Shards of Space

by Robert Sheckley

  Of course.

  Three buttons red. He pushed them. Three buttons green. He pushed them. Four dials. Riverread.

  “Oh-oh. Nielson’s cracked.”

  “Three is for me,” Nielson said, and touched his forehead with greatest stealth. Then he reached for the keyboard again. Unimaginable associations raced through his mind, produced by unaccountable stimuli.

  “Better grab him. Watch out!”

  Gentle hands surround me as I push two are brown for which is for mother, and one is high for all the rest.

  “Stop him from shooting off those guns!”

  I am lifted into the air, I fly, I fly.

  “Is there any hope for that man?” Ellsner asked, after they had locked Nielson in a ward.

  “Who knows,” Branch said. His broad face tightened; knots of muscles pushed out his cheeks. Suddenly he turned, shouted, and swung his fist wildly at the metal wall. After it hit, he grunted and grinned sheepishly.

  “Silly, isn’t it? Margraves drinks. I let off steam by hitting walls. Let’s go eat.”

  The officers ate separate from the crew. Branch had found that some officers tended to get murdered by psychotic crewmen. It was best to keep them apart.

  During the meal, Branch suddenly turned to Ellsner.

  “Boy, I haven’t told you the entire truth. I said this would go on for two years? Well, the men won’t last that long. I don’t know if I can hold this fleet together for two more weeks.”

  “What would you suggest?”

  “I don’t know,” Branch said. He still refused to consider surrender, although he knew it was the only realistic answer.

  “I’m not sure,” Ellsner said, “but I think there may be a way out of your dilemma.” The officers stopped eating and looked at him.

  “Have you got some superweapons for us?” Margraves asked. “A disintegrator strapped to your chest’“

  “I’m afraid not. But I think you’ve been so close to the situation that you don’t see it in its true light. A case of the forest for the trees.”

  “Go on,” Branch said, munching methodically on a piece of bread.

  “Consider the universe as the CPC sees it. A world of strict causality. A logical, coherent universe. In this world, every effect has a cause. Every factor can be instantly accounted for.

  “That’s not a picture of the real world. There is no explanation for everything, really. The CPC is built to see a specialized universe, and to extrapolate on the basis of that.”

  “So,” Margraves said, “what would you do?”

  “Throw the world out of joint,” Ellsner said. “Bring in uncertainty. Add a human factor that the machines can’t calculate.”

  “How can you introduce uncertainty in a chess game?” Branch asked, interested in spite of himself.

  “By sneezing at a crucial moment, perhaps. How could a machine calculate that?”

  “It wouldn’t have to. It would just classify it as extraneous noise, and ignore it.”

  “True.” Ellsner thought for a moment. “This battle—how long will it take once the actual hostilities are begun?”

  “About six minutes,” Branch told him. “Plus or minus twenty seconds.”

  “That confirms an idea of mine,” Ellsner said. “The chess game analogy you use is faulty. There’s no real comparison.”

  “It’s a convenient way of thinking of it,” Margraves said.

  “But it’s an untrue way of thinking of it. Checkmating a king can’t be equated with destroying a fleet. Nor is the rest of the situation like chess. In chess you play by rules previously agreed upon by the players. In this game you can make up your own rules.”

  “This game has inherent rules of its own,” Branch said.

  “No,” Ellsner said. “Only the CPCs have rules. How about this? Suppose you dispensed with the CPCs? Gave every commander his head, told him to attack on his own, with no pattern. What would happen?”

  “It wouldn’t work,” Margraves told him. “The CPC can still total the picture, on the basis of the planning ability of the average human. More than that, they can handle the attack of a few thousand second-rate calculators—humans—with ease. It would be like shooting clay pigeons.”

  “But you’ve got to try something,” Ellsner pleaded.

  “Now wait a minute,” Branch said. “You can spout theory all you want. I know what the CPCs tell me, and I believe them. I’m still in command of this fleet, and I’m not going to risk the lives in my command on some harebrained scheme.”

