Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley

by Robert Sheckley

  But it had awareness, and certain tropisms, affinities, reactions. It was resourceful. It knew what it needed. So it scanned space, waiting for its missing components.

  In the region of Bootes he came to a little cherry-red sun, and as the ship swung in, he saw that one of its planets was the rare, beautiful blue-green color of Earth.

  “Look at this!” Fleming shouted, turning from the controls, his voice breaking with excitement. “Earth type. It is Earth type, isn’t it, Howard? We’ll make a fortune on this one!”

  Howard came forward slowly from the ship’s galley, munching on a piece of avocado. He was short and bald, and he carried a dignified paunch the size of a small watermelon. He was irritated, for he had been deeply involved in making dinner. Cooking was an art with Howard, and had he not been a businessman, he would have been a chef. They ate well on all their trips, because Howard had a way with fried chicken, served his roasts with Howard sauce, and was especially adept at Howard salad.

  “It might be Earth type,” he said, staring coldly at the blue-green planet.

  “Of course it is,” Fleming said. Fleming was young, and more enthusiastic than any man had a right to be in space. He was gaunt, in spite of Howard’s cooking, and his carroty hair fell messily over his forehead. Howard tolerated him, not only because Fleming had a way with ships and engines; above all, Fleming had a businesslike attitude. A businesslike attitude was most necessary in space, where it cost a small fortune just to raise ship.

  “If only it’s not populated,” Fleming was praying in his enthusiastic, businesslike way. “If only it’s all ours. Ours, Howard! An Earthtype planet! God, we can sell the real estate alone for a fortune, to say nothing of mineral rights, refueling rights, and everything else.”

  Howard swallowed the last of his avocado. Young Fleming still had a lot to learn. Finding and selling planets was a business, exactly like growing and selling oranges. There was a difference, of course; oranges aren’t dangerous, and planets sometimes are. But then, oranges don’t make the profits a good planet can.

  “Shall we land on our planet now?” Fleming asked eagerly.

  “By all means,” Howard said. “Only—that space station ahead leads me to believe that the inhabitants might consider it their planet.”

  Fleming looked. Sure enough, a space station, previously hidden by the planet’s bulk, was swinging into sight.

  “Oh, damn,” Fleming said, his narrow freckled face twisting into a pout. “It’s populated, then. Do you suppose we could—” He left the sentence unfinished, but glanced at the gunfire controls.

  “Hmm.” Howard looked at the space station, appraised the technology that had built it, then glanced at the planet. Regretfully he shook his head. “No, not here.”

  “Oh, well,” Fleming said. “At least we have first trading rights.” He looked out the port again and caught Howard’s arm. “Look—the space station.”

  Across the gray metal surface of the sphere bright lights were winking in sequence.

  “What do you suppose it means?” Fleming asked.

  “I have no idea,” Howard told him, “and we’ll never find out here. You may as well land on the planet, if no one tries to stop you.”

  Fleming nodded, and switched the controls to manual. For a few moments, Howard watched.

  The control board was covered with dials, switches, and gauges, which were made of metal, plastics, and quartz. Fleming, on the other hand, was flesh and blood and bone. It seemed impossible that any relationship could exist between them, except the most perfunctory. Instead, Fleming seemed to merge into the control board. His eyes scanned the dials with mechanical precision, his fingers became extensions of the switches. The metal seemed to become pliable under his hands, and amenable to his will. The quartz gauges gleamed red, and Fleming’s eyes shone red, too, with a glow that didn’t seem entirely reflection.

  Once the deceleration spiral had been entered, Howard settled himself comfortably in the galley. He estimated his fuel and food expenditures, plus depreciation on the ship. To the sum he added a safe third, and marked it down in a ledger. It would come in useful later, for his income tax.

  They landed on the outskirts of a city, and waited for the local customs officials. No one came. They ran the standard atmosphere and microorganism tests, and continued waiting. Still no one came. After half a day, Fleming undogged the hatch, and they started toward the city.

