Victim Prime

by Robert Sheckley

  Just past midday he went through the ruins of a city. Savannah, maybe. It stretched for miles and seemed at first to contain no human life. But Harold soon realized there was someone nearby, dodging along behind a row of gutted buildings, because his passage disturbed the crows and buzzards.

  Harold had the .44 handy, but he didn’t draw it when the man presented himself, stepping out from between two burned-out buildings. He was a small, portly old man with a white fringe of cloudy hair around his bald skull. He wore a dark, shapeless poacher’s coat with many pockets. He looked a little mad, but not dangerous.

  “Are you friendly?” the man asked.

  “Sure I am,” Harold said. “What about you?”

  “I am a dangerous fellow,” the man said. “But only in the cut and thrust of repartee.”

  They sat down together near the wreck of the old Dixie Belle Café. The man, whom Harold came to know as the Professor, was a wandering scholar, who gave lectures on a variety of subjects in the towns through which he passed. He was going now to a town just down the line.

  “What sort of thing do you lecture about?” Harold asked.

  “All sorts of things,” the Professor said. “One of my favorite talks is number thirty-two, Why the Human Race Cannot Afford to Stabilize.”

  “That sounds like fun,” Harold said.

  “You’re an intelligent young man,” the Professor said. “I prove in that particular talk that to stabilize is to reach the end of uncertainty. When man reaches the end of uncertainty he will realize that his existence, at least in the terms he imagined it, is futile. Futility, you see, is the enemy of the species, more deadly than the devil himself. It is arguable that the great Indian civilizations of Central and South America perished through the sense of futility brought to them by the Spaniards’ invasions. They saw something in the Spaniards, something which on physical terms they could not surpass, could not even get anywhere near. In the terms which the Spaniards had made the real terms, they were defeated. Therefore futile, therefore civilization perished. They thought the Spaniards were godlike—not on a tribal level. They saw their defeat not as a defeat by men but as a defeat by gods.”

  Harold nodded. “When the gods wipe you out you stay wiped out.”

  “What defeated them,” the Professor said, “was the Weltanschaaung of new technology. The world-transforming activity which a new technology brings, shaping reality.”

  “You don’t happen to have anything to eat, do you, Professor?”

  “I was just about to ask you the same thing.”

  “Then we might as well start walking again.”

  “To be sure,” the Professor said. “And as we stroll I can give you a little sampling of talk sixteen. On Loss of Autonomy.”

  “Go right ahead,” Harold said. “I like to hear you talk, Professor.”

  “Men distract themselves with love and war and Hunting,” the Professor said, “and all manner of joys and cruelties in order to keep from themselves the fact that they are not autonomous, not godlike, but no more and no less than links in the great chain of being which is made up of men, amoebas, gas giants, and everything else. There is evidence aplenty that the ego-centered, individualistic-believing western races are in a decline due ultimately to flaws in their philosophy. They relied too much on intellect. Intellect has been tried and has failed. Intellect may be an evolutionary dead end.”

  “What should we try next?” Harold asked.

  “Nobody knows what’s really happening. Or rather, we know what’s happening, locally anyhow, but we don’t know what it means, if it means anything. We have lost the myth of human perfectibility. Our life span will never be as long again as it was a hundred years ago. Too much strontium in our bones. Too much cesium in our livers. Our internal clocks have been reset to run a shorter time. Our ingenuity finds no way out of this. Our pride is shocked at the intuition of our irreversible racial damage. Our position is that of a patient, dying on the operating table, still trying to plan for the future.”

  “That’s deep,” Harold said. “What does it mean?”

  “It’s not meant to be taken too seriously,” the Professor said. “My audiences like a bit of high-flown invective.”

  “I do like to hear you talk,” Harold said. “Some of the things you say set off really weird pictures in my head. I never even knew it was possible for a man to think the sort of things you think. I mean, for me, those things you talk about just don’t exist.”

  “What does exist?” the Professor asked.

  “ Harold thought about it. “Well, just knowing more or less what you have to do and then figuring out ways of doing it.”

  The Professor nodded. “But isn’t there also a presence within you which watches this, comments on it, and ultimately, perhaps, questions it?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Harold said.

  ‘“Perhaps you’re a sociopath,” the Professor said. “A person unable to feel.”

  “Hey, that’s not right either,” Harold said, unruffled. “I feel plenty of things. They’re just not the same things you feel.”

  “Perhaps you are the new man,” the Professor said, and his tone made it impossible to decide whether he spoke seriously or in jest.

  “Maybe I am,” Harold said. “Now let’s find something to eat.”

  “Psychic bilateral cleavage,” the Professor said. “Thank God you’re basically friendly.”

  They passed through the ruins of an oil refinery that stretched for miles and miles. It hadn’t been used for years. The pipes were rusted out. The concrete of the huge parking-lot-like areas was cracked and crazed. It looked like a graveyard for gigantic machines. Harold found it hard to imagine what they had been used for or why they had needed so many of them.

  They came through the refinery area and across the section where highways intersected in complex cloverleaves now overgrown with grass and even with some small trees. There were small, brightly colored flowers along the curving parallel lines of Route 95. The flowered roadways with their precise curves looked as though a giant had laid out a garden.

