Unidentified Funny Objects 2

by Silverberg, Robert

  “If you gentlemen will lift me off my side,” said Quatermain, “I will change my tire and we will continue the safari as if nothing happened.”

  The men put their shoulders into the task, and a few moments later Quatermain was upright again.

  “Thank you,” said the vehicle. “Please re-enter me now, while I go to work on the tire.”

  They climbed into the car, and the door closed and locked behind them.

  “Four hours and seventeen minutes and I’ll be as good as new,” said Quartermain. “Then we’ll travel to the Marisula Delta and explore an entirely different ecosystem.”

  “Let’s just travel back to the safari office,” said Tarica. “I’ve had enough.”

  “Me, too,” added Donahue.

  “You want to end your safari four days early?” asked Quatermain.

  “You got it.”

  “I am afraid I cannot accommodate you, sirs,” said Quatermain.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Your company paid for five full days,” explained Quatermain. “If you do not experience all five days, we could be sued for breach of contract.”

  “We’ve experienced five days’ worth,” said Tarica. “We just want to go home.”

  “Clearly your travel has left you mentally confused, sir. You have actually experienced only 21 hours and 49 minutes. I am not aware of confusion taking this form before, but I suppose it can happen.”

  “I know how long we’ve been here, and I’m not confused,” said Donahue. “Take us back.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good.”

  “As soon as the safari is over. My tire will be ready in four hours and thirteen minutes, and then we will proceed to the Marisula Delta.”

  Tarica tried the door. “Let me out!”

  “I am afraid I cannot, sir,” said Quatermain. “You might try to find your way back to the spaceport. If you do, there is a 97.328 percent likelihood that you will be killed and eaten, and should you make it back intact, there is a 95.673 percent chance that a breach of contract suit will be brought against my owners. Therefore, I feel I must fulfill our contract. Sit back and try to relax, sir.”

  “We’ll starve.”

  “Not to worry, sir. I will be able to feed you right where you are.”

  “We can’t sleep in this thing,” complained Donahue.

  “My understanding of human physiology, which I should note is encyclopedic, is that when you get tired enough you can sleep anywhere.” A brief pause. “All your needs will be provided for, sir. I even have a one-month supply of plastic bags.”

  IT WAS FIVE DAYS later that Quatermain pulled up to the spaceport.

  “Serving you has been a true pleasure, sirs,” it intoned as Tarica and Donahue wearily opened the door, raced around to the back, and grabbed their luggage. “I hope to see you again in the near future.”

  “In your dreams!” growled Tarica.

  “I do not dream, sir.”

  “I do,” muttered Donahue. “And I’m going to have nightmares about this safari for the rest of my life.”

  A squat robot, looking for all the world like a fire hydrant on wheels, rolled up, took their bags from them, and led them to a small waiting spaceship.

  “This isn’t the same spaceliner we took here,” said Tarica dubiously. “It looks like a small private ship.”

  “Your Stellar Voyages ship is not available, sir,” said the robot, as it placed their luggage in the cargo hold “This ship was supplied, gratis, by the safari company as a sign of their appreciation.”

  “And to dissuade us from suing?” asked Donahue.

  “That, too,” agreed the robot.

  The two men climbed into the ship and strapped themselves into the only two seats provided.

  “Welcome, gentlemen,” said the ship as the hatch closed and it began elevating. “I trust you enjoyed your once-in-a-lifetime safari experience on the planet Selous. I will be returning you to Earth. I come equipped with all creature comforts except sexual consorts”—it uttered an emotionless mechanical chuckle—“and have a gourmet kitchen at your disposal.”

  “What happened to the ship we were supposed to be on?” asked Tarica.

  “I regret to inform you that it was destroyed in an ion storm just as it was entering the system,” answered the ship.

  “Uh… we’re not going through that same storm on the way out, are we?” asked Donahue.

