Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  Perceveral glanced down at the almost-completed beamer. He began fitting the final pieces into place.

  The robot walked toward him.

  “Go cut firewood,” Perceveral said, in as normal a tone as he could manage.

  The robot stopped, turned, picked up the axe, hesitated, and started out the door.

  Perceveral fitted in the final component, slid the cover into place and began screwing it down.

  The robot dropped the axe and turned again, struggling with contradictory commands. Perceveral hoped he might fuse some circuits in the conflict. But the robot made his decision and launched himself at Perceveral.

  Perceveral raised the beamer and pressed the trigger. The blast stopped the robot in mid-stride. His metallic skin began to glow a faint red.

  Then the beamer failed again.

  Perceveral cursed, hefted the heavy weapon and threw it at the robot’s remaining eyecell. It just missed, bouncing off his forehead.

  Dazed, the robot groped for him. Perceveral dodged his arm and fled from the cabin, toward the black mouth of the tunnel. As he entered, he looked back and saw the robot following.

  HE walked several hundred yards down the tunnel. Then he turned on a flashlight and waited for the robot.

  He had thought the problem out carefully when he’d discovered that the robot had not been destroyed.

  His first idea naturally was flight. But the robot, traveling night and day, would easily overtake him. Nor could he dodge aimlessly in and out of the maze of tunnels. He would have to stop and eat, drink and sleep. The robot wouldn’t have to stop for anything.

  Therefore he had arranged a series of traps in the tunnels and had staked everything on them. One of them was bound to work. He was sure of it.

  But even as he told himself this, Perceveral shivered, thinking of the accumulation of accidents that the robot had for him—the months of broken arms and fractured ribs, wrenched ankles, slashes, cuts, bites, infections and diseases. All of which the robot would hound him into as rapidly as possible, in order to get back to normal routine.

  He would never survive the robot’s backlog. His traps had to work!

  Soon he heard the robot’s thundering footsteps. Then the robot appeared, saw him, and lumbered forward.

  Perceveral sprinted down a tunnel, then turned into a smaller tunnel. The robot followed, gaining slightly.

  When Perceveral reached a distinctive outcropping of rock, he looked back to gauge the robot’s position. Then he tugged a cord he had concealed behind the rock.

  The roof of the tunnel collapsed, releasing tons of dirt and rock over the robot.

  If the robot had continued for another step, he would have been buried. But appraising the situation instantly, he whirled and leaped back. Dirt showered him, and small rocks bounced off his head and shoulders. But the main fall missed him.

  When the last pebble had fallen, the robot climbed over the mound of debris and continued the pursuit.

  Perceveral was growing short of wind. He was disappointed at the failure of the trap. But, he reminded himself, he had a better one ahead. The next would surely finish off the implacable machine.

  THEY ran down a winding tunnel lit only by occasional flashes from Perceveral’s flashlight. The robot began gaining again. Perceveral reached a straight stretch and put on a burst of speed.

  He crossed a patch of ground that looked exactly like any other patch. But as the robot thundered over it, the ground gave way. Perceveral had calculated it carefully. The trap, which held under his weight, yielded at once under the robot’s bulk.

  The robot thrashed for a handhold. Dirt trickled through his fingers and he slid into the trap that Perceveral had dug—a pit with sloping sides that came together like a great funnel, designed to keep the robot immovably wedged at the bottom.

  The robot, however, flung both his legs wide, almost at, right angles to his body. His joints creaked as his heels bit into the sloping sides; they sagged under his weight, but held. He was able to stop himself before reaching the bottom, with both legs stiffly outspread and pressed into the soft dirt.

  The robot’s hand gouged deep handholds in the dirt. One leg retracted and found a foothold; then the other. Slowly the robot extricated himself, and Perceveral started running again.

  His breath came short and hard now and he was getting a stitch in his side. The robot gained more easily, and Perceveral had to strain to stay ahead.

  He had counted on those two traps. Now there was just one more left. A very good one, but risky to use.

