Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley

by Robert Sheckley

  “My God! A steak!” the Pusher said.

  The Crew cheered along Talker’s communication circuits. The Pusher had said his first words!

  Talker examined the words and searched his memory. He knew about two hundred Pusher languages and many more simple variations. He found that this Pusher was speaking a cross between two Pusher tongues.

  After the Pusher had eaten, he looked around. Talker caught his thoughts and broadcast them to the Crew.

  The Pusher had a queer way of looking at the Ship. He saw it as a riot of colors. The walls undulated. In front of him was something resembling a gigantic spider, colored black and green, with his web running all over the Ship and into the heads of all the creatures. He saw Eye as a strange, naked little animal, something between a skinned rabbit and an egg yolk—whatever those things were.

  Talker was fascinated by the new perspective the Pusher’s mind gave him. He had never seen things that way before. But now that the Pusher was pointing it out, Eye was a pretty funny looking creature.

  They settled down to communication.

  “What in hell are you things?” the Pusher asked, much calmer now than he had been during the two days. “Why did you grab me? Have I gone nuts?”

  “No,” Talker said, “you are not psychotic. We are a galactic trading ship. We were blown off our course by a storm, and our Pusher was killed.”

  “Well, what does that have to do with me?”

  “We would like you to join our crew,” Talker said, “to be our new Pusher.”

  The Pusher thought it over after the situation was explained to him. Talker could catch the feeling of conflict in the Pusher’s thoughts. He hadn’t decided whether to accept this as a real situation or not. Finally, the Pusher decided that he wasn’t crazy.

  “Look, boys,” he said, “I don’t know what you are or how this makes sense. I have to get out of here. I’m on a furlough, and if I don’t get back soon, the US Army’s going to be very interested.”

  Talker asked the Pusher to give him more information about “army,” and he fed it to Thinker.

  “These Pushers engage in personal combat,” was Thinker’s conclusion.

  “But why?” Talker asked. Sadly he admitted to himself that Thinker might have been right; the Pusher didn’t show many signs of willingness to cooperate.

  “I’d like to help you lads out,” Pusher said, “but I don’t know where you get the idea that I could push anything this size. You’d need a whole division of tanks just to budge it.”

  “Do you approve of these wars?” Talker asked, getting a suggestion from Thinker.

  “Nobody likes war—not those who have to do the dying at least.”

  “Then why do you fight them?”

  The Pusher made a gesture with his eating organ, which Eye picked up and sent to Thinker. “It’s kill or be killed. You guys know what war is, don’t you?”

  “We don’t have any wars,” Talker said.

  “You’re lucky,” the Pusher said bitterly. “We do. Plenty of them.”

  “Of course,” Talker said. He had the full explanation from Thinker now. “Would you like to end them?”

  “Of course I would.”

  “Then come with us. Be our Pusher.”

  The Pusher stood up and walked up to an Accumulator. He sat down on it and doubled the ends of his upper limbs.

  “How the hell can I stop all wars?” the Pusher demanded. “Even if I went to the big shots and told them—”

  “You won’t have to,” Talker said. “All you have to do is come with us. Push us to our base. Galactic will send a Contact Team to your planet. That will end your wars.”

  “The hell you say,” the Pusher replied. “You boys are stranded here, huh? Good enough. No monsters are going to take over Earth.”

  Bewildered, Talker tried to understand the reasoning. Had he said something wrong? Was it possible that the Pusher didn’t understand him?

  “I thought you wanted to end wars,” Talker said.

  “Sure I do. But I don’t want anyone making us stop. I’m no traitor. I’d rather fight.”

  “No one will make you stop. You will just stop because there will be no further need for fighting.”

  “Do you know why we’re fighting?”

  “It’s obvious.”

  “Yeah? What’s your explanation?”

  “You Pushers have been separated from the main stream of the Galaxy,” Talker explained. “You have your specialty—Pushing—but nothing to Push. Accordingly, you have no real jobs. You play with things—metal, inanimate objects—but find no real satisfaction. Robbed of your true vocation, you fight from sheer frustration.