  “Harebrained schemes sometimes win wars,” Ellsner said.

  “They usually lose them.”

  “The war is lost already, by your own admission.”

  “I can still wait for them to make a mistake.”

  “Do you think it will come?”

  “No.”

  “Well then?”

  “I’m still going to wait.”

  The rest of the meal was completed in moody silence. Afterward, Ellsner went to his room.

  “Well, Ed?” Margraves asked, unbuttoning his shirt.

  “Well yourself,” the general said. He lay down on his bed, trying not to think. It was too much. Logistics. Predetermined battles. The coming debacle. He considered slamming his fist against the wall, but decided against it. It was sprained already. He was going to sleep.

  On the borderline between slumber and sleep, he heard a click.

  The door!

  Branch jumped out of bed and tried the knob. Then he threw himself against it.

  Locked.

  “General, please strap yourself down. We are attacking.” It was Ellsner’s voice, over the intercom.

  “I looked over that keyboard of yours, sir, and found the magnetic door locks. Mighty handy in case of a mutiny, isn’t it?”

  “You idiot!” Branch shouted. “You’ll kill us all! That CPC—”

  “I’ve disconnected our CPC,” Ellsner said pleasantly. “I’m a pretty logical boy, and I think I know how a sneeze will bother them.”

  “He’s mad,” Margraves shouted to Branch. Together they threw themselves against the metal door.

  Then they were thrown to the floor.

  “All gunners—fire at will!” Ellsner broadcasted to the fleet.

  The ship was in motion. The attack was underway!

  The dots drifted together, crossing the no man’s land of space.

  They coalesced! Energy flared, and the battle was joined.

  Six minutes, human time. Hours for the electronically fast chess player. He checked his pieces for an instant, deducing the pattern of attack.

  There was no pattern!

  Half of the opposing chess player’s pieces shot out into space, completely out of the battle. Whole flanks advanced, split, rejoined, wrenched forward, dissolved their formation, formed it again.

  No pattern? There had to be a pattern. The chess player knew that everything had a pattern. It was just a question of finding it, of taking the moves already made and extrapolating to determine what the end was supposed to be.

  The end was—chaos!

  The dots swept in and out, shot away at right angles to the battle, checked and returned, meaninglessly.

  What did it mean, the chess player asked himself with the calmness of metal. He waited for a recognizable configuration to emerge.

  Watching dispassionately as his pieces were swept off the board.

  “I’m letting you out of your room now,” Ellsner called, “but don’t try to stop me. I think I’ve won your battle.”

  The lock released. The two officers ran down the corridor to the bridge, determined to break Ellsner into little pieces.

  Inside, they slowed down.

  The screen showed the great mass of Earth dots sweeping over a scattering of enemy dots.

  What stopped them, however, was Nielson, laughing, his hands sweeping over switches and buttons on the great master control board.

  The CPC was droning the losses. “Earth—eighteen percent.
Enemy—eighty-three. Eighty-four. Eighty-six. Earth, nineteen percent.”

  “Mate!” Ellsner shouted. He stood beside Nielson, a Stillson wrench clenched in his hand. “Lack of pattern. I gave their CPC something it couldn’t handle. An attack with no apparent pattern. Meaningless configurations!”

  “But what are they doing?” Branch asked, gesturing at the dwindling enemy dots.

  “Still relying on their chess player,” Ellsner said. “Still waiting for him to dope out the attack pattern in this madman’s mind. Too much faith in machines, general. This man doesn’t even know he’s precipitating an attack.”

  ...And push three that’s for dad on the olive tree I always wanted to two two two Danbury fair with buckle shoe brown all brown buttons down and in, sin, eight red for sin—”What’s the wrench for?” Margraves asked. “That?” Ellsner weighed it in his hand. “That’s to turn off Nielson here, after the attack.”

  .. .And five and love and black, all blacks, fair buttons in I remember when I was very young at all push five and there on the grass ouch—

  SUBSISTENCE LEVEL

  Her mother had warned her. “Are you out of your mind, Amelia? Why in heaven’s name must you marry a pioneer? How do you expect to be happy in a wilderness?”