  Perceveral forced himself to concentrate in spite of a growing dizziness. The last trap had to be calculated carefully. He passed a stone marked in white and switched off his flashlight He began counting strides, slowing until the robot was directly behind him, his fingers inches from his neck.

  Eighteen—nineteen—twenty!

  On the twentieth step, Perceveral flung himself head-first into the darkness. For seconds, he seemed to be floating in the air.

  Then he struck water in a flat, shallow dive, surfaced and waited.

  The robot had been too close behind to stop. There was a tremendous splash as he hit the surface of the underground lake; a sound of furious splashing; and, finally, the sound of bubbles as the heavy robot sank beneath the surface.

  When he heard that, Perceveral struck out for the opposite shore.

  He made it and pulled himself out of the icy water. For minutes, he lay shuddering on the slimy rocks. Then he forced himself to climb further ashore on hands and knees, to a cache where he had stored firewood, matches, whiskey, blankets and clothes.

  DURING the next hours, Perceveral dried himself, changed clothes and built a small fire. He ate and drank and watched the still surface of the underground lake. Days ago, he had tested with a hundred-foot line and had found no bottom. Perhaps the lake was bottomless. More likely it fed into a swift-flowing underwater river that would pull the robot along for weeks and months. Perhaps . . .

  He heard a faint sound in the water and trained his flashlight in its direction. The robot’s head appeared, and then his shoulders and torso emerged.

  The lake was very evidently not bottomless. The robot must have walked across the bottom and climbed the steep slope on the opposite side.

  The robot began to climb the slimy rocks near shore. Perceveral wearily pulled himself to his feet and broke into a run.

  His last trap had failed him and his neurosis was closing in for the kill. Perceveral headed toward a tunnel exit. He wanted the end to come in sunlight.

  At a jolting dog-trot, Perceveral led the robot out of the tunnels toward a steep mountain slope. His breath felt like fire in his throat and his stomach muscles were knotted painfully. He ran with his eyes half-closed, dizzy from fatigue.

  His traps had failed. Why hadn’t he realized the certainty of their failure earlier? The robot was part of himself, his own neurosis moving to destroy him. And how can a man trick the trickiest part of himself? The right hand always finds out what the left hand is doing, and the cleverest of devices never fools the supreme fooler for long.

  He had gone about the thing in the wrong way, Perceveral thought, as he began to climb the mountain slope. The way to freedom is not through deception. It is . . .

  The robot clutched at his heel, reminding Perceveral of the difference between theoretical and practical knowledge. He pulled himself out of the way and bombarded the robot with stones. The robot brushed them aside and continued climbing.

  PERCEVERAL cut diagonally across the steep rock face. The way to freedom, he told himself, is not through deception. That was bound to fail. The way out is through change! The way out is through conquest, not of the robot, but of what the robot represented. Himself!

  He was feeling light-headed and his thoughts poured on unchecked. If, he insisted to himself, he could conquer his sense of kinship with the robot—then obviously the robot would no longer be his neurosis! It would simply be a neurosis, with no power ov
er him.

  All he had to do was lose his neurosis—even for ten minutes—and the robot couldn’t harm him!

  All sense of fatigue left him and he was flooded with a supreme and intoxicating confidence. Boldly, he ran across a mass of jumbled rocks, a perfect place for a twisted ankle or a broken leg. A year ago, even a month ago, he would infallibly have had an accident. But the changed Perceveral, striding like a demigod, traversed the rocks without error.

  The robot, one-armed and one-eyed, doggedly took the accident upon himself. He tripped and sprawled at full length across the sharp rocks. When he picked himself up and resumed the chase, he was limping.

  Completely intoxicated but minutely watchful, Perceveral came to a granite wall, and leaped for a fingerhold that was no more than a gray shadow above him. For a heart-stopping second, he dangled in the air. Then, as his fingers began to slip, his foot found a hold. Without hesitation, he pulled himself up.