  Beyond this they came to low green hills. They crossed these and came out the other side, into fields with a path between them, leading to a collection of low buildings.

  “That is Maplewood,” the Professor said.

  There was one larger building in the center, low and long and capable of holding hundreds of people, perhaps thousands. Harold had never seen one before.

  “That is a shopping mall,” the Professor said. “At one time it was the central artifact of American life. It was to the Americans what the atrium was to the Romans or the plaza to the Spaniards, the great place of assemblage where one comes and ritually buys foods and tries to arrange romantic assignations with attractive members of the preferred sex, whichever that might be.”

  “Professor,” Harold said, “you got a real strange way of looking at things. Let’s go down there and talk with those people and see if we can get some food.”

  8

  In the town the drums were sounding to signal the arrival of strangers. Many of the isolated little towns of America made use of drums, because the Indians had used drums and the new tribalism called for white, colored, and Hispanic men to act tribally. To act tribally meant to use drums. The drumming wasn’t very good because this was a largely white town and the inhabitants, many of them, didn’t have much of a sense of rhythm. But they were earnest about it. The spirit was there.

  “Ahh, you come just in time for the big potakawa,” a spokesman said, coming out of the crowd to greet them.

  “That’s great,” Harold said, “but what’s a potakawa?”

  “Potakawa,” the spokesman said, “is an old Indian word for Red Tag Day. That is the day on which, in accordance with the ancient traditions of our tribe, everything goes on sale at half price.”

  “I see that we have indeed come at an auspicious time,” Harold said.

  “Foreign buyers are always welcome,” the spo
kesman said. “You honor our village.”

  “They seem like real nice people,” Harold said later as he and the Professor were resting in a well-appointed room in the town’s guest house. They had eaten well—a tasty stew of opossum and eel with okra, a specialty in the region.

  The town was called Maplewood and the guest house was called Maplewood Guest House. And the room they were in was the Maplewood Room. “But the wood’s pine,” Harold noted, tapping it with his knuckles.

  “Doesn’t matter,” the Professor said. “Maplewood does not refer to a type of wood—that is to say wood of maple—but is instead the name of an entirely different entity, namely this town.”

  “Well, I guess I got a lot to learn about,” Harold said. “What do we do now?”

  “I believe,” the Professor said, “that we are supposed to buy something.”

  “Nothing hard about that,” Harold said.

  “The problem is,” the Professor said, “one has to buy the right something. Otherwise they get offended.”

  “How offended? Enough to kill?”

  The Professor shrugged. “Why not? Dying’s no big deal. And who cares what happens to a stranger?”

  “Well,” Harold said, “let’s go out there and buy the right thing. Do you have any idea what that might be?”

  “They change it every year,” the Professor said gloomily.

  Just then the spokesman popped his head in the door. “Time to buy something,” he said, smiling brightly.

  Harold and the Professor rose and followed the spokesman out to the brightly decorated supermarket. The chief was in full tribal costume, which consisted of a paisley Chardin jacket, trousers by Homophilia of Hollywood, and shoes by the fabled Thom McAnn. These were the clothes which businessmen had once worn as they went about their mysterious errands of power in the great cities, back when there had been great cities.

  Harold and the Professor followed the spokesman outside to the supermarket. The shelves were all bare. Harold was surprised at this at first until the Professor reminded him that he was taking part in a ritual, that is to say, something that is not the thing itself. The real merchandise was kept outside, and where the choice of life or death would have to be made.

  Outside the supermarket there were long rows of booths like an oriental bazaar. These booths were constructed of simulated deerskin as in the ancient Indian fashion, and were suspended upon tall ribs of iron painted to simulate wood. In front of each booth the owner sat cross-legged, with his wife or a son or daughter nearby to help wait upon the customer; for in the ancient Indian tradition the customer was sacred.

  The goods that Harold saw, piled on little tables in front of the booths, were not the sort of goods he’d seen in Mr. Smith’s general store back in Keene Valley. Mr. Smith, for example, had not stocked broken light bulbs; but here was an entire window display of them. Here was a shop selling nothing but broken furniture, another shop with smashed china. Here was one that had scraps of painted canvas. There was a booth of farm machinery, hopelessly wrecked.

  Harold realized that nothing in this supermarket was whole and usable—it was all what the Professor called “symbolic.” Yet he was supposed to pick something. But what?

  His forehead creased. Why not let the Professor do the picking? He was an educated man who was supposed to know about such things.

  He looked at the Professor and saw the look on his face. It was a look that said, “You do it.”

  Harold knew that look. It was the slave look. It was the look that said, “I’m too scared to choose so you’d better do it for both of us.”

  Harold turned quite abruptly, reached into a booth, and plucked from it a crowbar about three feet in length and slightly bent. “How much for this?” he asked the spokesman.

  The merchant conversed with the spokesman in language Harold did not understand. This town-spoke its own patois as well as the generally accepted Spanish and English.

  The shopkeeper, his face a grotesque mask portraying willingness to serve, said, “Since it’s Red Tag Day and since I like your face we’ll make it two dollars.”