  “The Cap isn’t a wilderness, Mother,” Amelia had said.

  “It isn’t civilized. It’s a crude, primitive place. And how long will this pioneer be satisfied there? I know the type. He’ll always want some new place to conquer.”

  “Then I’ll conquer it with him,” Amelia had said, certain of her own pioneering spirit.

  Her mother wasn’t so sure. “Frontier life is hard, dear. Harder than you imagine. Are you really prepared to give up your friends, all the comforts you’ve known?”

  “Yes!”

  Her mother wanted to say more. But since her husband’s death, she had become less certain of her own convictions, less determined to impose them on others.

  “It’s your life,” she said at last.

  “Don’t worry, Mother, I know what I’m doing,” Amelia said.

  She knew that Dirk Bogren couldn’t stand crowding. He was a big man and he needed elbow room, and silence, and free air to breathe. He had told her about his father, who had settled in the newly reclaimed Gobi Desert. It broke the old man’s heart when the place got so crowded that land had to be fenced in according to county regulations and he died with his face turned toward the stars.

  That was Dirk, too. She married him, and moved to the desolate Southern Polar Cap.

  But settlers came after them, and soon the Cap was called Cap City, and then it had stores and factories, and neat little suburbs stretching across the atom-heated land.

  It happened sooner than she ever expected.

  One evening they were sitting on the veranda, and Dirk was looking over his land. He stared for a long time at the tip of a radar tower on a distant rise of the land.

  “Getting crowded around here,” he said finally.

  “Yes, it is—a little,” Amelia agreed.

  “They’ll be building a golf course next. Figure it’s time to move on?”

  “All right,” Amelia said, after the slightest hesitation. And that was all that had to be said.

  They sold their farm. They bought a second-hand spaceship and filled it with the barest necessities of life. The evening before blastoff, Dirk’s friends threw a farewell party for him.

  They were the old inhabitants and they could remember when the Cap was still partly ice and snow. They kidded Dirk, half enviously.

  “Going to the asteroids, eh?”

  “That’s the place,” Dirk said.

  “But you’re soft!” an old man cackled. “Easy living’s got you, Dirk.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “Think you can still work an honest five-hour day?”

  Dirk grinned and drank his beer, and listened to the women give Amelia advice.

  “Take plenty of warm things. I remember on Mars—”

  “First-aid equipment—”

  “The trouble with low gravity—”

  “Dirk!” a man shouted. “You taking a pretty little thing like her to an asteroid?”

  “Sure,” Dirk said.

  “She won’t like it,” another man warned. “No parties, no new clothes, no doodads.”

  “Folks go crazy from overwork out there.”

  “Don’t you believe them,” an older woman put in hastily. “You’ll love it once you get used to it.”

  “I’m sure I will,” Amelia said politely and hoped it was true.

  Just before blastoff, she called her mother and told her the news.

  Her mother wasn’t surprised.

  “Well, dear,” she said, “it won’t be easy. But you knew that before you married him. The asteroids—that’s where your father wanted to go.”

  Amelia remembered her father as a gentle, soft-spoken man. Every night, when he returned from the bank, he would read through the ads for used spaceships and he would compile detailed lists of the equipment an explorer would need. Mother was dead set against any change and would not be moved. There were few open arguments—until all bitterness was resolved when a helicopter smashed into her father’s car one day, when he was returning from the bank.

  “Try to be a good wife to him,” her mother urged.

  “Of course I will,” Amelia declared a little angrily.

  The new frontiers were in space, for Earth was tame and settled now. Dirk had studied the available charts of the Asteroid Belt, but they didn’t tell him much. No one had ever penetrated very far and the vast extent was simply marked Unknown Territory.

  It was a long journey and a dangerous one, but free land was there, land for the taking, and all the room a man could ask. Dirk fought through the shifting patterns of rock with steady patience. The spaceship was always pointed implacably outward, though no route was marked.

