Fear and Trembling

by Robert Bloch

  Only it wasn’t easy. The crawl rolled, the laughs came, but something was wrong.

  He squinted into the light that hid his audience and revealed him, wondering just how much they could see, how much they knew.

  But how could they know anything? For years now his life-style protected privacy. He gave no interviews and didn’t read the ones his publicists planted in print. The staff-meetings and business conferences were conducted on closed-circuit TV. There was no time to waste on friends or acquaintances, he didn’t give or attend parties. Since the last divorce—Jesus, that was over six years ago—he hadn’t had a woman, not even a call-girl, and he didn’t want any. A limo drove him to the studio, then back to his automated house; help and security did their jobs without hitches. If liquor deadened his days and pills pacified his nights, nothing leaked to the press, so how could anyone know?

  Trouble was it worked both ways. If people didn’t know about him, he didn’t know about people anymore. He’d lost personal contact and since the trouble started he’d been completely out of touch. Harry didn’t even read the papers after he got sick—all this crap about new medical problems was a drag and he didn’t want to hear scare-talk on the nightly news. The only thing he watched on television was old movies, and the stars who played in them were dead.

  Dead stars—that was a laugh! The audience was laughing now but they didn’t know Harry was practically a dead star himself, a brain in a mechanized body, a product of plastic and cosmetic surgery, of built-in artificial organs supported by electronic impulses and computer-circuitry.

  They didn’t know, and he’d keep it that way through this new season. Time to forget the past and pay attention to what he was doing. Right now the crawl cued him to bring out his first guest.

  Harry read the intro and a jock came out, moving to him and shaking hands before they took their seats at stage-center. The jock was big, burly, bearded; Harry was surprised that his hand was so cold and his grip so feeble. Stage-fright, of course—funny how these steroid-stuffed apes went into flop-sweat in front of an audience.

  But no sweat, all he had to do now was read the crawl. Harry fed him his first line, then waited for a response.

  There wasn’t any.

  Harry repeated the line, making sure the jock heard him. Or did he? The nerd just sat there without a peep. What the hell—don’t tell me he’s illiterate?

  Harry peered at him, whispering under his breath. “We’re on, dummy! Answer me—say something, for Christ’s sake—”

  No reaction. The jock’s face was blank, expressionless.

  Harry’s face was blank now too, but he was seething inside. Jesus, the guy’s wired, he’s tripped-out—

  Instinct came to the rescue and he turned to the audience, rapping out an old line off the top of his head. It was a feeble gag, but anything was better than dead air.

  The jock didn’t move a muscle, just sat there frozen. Only one thing to do—get him off, quick. Harry gave the signal, a hand-gesture, and two bosomy blondes jiggled onstage. “Harry’s Hostesses,” that’s what they were called, but their real job was to cover for him in emergencies like this. And while he popped a line about the jock coming down with a sudden attack of athlete’s foot, the smiling girls helped the guy to rise from his seat.

  Helped him, hell—they couldn’t budge him, he just sat there stiff as a board. Harry shot out another line to grab the audience’s attention while the girls, smiling no longer, practically carried the big ape offstage, his feet dragging between them.

  Now what? Harry signalled again and the fat announcer came to his rescue, plodding onstage and going into a schtick which had nothing to do with what had happened. Looking up, Harry saw that the crawl had whirred through a speed-up and now it fed him a line which segued into a commercial break.

  As it came, he switched off his mike and spoke quickly. “What’s going on here?”

  “The computer’s down,” the announcer said. And walked off, striding stiffly, without another word.

  “Hey, come back here—”

  Harry’s voice rose, but the announcer only increased his pace, legs jerking as he lurched against the backdrop in his haste to reach the wings.

  Panic impelled Harry’s fingers to the buttons on the end-table beside his chair, pressing a signal that would alert the director in the control-booth.

  There was no response. A new commercial tape rolled on the monitor screen, but that didn’t tell him anything. Harry blinked up through the lights until he managed to focus on the glass-fronted booth high on the rear wall of the studio.