  The first skeletons, scattered across the bomb-torn concrete road, puzzled them; it seemed so untidy. What civilized people left skeletons in their roads? Why didn’t someone clean up?

  The city was populated only by skeletons, thousands, millions, packed into crumbling theaters, fallen at the doorways of dusty stores, scattered across the bullet-ripped streets.

  “Must have had a war on,” Fleming said brightly.

  In the center of the city they found a parade grounds where rank upon rank of uniformed skeletons lay upon the grass. The reviewing stands were packed with skeleton officials, skeleton officers, skeleton wives and parents. And behind the stands were skeleton children, gathered to see the fun.

  “A war, all right,” Fleming said, nodding his head with finality. “They lost.”

  “Obviously,” Howard said. “But who won?”

  “What?”

  “Where are the victors?”

  At that moment the space station passed overhead, casting a shadow across the silent ranks of skeletons. Both men glanced up uneasily.

  “You think everyone’s dead?” Fleming asked hopefully.

  “I think we should find out.”

  They walked back to the ship. Fleming began to whistle out of sheer high spirits, and kicked a mound of pocked bones out of his way. “We’ve struck it rich,” he said, grinning at Howard.

  “Not yet,” Howard said cautiously. “There may be survivors—” He caught Fleming’s look and smiled in spite of himself.

  “It does look like a successful business trip.”

  Their tour of the planet was brief. The blue-green world was a bomb-splattered tomb. On every continent, the towns contained their tens of thousands of bony inhabitants, each city its millions. The plains and mountains were scattered with skeletons, and there were skeletons in the lakes, and skeletons in the forests and jungles.

  “What a mess!” Fleming said at last, as they hovered over the planet. “What do you suppose the population was here?”

  “I’d estimate it at nine billion, give or take a billion,” Howard said.

  “What do you suppose happened?”

  Howard smiled sagely. “There are three classic methods of genocide. The first is pollution of the atmosphere by poison gas. Allied to that is radioactive poisoning, which kills the plant life as well. And finally, there are mutated laboratory germs, created solely for the purpose of attacking whole populations. If they get out of hand, they can wipe out a planet.”

  “Think that happened here?” Fleming asked, with lively interest.

  “I believe so,” Howard said, wiping an apple on his arm and biting into it. “I’m no pathologist, but the marks on those bones—”

  “Germs,” Fleming said. he coughed involuntarily. “You don’t suppose—”

  “You’d be dead already, if they were still active. All this must have happened several hundred years ago, to judge by the weathering of the skeletons. The germs die for lack of a human host.”

  Fleming nodded emphatically. “That’s made to order. Oh, it’s too bad about the people. Fortunes of war and all that. But this planet really is ours!” He peered out the port at the rich green fields below. “What’ll we call it, Howard?”

  Howard looked at the fields, and the wild, overgrown pastureland that bordered the concrete roads. “We might call it Paradise II,” he said. “This place ought to be a farmer’s heaven.”

  “Paradise II! That’s pretty good,” Fleming said. “I suppose we’ll have to hire a gang to clear off those skeletons. Looks too weird-like.”

 
; Howard nodded. There were many details to be attended to. “We’ll do that after—”

  The space station passed over them.

  “The lights!” Howard cried suddenly.

  “Lights?” Fleming stared at the receding sphere.

  “When we came in. Remember? Those flashing lights?”

  “Right.” Fleming said. “Do you suppose someone is holed up in the station?”

  “We’ll find out right now,” Howard said grimly. He took a determined bite of his apple as Fleming turned the ship.

  When they reached the space station the first thing they saw was the other ship, clinging to the station’s polished metal as a spider clings to its web. It was small, a third the size of their ship, and one of its hatches was ajar.

  The two men, suited and helmeted, paused in front of the hatch. Fleming seized the hatch in his gloved hands, and pulled it completely open. Cautiously they aimed their flash-lights inside, looked, and jerked abruptly back. Then Howard motioned impatiently, and Fleming started in.

