Science Fiction Discoveries

by Carol

  As if on signal, Stumblecat drew his stick and gestured. People pulled back, leaving a clear circle at the base of the stairway. A wall formed to keep onlookers out; blackskulls and Starlady's swaggers, working together.

  Starlady descended, golden.

  The ring closed around her. Inside was only Crawney, Stumblecat, the Marquis, and Hairy Hal. Plus her, plus Starlady. Or was it Janey Small, from Rhiannon?

  The light went violet again. The Marquis smiled darkly, and Janey Small suddenly looked small indeed. She shifted her no-knife nervously from one hand to another, then back again.

  As they advanced, Stumblecat sidled up to Hairy Hal. He grinned, and lifted his stingstick, and jabbed Hal very lightly in the chest. Pain sparkwheeled out, and Hal winced.

  “Your no-knife, Hal,” Stumblecat said. “On the ground.”

  “Hey, sure, Hal's on your side,” he said. His good hand reached under the cape, came out again, and dropped a dead knife to the floor. “Straight spin, Stumblecat! Starlady needs a stinging, she never learned the rules, right?”

  Stumblecat just smiled. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe that’s what you think.” He eyed Hal speculatively. His stingstick wandered under the comer of the cape, began to lift it. Then, suddenly, he glanced over at the Marquis, laughed, and changed his mind. Stumblecat put the stick away.

  “They all saw me disarm you, Hal,” he said, nodding.

  Meanwhile Janey circled, holding her no-knife out clumsily, trying to keep the Marquis at bay. He hadn’t moved yet. He just grinned at her, and waved his stick, like a snake preparing for the strike.

  When the light clicked from purple to green, she jumped, bringing the ghost blade down at his baton. One touch, cut it in half, and he was hers. She’d seen Hal do it oh, so often.

  But the Marquis just flicked his stick back, blinking-quick, and her no-knife severed air. Then it whirled forward again, to brush her wrist. Janey screamed, and pulled back. The no-knife rang upon the floor.

  She backed away. The Marquis followed. “Not over, silly ship girl,” he said to her softly, as she clutched her wrist. ‘Tm going to chill you good, and hurt you, and teach you how things work. Come to me, starlady.”

  And he darted at her, his stick brushing one cheek. She screamed again, as an angry flush appeared. The Marquis had his stick set on maximum.

  He was cornering her, advancing towards her, herding her towards the ring of stingsticks that kept the crowd away. As he drifted in, oh so slowly, the watchers pushed and shoved for better position, while inside the ring, Crawney and Stumblecat and Hairy Hal followed behind him.

  Janey took one step too far backwards, came up against a stick, yelped, jumped forward again. The Marquis stroked her lovingly down her side, and heard another scream.

  She rushed at him then, tried to grab the stick, screamed again as she finally caught it and had to let it go. He gave her another swat as she rushed past, past him and Hal and Stumblecat, towards the fallen no-knife.

  Marquis swiveled and started to follow. But Hal stepped beside him, then, and the Marquis shoved up against his cape.

  And cried a gurgling cry.

  And fell.

  It was quite an ordinary kitchen knife sticking through Hal’s cape. Beneath, clutching it and trembling, a crottled blackened hand.

  By then, Janey had recovered her no-knife. She finished the Marquis as he lay there bleeding.

  There were loud noises from the crowd. Stumblecat snarled and gestured, and suddenly the ring broke, the blackskulls began swinging their sticks, and people shouted and shrieked and scattered. A few swaggers fought briefly before running. And Crawney was still standing open-mouthed while Stumblecat picked up Hal’s no-knife, moved in behind him, and neatly slit his throat. There was only room for one emperor at a time.

  In the center of chaos, Hal stood smiling. Janey knelt by the Marquis. “Hey, starlady,” Hal said. “We did it. I did it. Now we can get back an* buy our way down, an ...”

  “I still don’t have Golden Boy,” she said, coldly.

  Stumblecat walked over and smiled down at her. “Ah, but you do. He doesn’t seem to understand us. I think he had some sort of empathic link with you, or Hal, or both. Join us, starlady, and you’ll have him every night.”

  “Hey!” Hal said, angrily.

  “All right,” said Janey.

