Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley

by Robert Sheckley

  “I don’t like any of this,” Simon said, getting to his feet. “I think I’ll just go see a movie.”

  “Wait!” Mr. Tate cried. “You think we’re trying to put something over on you. You think we’ll introduce you to a girl who will act as though she loved you, but who in reality will not. Is that it?”

  “I guess so,” Simon said.

  “But it just isn’t so! It would be too costly for one thing. For another, the wear and tear on the girl would be tremendous. And it would be psychologically unsound for her to attempt living a lie of such depth and scope.”

  “Then how do you do it?”

  “By utilizing our understanding of science and the human mind.”

  To Simon, this sounded like double-talk. He moved toward the door.

  “Tell me something,” Mr. Tate said. “You’re a bright looking young fellow. Don’t you think you could tell real love from a counterfeit item?”

  “Certainly.”

  “There’s your safeguard! You must be satisfied, or don’t pay us a cent.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Simon said.

  “Why delay? Leading psychologists say that real love is a fortifier and a restorer of sanity, a balm for damaged egoes, a restorer of hormone balance, and an improver of the complexion. The love we supply you has everything: deep and abiding affection, unrestrained passion, complete faithfulness, an almost mystic affection for your defects as well as your virtues, a pitiful desire to please, and, as a plus that only Love, Inc., can supply: that uncontrollable first spark, that blinding moment of love at first sight!”

  Mr. Tate pressed a button. Simon frowned undecisively. The door opened, a girl stepped in, and Simon stopped thinking.

  She was tall and slender, and her hair was brown with a sheen of red. Simon could have told you nothing about her face, except that it brought tears to his eyes. And if you asked him about her figure, he might have killed you.

  “Miss Penny Bright,” said Tate, “meet Mr. Alfred Simon.”

  The girl tried to speak but no words came, and Simon was equally dumbstruck. He looked at her and knew. Nothing else mattered. To the depths of his heart he knew that he was truly and completely loved.

  They left at once, hand in hand, and were taken by jet to a small white cottage in a pine grove, overlooking the sea, and there they talked and laughed and loved, and later Simon saw his beloved wrapped in the sunset flame like a goddess of fire. And in blue twilight she looked at him with eyes enormous and dark, her known body mysterious again. The moon came up, bright and lunatic, changing flesh to shadow, and she wept and beat his chest with her small fists, and Simon wept, too, although he did not know why. And at last dawn came, faint and disturbed, glimmering upon their parched lips and locked bodies, and nearby the booming surf deafened, inflamed, and maddened them.

  At noon they were back in the offices of Love, Inc. Penny clutched his hand for a moment, then disappeared through an inner door.

  “Was it real love?” Mr. Tate asked.

  “Yes!”

  “And was everything satisfactory?”

  “Yes! It was love, it was the real thing! But why did she insist on returning?”

  “Posthypnotic command,” Mr. Tate said.

  “What?”

  “What did you expect? Everyone wants love, but few wish to pay for it. Here is your bill, sir.”

  Simon paid, fuming. “This wasn’t necessary,” he said. “Of course I would pay you for bringing us together. Where is she now? What have you done with her?”

  “Please,” Mr. Tate said soothingly. “Try to calm yourself.”

  “I don’t want to be calm!” Simon shouted. “I want Penny!”

  “That will be impossible,” Mr. Tate said, with the barest hint of frost in his voice. “Kindly stop making a spectacle of yourself.”

  “Are you trying to get more money out of me?” Simon shrieked. “All right, I’ll pay. How much do I have to pay to get her out of your clutches?” And Simon yanked out his wallet and slammed it on the desk.

  Mr. Tate poked the wallet with a stiffened forefinger. “Put that back in your pocket,” he said. “We are an old and respectable firm. If you raise your voice again, I shall be forced to have you ejected.”

  Simon calmed himself with an effort, put the wallet back in his pocket, and sat down. He took a deep breath and said, very quietly, “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s better,” Mr. Tate said. “I will not be shouted at. However, if you are reasonable, I can be reasonable, too. Now, what’s the trouble?”