  There was the body of a man inside, half out of the pilot’s chair, frozen forever in that unstable position. His face was fleshed enough to show his death agony, but the skin had been eaten bone deep in spots by some disease.

  Piled high in the rear of the ship were dozens of wooden cases. Fleming broke one open and flashed his light inside.

  “Food,” Howard said.

  “Must have tried to hide in the space station,” Fleming said.

  “Looks that way. He never made it.” They left the ship quickly, a little disgusted. Skeletons were acceptable; they were self-contained entities in themselves. But this corpse was too eloquently dead.

  “So who turned on the lights?” Fleming asked, on the surface of the station.

  “Perhaps they were on automatic relay,” Howard said doubtfully. “There couldn’t be any survivors.”

  They walked across the surface of the station, and found the entrance.

  “Shall we?” asked Fleming.

  “Why bother?” Howard said quickly. “The race is dead. We might as well go back and file our claim.”

  “If there’s even one survivor in there,” Fleming reminded him, “the planet’s his by law.”

  Howard nodded unwillingly. It would be too bad to make the long, expensive trip back to Earth, return with their surveying teams, and find someone cozily keeping house in the space station. It would be different if survivors were hiding on the planet. Legally, they would still have a valid claim. But a man in the space station, which they had neglected to examine—

  “I suppose we must,” Howard said, and opened the hatch.

  Within, they were in total darkness. Howard turned his flashlight on Fleming. In its yellow glow, Fleming’s face was completely shadowless, stylized like a primitive mask. Howard blinked, a little frightened at what he saw, for at that moment, Fleming’s face was completely depersonalized.

  “Air’s breathable,” Fleming said, and immediately regained his personality.

  Howard pushed back his helmet and turned up the light. The sheer mass of the walls seemed to crush in on him. He groped in his pocket, found a radish, and popped it in his mouth for morale.

  They started forward.

  For half an hour they walked along a narrow, winding corridor, their flashlights pushing the darkness ahead of them. The metal floor, which had seemed so stable, began to creak and groan from hidden stresses, setting Howard’s nerves on edge. Fleming seemed unaffected.

  “This place must have been a bombing station,” he remarked after a while.

  “I suppose so.”

  “Simply tons of metal here,” Fleming said conversationally, tapping one of the walls. “I suppose we’ll have to sell it for junk, unless we can salvage some of the machinery.”

  “The price of scrap metal—” Howard began. But at that instant a section of floor opened directly under Fleming’s feet. Fleming plunged out of sight so quickly that he didn’t have a chance to scream, and the section of floor slammed back into place.

  Howard staggered back, as though physically struck. His flashlight seemed to blaze maniacally for a moment, then fade. Howard stood perfectly still, his hands raised, his mind caught in the timelessness of shock.

  The shock wave receded slowly, leaving Howard with a dull, pounding headache. “—is not particularly good just now,” he said inanely, finishing his sentence, wishing that nothing had happened.

  He stepped close to the section of floor and called, “Fleming.”

  There was no answer. A shudder passed over his body. He shouted, “Fleming!” at the top of his lungs, leaning over the sealed floor. He straightened up, his head pounding painfully, took a deep breath, turned, and trotted back to the entrance. He did not allow himself to think.

  The entrance, however, was sealed, and its fused edges were still hot. Howard examined it with every appearance of interest. He touched it, tapped it, kicked it. Then he became aware of the darkness pressing against him. He whirled, perspiration pouring down his face.

  “Who’s there?” he shouted down the corridor. “Fleming! Can you hear me?”

  There was no answer.

  He shouted, “Who did this? Why did you flash the station lights? What did you do to Fleming?” He listened for a moment, then went on, sobbing for breath. “Unseal the entrance! I’ll go, and I won’t tell anyone!”

  He waited, shining his light down the corridor, wondering what lay behind the darkness. Finally he screamed, “Why don’t you open a trapdoor under me?”

  He lay back against the wall, panting. No trapdoor opened. Perhaps, he thought, no trapdoor will. The thought gave him a moment’s courage. Sternly he told himself that there had to be another way out. He walked back up the corridor.