  He looked at her shocked. “Janey” he said. “You’re spinning wobbly. I killed him for you, starlady, my starlady. Like you wanted.”

  “That’s what Mayliss wanted, Hal,” she said, standing. “I just wanted Golden Boy. And Im going to have him. He’s not like the rest of you. He’s still clean, and kind, and I love him.” She smiled.

  “But,” said Hal. “But, starlady, Hal hums—I love, you. What about me?”

  “What about you?” Starlady said.

  And she went off with Stumblecat, to find her Golden Boy.

  In the end, some of them were dead. The rest survived.

  The Never-Ending Western Movie

  by Robert Sheckley

  Robert Sheckley burst like a meteor in the sky of science fiction 20-odd years ago and achieved in his first few months of published writing a standing he has maintained ever since at the very top. His story “The Seventh Victim” was made into a film starring Ursula Andress called, for reasons known best to film makers, The Tenth Victim. He makes his home in the Balearic Isles with his new wife end even newer daughter.

  The name is Washburn: just plain Washburn to my friends, Mister Washburn to enemies and strangers. Saying that, I've said everything, because you’ve seen me a thousand times, on the big screen in your neighborhood theater or on the little pay-TV screen in your living room, riding through Cholla cactus and short grass, my famous derby pulled down over my eyes, my famous Colt .44 with the 7½-inch barrel strapped down to my right leg. But just now I’m riding in a big air-conditioned Cadillac, sitting between my agent-manager Gordon Simms, and my wife, Consuela. We’ve turned off State Highway 101 and we’re bouncing along a rutted dirt road which will end presently at the Wells Fargo Station that marks one of the entrances to The Set. Simms is talking rapidly and rubbing the back of my neck like I was a fighter about to enter the ring, which is more or less the situation. Consuela is quiet. Her English isn’t too good yet. She’s the prettiest little thing imaginable, my wife of less than two months, a former Miss Chile, a former actress in various gaucho dramas filmed in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. This entire scene is supposed to be off-camera. It’s the part they never show you: the return of the famous gunfighter, all the way from Bel Aire in the jolly jittery year of 2031 to the Old West of the mid-nineteen hundreds.

  Simms is jabbering away about some investment he wants me to come in on, some new seabed mining operation, another of Simms’s get-richer-quick schemes, because Simms is already a wealthy man, as who wouldn’t be with a thirty percent bite on my earnings throughout my ten biggest years as a star? Simms is my friend, too, but I can’t think about investments now because we’re coming to The Set.

  Consuela, sitting on my right, shivers as the famous weatherbeaten old station comes into view. She’s never really understood The Never-Ending Western Movie. In South America they still make their movies in the old-fashioned way, everything staged, everything faked, and the guns fire only blanks. She can’t understand why America’s famous Movie has to be done for real when you could contrive all the effects and nobody would get killed. I’ve tried to explain it to her, but it sounds ridiculous in Spanish.

  It’s different for me this time, of course: I’m coming out of retirement to make a cameo appearance. I’m on a no-kill contract-famous gunman to do comedy bit with Old Jeff Mangles and Natchez Parker. There’s no script, of course: there never is in The Movie. We’ll improvise around any situation that comes up—we, the commedia dell’arte players of the

  Old West. Consuela doesn’t understand any of this. She’s heard about contracts to kill, but a no-kill contract is something new in her experience
.

  And now we’ve arrived. The car stops in front of a low, unpainted pinewood building. Everything on this side of it is twenty-first century America in all its recycled and reprocessed glory. On the other side is the million-acre expanse of prairie, mountains and desert, with its thousands of concealed cameras and microphones, that is The Set for The Never-Ending Movie.

  I’m in costume already—blue jeans, blue and white checked shirt, boots, derby, rawhide jacket, and 3.2 pounds of revolver. A horse is waiting for me at the hitching post on the other side of the station, with all my gear tied aboard in a neat blanket roll. An assistant director checks me over and finds me in order: no wristwatch or other anachronisms for the cameras to find. “All right, Mr. Washburn,” he says, “you can go through whenever you’re ready.”