  “Once you find your place in the galactic Cooperation—and I assure you that it is an important place—your fighting will stop. Why should you fight, which is an unnatural occupation, when you can Push? Also, your mechanical civilization will end, since there will be no need for it.”

  The Pusher shook his head in what Talker guessed was a gesture of confusion. “What is this pushing?”

  Talker told him as best he could. Since the job was out of his scope, he had only a general idea of what a Pusher did.

  “You mean to say that that is what every Earthman should be doing?”

  “Of course,” Talker said. “It is your great specialty.”

  The Pusher thought about it for several minutes. “I think you want a physicist or a mentalist or something. I could never do anything like that. I’m a junior architect. And besides—well, it’s difficult to explain.”

  But Talker had already caught Pusher’s objection. He saw a Pusher female in his thoughts. No, two, three. And he caught a feeling of loneliness, strangeness. The Pusher was filled with doubts. He was afraid.

  “When we reach galactic,” Talker said, hoping it was the right thing, “you can meet other Pushers. Pusher females, too. All you Pushers look alike, so you should become friends with them. As far as loneliness in the Ship goes—it just doesn’t exist. You don’t understand the Cooperation yet. No one is lonely in the Cooperation.”

  The Pusher was still considering the idea of there being other Pushers. Talker couldn’t understand why he was so startled at that. The Galaxy was filled with Pushers, Feeders, Talkers, and many other species, endlessly duplicated.

  “I can’t believe that anybody could end all war,” Pusher said. “How do I know you’re not lying?”

  Talker felt as if he had been struck in the core. Thinker must have been right when he said these Pushers would be uncooperative. Was this going to be the end of Talker’s career? Were he and the rest of the Crew going to spend the rest of their lives in space, because of the stupidity of a bunch of Pushers?

  Even thinking this, Talker was able to feel sorry for the Pusher. It must be terrible, he thought. Doubting, uncertain, never trusting anyone. If these Pushers didn’t find their place in the Galaxy, they would exterminate themselves. Their place in the Cooperation was long overdue.

  “What can I do to convince you?” Talker asked.

  In despair, he opened all the circuits to the Pusher. He let the Pusher see Engine’s good-natured gruffness, the devil-may-care humor of the Walls; he showed him Eye’s poetic attempts, and Feeder’s cocky good nature. He opened his own mind and showed the Pusher a picture of his home planet, his family, the tree he was planning to buy when he got home.

  The pictures told the story of all of them, from different planets, representing different ethics, united by a common bond—the galactic Cooperation.

  The Pusher watched it all in silence.

  After a while, he shook his head. The thought accompanying the gesture was uncertain, weak—but negative.

  Talker told the Walls to open. They did, and the Pusher stared in amazement.

  “You may leave,” Talker said. “Just remove the communication line and go.”

  “What will you do?”

  “We will look for another Pusher planet.”

  “Where? Mars? Venus?”


  “We don’t know. All we can do is hope there is another in this region.”

  The Pusher looked at the opening, then back at the Crew. He hesitated and his face screwed up in a grimace of indecision.

  “All that you showed me was true?”

  No answer was necessary.

  “All right,” the Pusher said suddenly. “I’ll go. I’m a damned fool, but I’ll go. If this means what you say—it must mean what you say!”

  Talker saw that the agony of the Pusher’s decision had forced him out of contact with reality. He believed that he was in a dream, where decisions are easy and unimportant.

  “There’s just one little trouble,” Pusher said with the lightness of hysteria. “Boys, I’ll be damned if I know how to Push. You said something about faster-than-light? I can’t even run the mile in an hour.”

  “Of course you can Push,” Talker assured him, hoping he was right. He knew what a Pusher’s abilities were; but this one ...

  “Just try it.”

  “Sure,” Pusher agreed. “I’ll probably wake up out of this, anyhow.”

