Is That What People Do?

by Robert Sheckley

  The injection had taken effect by the time Dr. Miles saw him. Miles told two husky aides, one of them a former guard for the Detroit Lions, and a psychiatric nurse named Norma to wait outside. The patient wasn’t going to assault anyone just now. He was throttled way back, riding the crest of a Valium wave where there’s nothing to hassle and even a wet pack can have its friendly aspects.

  “Well, Mr. Nisher, how do you feel now?” Miles asked.

  “I’m fine, doc,” Nisher said. “Sorry I caused that trouble when I came out of the space-time anomaly and landed in front of the Plaza.”

  “It could affect anyone that way,” Miles said reassuringly.

  “I guess it sounds pretty crazy,” Nisher said. “There’s no way I can prove it, but I have just been into the future and back again.”

  “Is the future nice?” Miles asked.

  “The future,” Nisher said, “is a pussycat. And what happened to me there—well, you’re not going to believe it.”

  The patient, a medium-sized white male of about thirty-five, wearing an off-white wet pack and a broad smile, proceeded to tell the following story.

  Yesterday he had left his job at Hanratty & Smirch, Accountants, at the usual time and gone to his apartment on East Twenty-fifth Street. He was just putting the key in the lock when he heard something behind him. Nisher immediately thought mugger, and whirled around in the cockroach posture that was the basic defense mode in the Taiwanese karate he was studying. There was no one there. Instead there was a sort of red, shimmering mist. It floated toward Nisher and surrounded him. Nisher heard weird noises and saw flashing lights before he blacked out.

  When he regained consciousness, someone was saying to him, “Don’t worry, it’s all right.” Nisher opened his eyes and saw that he was no longer on Twenty-fifth Street. He was sitting on a bench in a beautiful little park with trees and ponds and promenades and strangely shaped statues and tame deer, and there were people strolling around, wearing what looked like Grecian tunics. Sitting beside him on the bench was a kindly, white-haired old man dressed like Charlton Heston playing Moses.

  “What is this?” Nisher asked. “What’s happened?”

  “Tell me,” the old man said, “did you happen to run into a reddish cloud recently? Aha! I thought so! That was a local space-time anomaly, and it has carried you away from your own time and into the future.”

  “The future?” Nisher said. “The future what?”

  “Just the future,” the old man said. “We’re about four hundred years ahead of you, give or take a few years.”

  “You’re putting me on,” Nisher said. He asked the old man in various ways where he really was, and the old man replied that he really was in the future, and it was not only true, it wasn’t even unusual, though of course it wasn’t the sort of thing that happens every day. At last Nisher had to accept it.

  “Well, okay,” he said. “What sort of future is this?”

  “A very nice one,” the old man assured him.

  “No alien creatures have taken us over?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Has lack of fossil fuels reduced our standard of living to a bare subsistence level?”

  “We solved the energy crisis a few hundred years ago when we discovered an inexpensive way of converting sand into shale.”

  “What are your major problems?”

  “We don’t seem to have any.”

  “So this is Utopia?”

  The old man smiled. “You must judge for yourself. Perhaps you would like to look around during your brief stay here.”

  “Why brief?”

  “These space-time anomalies are self-regulating,” the old man said. “The universe won’t tolerate for long your being here when you ought to be there. But it usually takes a little while for the universe to catch up. Shall we go for a stroll? My name is Ogun.”

  They left the park and walked down a pleasant, tree-lined boulevard. The buildings were strange to Nisher’s eye and seemed to contain too many strange angles and discordant colors. They were set back from the street and bordered with well-kept green lawns. It looked to Nisher like a really nice future. Nothing exotic, but nice. And there were people walking around in their Grecian tunics, and they all looked happy and well fed. It was like a Sunday in Central Park.

  Then Nisher noticed one couple who had gone beyond the talking stage. They had taken their clothes off. They were, to use a twentieth-century expression, making it.