  Simms gives his main-event boy a final rub on the back. He’s bouncing up and down on his toes, excited, envying me, wishing he were the one to be riding out into the desert, a tall, slow-moving man with mild manners and sudden death always near his right hand. But Simms is short and fat and nearly bald and he would never do, certainly not for a heroic gunman’s role, so he lives it vicariously. I am Simms’s manhood, and he and I have ridden the danger trail many times, and our trusty .44 has cleared out all opposition until we reigned supreme, the absolute best gunslinger in the West, the one who finally retired when all the opposition was dead or laying low ... Poor Simms, he always wanted us to play that last big scene, the final definitive walkdown on some dusty Main Street. He wanted us to go out high, wide and handsome, not for the money—we’ve got too much of that as it is, but just for the glory, retiring from The Movie in a blaze of gunfire at the top of our form. I wanted it that way myself, but the opposition got cautious, and Washburn spent a final ridiculous year in The Movie, riding around looking for something to do, six-shooter ready, but never finding anyone who wanted to shoot it out with him. And even this cameo appearance—for Simms it is a mockery of all that we have stood for, and I suppose it’s that way for me, too. (It is difficult to know where I start and where Simms ends, difficult to separate what I want and what Simms wants, difficult to face this, the end of our great years in The Movie.)

  Simms shakes my hand and grips me hard on the shoulder and says nothing in that manly Western style he’s picked up through the years of associating with me, being me. Consuela hugs me, there are tears in her eyes, she kisses me, she tells me to come back to her soon. Ah, those incredible first months with a new wife! The splendor of it, before the dreary old reality sets in! Consuela is number four. I’ve ridden down a lot of trails in my time, most of them the same, and now the director checks me again for lipstick smears, nods OK, and I turn away from Consuela and Simms, throw them the little two-finger salute I’m famous for, and stride across the creaking floor of the Wells Fargo Office and out the other side, into the blazing sunshine and the world of The Never-Ending Western Movie.

  From far away the camera picks up a lone rider, moving ant-like between brilliantly striped canyon walls. We see him in successive shots against an unfolding panorama of desert scenery. Here he is in the evening, silhouetted against a flaming sky, derby cocked jauntily on the back of his head, cooking over a little fire. Now he is asleep, rolled in his blanket, as the embers of his fire fade to ash. Before dawn the rider is up again, making coffee, preparing for the day’s ride. Sunrise finds him mounted and moving, shielding his eyes from the sun, leaning back long in the stirrups, letting his horse pick its own way over the rocky slopes.

  I am also the audience watching me the actor, as well as the actor watching me the audience. It is the dream of childhood come true: to play a part and also watch ourselves play it. I know now that we never stop acting, never stop watching ourselves act. It is merely an irony of fate that the heroic images I see coincide with what you, sitting in front of your little screen, also see.

  Now the rider has climbed to a high saddleback between two mountains. It is cold up here, a high wind is blowing, the rider’s coat collar is turned up and his derby is tied in place with a bright wool scarf. Looking over the man’s shoulder, far below, we see a settlement, tiny and lost in the immensity of the landscape. We follow as the rider clucks to his tired horse and begins the journey down to the settlement.

  The derbied rider is walking his horse through the settlement of Comanche. There is one street—Main Street—with its saloon, boarding house, livery stable, blacksmith’s, general store, all as quaint and stark as a Civil War daguerreotype. The desert wind blows unceasingly through the town, and a fine dust is settled over everything.

  The rider is recognized. Loungers in front of the general store say: “Hey, it’s Washburn!”

  I dismount stiffly in front of the livery stable—a tall, travel-stained man, gun belt worn low and strapped down, the cracked, horn-faced gun butt standing out easy to reach, easy to see. I turn and rub my face— the famous, long, sorrowful face, the puckered scar along one cheekbone, the narrow unblinking gray eyes. It is the face of a tough, dangerous, unpredictable man; yet a sympathetic one. It is me watching you watching me.

  I come out of the livery stable, and there to greet me is Sheriff Ben Watson, an old friend, hard tanned face and black handlebar moustache, tin star gleaming on his worsted vest.

  “Heard you might be coming through,” Watson says. “Heard you been to Califomee for a spell.”

  “Califomee” is our own special codeword for retirement.

  “That's so,” I say. “How's everything around here?”

  “So so,” Watson tells me. “I don't suppose you heard about Old Jeff Mangles?”