  “Yes, sir,” said the ship. “But there is no need for concern, sir. I am a new model, equipped with every conceivable safety device. I am far more maneuverable than a—” The ship shuddered for just an instant. “Just some minor space debris. Nothing to worry about. As I was saying, I am far more maneuverable than a spaceliner, and besides, this is my home system. Every ion storm during the past ten years has been charted and placed in my data banks.”

  “So you’ve flown through them before?” said Tarica.

  “Actually, no,” said the ship. “This is my first flight. But as I say, I am fully equipped and programmed. What could go wrong?”

  Tarica cursed under his breath. Donahue merely checked to make sure there was a small paper bag near his seat.

  “I am sure we’re going to get along splendidly together,” continued the ship. “You are Mr. Tarica and Mr. Donahue, am I correct?

  “Right,” said Tarica.

  “And my name was clearly discernable in bold letters on my nose as you entered me,” said the ship proudly.

  “I must have missed it,” said Tarica. “What was it?”

  “I am the Pequod.”

  Donahue reached for the bag.

  Story notes:

  This story is a tribute to a dear friend, and a one-time collaborator, the late Robert Sheckley. It's exactly the kind of story he was doing in the 1950s, before he began experimenting—which reached its apex in Dimension of Miracles—with a form of humor that only worked as science fiction.

  Mike Resnick is, according to Locus, the all-time leading award-winner, living or dead, for short science fiction. He is the winner of 5 Hugos, a Nebula, and other major awards in the USA, Japan, Spain, Poland, Croatia, Catalonia, and France.

  Mike is the author of 71 novels, close to 300 stories, and three screenplays, and is the editor of 41 anthologies. He recently took on the editorship of the Stellar Guild line of books and Galaxy's Edge magazine as well.

  HOW YOU RUINED EVERYTHING

  by Konstantine Paradias

  The first step toward realizing it’s your fault that everything’s gone wrong is admitting that you were, at the time, the only man with a functioning time machine.

  The second step is, of course, admitting that you stole it from its original owner, by bashing his head in with a shovel when he wasn’t looking. And that you left the poor bastard unconscious out in the rain, telling yourself that you’d be back fifteen seconds of real time later to help him using copious applications of your now almost inexhaustible capital, considerable connections, and a first aid kit.

  Because what you were going to do was step into that time machine, go back to the past, and make your life so much better. Armed with the knowledge of other people’s financial and personal successes, you would venture into the times of the monkey-men (or your dad’s) and there proceed to build yourself a financial empire.

  The third part toward accepting how the entire mess might actually be your fault, is realizing that you don’t know the first thing about driving a time machine. That, as you look at the series of knobs, flashing lights, levers, revolving spigots, glass tubes, masses of wires and circuitry with the complexity of fractals, you don’t think: Dear God, what is this thing?

  Instead, you say: “Yeah, I got this.”

  As you start pressing buttons and flicking unlabeled switches and turning spigots and prodding screens, listening to impossible gadgetry rev and whirr and roar beneath the dashboard and inside the unknowable bowels of the machine, you don’t-for-one-moment-stop-to-consider:
I have no idea what I’m doing.

  Instead, you say: “Alright! Rev it up!”

  As the time machine screeches, roars, and a previously obscured dial pops out of the dashboard, proceeding to spin and whistle madly, your instincts (honed by a steady diet of science fiction books and serials) tell you that this is obviously the date dial, through which you can adjust your destination. You’re so busy winding it, flipping it to your date of choice that you don’t stop for one moment to consider that: None of those numbers are dates. And that smaller dial, why is it pointing to Mil?

  You just say: “Come on, baby! 1960, let’s go!”

  So the time machine roars once more, shudders like a cheetah in heat and then it jumps. You find yourself in a forest with pine trees tall as houses blocking your view. It jumps again and you’re on a hill, overlooking a glade, where men in long robes wave sickles and gnash their teeth at the sight of you. You jump again and this time you’re in a jungle. Then you’re in a marsh. Then you’re standing beneath the shadow of a great mountain. Then you just jump and jump and jump and jump…

  When the time machine screeches to a halt so sudden that it sends you flying, you find yourself landing in the middle of a field of tall grass, beneath a sky that’s baby-room-wallpaper blue. The air smells clearer, fresher, yet still alien. You take a whiff, look at the empty fields around you that stretch on forever, and as you notice a group of upright monkeys, you think: This doesn’t look like Woodstock at all.