  They sealed the ship for takeoff while Pusher talked to himself.

  “Funny,” Pusher said. “I thought a camping trip would be a nice way to spend a furlough, and all I do is get nightmares!”

  Engine boosted the Ship into the air. The Walls were sealed and Eye was guiding them away from the planet.

  “We’re in open space now,” Talker said. Listening to Pusher, he hoped his mind hadn’t cracked. “Eye and Thinker will give a direction, I’ll transmit it to you, and you Push along it.”

  “You’re crazy,” Pusher mumbled. “You must have the wrong planet. I wish you nightmares would go away.”

  “You’re in the Cooperation now,” Talker said desperately. “There’s the direction. Push!”

  The Pusher didn’t do anything for a moment. He was slowly emerging from his fantasy, realizing that he wasn’t in a dream, after all. He felt the Cooperation. Eye to Thinker, Thinker to Talker, Talker to Pusher, all inter-coordinated with Walls, and with each other.

  “What is this?” Pusher asked. He felt the oneness of the Ship, the great warmth, the closeness achieved only in the Cooperation.

  He Pushed.

  Nothing happened.

  “Try again,” Talker begged.

  Pusher searched his mind. He found a deep well of doubt and fear. Staring into it, he saw his own tortured face.

  Thinker illuminated it for him.

  Pushers had lived with this doubt and fear for centuries. Pushers had fought through fear, killed through doubt.

  That was where the Pusher organ was!

  Human—specialist—Pusher—he entered fully into the Crew, merged with them, threw mental arms around the shoulders of Thinker and Talker.

  Suddenly, the Ship shot forward at eight times the speed of light. It continued to accelerate.

  WARM

  ANDERS lay on his bed, fully dressed except for his shoes and black bow tie, contemplating, with a certain uneasiness, the evening before him. In twenty minutes he would pick up Judy at her apartment, and that was the uneasy part of it.

  He had realized, only seconds ago, that he was in love with her.

  Well, he’d tell her. The evening would be memorable. He would propose, there would be kisses, and the seal of acceptance would, figuratively speaking, be stamped across his forehead.

  Not too pleasant an outlook, he decided. It really would be much more comfortable not to be in love. What had done it? A look, a touch, a thought? It didn’t take much, he knew, and stretched his arms for a thorough yawn.

  “Help me!” a voice said.

  His muscles spasmed, cutting off the yawn in midmoment. He sat upright on the bed, then grinned and lay back again.

  “You must help me!” the voice insisted.

  Anders sat up, reached for a polished shoe, and fitted it on, giving his full attention to the tying of the laces.

  “Can you hear me?” the voice asked. “You can, can’t you?”

  That did it. “Yes, I can hear you,” Anders said, still in a high good humor. “Don’t tell me you’re my guilty subconscious, attacking me for a childhood trauma I never bothered to resolve. I suppose you want me to join a monastery.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the voice said. “I’m no one’s subconscious. I’m me. Will you help me?”

  Anders believed in voices as much as anyone; that is, he didn’t believe in them at all, until he heard them. Swiftly he catalogued the possibilities. Schizophrenia was the best answer, of course, and one in which his colleagues would concur. But Anders had a lamentable confidence in his own sanity. In which case—

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” the voice answered.

  Anders realized that the voice was speaking within his own mind. Very suspicious.

  “You don’t know who you are,” Anders stated. “Very well. Where are you?”

  “I don’t know that, either.” The voice paused, and went on. “Look, I know how ridiculous this must sound. Believe me, I’m in some sort of limbo. I don’t know how I got here or who I am, but I want desperately to get out. Will you help me?”

  Still fighting the idea of a voice speaking within his head, Anders knew that his next decision was vital. He had to accept—or reject—his own sanity.

  He accepted it.

  “All right,” Anders said, lacing the other shoe. “I’ll grant that you’re a person in trouble, and that you’re in some sort of telepathic contact with me. Is there anything else you can tell me?”