  “We’re not turning back,” he told Amelia, “so there’s no sense charting a way.”

  She nodded agreement, but her breath came short when she looked at the bleak, dead spots of light ahead. She couldn’t help feeling apprehensive about their new life, the grim, lonely existence of the frontier. She shivered and put her hand over Dirk’s.

  He smiled, never taking his eyes off the dials.

  They found a slab of rock several miles long by a mile wide. They landed on the dark, airless little world, set up their pressure dome and turned on the gravity. As soon as it approached normal, Dirk set to work uncrating the Control Robot. It was a long, tiring job, but finally he inserted the tape and activated the controls.

  The robot went to work. Dirk turned on all available searchlights. Using the small crane, he lifted their Frontier Shelter out of the ship’s hold, placed it near the center of the dome, and activated it. The Shelter opened like a gigantic flower, blossoming into a neat five-room dwelling, complete with basic furniture, kitchen, plumbing, and disposal units.

  It was a start. But everything couldn’t be unpacked at once. The temperature control was buried somewhere in the hold of the ship, and Dirk had to warm their house with an auxiliary heater hooked to the generator.

  Amelia was too cold to make dinner. The temperature in the Shelter hovered around 52 degrees Fahrenheit. Even in her Explorers, Inc. furs, she was cold, and the dismal glow of the fluorescents made her feel colder.

  “Dirk,” she asked timidly, “couldn’t you make it a little warmer?”

  “I suppose I could, but that would slow down the robot.”

  “I didn’t know,” Amelia said. “I’ll be all right.”

  But it was impossible working under fluorescents and she set the dial wrong on the Basic Ration Pack. The steak came out overdone, the potatoes were lumpy, and the chill was barely taken off the apple pie.

  “I’m afraid I’m not much good at roughing it,” Amelia said, trying to smile.

  “Forget it,” Dirk told her, and wolfed down his food as though it were regula
r Earthside fare.

  They turned in. Amelia could hardly sleep on the emergency mattress. But she had the dubious satisfaction of knowing that Dirk was uncomfortable, too. He had been softened by the relatively easy life at the Cap.

  When they awoke, everything seemed more cheerful. The Control Robot, working through the night, had set up the main lighting plant. Now they had their own little sun in the sky and a fair approximation of night and day. The Control had also unloaded the heavy Farm Robots, and they in turn had unloaded the Household Robots.

  Dirk directed the topsoil manufacturing and coordinated the work of his robots as they force-seeded the soil. He worked a full five-hour day, and when the little sun was low on the horizon, he came home exhausted.

  Amelia, meanwhile, had taped in her basic food sequences during the day, and that evening she was able to give her husband a plain but hearty eight-course dinner.

  “Of course, it’s not the twenty-plate special,” she apologized as he munched on the hors d’oeuvres.

  “Never could eat all that food, anyhow,” Dirk said.

  “And the wine isn’t properly chilled.”

  Dirk looked up and grinned. “Hell, honey, I could drink warm Ola-Cola and never notice it.”

  “Not while I’m cook here,” Amelia said. But she could see one advantage of frontier life already—a hungry man would eat anything that was put in front of him.

  After helping Amelia pile the dishes into the washer, Dirk set up a projector in their living room. As a double feature flicked across the screen, they sat in durable foam-rubber chairs, just as generations of pioneers before them had done. This continuity with the past touched Amelia deeply.

  And Dirk unpacked their regular bed and adjusted the gravity under it. That night they slept as soundly as they ever had at the Cap.

  But the work on the asteroid was ceaseless and unremitting. Dirk labored five and, several times, even six hours a day with his Field Robots, changing tapes, bellowing commands, sweating to get the best out of them. In a few days, the force-seeded plants began to show green against the synthesized black loam. But it was apparent at once that it was a stunted crop.

  Dirk’s mouth tightened and he set his robots to pumping trace elements into the soil. He tinkered with his sun until he had increased its ultraviolet output. But the resulting crop, a week later, was a failure.