  “The trouble?” Simon’s voice started to lift. He controlled it and said, “She loves me.”

  “Of course.”

  “Then how can you separate us?”

  “What has the one thing got to do with the other?” Mr. Tate asked. “Love is a delightful interlude, a relaxation, good for the intellect, for the ego, for the hormone balance, and for the skin tone. But one would hardly wish to continue loving, would one?”

  “I would,” Simon said. “This love was special, unique—”

  “They all are,” Mr. Tate said. “But as you know, they are all produced in the same way.”

  “What?”

  “Surely you know something about the mechanics of love production?”

  “No,” Simon said. “I thought it was—natural.”

  Mr. Tate shook his head. “We gave up natural selection centuries ago, shortly after the Mechanical Revolution. It was too slow, and commercially unfeasible. Why bother with it, when we can produce any feeling at will by conditioning and proper stimulation of certain brain centers? The result? Penny, completely in love with you! Your own bias, which we calculated, in favor of her particular somatotype, made it complete. We always throw in the dark sea-beach, the lunatic moon, the pallid dawn—”

  “Then she could have been made to love anyone,” Simon said slowly.

  “Could have been brought to love anyone,” Mr. Tate corrected.

  “Oh, lord, how did she get into this horrible work?” Simon asked.

  “She came in and signed a contract in the usual way,” Tate said. “It pays very well. And at the termination of the lease, we return her original personality—untouched! But why do you call the work horrible? There’s nothing reprehensible about love.”

  “It wasn’t love!” Simon cried.

  “But it was! The genuine article! Unbiased scientific firms have made qualitative tests of it, in comparison with the natural thing. In every case, our love tested out to more depth, passion, fervor, and scope.”

  Simon shut his eyes tightly, opened them, and said, “Listen to me. I don’t care about your scientific tests. I love her, she loves me, that’s all that counts. Let me speak to her! I want to marry her!”

  Mr. Tate wrinkled his nose in distaste. “Come, come, man! You wouldn’t want to marry a girl like that! But if it’s marriage you’re after, we deal in that, too. I can arrange an idyllic and nearly spontaneous love-match for you with a guaranteed government-inspected virgin—”

  “No! I love Penny! At least let me speak to her!”

  “That will be quite impossible,” Mr. Tate said.

  “Why?”

  Mr. Tate pushed a button on his desk. “Why do you think? We’ve wiped out the previous indoctrination. Penny is now in love with someone else.”

  And then Simon understood. He had realized that even now Penny was looking at another man with that passion he had known, feeling for another man that complete and bottomless love that unbiased scientific firms had shown to be so much greater than the old-fashioned, commercially unfeasible natural selection, and that upon that same dark sea-beach mentioned in the advertising brochure—

  He lunged for Tate’s throat. Two attendants, who had entered the office a few moments earlier, caught him and led him to the door.

  “Remember!” Tate called. “This in no way invalidates your own experience.”

  Hellishly enough, Simon knew that what Tate said was true.

&nb
sp; And then he found himself on the street.

  At first, all he desired was to escape from Earth, where the commercial impracticalities were more than a normal man could afford. He walked very quickly, and his Penny walked beside him, her face glorified with love for him, and him, and him, and you, and you.

  And of course he came to the shooting gallery.

  “Try your luck?” the manager asked.

  “Set ’em up,” said Alfred Simon.

  A WIND IS RISING

  OUTSIDE, a wind was rising. But within the station, the two men had other things on their minds. Clayton turned the handle of the water faucet again and waited. Nothing happened.

  “Try hitting it,” said Nerishev.

  Clayton pounded the faucet with his fist. Two drops of water came out. A third drop trembled on the spigot’s lip, swayed, and fell. That was all.

  “That does it,” Clayton said bitterly. “That damned water pipe is blocked again. How much water we got in storage?”