  “I’m afraid not,” the voice said, with infinite sadness. “You’ll have to find out for yourself.”

  “Can you contact anyone else?”

  “No.”

  “Then how can you talk with me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Anders walked to his bureau mirror and adjusted his black bow tie, whistling softly under his breath. Having just discovered that he was in love, he wasn’t going to let a little thing like a voice in his mind disturb him.

  “I really don’t see how I can be of any help,” Anders said, brushing a bit of lint from his jacket. “You don’t know where you are, and there don’t seem to be any distinguishing landmarks. How am I to find you?” He turned and looked around the room to see if he had forgotten anything.

  “I’ll know when you’re close,” the voice said. “You were warm just then.”

  “Just then?” All he had done was look around the room. He did so again, turning his head slowly. Then it happened.

  The room, from one angle, looked different. It was suddenly a mixture of muddled colors, instead of the carefully blended pastel shades he had selected. The lines of wall, floor, and ceiling were strangely off proportion, zigzag, unrelated.

  Then everything went back to normal.

  “You were very warm,” the voice said.

  Anders resisted the urge to scratch his head, for fear of disarranging his carefully combed hair. What he had seen wasn’t so strange. Everyone sees one or two things in his life that make him doubt his normality, doubt sanity, doubt his very existence. For a moment the orderly Universe is disarranged and the fabric of belief is ripped.

  But the moment passes.

  Anders remembered once, as a boy, awakening in his room in the middle of the night. How strange everything had looked! Chairs, table, all out of proportion, swollen in the dark. The ceiling pressing down, as in a dream.

  But that also had passed.

  “Well, old man,” he said, “if I get warm again, tell me.”

  “I will,” the voice in his head whispered. “I’m sure you’ll find me.”

  “I’m glad you’re so sure,” Anders said gaily, switched off the lights, and left.

  Lovely and smiling, Judy greeted him at the door. Looking at her, Anders sensed her knowledge of the moment. Had she felt the change in him, or predicted it? Or was love making him grin like an idiot?<
br />
  “Would you like a before-party drink?” she asked.

  He nodded, and she led him across the room, to the improbable green-and-yellow couch. Sitting down, Anders decided he would tell her when she came back with the drink. No use in putting off the fatal moment. A lemming in love, he told himself.

  “You’re getting warm again,” the voice said.

  He had almost forgotten his invisible friend. Or fiend, as the case could well be. What would Judy say if she knew he was hearing voices? Little things like that, he reminded himself, often break up the best of romances.

  “Here,” she said, handing him a drink.

  Still smiling, he noticed. The number two smile—to a prospective suitor, provocative and understanding. It had been preceded, in their relationship, by the number one nice-girl smile, the don’t-misunderstand-me smile, to be worn on all occasions, until the correct words have been mumbled.

  “That’s right,” the voice said. “It’s in how you look at things.”

  Look at what? Anders glanced at Judy, annoyed at his thoughts. If he was going to play the lover, let him play it. Even through the astigmatic haze of love, he was able to appreciate her blue-gray eyes, her fine skin (if one over-looked a tiny blemish on the left temple), her lips, slightly reshaped by lipstick.

  “How did your classes go today?” she asked.

  Well, of course she’d ask that, Anders thought. Love is marking time.

  “All right,” he said. “Teaching psychology to young apes—”

  “Oh, come now!”

  “Warmer,” the voice said.

  What’s the matter with me, Anders wondered. She really is a lovely girl. The gestalt that is Judy, a pattern of thoughts, expressions, movements, making up the girl I—

  I what?

  Love?

  Anders shifted his long body uncertainly on the couch. He didn’t quite understand how this train of thought had begun. It annoyed him. The analytical young instructor was better off in the classroom. Couldn’t science wait until 9:10 in the morning?

  “I was thinking about you today,” Judy said, and Anders knew that she had sensed the change in his mood.

  “Do you see?” the voice asked him. “You’re getting much better at it.”