Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley

by Robert Sheckley

  Captain Sven went to the ship’s library, where he glanced over Coming of Age in Georgia and Folkways of Mountain-Georgia. They didn’t seen to help much. He thought for a moment, and glanced at his watch. Two hours to blastoff! He hurried to the Navigation Room.

  Within the room was Ks’rat. A native of Venus, Ks’rat was perched on a stool inspecting the auxiliary navigating instruments. He was gripping a sextant in three hands, and was polishing the mirrors with his foot, his most dexterous member. When Sven walked in the Venusian turned orange-brown to show his respect for authority, then returned to his habitual green.

  “How’s everything?” Sven asked.

  “Fine,” said Ks’rat. “Except for the Forbes problem, of course.” He was using a manual soundbox, since Venusians had no vocal cords. At first, these sound boxes had been harsh and metallic; but the Venusians had modified them until now, the typical Venusian “voice” was a soft, velvety murmur.

  “Forbes is what I came to see you about,” said Sven. “You’re non-Terran. As a matter of fact, you’re nonhuman. I thought perhaps you could throw a new light on the problem. Something I may have overlooked.”

  Ks’rat pondered, then turned gray, his “uncertain” color. “I’m afraid I can’t help much, Captain Sven. We never had any racial problems on Venus. Although you might consider the sclarda situation a parallel—”

  “Not really,” Sven said. “That was more a religious problem.”

  “Then I have no further ideas. Have you tried reasoning with the man?”

  “Everyone else has.”

  “You might have better luck, Captain. As an authority symbol, you might tend to supplant the father symbol within him. With that advantage, try to make him aware of the true basis for his emotional reaction.”

  “There is no basis for racial hatred.”

  “Perhaps not in terms of abstract logic. But in human terms, you might find an answer and a key. Try to discover what Forbes fears. Perhaps if you can put him in better reality-contact with his own motives, he’ll come around.”

  “I’ll bear all that in mind,” said Sven, with a sarcasm that was lost on the Venusian.

  The intercom sounded the captain’s signal. It was the first mate. “Captain! Tower wants to know whether you’re blasting on schedule.”

  “I am,” Sven said. “Secure the ship.” He put down the phone.

  Ks’rat turned a bright red. It was the Venusian equivalent of a raised eyebrow.

  “I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t,” Sven said. “Thanks for your advice. I’m going to talk to Forbes now.”

  “By the way,” Ks’rat said, “of what race is the man?”

  “What man?”

  “The new man that Forbes won’t serve with.”

  “How the hell should I know?” shouted Sven, his temper suddenly snapping. “Do you think I sit on the bridge inspecting a man’s racial background?”

  “It might make a difference.”

  “Why should it? Perhaps it’s a Mongolian that Forbes won’t serve with, or a Pakistani, or a New Yorker or a Martian. What do I care what race his diseased, impoverished little mind picks on?”

  “Good luck, Captain Sven,” Ks’rat said as Sven hurried out.

  James Forbes saluted when he entered the bridge, though it was not customary aboard Sven’s ship. The radioman stood at full attention. He was a tall, slender youth, tow-headed, light-skinned, freckled. Everything about him looked pliant, malleable, complaisant. Everything except his eyes, which were dark blue and very steady.

  Sven didn’t know how to begin. But Forbes spoke first.

  “Sir,” he said, “I want you to know I’m mighty well ashamed of myself. You’ve been a good Captain, sir, the very best, and this has been a happy ship. I feel like a worthless no-account for doing this.”

  “Then you’ll reconsider?” asked Sven, with a faint glimmer of hope.

  “I wish I could, I really do. I’d give my right arm for you, Cap’n, or anything else I possess.”

  “I don’t want your right arm. I merely want you to serve with the new man.”

  “That’s the one thing I can’t do,” Forbes said sadly.

  “Why in hell can’t you?” Sven roared, forgetting his determination to use psychology.

  “You just don’t understand us Georgia mountain boys,” Forbes said. “That’s how my pappy, bless his memory, raised me. That poor little old man would spin in his grave if I went against his dying wish.”