  The upright monkeys approach and you’re naturally scared. You never liked monkeys, anyway: they’re like caricatures of people, all hair and big stupid eyes and mouths full of sharp teeth. One of them (the biggest and bravest of the bunch), reaches out his long, misshapen hand to touch you. He’s unarmed, but you’ve seen 2001: A Space Odyssey; you know it’s only a matter of time before he finds a big enough bone to smash your ribs.

  The rock’s in your hand before you know it. It’s jagged and it barely fits in your palm, therefore perfect. You whack the upright monkey with it, because you’ll be damned if you let another one of those things bite you in the ear like that circus one did, when you were six. The upright monkey squeals, snarls. and claws blindly at empty air, so you crack it on the head again and again. When it’s down, you sit on its chest and keep bashing it, until it’s good and quiet. Not once, at any point do you stop to think: Jesus Christ, what am I doing? What if I’m altering history?

  What comes out of your mouth is: “Yeah! Yeah! Get some! Get some!”

  So you throw away the rock. The upright monkey ladies begin to swoon for you once they’re done soiling themselves in terror. The monkey-men begin to divvy up the corpse to offer to you, their new master. Long story short, you end up spending the night with them, showing off that trick you learned with your lighter back in college. Somehow (and not in any way that you can actually describe), a great fire breaks out that consumes the entire valley of tall grass, and you run back to your time machine.

  Panicked, you press buttons again, flicking every switch, but this time, you turn all the dials away from you. You sneak a look at the dial, which now reads: 1800 Mil.

  As the time machine revs up and jumps, forward and upward, you never once stop to think: Maybe I should stop. Maybe I should try to go back and ask the man I brained for directions. Before I brain him, of course.

  Instead, you say: “Onward and upward!”

  When the time machine screeches to a screaming halt, you find your senses assaulted by an overwhelming smell of burning plastic before you open your eyes. Something flies by you, leaving behind only an afterimage of green light and a scent very much like battery acid. Something behind you explodes, just as you’re beginning to rev up the time machine. A cold metal hand wraps around your arm. You follow it and find yourself staring into a pair of frosted-glass eyes, set above something that looks like a speaker.

  “Throk’to akh-ha?” it blares.

  “Aaaaah!” you retort.

  The metal thing with the speaker for a face raises its other arm, producing something that looks like a prop gun from a Flash Gordon flick, when a ragged man jumps from cover and cuts its hand clean off with a sword made out of light. The dial of the machine spins and stops short of 180 Mil as you slap the big red button at the center of the dashboard and you’re ejected across time with a severed robot arm that bleeds black liquid onto your lap.

  When you finally stop, you’re standing beside a podium. A short man with tiny, beady eyes and a toothbrush-wide moustache looks at you, his hand frozen mid-salute. There’s a red band wrapped around his arm that looks awfully familiar.

  “Was is das?” the man on the podium asks with a voice you’ve come to recognize after countless of hours of playing Call of Duty.

  Somehow, the Flash Gordon prop’s in your hand and you pull the trigger. Green light shoots from the tip and strikes the familiar man, reducing him to a pile of dust in an instant. As the Gestapo officers rush toward you, machine guns in hand, you’re thinking: Damn! I just killed Hitler!

  You say: “Hot diggity damn!”

  You pull the lever, not really checking the dial. One of the officers shoots at you and you see the bullet slowing down mid-flight, stopping and then returning back to the barrel, swallowing up the flame that had just propelled it through the air. You jump, and in the time it takes you to blink, the time machine has landed in the middle of a park, in a place that smells like freshly bloomed anemones, with just a dash of hash.