  I wait. The sheriff says, “Happened just yesterday. Old Jeff got thrown, out on the desert. We figure his horse shied at a rattler—Christ knows I told him to sell that big, skittery, walleyed brute. But you know Old Jeff-”

  “What happened to him?” I ask.

  “Well, like I say, he got thrown and dragged. He was dead before Jimmy Conners found him.”

  Long silence. I push the derby to the back of my head. Finally I say, “Okay, Ben, what else do you want to tell me?”

  The sheriff is ill at ease. He fidgets, shifting from one foot to the other. I wait. Jeff Mangles dead; that blows the scene I was hired to play. What other development is coming up?

  Watson says, “You must be thirsty. What say we put down a beer—”

  “Just tell me the news.”

  “Well ... You ever hear of a cowpuncher from the Panhandle name of Little Joe Potter?”

  I shake my head.

  “He came drifting up this way a while ago, bringing with him quite a reputation as a fast gun. Didn't you hear about the shootout down at Twin Peaks?”

  Now that he mentions it, I do remember hearing something about it. But I've been out to Californee doing other things, and shootouts just didn't interest me much until right now.

  “This Little Joe Potter,” Watson goes on, “he went up against four X-Bar riders in a dispute over some woman. They say it was quite a fight. The result was that Little Joe blew them four riders all to hell, and he picked himself up quite a reputation thereby."

  "So what?” I ask.

  ‘Well, some time after that, Little Joe was in a poker game with some of the boys down Gila Bend way ...” Watson stops, uncomfortable. "Washburn, maybe you better get the story from Charlie Gibbs, since he spoke to a man who was actually present at that game. Yeah, you better hear it from Charlie. See you later, Washburn.”

  The sheriff moves away, following the Movie dictum of keeping the talk-scenes short and letting other people have a piece of the action.

  I walk to the saloon. There is someone following me, a kid, no more than eighteen or nineteen, a gangling snub-nosed freckled kid in too-short overalls and cracked boots. He wears a gun. What does he want of me? What everyone else wants, I suppose.

  I enter the saloon, my spurs clattering on the plank floor. Charlie Gibbs is drinking at the bar, a fat sloppy man all grin and crinkle, not wearing a gun beca
use Charlie Gibbs is a comic character and therefore does not kill or get killed. Charlie is also our local Screen Actors Guild representative.

  I buy him a drink and ask him about Little Joe Potters famous poker game.

  "I heard about it from Texas Jim Claire. You remember Texas Jim, don’t you, Washburn? Good old boy who works for the Donaldson outfit as a wrangler? Well, sir, Texas Jim was in this poker game over by way of Gila Bend. The action commenced to get hot. There was this one big jackpot at the end, and Doc Dailey bet a thousand dollars Mex on his hand. Little Joe was right fond of the cards he was holding, but he didn’t have no more money to back hisself with. Doc said he’d take collateral, if Little Joe could think of any. Little Joe thought about it for a while, and then he said, ‘How much would you give me for Mr. Washburn’s derby?’ There was a silence then, because nobody just walks up and takes away Mr. Washburn’s derby, not without first killing the man underneath it. But on the other hand, Little Joe was not known as a braggart, and he’d handled his-self well during that shootout with the X-Bar riders. So Doc, he thought about it a while, then he said, ‘Sure, Joe, I’ll allow you a thousand for Washburn’s derby, and I’d gladly pay another thousand for a ringside seat when you go to take it off him.’ You can have that ringside seat for nothing,’ says Little Joe, ‘if I lose this hand, which I’m not fixing to do.’ So the bet is accepted and they show down. Little Joe’s four eights lose to Doc’s four Jacks. Little Joe rises and stretches, and says, ‘Well, Doc, looks like you’re going to get your ringside seat after all.’ ”

  Charlie finishes off his drink and looks at me with bright, malicious eyes. I nod, finish my own drink and go out back to the outhouse.

  The outhouse is a designated off-camera area. We use it for talks which are necessary, but are out of our Western context. Charlie Gibbs comes out a few minutes later. He turns on the hidden air conditioning, takes a pack of cigarettes from behind a beam, lights up, sits down and makes himself comfortable. As SAG representative, Charlie spends a fair amount of time out here listening to gripes and grievances. This is his office, and he’s tried to make it pleasant for himself.