  Sven stifled a curse and said, “You know the situation that leaves me in, Forbes. Do you have any suggestions?”

  “Only one thing to do, sir. Angka and me’ll leave the ship. You’ll be better off short-handed than with an uncooperative crew, sir.”

  “Angka is leaving with you? Wait a minute! Who’s he prejudiced against?”

  “No one, sir. But him and me’s been shipmates for close to five years now, ever since we met on the freighter Stella. Where one goes, the other goes.”

  A red light flickered on Sven’s control board, indicating the ship’s readiness for blastoff. Sven ignored it.

  “I can’t have both of you leaving the ship,” Sven said. “Forbes, why won’t you serve with the new man?”

  “Racial reasons, sir,” Forbes said tightly.

  “Now listen closely. You have been serving under me, a Swede. Has that disturbed you?”

  “Not at all, sir.”

  “The medical officer is an Israeli. The navigator is a Venusian. The engineer is Chinese. There are Russians, New Yorkers, Melanasians, Africans, and everything else in this crew. Men of all races, creeds, and colors. You have served with them.”

  “Of course I have. From earliest childhood us Mountain-Georgians expect to serve with all different races. It’s our heritage. My pappy taught me that. But I will not serve with Blake.”

  “Who’s Blake?”

  “The new man, sir.”

  “Where’s he from?” Sven asked wearily.

  “Mountain-Georgia.”

  For a moment, Sven thought he hadn’t heard right. He stared at Forbes, who stared nervously back.

  “From the mountain country of Georgia?”

  “Yes, sir. Not too far, I believe, from where I was born.”

  “This man Blake, is he white?”

  “Of course, sir. White English-Scottish ancestry, same as me.”

  Sven had the sensation of discovering a new world, a world no civilized man had ever encountered. He was amazed to discover that weirder customs could be found on Earth than anywhere else in the galaxy.

  He said to Forbes, “Tell me about the custom.”

  “I thought everybody knew about us Mountain-Georgians, sir. In the section I come from, we leave home at the age of sixteen and we don’t come back. Our customs teach us to work with any race, live with any race ... except our own.”

  “Oh,” said Sven.

  “This new man Blake is a white Mountain-Georgian. He should have looked over the roster and not signed for this ship. It’s all his fault, really, and if he chooses to overlook the custom, I can’t help that.”

  “But why won’t you serve with your own kind?” Sven asked.

  “No one knows, sir. It’s been handed down from father to son for hundreds of years, ever since the Hydrogen War.”

  Sven stared at him closely, ideas beginning to form. “Forbes, have you ever had any ... feeling about Negroes?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Describe it.”

  “Well, sir, we Mountain-Georgians hold that the Negro is the white man’s natural friend. I mean to say, whites can get along fine with Chinese and Martians and such, but there’s something special about black and white—”

  “Go on,” Sven urged.

  “Hard to explain it good, sir. It’s just that—well, the qualities of the two seem to mesh, like good gears. There’s a special understanding between black and white.”

  “Did you know,” Sven said gently, “that once, long ago, your
ancestors felt that the Negro was a lesser human being? That they created laws to keep him from interacting with whites? And that they kept on doing this long after the rest of the world had conquered its prejudices? That they kept on doing it, in fact, right up to the Hydrogen War?”

  “That’s a lie, sir!” Forbes shouted. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to call you a liar, sir, but it just isn’t true. Us Georgians have always—”

  “I can prove it to you in history books and anthropological studies. I have several in the ship’s library, if you’d care to look!”

  “Yankee books!”

  “I’ll show you Southern books, too. It’s true, Forbes, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Education is a long, slow process. You have a great deal to be proud of in your ancestry.”

  “If this is true,” Forbes said, very hesitantly, “then what happened?”