  The crowd pressed forward as Harold took his worn billfold out of the back pocket of his shiny-assed blue jeans. He opened it slowly, and the people gaped and pressed closer. You’d think they’d never seen something like that before—somebody buying something. It was religious with them, of course, that would have to account for it. The Professor held his breath as Harold handed over his two dollars.

  “Now,” the spokesman said, “you must answer the question.”

  “All right,” Harold said. His face was peaceful, untroubled.

  “Why did you buy the crowbar?”

  Harold smiled. He stood tall, head and shoulders above any of them. The crowbar in his fist came back behind his shoulder, and the crowd fell back.

  “I bought it,” Harold said, “to crack me a few skulls if anyone started messing with me.”

  There was a moment of silence as the crowd digested this. “And also,” Harold said, “it’s the custom where I come from to pick something useful.”

  It took a second for it to sink in, and then a vast sigh went through the crowd. It was like the sound of a giant amen. Harold had said magic words which made him, temporarily at least, a brother like the rest of them. Harold had told them he came from a place that had customs, just like Maplewood had.

  9

  In a few hours he had reached the coastal highway and started hitchhiking again. Two days later he crossed the border into Florida.

  He made pretty good time down Florida, considering the state of the roads. Truckers stopped for him because he was big enough to lend a hand if something had to be loaded or unloaded down the line and because he didn’t look mean. The quick impression was that Harold looked pretty much OK. He picked up his last ride outside of the disused Cape Canaveral base. The driver was carrying a load of timber and iron punchings and was hoping to sell them or trade them for food. That ride took him the rest of the way down to Miami.

  Miami looked even worse than Harold had expected. The big buildings along Flagler Boulevard were fire-streaked concrete shells, burned out, gutted, and stripped. The people on the streets were furtive, dark, dressed in rags. The T virus had really hit hard here. There were bodies on the streets. Even the palmetto palms looked scrubby and tired and ready to give up. It was depressing to see that it was as bad in the south as in the north. But there was nothing he could do about it. He was going to Esmeralda, where a man could make a living.

  Esmeralda was a couple hundred miles away across the Caribbean, in the southeastern corner of the Bahamas near Cuba and Haiti. Harold asked around and was sent to the Dinner Key docks. He had hoped to work his way across, island to island. But the dark-skinned fishing-boat crews didn’t seem to speak any English, and they shook their heads when he tried them in broken Spanish. After three days of this, sleeping on the beach with his gun in his hand in case of trouble, he decided to spend some of the money he had been hoarding ever since leaving Keene Valley and take the plane, the Flying Cattle Car, over to Esmeralda.

  10

  The flight was full. Harold sat across the aisle from three middle-aged men who were teasing one of their group, “good old Ed,” about his supposed intention of getting into the Hunt once they reached Esmeralda, an idea which Ed denied. Ed was gaunt, dressed in a Montgomery Ward glen-plaid suit. He had homely, wind-reddened country features and a shock of iron-gray hair. He was a little older than his friends. He was trying to laugh off their witticisms and was getting flustered.

  Harold got bored listening to them after a while and went to the scruffy little cabin lounge. He had spent very little money since leaving Keene, so now he treated himself to a beer. He was halfway through it when good old Ed came back to the lounge, glanced at him, and sat down nearby. Ed ordered a beer, took a sip, chewed at his heavy lower lip for a while, then said to Erdman, “I hope we weren’t making too much noise back there.”

  Harold s
hrugged. “It didn’t bother me none.”

  “They like to kid me a lot,” Ed said, “but they don’t mean no harm by it. We’ve known each other since we was kids. We all still live within twenty-five miles of where we grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. That’s something, eh? They rag me like this because my hobby is guns. I’ve competed in a couple of fast-draw competitions in the midwest. Trying to outdraw a machine, of course, not a real opponent. But I figure you need a lot more than a fast draw if you want to compete in Huntworld. It’s not for me. I’m just going to see the sights.”

  There were other people in the lounge, and they began getting into the conversation. An old man with a face like a crumpled brown paper bag told them that the Huntworld they were going to was a pale imitation of what Hunting used to be like back in the good old days when it was legal in the United States.

  “Back then the Hunts computer was like God. Impartial. Fair to all. The rules were simple and strict and straightforward. Not like nowadays, when you hear strange stories about Treachery Cards and Vendetta Cards and similar tomfoolery. It’s commercialism at its worst, and the government of Esmeralda encourages it. I’ve even heard that some of those gunfights are fixed.”

  Another man, tall, with a rectangular, tanned, even-featured face shadowed under a white Stetson, looked up from his beer and said, “I doubt that, about the Hunts being fixed. It’s hard to fix a gun battle when both parties are armed.”

  “People are up to anything these days. I’m Ed McGraw, by the way. From Iowa.”

  “Tex Draza, from Waco, Texas.”

  The three men talked for a while, then Harold finished his beer and went back to his seat. His seatmate, a beefy man with a sunburned face and wearing a Hawaiian shirt, had been asleep since Miami. Now he awoke abruptly.