  No one seemed to think this was unusual. Ogun didn’t comment on it; so Nisher didn’t say anything, either. But he couldn’t help noticing, as they walked along, that other people were making it, too. Quite a few people. After passing the seventh couple so engaged, Nisher asked Ogun whether this was some sexual holiday or whether they had stumbled onto a fornicator’s convention.

  “It’s nothing special,” Ogun said.

  “But why don’t these people do it in their homes or in hotel rooms?”

  “Probably because most of them happened to meet here in the street.”

  That shook Nisher. “Do you mean that these couples never knew each other before?”

  “Apparently not,” Ogun said. “If they had, I suppose they would have arranged for a more comfortable place in which to make love.”

  Nisher just stood there and stared. He knew it was rude, but he couldn’t help it. Nobody seemed to mind. He observed how people looked at each other as they walked along, and every once in a while somebody would smile at someone, and someone else would smile back, and they would sort of hesitate for a moment, and then…

  Nisher tried to ask about twenty questions at the same time. Ogun interrupted. “Let me try to explain, since you have so little time among us. You come from an age of sexual repression and rebelliousness. To you this must appear a spectacle of unbridled license. For us it is no more than a normal expression of affection and solidarity.”

  “So you’ve solved the problem of sex!” Nisher said.

  “More or less by accident,” Ogun told him. “We were really trying to abolish war before it obliterated us. But to get rid of war, we had to change the psychological base upon which it rests. Repressed sexuality was found to be the greatest single factor. Once this was recognized and the information widely disseminated, a universal plebiscite was held. It was agreed that human sexual mores were to be modified and reprogrammed for the good of the entire human race. Biological engineering and special clinics—all on a voluntary basis, of course—took care of that. Divorced from aggression and possessiveness, sex today is a mixture of aesthetics and sociability.”

  Nisher was about to ask Ogun how that affected marriage and the family when he noticed that Ogun was smiling at an attractive blonde and edging over in her direction. “Hey, Ogun!” Nisher said. “Don’t leave me now!”

  The old man looked surprised. “My dear fellow, I wasn’t going to exclude you. Quite the contrary, I want to include you. We all do.”

  Nisher saw that a lot of people had stopped. They were looking at him, smiling.

  “Now wait a minute,” he said, automatically taking up the cockroach posture.

  But by then a woman had hold of his leg, and another was snuggling up under his armpit, and somebody else was pinching his Fingers. Nisher got a little hysterical and shouted at Ogun, “Why are they doing this?”

  “It is a spontaneous demonstration of our great pleasure at the novelty and poignancy of your presence. It happens whenever a man from the past appears among us. We feel so sorry for him and what he has to go back to, we want to share with him, share all the love we have. And so this happens.”

  Nisher felt as though he were in the middle of a Cinemascope mob scene set in ancient Rome, or maybe Babylon. The street was crowded with people as far as the eye could see, and they were all making it with one another and on top of one another and around and under and over and in between. But what really got to Nisher was the feeling that the crowd gave off. It went completely beyond sex. It felt like
a pure ocean of love, compassion, and understanding. He saw Ogun’s face receding in a wave of bodies and called out, “How far does this thing go?”

  “Visitors from the past always send out big vibrations,” Ogun shouted back. “This will probably go all the way.”

  All the way? Nisher couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. Then he got it and said, almost reverently, “Do you mean—planet-wide?”

  Ogun grinned, then he was gone. Nisher saw the way it had to be—this group of people loving one another and pulling more and more people into it as the vibes got stronger and stronger until everybody in the world was in on it. To Nisher this was definitely Utopia. He knew he had to figure out some way of bringing this message back to his own time, some way to convince people. Then he looked up and saw that he was on Central Park South, in front of the Plaza.

  “I suppose the transition was just too much for you?” Miles asked.

  Nisher smiled. His eyelids were drooping. The Valium rush was passing, and he was coming down fast.

  “I guess I just freaked out,” Nisher said. “I thought I could explain it to everyone. I thought I could just grab people and make them give up their hangups, that I could show them how their bodies were shaped for love. But I went at it too hysterically, of course; I scared them. And then the cops grabbed me.”