  The robot followed, his dry joints creaking loudly. He bent a finger out of commission making the climb that Perceveral should have failed.

  Perceveral leaped from boulder to boulder. The robot came after him, slipping and straining, drawing near. Perceveral didn’t care. The thought struck him that all his years of accident-proneness had gone into the making of this moment. The tide had turned now. He was at last what nature had intended him to be all along—an accident-proof man!

  The robot crawled after him up a dazzling surface of white rock. Perceveral, drunk with supreme confidence, pushed boulders into motion and shouted to create an avalanche.

  The rocks began to slide, and above him he heard a deep rumble. He dodged around a boulder, evaded the robot’s outflung arm and came to a dead end.

  He was in a small, shallow cave. The robot loomed in front of him, blocking the entrance, his iron fist pulled back.

  Perceveral burst into laughter at the sight of the poor, clumsy, accident-prone robot. Then the robot’s fist, driven by the full force of his body, shot out.

  Perceveral ducked, but it wasn’t necessary. The clumsy robot missed him anyhow, by at least half an inch. It was just the sort of mistake Perceveral had expected of the ridiculous accident-prone creature.

  The force of the swing carried the robot outward. He fought hard to regain his balance, poised on the lip of the cliff. Any normal man or robot would have regained it But not the accident-prone robot. He fell on his face, smashing his last eyecell, and began to roll.

  Perceveral leaned out to accelerate the roll, then quickly crouched back inside the shallow cave. The avalanche completed the job for him, rolling a diminishing black dot down the dusty white mountainside and burying it under tons of stone.

  Perceveral watched it all, chuckling to himself. Then he began to ask himself what, exactly, he had been doing.

  And that was when he started to shake.

  MONTHS later, Perceveral stood by the gangplank of the colony ship Cuchulain, watching the colonists step down into Theta’s midwinter sunshine. There were all types and kinds.

  They had all come to Theta for a chance at a new life. Each of them was vitally important at least to himself, and each deserved a fighting chance at survival, no matter what his potentialities.

  And he, Anton Perceveral, had scouted the minimum-survival requirements on Theta for these people; and had, in some measure, given hope and promise to the least capable among them—the incompetents who also wanted to live.

  He turned away from the stream of pioneers and entered the ship by a rear ladder. He walked down a corridor and entered Haskell’s cabin.

  “Well, Anton,” Haskell said, “how do they look to you?”

  “They seem like a nice group,” Perceveral said.

  “They are. Those people consider you their founding father, Anton. They want you here. Will you stay?”

  Perceveral said, “I consider Theta my home.”

  “Then it’s settled. I’ll just—”

  “Wait,” Perceveral said. “I’m not finished. I consider Theta my home. I want to settle here, marry, raise kids. But not yet.”

  “Eh?”

  “I’ve grown pretty fond of exploring,” Perceveral said. “I’d like to do some more of it. Maybe one or two more planets. Then I’ll settle down on Theta.”

  “I was afraid you might want that,” Haskell said unhappily. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothing. But I’m afraid we can’t use you again as an explorer, Anton.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know what we need. Minimum-survival personalities for staking out future colonies. You cannot by any stretch of the imagination be considered a minimum-survival personality any longer.”

  “But I’m the same man I always was!” Perceveral said. “Oh, sure, I improved on the planet. But you expected that and had the robot to compensate for it And at the end—”

  “Yes, what about that?”

  “Well, at the end I just got carried away. I think I was drunk or something. I can’t imagine how I acted that way.”

  “Still, that’s how you did act.”

  “Yes. But look! Even with that, I barely survived the experience—the total experience on Theta! Barely! Doesn’t that prove I’m still a minimum-survival personality?”

  HASKELL pursed his lips and looked thoughtful. “Anton, you almost convince me. But I’m afraid you’re indulging in a bit of word-juggling. In all honesty, I can’t view you as minimum any longer. I’m afraid you’ll just have to put up with your lot on Theta.”