  The booth was empty.

  No director. No production people, not even a sound engineer.

  Harry stared. What gives here? Don’t tell me it’s all computerized now—camera-cues, sound-levels, light-changes, the works—

  Frantic, he glanced over to the wings, then wished he hadn’t. The announcer was there, sprawled face-down on the floor next to the inert jock. As Harry watched, a pair of paramedics approached, then knelt beside the fat figure as they stripped off the announcer’s jacket and shirt. Hastily they began to press the shiny studs imbedded in his bare back, fiddling with connections.

  Connections.

  Harry made connections of his own. Jesus, he’s like me! And the jock, too.

  Then the commercial faded from the monitor and Harry was on again. His eyes sought the crawl but there was no crawl. All he could do was switch his mike back on and stall for time.

  But the mike was dead. Dead, like the announcer and the jock and—

  Realization hit him then. He wasn’t the only one. Something had been building up while he was out of it. Harry remembered the rumors about an epidemic; it must have been going on for a long time, hushed-up but happening just the same. More and more people at the top were like himself now, empty shells with artificial life-support.

  How far had it spread? How long would it be before presidents were programmed, robots ruled the world? Calling it a medical miracle didn’t change the facts—this was a conspiracy. Somebody had to blow the whistle, tell the truth, tell it quickly.

  Now a faint hum sounded and Harry knew his mike was live again; an automatic backup had corrected its breakdown. But it was up to him to correct the other breakdown, the big one.

  Facing the lights that separated him from his audience, Harry’s voice bridged the gap with words. He had to warn them now, if it was the last thing he could do.

  “Can you hear me? Then get out of here! You’ve got to understand—this isn’t real. I’m not real. Tell your friends. Don’t let the computers take over, don’t let artificial organs and electronic implants turn you into zombies! It happened to me and it can happen to you unless you do something now. Find a cure for this—get back to reality before it’s too late!”

  Harry paused, waiting for a reaction.

  And then it came—in a burst of sound from the laugh-track.

  That was to be expected, of course. There was always a track to punch up the laughs, another to sweeten the applause.

  But over the years Harry had learned to detect the difference between canned laughter and the real thing. And this mirth was mechanical. Nobody was laughing out there, nobody was applauding, nobody was reacting because they didn’t know how to react unless they were cued. This was a funny show, he was a funny man, and they couldn’t respond to an unexpected warning on their own.

  During the years that surgery had robbed him of his body, something had stolen their brains. Computers did their thinking, the media dictated their life-styles. Making love, driving cars or shaking their fists in protest-demonstrations were all a matter of mimicry. Machines made the products, machines pitched the products, machines bought the products and used them. Life wasn’t real any longer—it was like this show, with its phoney guests, phoney ad-libs, and phoney host.

  The only reality Harry could find now was his own despair. What good would warnings do? Viewers weren’t going to hear what he said—it would be edited fro
m the tape.

  But there was still a way. Word-of-mouth. That was the answer—if he got through to the studio audience here, made them believe, they’d go out and spread the truth. And he had to convince them now, because this was his last chance.

  Harry faced the lights, fighting the blinding glare, forcing himself to make eye-contact with the figures seated silently in the shadows below. His vision blurred, then cleared, and he stared down at the empty expanse of the studio.

  There was no audience.

  No audience—just Harry and the crawl. A blinking light from the TelePrompTer told him it had resumed functioning again, cueing him in on his next line.

  Automatically, Harry began to read the words aloud. What the hell, it was a new season, the show must go on, and a gag is a gag.

  And if there was no audience, it didn’t matter. He’d always have the laugh-track.

  ETFF

  This is the first time I’ve ever written anything in English.

  Like all primitive language-systems, it’s a clumsy method of communication. I had to study several days before I mastered it, but I’m glad I did.

  It came in handy the other night, on that back-country road in West Virginia.

  And so did my human body.