  “How do you feel now?” Miles asked.

  “I’m tired and disappointed, and I’ve come back to my senses, if that’s what you want to call it. Maybe it was all an hallucination. That doesn’t matter. What counts is that I’m back and in my own day and age, when we still have wars and energy crises and sexual hangups, and nothing I can do will change that.”

  “You seem to have made a very rapid adjustment,” Miles said.

  “Hell, yes. No one ever accused Leonard Nisher of being a slow adjuster.”

  “You sound good to me,” Miles said. “But I would like you to stay here for a few days. This is not a punishment, you understand. It is genuinely meant as an assistance to you.”

  “Okay, doc,” Nisher said drowsily. “How long must I stay?”

  “Perhaps no more than a day or two. I’ll release you as soon as I’m satisfied with your condition.”

  “Fair enough,” Nisher mumbled. And then he fell asleep. Miles told the orderlies to stand by, and alerted the psychiatric nurse. Then he went to his nearby apartment to get some rest.

  Nisher’s story haunted Miles as he broiled a steak for his lunch. It couldn’t be true, of course. But suppose, just suppose, it had actually happened. What if the future had achieved a state of polymorphous-perverse sexuality? There was, after all, a fair amount of evidence that space-time anomalies did exist.

  Abruptly he decided to visit his patient again. He left his apartment and went back to the hospital, hurrying now, impelled by a strange sense of urgency.

  There was no one at the reception desk on Wing Two. The policeman normally stationed in the corridor was missing. Miles ran down the hall. Leonard’s door was open, and Miles peered in.

  Someone had folded Leonard’s cot and leaned it against the wall. That left just enough room on the floor for two aides (one a former guard for the Detroit Lions), a psychiatric nurse named Norma, two student nurses, a policeman, and a middle-aged woman from Denver who had been visiting a relative.

  “Where is Leonard?” cried Miles.

  “That guy musta hypnotized me,” the policeman said, struggling into his trousers.

  “He preached a message of love,” said the woman from Denver, wrapping herself in Leonard’s wet pack.

  “Where is he?” Miles shouted.

  White curtains flapped at the open window. Miles stared out into the darkness. Nisher had escaped. His mind inflamed by his brief vision of the future, he was sure to be preaching his message of love up and down the country. He could be anywhere, Miles thought. How on earth can I find him? How can I join him?

  WILD TALENTS, INC.

  Glancing at his watch, Waverley saw that he still had ten minutes before the reporters were due. “Now then,” he said in his best interviewing voice, “what can I do for you, sir?”

  The man on the other side of the desk looked startled for a moment, as though unaccustomed to being addressed as sir. Then he grinned, suddenly and startlingly.

  “This is the place, isn’t it?” he asked. “The place of refuge?”

  Waverley looked intently at the thin, bright-eyed man. “This is Wild Talents, Incorporated,” he said. “We’re interested in any supernormal powers.”

  “I knew that,” the man said, nodding vigorously. “That’s why I escaped. I know you’ll save me from them.” He glanced fearfully over his shoulder.

  “We’ll see,” Waverley said diplomatically, settling back in his chair. His young organization seemed to hold an irresistible fascination for the lunatic fringe. As soon as he had announced his interest in psi functions and the like, an unending stream of psychotics and quacks had beaten a path to his door.

  But Waverley didn’t bar even the obvious ones. Ridiculously enough, you sometimes found a genuine psi among the riffraff, a diamond in the rubbish. So—

  “What do you do, Mr.—”

  “Eskin, Sidney Eskin,” the man said. “I’m a scientist, sir.” He drew his ragged jacket together, assuming an absurd dignity. “I observe people, I watch them, and note down what they are doing, all in strict accordance with the best scientific methods and procedure.”

  “I see,” Waverley said. “You say you escaped?”