  “Four gallons—assuming the tank hasn’t sprung another leak,” said Nerishev. He stared at the faucet, tapping it with long, nervous fingers. He was a big, pale man with a sparse beard, fragile-looking in spite of his size. He didn’t look like the type to operate an observation station on a remote and alien planet. But the Advance Exploration Corps had discovered, to its regret, that there was no type to operate a station.

  Nerishev was a competent biologist and botanist. Although chronically nervous, he had surprising reserves of calm. He was the sort of man who needs an occasion to rise to. This, if anything, made him suitable to pioneer a planet like Carella I.

  “I suppose somebody should go out and unblock the water pipe,” said Nerishev, not looking at Clayton.

  “I suppose so,” Clayton said, pounding the faucet again. “But it’s going to be murder out there. Listen to it!”

  Clayton was a short man, bull-necked, red-faced, powerfully constructed. This was his third tour of duty as a planetary observer.

  He had tried other jobs in the Advance Exploration Corps, but none suited him. PEP—Primary Extraterrestrial Penetration—faced him with too many unpleasant surprises. It was work for daredevils and madmen. But Base Operations was much too tame and restricting.

  He liked the work of a planetary observer, though. His job was to sit tight on a planet newly opened by the PEP boys and checked out by a drone camera crew. All he had to do on this planet was stoically endure discomfort and skillfully keep himself alive. After a year of this, the relief ship would remove him and note his report. On the basis of the report, further action would or would not be taken.

  Before each tour of duty, Clayton dutifully promised his wife that this would be the last. After this tour, he was going to stay on Earth and work on the little farm he owned. He promised ...

  But at the end of each rest leave, Clayton journeyed out again, to do the thing for which he was best suited: staying alive through skill and endurance.

  But this time, he had had it. He and Nerishev had been eight months on Carella. The relief ship was due in another four months. If he came through alive, he was going to quit for good.

  “Just listen to that wind,” Nerishev said.

  Muffled, distant, it sighed and murmured around the steel hull of the station like a zephyr, a summer breeze.

  That was how it sounded to them inside the station, separated from the wind by three inches of steel plus a soundproofing layer.

  “It’s rising,” Clayton said. He walked over to the wind-speed indicator. According to the dial, the gentle-sounding wind was blowing at a steady 82 miles an hour—

  A light breeze on Carella.

  “Man, oh, man!” Clayton said. “I don’t want to go out there. Nothing’s worth going out there.”

  “It’s your turn,” Nerishev pointed out.

  “I know. Let me complain a little first, will you? Come on, let’s get a forecast from Smanik.”

  They walked the length of the station, their heels echoing on the steel floor, past compartments filled with food, air supplies, instruments, extra equipment. At the far end of the station was the heavy metal door of the receiving shed. The men slipped on air masks and adjusted the flow.

  “Ready?” Clayton asked.

  “Ready.”

  They braced themselves, gripping handholds beside the door. Clayton touched the stud. The door slid away and a gust of wind shrieked in. The men lowered their heads and butted into the wind, entering the receiving shed.

  The shed was an extension of the station, some thirty feet long by fifteen feet wide. It was not sealed, like the rest of the structure. The walls were built of openwork steel, with baffles set in. The wind could pass through this arrangement, but slowed down, controlled. A gauge told them it was blowing 34 miles an hour within the shed.

  It was a damned nuisance, Clayton thought, having to confer with the natives of Carella in a 34-mile gale. But there was no other way. The Carellans, raised on a planet where the wind never blew less than 70 miles an hour, couldn’t stand the “dead air” within the station. Even with the oxygen content cut down to the Carellan norm, the natives couldn’t make the adjustment. Within the station, they grew dizzy and apprehensive. Soon they began strangling, like a man in a vacuum.

  Thirty-four miles an hour of wind was a fair compromise-point for human and Carellan to meet.

  Clayton and Nerishev walked down the shed. In one corner lay what looked like a tangle of dried-out octopi. The tangle stirred and waved two tentacles ceremoniously.

  “Good day,” said Smanik.