  “It’s in the anthropology book. You know, don’t you, that Georgia was hit during the war by a hydrogen bomb meant for Norfolk?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Perhaps you didn’t know that the bomb fell in the middle of the so-called Black Belt. Many whites were killed. But almost the entire Negro population of that section of Georgia was wiped out.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Now, you must take my word that there had been race riots before the Hydrogen War, and lynchings, and a lot of bad feeling between white and black. Suddenly the Negroes were gone—dead. This created a considerable feeling of guilt among the whites, particularly in isolated communities. Some of the more superstitious whites believed that they had been spiritually responsible for this wholesale obliteration. And it hit them hard, for they were religious men.”

  “What would that matter, if they hated the Negroes?”

  “They didn’t, that’s the whole point! They feared intermarriage, economic competition, a change of hierarchy. But they didn’t hate the Negroes. Quite the contrary. They always maintained, with considerable truth, that they liked the Negroes better than the ‘liberal’ Northerners did. It set up quite a conflict.”

  Forbes nodded, thinking hard.

  “In an isolated community like yours, it gave rise to the custom of working away from home, with any race except their own. Guilt was at the bottom of it all.”

  Perspiration rolled down Forbes’s freckled cheeks. “I can’t believe it,” he said.

  “Forbes, have I ever lied to you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Will you believe me, then, when I swear to you that this is true?”

  “I—I’ll try, Captain Sven.”

  “Now you know the reason for the custom. Will you work with Blake?”

  “I don’t know if I can.”

  “Will you try?”

  Forbes bit his lip and squirmed uncomfortably. “Captain, I’ll try. I don’t know if I can, but I’ll try. And I’m doing it for you and the men, not on account of what you said.”

  “Just try,” Sven said. “That’s all I ask of you.”

  Forbes nodded and hurriedly left the bridge. Sven immediately signaled the tower that he was preparing for blastoff.

  Down in the crew’s quarters, Forbes was introduced to the new man, Blake. The replacement was tall, black-haired, and obviously ill at ease.

  “Howdy,” said Blake.

  “Howdy,” said Forbes. Each made a tentative gesture toward a handshake, but didn’t follow it through.

  “I’m from near Pompey,” said Forbes.

  “I’m from Almira.”

  “Practically next door,” Forbes said unhappily.

  “Yeah, afraid so,” Blake said.

  They eyed each other in silence. After a long moment, Forbes groaned, “I can’t do it, I just can’t.” He began to walk away.

  “Suddenly he stopped, turned and blurted out, “You all white?”

  “Can’t say as how I am,” Blake replied. “I’m one-eighth Cherokee on my mother’s side.”

  “Cherokee, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, man, why didn’t you say so in the first place. Knew a Cherokee from Altahatchie once, name of Tom Little Sitting Bear. Don’t suppose you’re kin to him?”

  “Don’t believe so,” Blake said. “Never knew no Cherokees, myself.”

  “Well, it don’t make no never-mind. They shoulda told me in the first place you was a Cherokee. Come on, I’ll show you your bunk.”

  When the incident was reported to Captain Sven, several hours after blastoff, he was completely perplexed. How, he asked himself, could one-eighth Cherokee blood make a man a Cherokee? Wasn’t the other seven-eighths more indicative?

  He decided he didn’t understand American Southerners at all.

  THE LANGUAGE OF LOVE

  JEFFERSON Toms went into an auto-café one afternoon after classes, to drink coffee and study. He sat down, philosophy texts piled neatly before him, and saw a girl directing the robot waiters. She had smoky-gray eyes and hair the color of a rocket exhaust. Her figure was slight but sweetly curved and, gazing at it, Toms felt a lump in his throat and a sudden recollection of autumn, evening, rain, and candlelight.

  This was how love came to Jefferson Toms. Although he was ordinarily a very reserved young man, he complained about the robot service in order to meet her. When they did meet, he was inarticulate, overwhelmed by feeling. Somehow, though, he managed to ask her for a date.

  The girl, whose name was Doris, was strangely moved by the stocky, black-haired young student, for she accepted at once. And then Jefferson Toms’s troubles began.