  “From the Blackstone Sanitarium, sir. Frightened by my investigations, secret enemies had me locked up. But I escaped, and have come to you for aid and sanctuary.”

  Tentatively, Waverley classified the man as paranoidal. He wondered whether Eskin would become violent if he tried to call Blackstone.

  “You say you observe people,” Waverley said mildly. “That doesn’t sound supernormal—”

  “Let me show you,” the man said, with a sudden show of panic. He stared intently at Waverley. “Your secretary is in the reception room, seated at her desk. She is, at the moment, powdering her nose. She is doing it very delicately, applying the strokes with a circular motion. Now she is reaching forward, the powder box in her hand—ah! She has inadvertently spilled it against the typewriter. She says ‘Damn!’ under her breath. Now she—”

  “Hold it,” Waverley said. He hurried over and opened the door to the reception room.

  Doris Fleet, his secretary, was mopping up spilled powder. Some of it had dusted her black hair a creamy white, giving her the appearance of a kitten that had rolled in flour.

  “I’m sorry, Sam,” she said.

  “On the contrary,” Waverley said, “I’m grateful.” He didn’t bother to explain, but closed the door and hurried back to Eskin.

  “You will protect me?” Eskin asked, leaning over the desk. “You won’t let them take me back?”

  “Can you observe like that all the time?” Waverley asked.

  “Of course!”

  “Then don’t worry about a thing,” Waverley said calmly, but with a pulse of excitement rising within him. Lunatic or not, Eskin wasn’t going to waste his talents in any sanitarium. Not if Waverley had anything to do about it.

  The intercom on his desk buzzed. He flipped the switch, and Doris Fleet said, “The reporters are here, Mr. Waverley.” “Hold them a moment,” Waverley said, smiling to himself at her “official” tone of voice. He ushered Eskin to a little room adjoining his office. “Stay here,” he told him. “Don’t make any noise, and don’t worry.”

  He closed the door, locked it, and told Doris to let the reporters in.

  There were seven of them, pads out, and Waverley thought he could detect a certain grudging respect in their faces. Wild Talents, Inc. wasn’t back-page filler anymore. Not since Billy Walker, Waverley’s star psi, had aided the flight of the Venture to Mars with a terrific telekinetic boost. Since then, Wild Talents had been front-page news.

  Waverley
had played it for all it was worth, holding back until he felt the maximum point of interest had been reached.

  This was the point. Waverley waited until they were all quiet.

  “Wild Talents, Incorporated, gentlemen,” he told them, “is an attempt to find the occasional person among the general population who has what we call psi powers.”

  “What is a psi power?” a lanky reporter asked.

  “It is difficult to define,” Waverley said, smiling with what he hoped was perfect candor. “Let me put it to you this way—”

  “Sam!” He heard Doris Fleet’s voice in his head as clearly as though she were standing beside him. Although she might not be the best of secretaries, Doris was a telepath. Her ability worked only about twenty percent of the time, but that twenty percent sometimes came in useful.

  “Sam, two of the men in your office. They’re not reporters.”

  “What are they?” he thought back.

  “I don’t know,” Doris told him. “But I think they might mean trouble.”

  “Can you get a line on what sort of trouble?”

  “No. They’re the ones in the dark suits. They’re thinking—” Her thought died out.

  Telepathy is lightning-fast. The entire exchange had taken perhaps a second. Waverley spotted the two men, sitting a little apart from the rest, and taking no notes. He went on.

  “A psi, gentlemen, is a person with some form of mental control or development, the true nature of which we can only guess at. Today, most psis are to be found in circuses and sideshows. They lead, for the most part, unhappy, neurotic lives. My organization is trying to find the work that their special talents equip them for. Next we hope to discover why and how it works, and what makes it so erratic. We want—”

  He continued, laying it on thick. Public acceptance was a big factor in his work, a factor he had to have on his side. The public, stimulated by atomic power and enormously excited by the recent flights to the moon and Mars, was prepared to accept the idea of psi, if it could be made sufficiently understandable for them.