  “Good day,” Clayton said. “What do you think of the weather?”

  “Excellent,” said Smanik.

  Nerishev tugged at Clayton’s sleeve. “What did he say?” he asked, and nodded thoughtfully when Clayton translated it for him. Nerishev lacked Clayton’s gift for language. Even after eight months, the Carellan tongue was still an undecipherable series of clicks and whistles to him.

  Several more Carellans came up to join the conversation. They all looked like spiders or octopi, with their small centralized body and long, flexible tentacles. This was the optimum survival shape on Carella, and Clayton frequently envied it. He was forced to rely absolutely on the shelter of the station; but the Carellans lived directly in their environment.

  Often he had seen a native walking against a tornado-force wind, seven or eight limbs hooked into the ground and pulling, other tentacles reaching out for further grips. He had seen them rolling down the wind like tumbleweed, their tentacles curled around them, wickerwork-basket fashion. He thought of the gay and audacious way they handled their land ships, scudding merrily along on the wind....

  Well, he thought, they’d look damned silly on Earth.

  “What is the weather going to be like?” he asked Smanik.

  The Carellan pondered the question for a while, sniffed the wind, and rubbed two tentacles together.

  “The wind may rise a shade more,” he said finally. “But it will be nothing serious.”

  Clayton wondered. Nothing serious for a Carellan could mean disaster for an Earthman. Still, it sounded fairly promising.

  He and Nerishev left the receiving shed and closed the door.

  “Look,” said Nerishev, “if you’d like to wait—”

  “Might as well get it over with,” Clayton said.

  Here, lighted by a single dim overhead bulb, was the smooth, glittering bulk of the Brute. That was the nickname they had given to the vehicle specially constructed for transportation on Carella.

  The Brute was armored like a tank and streamlined like a spheric section. It had vision slits of shatterproof glass, thick enough to match the strength of its steel plating. Its center of gravity was low; most of its twelve tons were centered near the ground. The Brute was sealed. Its heavy diesel engine, as well as all necessary openings, were fitted with special dustproof covers. The Brute rested on its six fat tires, looking, in its immovable bulk, like some prehistoric monster.


  Clayton got in, put on crash helmet and goggles, and strapped himself into the padded seat. He revved up the engine, listened to it critically, then nodded.

  “Okay,” he said, “the Brute’s ready. Get upstairs and open the garage door.”

  “Good luck,” said Nerishev. He left.

  Clayton went over the instrument panel, making sure that all the Brute’s special gadgets were in working order. In a moment, he heard Nerishev’s voice coming in over the radio.

  “I’m opening the door.”

  “Right.”

  The heavy door slid back and Clayton drove the Brute outside.

  The station had been set up on a wide, empty plain. Mountains would have offered some protection from the wind; but the mountains on Carella were in a constant restless state of building up and breaking down. The plain presented dangers of its own, however. To avert the worst of those dangers, a field of stout steel posts had been planted around the station. The closely packed posts pointed outward, like ancient tank traps, and served the same purpose.

  Clayton drove the Brute down one of the narrow, winding channels that led through the field of posts. He emerged, located the pipeline, and started along it. On a small screen above his head, a white line flashed into view. The line would show any break or obstruction in the pipeline.

  A wide, rocky, monotonous desert stretched before him. An occasional low bush came into sight. The wind was directly behind him, blanketed by the sound of the diesel.

  He glanced at the wind-speed indicator. The wind of Carella was blowing at 92 miles an hour.

  He drove steadily along, humming to himself under his breath. From time to time, he heard a crash. Pebbles, propelled by the hurricane wind, were cannonading against the Brute. They shattered harmlessly against the thick armor.

  “Everything all right?” Nerishev asked over the radio.

  “Fine,” Clayton said.

  In the distance, he saw a Carellan land ship. It was about forty feet long, he judged, and narrow in the beam, skimming rapidly on crude wooden rollers. The ship’s sails were made from one of the few leaf-bearing shrubs on the planet.