  Perceveral’s shoulders slumped. He nodded wearily, shook hands with Haskell and turned to go.

  As he turned, the edge of his sleeve caught Haskell’s inkstand, brushing it off the table. Perceveral lunged to catch it and banged his hand against the desk. Ink splattered over him. He fumbled again, tripped over a chair, fell.

  “Anton,” Haskell asked, “was that an act?”

  “No,” Perceveral said. “It wasn’t, damn it.”

  “Hmm. Interesting. Now, Anton, don’t raise your hopes too high, but maybe—I say just maybe—”

  Haskell stared hard at Perceveral’s flushed face, then burst into laughter.

  “What a devil you are, Anton! You almost had me fooled. Now will you kindly get the hell out of here and join the colonists? They’re dedicating a statue to you and I think they’d like to have you present.”

  Shamefaced, but grinning in spite of it, Anton Perceveral walked out to meet his new destiny.

  TIME KILLER

  Beginning A 4-Part Serial

  It stands to reason that the last thing a man can bungle is his own death . . . but not Blaine; he had some finished business yet to unfinish!

  I

  AFTERWARD, Thomas Blaine thought about the manner of his dying and wished it had been more interesting.

  Why couldn’t his death have come while he was battling a typhoon, meeting a tiger’s charge, or climbing a windswept mountain? Why had his death been so tame, so commonplace, so ordinary?

  But an enterprising death, he realized, would have been out of character for him. Undoubtedly he was meant to die in just the quick, common, messy, painless way he did. And all his life must have gone into the forming and shaping of that death—a vague indication in childhood, a fair promise in his college years, an implacable certainty at the age of thirty-two.

  Still, no matter how commonplace, one’s death is the most climactic event of one’s life. Blaine thought about his with intense curiosity. He had to know about those last precious moments when his own particular death lay waiting for him on a dark New Jersey highway.

  Had there been some warning sign, some portent? What had he done, or not done? What had he been thinking?

  Those final seconds were crucial to him.

  How, exactly, had he died?

  HE had been driving over a straight, empty white highway, his headlights probing ahead, the darkness receding endlessly before him. His speedometer read seventy-five. It felt like forty. Far down the road, he saw h
eadlights approaching, the first in hours.

  Blaine was returning to New York after a week’s vacation at his cabin on Chesapeake Bay. He had fished and swum and dozed in the sun on the rough planks of his dock. One day he sailed his sloop to Oxford and attended a dance at the yacht club that night. He met a silly, pert-nosed girl in a blue dress who told him he looked like a South Seas adventurer, so tanned and tall in his khakis. He sailed back to his cabin the next day, to doze in the sun and dream of giving up everything, loading his sailboat with canned goods and heading for Tahiti. Ah, Raiatea, the mountains of Moorea, the fresh trade wind . . .

  But a continent and an ocean lay between him and Tahiti, and other obstacles besides. The thought was only for an hour’s dreaming and definitely not to be acted upon. Now he was returning to New York, to his job as a junior yacht designer for the famous old firm of Mattison & Peters.

  The other car’s headlights were drawing near. Blaine slowed to sixty.

  In spite of his title, there were few yachts for Blaine to design. Old Tom Mattison took care of the conventional cruising boats. His brother Rolf, known as the Wizard of Mystic, had an international reputation for his ocean-racing sailboats and fast one-designs. So what was there for a junior yacht designer to do?

  Blaine drew layouts and deck plans, and handled promotion, advertising and publicity. It was responsible work and not without its satisfactions. But it was not yacht designing.

  He knew he should strike out on his own. But there were so many yacht designers, so few customers. As he had told Laura, it was rather like designing arbalests, catapults and matchlocks. Interesting creative work, but who would buy your products?

  “You could find a market for your sailboats,” she had told him, distressingly direct.

  He had grinned. “Action isn’t my forte. I’m an expert on contemplation and mild regret.”

  “You mean you’re lazy.”