  The body is even more clumsy than the language. The construction is easy enough—just rob a sperm-bank and away you go—but I spent nearly a week, by earth-time reckoning, adapting myself to the limitations of movement and perception. And I never did reconcile myself to its ugliness.

  But one must be tolerant, and I learned to cope; just as I learned to comprehend the simplistic structure of terrestrial history, geography, biology, zoology, chemistry, anthropology, ethnology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, theology, astronomy, technology and pornography.

  I still don’t understand their mathematics completely—for example, how did McDonald’s determine just exactly when they sold their 68,000,000,000th hamburger?—but then there are some things we are not meant to know.

  And the earthlings are fallible, too.

  That night in West Virginia, when I dropped down to the road in front of the van, Rick and Steve thought I was a fugitive from the fuzz.

  Rick was driving, and he jammed on the brakes fast, pulling over to the side just before hitting me. “Climb in, man!” he yelled. “We gotta get away from that helicopter!”

  Steve was sitting next to him, and he opened the door to pull me aboard. “Turn off on the side-road, fast—we can lose them,” he told Rick.

  “Don’t bother,” I said. “Look, they’ve scrinched.”

  And of course, they had scrinched—grocceling up and out into a blik, right on schedule.

  “Scrinched, hell,” said Steve. “They’ve disappeared!” He shook his head. “I never saw a police chopper do that before.”

  “Weird,” said Rick. “Like I need a drink, you know?” And he grabbed the beer-can out of Steve’s hand.

  It was then that I noticed both of them were in a condition caused by alcoholic drink in which control of the faculties is impaired and inhibitions are broken; i.e., they were smashed.

  “Maybe it wasn’t a chopper,” Steve said. “Could be a flying saucer.”

  “What’s a flying saucer?” I asked.

  “It’s a UFO. Unidentified flying object.”

  “But I can identify it for you,” I said. “It was a plain, ordinary vroob.”

  “Vroob?”

  I nodded. “You’d call it a space-ship.”

  Rick made a face. “Space-ship? What are you, a Trekkie or something?”

  “Exactly. A something named Pzquadfltorzz. At least that’s as close as I can come to it in English.”

  Steve looked at Rick. “This guy is bananas.”

  “No, I’m Pzquadfltorzz. Pzquadfltorzz Icthylopaughribbl III, to be exact, from Freebis M2, Quadrant IV, Vector—”

  “Open another beer, quick,” Steve said.

  Rick reached into a six-pack on the seat beside him and handed Steve a can. “Let’s get it all together. What you’re saying is that you’re an alien and you just landed here from a spaceship—”

  “Ohhhhhh!”

  The soft moan came from the interior of the van behind us. We turned to look at the girl lying on the bunk in back.

  Steve frowned at her. “Sherry, what’s the matter?”

  “I bumped my arm against the side when you hit the brakes back there. I think I cut myself.”

  Both Steve and Rick were frowning now.

  “What’s the trouble?” I said.

  “Trouble? Sherry needs a doctor right away, man.”

  “For a minor cut?”

  “Could be fatal. She’s a haemophilic. You know what that means.”

  “Of course.” I nodded. “Let me help her.”

  “You?”

  “I told you I’m an extra-terrestrial,” I said. “Take me to your bleeder.”

  “Hold it, what do you think you’re doing—?”

  But I ignored him and climbed into the back of the van. Kneeling beside the girl, I examined her arm. Sure enough, she had a cut just below the left elbow and it was bleeding profusely. I lifted her arm and ran my fingers over the cut. The bleeding slopped. Then I pressed my fingers against the wound. It puckered up and vanished.

  “Holy Asimov!” the girl gasped. “What did you do?”

  “I stroomfed it. A simple technique, known to your ancient Egyptians and modern faith-healers. Laying on of hands, that sort of thing. We do it all the time on Freebis M2, Quadrant IV, Vector—”

  “I believe it,” Sherry said. She sat up, nodding at Rick and Steve. “You know something? This dude’s telling the truth.”

  Steve stared at her. “You mean—?”