  You look around and all you can see are hippies, jangling their guitars to the non-tune of Yoko on the radio, turned to almost-music by the genius of John Lennon. The hippies run, of course. They head for the hills, their reefers forgotten in the grass. Only one girl’s left, staring at you with wide-eyed wonder.

  “Where the hell did you come from?” she asks, her voice sounding vaguely familiar. The way she’s dressed, her clothes a mish-mash of beads and cotton threads, complete with a makeshift dreamcatcher hanging from her neck between her breasts, she looks like a pagan goddess, refitted for the twentieth century.

  “I’m from the future” you tell her in your most suave tone. “Wanna hop on my time machine?” you give her a wink that you know is embarrassing, even under the circumstances.

  “You’re from the future huh, spaceman? Whose arm is that?” she asks, smiling as she looks at the severed robot arm still in your lap.

  “Oh that? That’s just a trophy taken from one of my many fallen foes. The future is a dangerous place, after all. Thank goodness for my ray gun, I suppose…” you say, reaching for it, when you realize it’s not there anymore. Frantically, you pat down your jacket, your pants. You open dashboard drawers, spilling out yellowed papers and dog-eared notebooks with gilded lettering. Suddenly, it hits you: The Nazis have the damn ray gun.

  You’re desperately trying to consider the implications when the hippie girl walks up to you and her hazel eyes suddenly dawn in your field of vision. Her lips are the color of fresh cherries. She runs her hands through your hair and she doesn’t just feel right. She feels divine.

  “It’s okay, you can show off later.”

  “Later when?” you ask, as she kisses you and you roll on the grass, your hands all over each other. The entire time, you’re thinking: Eh, why hurry? I’ve got a time machine, for Christ’s sake!

  You’re sharing a joint, when she says: “My name’s Lily. FFFFtttp.” she exhales, letting out a billow of smoke so white, you’d think her lungs had elected a new pope.

  “You know, you look like a Lily. FFFtttp,” you say, blowing halfway-formed rings of smoke.

  You look at her as she turns, eyes following the arch of her back as you’re passing the roach, when you notice them for the first time: first, the tiny tail, wagging at the small of her back; second, the tiny patch of ink printed above it.

  “You know, you’re the first man I’ve seen who didn’t have a tail. FFFFtttp.” she says, half-smiling, as she turns to ruffle your hair.

  “What’s t
hat thing on your back?” you ask, as your brain slowly pieces together the design. It’s a tattoo, shaped like a stylized swastika. Please, let this be a post-modern statement you pray.

  “What, that? Oh, you like it? It’s a Party thing. They were gonna put it on my palm like everybody else, but I thought why not try something new, you know? Why, where’s your tattoo?” she says, between puffs.

  “That’s a Nazi-oh God.”

  “Oh please, don’t tell me you’re like one of those Jew-lovers? My fiancé went to one of their rallies once and they shipped him off to ’Nam to kill gooks all day.” Lily responds, matter-of-factly.

  “Fiancé? You have a boyfriend?” you exclaim and suddenly, the small details that had escaped you begin to sink in: the color of her eyes, her hair, the line of her neck, the sound of her voice, the derision in her tone. “Where did you say you lived?”

  “Over in Jonestown, a ways off from the big city.”

  “And your fiancé’s name’s Kurt?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “And your maiden name’s Popowitz?”

  “Used to be. Daddy changed it to Lauk, after the war, to get on the Party’s good side. How come you know so much about me?”

  And suddenly, it hits you: this woman is your own mother, who’s now a Nazi (like everyone else) because you gave them a ray gun in the first place!

  The fourth part toward realizing how you’ve messed everything up is coming to terms with the fact that everything that’s gone wrong is entirely your own damn fault. Also, that you need to stop and fix whatever it is you’re doing, right now.

  The fifth part toward realizing that everything is your fault is taking a deep breath and trying to think of a viable solution: finding the man who owned this machine and asking for his help is a solid plan. Thinking about going back in time to the point before he met you and thus risking a paradox, is not.