternal complaints, and our children with their eternal complaints, bound together by apocalyptic conjunction stronger than our marriage vows, for eternity or until Armageddon, whichever came first. I put this to Rachel in what I hoped was a nice way, and she said to me, “Don’t worry, if the world does not end on schedule as predicted by eminent scientists, you will return to your dismal furnished apartment and I will stay here with the children and my lover.”

  That was reassuring, and of course, I didn’t want to spend the end of the world by myself in the dismal furnished apartment I shared with the Japanese girl and her English boyfriend and no television. There would be nothing to do there but listen to the Japanese girl talk to her friends on the telephone and eat in the Chinese restaurant, which had promised to stay open throughout the end of the world or as long as physically possible, since the owner did not believe in making changes hastily.

  Rachel said, “I don’t want to face anything like this straight,” so she brought out her entire stash, the Thai sticks, the speckled brown cocaine, the acid in the form of tiny red stars, the gnarled mushrooms from God knows where, the red Lebanese and the green Moroccan, yes, and the last few treasured Quaaludes, and a few Mogadon for good measure. She said, “Let’s pool our mind-blowing resources and go out before we come down.”

  Other people had made their own preparations. The airlines were running end-of-the-world specials to Ultima Thule, Valparaiso, Kuala Lumpur: kinky trips for demising people. The networks were making a lot of the event, of course. Some of our favorite programs were cut, replaced by End of the World Specials. We tuned into “The Last Talkathon” on CBS: “Well, it sure looks like the kite is going up at last. I have a guest here, Professor Mandrax from UCLA, who is going to explain to us just how the big snuff is going to come about.”

  Whatever channel you turned to, there were physicists, mathematicians, biologists, chemists, linguistic philosophers, and commentators to try to explain what they were explaining. Professor Johnson, the eminent cosmologist, said, “Well, of course, it’s not exactly a cosmological event, except metaphorically, in its effect upon us. We humans, in our parochial way, consider these things to be very important. But I can assure you that in the scale of magnitude I work on, this event is of no significance, is banal, in fact; our little O-type sun entering the Z-field just at the time of the Saperstein Conjunction, with the ensuing disarrangement of local conditions. I am imprecise on purpose, of course, since Indeterminacy renders exactitude a nineteenth-century hangup. But Professor Weaver of the Philosophy Department might have more to say about that.”

  “Well, yes,” Professor Weaver said, “‘end of the world’ is a somewhat loose expression. What we are faced with is a viewpoint problem. We could say that, from some other point of observation, if such exists, this ending is the end of nothing at all. Just one moment of pain, my dear, and then eternal life, to quote the poet.”

  On another channel we heard that the army was issuing turkey dinners to all our servicemen in Germany. There had been some talk of flying them home, but we decided to keep them in position in case it was not the end of the world after all, but instead some devious communistic scheme of the sort we know the Russians are capable of, with their twisted sense of humor and their implacable will to give everyone a hard time. And we heard that the Chinese hadn’t even announced the fact, or so-called fact, to their population at large, except obliquely, in the form of posters no larger than postage stamps, signed by “A Concerned Neighbor from Neighborhood C.”

  And Rachel couldn’t understand why Edward, her lover, insisted upon staying in his room and working on his novel. “It’s not apropos any longer,” she told him. “There’s not going to be anyone around to publish it or read it.”

  “What has that got to do with it?” Edward asked, and winked at me.

  I understood perfectly, was in fact working like a berserker to finish my own account of the last day, yes, and with great pleasure, for the end of the world presents a writer with the greatest deadline of them all, the ultimate deadline: twelve o’clock midnight tonight and that’s all she wrote, folks. What a challenge! I knew that artists all over the world were responding to it, that an end-of-the-world oeuvre was being created that might be of interest to historians in a world parallel to our own in which this catastrophe did not take place.

  “Well, yes,” Professor Carpenter said, “the concept of parallel universes is, I would say, licit but unprovable, at least in the time we have left. I myself would consider it a wish-fulfillment fantasy, though my good friend Professor Mung, the eminent psychologist, is more competent to speak of that than I.”

  Rachel made her famous turkey dinner that night, with the stuffing and the cranberry sauce and the sweet-potato pie with meringue topping, and she even made her special Chinese spareribs as an extra treat, even though the Chinese refused to believe in the event except in postage-stamp-size posters of oriental foreboding. And everyone in the world began smoking cigarettes again, except for the irreducible few who did not believe in the end of the world and were therefore still scared of lung cancer. And people on their deathbeds struggled to stay alive a little longer, just a little longer, so that when I go, the whole damn thing goes. And some doctors stayed on call, declaring it their ludicrous duty, while others compulsively played golf and tennis and tried to forget about improving their strokes.

  The turkey with four drumsticks and eight wings. Lewd displays on television: since all is over, all is allowed. The compulsive answering of business letters: Dear Joe, take your contract and stick it up your giggie the show is over and I can finally tell you what a crap artist you are, but if there is any mistake about the End I want you to know that this letter is meant as a joke which I’m sure that you as the very special person you are can appreciate.

  All of us were caught between the irreconcilable demands of abandonment and caution. What if we are not to die? Even belief in the end of the world required an act of faith on the part of dishwashers as well as university professors.

  And that last night of creation I gave up cigarettes forever. An absurdity. What difference did it make? I did it because Rachel had always told me that absurdities made a difference, and I had always known that, so I threw away my pack of Marlboros and listened while Professor Mung said, “Wish fulfillment, or its obverse, death-wish fulfillment, cannot licitly be generalized into an o
bjective correlative, to use Eliot’s term. But if we take Jung into our synthesis, and consider this ending as an archetype, not to say Weltanschauung, our understanding increases as our tiempo para gastarlo disappears into the black hole of the past which contains all our hopes and endeavors.”

  The final hour came at last. I carved the turkey and Edward came out of his room long enough to take a plateful of breast and ask for my comments on his final rewrite of his last chapter, and I said, “It still needs work,” and Rachel said, “That’s cruel,” and Edward said, “Yes, I thought it needed something myself,” and went back to his room. Outside, the streets were deserted except for the unfortunate few who couldn’t get to a television set, and we did up most of the remaining drugs and switched wildly between channels. I had brought my typewriter into the kitchen and I was getting it all down, and Rachel talked of the holidays we should have taken, and I thought about the women I should have loved, and at five to twelve Edward came out of his room again and showed me the rewritten last chapter, and I said, “You’ve got it this time,” and he said, “I thought so, is there any more coke left?” And we did up the rest of the drugs and Rachel said to me, “For Chrissakes, can’t you stop typing?” And I said, “I have to get it all down,” and she hugged me, and Edward hugged me, and the three of us hugged the children, whom we had allowed to stay up late because it was the end of the world, and I said, “Rachel, I’m sorry about everything,” and she said, “I’m sorry too,” and Edward said, “I don’t think I did anything wrong, but I’m sorry too.” “Sorry about what?” the children asked, but before we had a chance to tell them, before we could even decide what we were sorry about…

  THE FUTURE LOST

  Leonard Nisher was found in front of the Plaza Hotel in a state of agitation so extreme that it took the efforts of three policemen and a passing tourist from Biloxi, Mississippi, to subdue him. Taken to St. Clare’s Hospital, he had to be put into a wet pack—a wet sheet wound around the patient’s arms and upper body. This immobilized him long enough for an intern to get a shot of Valium into him.