  “Well, he didn’t ask for any donations, so he’s not a faith-healer. And he doesn’t have enough wrinkles to be an ancient Egyptian, either. Besides, that flying thing did look like a space-ship.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” Rick said. And he did.

  “But if you’re an extra-terrestrial, what are you doing here?” Steve said.

  “Same thing you are. I’m on my way to Connecticut.”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “I know a lot of things. You’re Steve Morgan and Sherry’s your sister. Rick Greeley is your best friend.”

  “You’ve been reading our minds?”

  “I’ve been reading your fanzine. And it isn’t easy—your mimeo is terrible. Also you should justify your margins.”

  “You read Smudge!” Rick shook his head. “How could you? We only printed twenty-nine copies of the last issue. I thought nobody read it except Harry Warner, Jr.”

  “How would an extra-terrestrial get hold of a fanzine?” Steve asked. “I know the post office is fouled up, but this is ridiculous.”

  “Space-ships get around,” I told him. “We make frequent visits here to acquire artifacts.”

  “In other words, you ripped it off,” Sherry said.

  I shrugged. “I could hardly subscribe, you know. As your brother says, the post office is undependable, and I doubt if there’s regular delivery service to Freebis M2, Quadrant IV, Vector—”

  “Why?” Rick said. “What would you want with a fanzine?”

  “We’re interested in pop culture. That’s why we send our ships here. We’ve been studying your planet for years.”

  “Now wait a minute!” Steve looked grim. “Don’t tell me you’re planning to invade earth?”

  “None of that crazy Buck Rogers stuff,” I said. “What would an extra-terrestrial want to do that for? Do you think we need your troubles—pollution, inflation, wars, muggings, television game-shows, political assassinations, Rod McKuen—”

  “Then why come here?”

  “Because I couldn’t risk landing in Connecticut near the hotel, where the ship would be seen. But your fanzine said you’d be driving there by this route, and I thought you’d give me a lift.”

  “To the Convention?”

  “
Of course.” I nodded. “Don’t you understand? I’m a fan.”

  “A science fiction fan?”

  “Why not? After all, fandom is a way of life. And nowhere is it specified that it must be limited merely to terrestrial life. Well, I’m alive. And when I got into your earth culture, fandom turned me on. Fanzines like yours, and prozines too. Your science fiction writers have some interesting concepts of the universe. Quaint, but interesting. I became fascinated with the naïve extrapolations of Clarke, Heinlein and van Vogt—the subtleties of the Perry Rhodan series—the autoerotic imagery of your New Wave. I even read the first four pages of Dhalgren—”

  “And you’re going to the Convention in Connecticut? The Con-Con?”

  “That’s my reward for working on these earth-study projects. My colleagues, noting my interest and enthusiasm, created an informal organization to sponsor my trip here. The ETFF.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Extra-Terrestrial Fan Fund.”

  “Oh wow,” said Sherry, with the natural eloquence of a young earthling. “What a break for us! Bringing the first actual visitor from outer space to a science fiction convention—why, it’ll double our circulation! I can just see the look on their faces when we get up and introduce Pzquadfltorzz Icthylopaughribbl III from—”

  “Please,” I murmured. “No names.”

  “No names like that one, anyway,” Rick said. “It sounds like something out of H.P. Lovecraft. Yog-sothoth, Nyarlathotep, Cthulhu—”

  “Never mind about Cthulhu,” I said. “He happens to be a good friend of mine.”

  “Suppose we just call you Pete,” Steve said.

  “That would be fine,” I told him. “But just remember, I’m incognito.”

  “You mean we can’t tell anyone you’re an alien?” He looked disappointed.

  “If you do, you’ll spoil the whole purpose of my visit. I want to feel free to act as an observer, instead of being mobbed by autograph-hounds.”

  Sherry sighed. “You’ve got a point there. But just think of the sensation it would cause if—”

  “I am thinking of it,” I said. “And I insist on privacy. As one trufan to another, please DNQ or I’ll gafiate. Is that clear?”