  He found love delightful, yet extremely disturbing, in spite of his advanced studies in philosophy. But love was a confusing thing even in Toms’s age, when spaceliners bridged the gaps between the worlds, disease lay dead, war was inconceivable, and just about anything of any importance had been solved in an exemplary manner.

  Old Earth was in better shape than ever before. Her cities were bright with plastic and stainless steel. Her remaining forests were carefully tended bits of greenery where one might picnic in perfect safety, since all beasts and insects had been removed to sanitary zoos which reproduced their living conditions with admirable skill.

  Even the climate of Earth had been mastered. Farmers received their quota of rain between three and three-thirty in the morning, people gathered at stadiums to watch a program of sunsets, and a tornado was produced once a year in a special arena as part of the World Peace Day Celebration.

  But love was as confusing as ever, and Toms found this distressing.

  He simply could not put his feelings into words. Such expressions as “I love you,” “I adore you,” “I’m crazy about you” were overworked and inadequate. They conveyed nothing of the depth and fervor of his emotions. Indeed they cheapened them, since every stereo, every second-rate play was filled with similar words. People used them in casual conversation and spoke of how much they loved pork chops, adored sunsets, were crazy about tennis.

  Every fiber of Toms’s being revolted against this. Never, he swore, would he speak of his love in terms used for pork chops. But he found, to his dismay, that he had nothing better to say.

  He brought the problem to his philosophy professor. “Mr. Toms,” the professor said, gesturing wearily with his glasses, “ah—love, as it is commonly called, is not an operational area with us as yet. No significant work has been done in this field, aside from the so-called Language of Love of the Tyanian race.”

  This was no help. Toms continued to muse on love and think lengthily of Doris. In the long haunted evenings on her porch when the shadows from the trellis vines crossed her face, revealing and concealing it, Toms struggled to tell her what he felt. And since he could not bring himself to use the weary commonplaces of love, he tried to express himself in extravagances.

  “I feel about you,” he would say, “the way a star feels about its planet.”

  “How immense!” she would answer, immensely flattered at being compared to anything so cosmic.

 
; “That’s not what I meant,” Toms amended. “The feeling I was trying to express was more—well, for example, when you walk, I am reminded of—”

  “Of a what?”

  “A doe in a forest glade,” Toms said, frowning.

  “How charming!”

  “It wasn’t intended to be charming. I was trying to express the awkwardness inherent in youth and yet—”

  “But, honey,” she said. “I’m not awkward. My dancing teacher—”

  “I didn’t mean awkward. But the essence of awkwardness is—is—”

  “I understand,” she said.

  But Toms knew she didn’t.

  So he was forced to give up extravagances. Soon he found himself unable to say anything of any importance to Doris, for it was not what he meant, nor even close to it.

  The girl became concerned at the long, moody silences which developed between them.

  “Jeff,” she would urge, “surely you can say something!”

  Toms shrugged his shoulders.

  “Even if it isn’t absolutely what you mean.”

  Toms sighed.

  “Please,” she cried, “say anything at all! I can’t stand this!”

  “Oh, hell—”

  “Yes?” she breathed, her face transfigured.

  “That wasn’t what I meant,” Toms said, relapsing into his gloomy silence.

  At last he asked her to marry him. He was willing to admit that he “loved” her—but he refused to expand on it. He explained that a marriage must be founded upon truth or it is doomed from the start. If he cheapened and falsified his emotions at the beginning, what could the future hold for them?

  Doris found his sentiments admirable, but refused to marry him.

  “You must tell a girl that you love her,” she declared. “You have to tell her a hundred times a day, Jefferson, and even then it’s not enough.”

  “But I do love you!” Toms protested. “I mean to say I have an emotion corresponding to—”

  “Oh, stop it!”

  In this predicament, Toms thought about the Language of Love and went to his professor’s office to ask about it.

  “We are told,” his professor said, “that the race indigenous to Tyana II had a specific and unique language for the expression of sensations of love. To say ‘I love you’ was unthinkable for Tyanians. They would use a phrase denoting the exact kind and class of love they felt at that specific moment, and used for no other purpose.”