  An hour later he was still walking, his flashlight stabbing ahead, and darkness creeping at his back. He had himself under control now, and his headache had subsided to a dull ache. He had begun to reason again.

  The lights could have been on automatic circuit. Perhaps the trapdoor had been automatic, too. As for the self-sealing entrance—that could be a precaution in time of war, to make sure that no enemy agent could sneak in.

  He knew that his reasoning wasn’t too sound, but it was the best he could do. The entire situation was inexplicable. That corpse in the spaceship, the beautiful dead planet—there was a relationship, somewhere. If only he could discover where.

  “Howard,” a voice said.

  Howard jumped back convulsively, as though he had touched a high-tension wire. Immediately his headache resumed.

  “It’s me,” the voice said. “Fleming.”

  Howard flashed his light wildly in all directions. “Where? Where are you?”

  “About two hundred feet down, as well as I can judge,” Fleming said, his voice floating harshly down the corridor. “The audio hookup isn’t very good, but it’s the best I can do.”

  Howard sat down in the corridor, because his legs refused to hold him up. He was relieved, however. There was something sane about Fleming being two hundred feet down, something very human and understandable about an imperfect audio hookup.

  “Can you get up? How can I help you?”

  “You can’t,” Fleming said, and there was a crackle of static which Howard thought was a chuckle. “I don’t seem to have much ... body left.”

  “But where is your body?” Howard insisted seriously.

  “Gone, smashed in the fall. There’s just enough left of me to hook into circuit.”

  “I see,” said Howard, feeling strangely light-headed. “You’re now just a brain, a pure intelligence.”

  “Oh, there’s a little more to me than that,” Fleming said. “As much as the machine needs.”

  Howard started to giggle nervously, for he had an image of Fleming’s gray brain swimming in a pool of crystal water. He stopped himself, and said, “The machine? What machine?”

  “The space station. I imagine it’s the most intricate machine ever built. It f
lashed the lights and opened the door.”

  “But why?”

  “I expect to find out,” Fleming said. “I’m a part of it now. Or perhaps it’s a part of me. Anyhow, it needed me, because it’s not really intelligent. I supply that.”

  “You? But the machine couldn’t know you were coming!”

  “I don’t mean me, specifically. The man outside, in the ship, he was probably the real operator. But I’ll do. We’ll finish the builder’s plans.”

  Howard calmed himself with an effort. He couldn’t think any more right now. His only concern was to get out of the station, back to his ship. To do this, he had Fleming to work with; but a new, unpredictable Fleming. He sounded human enough—but was he?”

  “Fleming,” Howard said tentatively.

  “Yes, old man?”

  That was encouraging. “Can you get me out of here?”

  “I think so,” Fleming’s voice said. “I’ll try.”

  “I’ll come back with neurosurgeons,” Howard assured him. “You’ll be all right.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Fleming said. “I’m all right now.”

  Howard lost count of the hours he walked. One narrow corridor followed another, and dissolved into still more corridors. He grew tired, and his legs began to stiffen. As he walked, he ate. There were sandwiches in his knapsack, and he munched on them mechanically, for strength.

  “Fleming,” he called finally, stopping to rest.

  After a long pause he heard a barely recognizable sound, like metal grating against metal.

  “How much longer?”

  “Not much longer,” the grating, metallic voice said. “Tired?”

  “Yes.”

  “I will do what I can.”

  Fleming’s voice was frightening, but silence was even more frightening. As Howard listened, he heard an engine, deep in the heart of the station, spurt into life.

  “Fleming?”

  “Yes?”

  “What is all this? Is it a bomb station?”

  “No. I do not know the purpose of the machine yet. I am still not entirely integrated.”

  “But it does have a purpose?”

  “Yes!” The metallic voice grated so loud that Howard winced. “I possess a beautifully functional interlocking apparatus. In temperature control alone I am capable of a range of hundreds of degrees in a microsecond, to say nothing of my chemical mixing stores, power sources, and all the rest. And, of course, my purpose.”