Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  “I suppose that would be the Brotherhood of the Afterlife?”

  “Yes. They splintered off from other religions. According to them, the mind contains the soul, and the hereafter is the soul’s rebirth after death, with no spiritual ifs and buts.”

  “That’s keeping up with the times,” Blaine said. “But morality—”

  “In their view, this didn’t dispense with morality. The After-lifers say that you can’t impose morals and ethics on people by a system of spiritual rewards and punishments; and if you could, you shouldn’t. They say that morality must be good in its own right, first in terms of the social organism, second in terms of the individual man’s best good.”

  To Blaine, this seemed a lot to ask of morality. “I suppose it’s a popular religion?” he asked.

  “Very popular,” Marie Thorne answered.

  Blaine wanted to ask more, but Brother James had begun speaking.

  “William Fitzsimmons,” the clergyman said to the host, “you have come to this place of your own free will, for the purpose of discontinuing your existence upon the earthly plane and resuming it upon the spiritual plane?”

  “Yes, Brother,” the pale host whispered.

  “And the proper scientific instrumentality has been performed so that you may continue your existence upon the spiritual plane?”

  “Yes, Brother.”

  BROTHER James turned to Reilly. “Kenneth Reilly, you have come to this place of your own free will for the purpose of continuing your existence upon Earth in the body of William Fitzsimmons?”

  “Yes, Brother,” Reilly said, small and hard-faced.

  “And you have made possible for William Fitzsimmons an entrance into the hereafter; and have paid a sum of money to Fitzsimmons’ heirs; and have paid the government tax involved in transactions of this kind?”

  “Yes, Brother,” Reilly said.

  “All these things being so,” Brother James said, “no crime is involved, civic or religious. Here there is no taking of life, for the life and personality of William Fitzsimmons continue unabated in the hereafter, and the life and personality of Kenneth Reilly continue unabated upon Earth. Therefore, let the reincarnation proceed!”

  To Blaine, it seemed a hideous mixture of wedding ceremony and execution. The smiling clergyman withdrew. Technicians secured the men to their chairs and attached electrodes to their arms, legs and foreheads. The theater grew very still and the Rex directors leaned forward expectantly in their seats.

  “Go ahead,” Reilly said, looking at Blaine and smiling slightly. The chief technician turned a dial on the black machine. It hummed loudly and the floodlights dimmed. Both men jerked convulsively against the straps, then slumped back.

  Blaine whispered, “They’re murdering that poor Fitzsimmons sucker.”

  “That poor sucker,” Marie Thorne told him, “knew exactly what he was doing. He’s thirty-seven years old and he’s been a failure all his life. He’s never been able to hold a job for long and had no previous chance for survival after death. This was a marvelous opportunity for him. Furthermore, he has a wife and five children for whom he has not been able to provide. The sum Mr. Reilly paid will enable the wife to support the children and give them a decent education.”

  “Hurray for them,” said Blaine. “For sale, one father with slightly used body in excellent condition. Must sell! Sacrifice!”

  “You’re being ridiculous,” she said.

  “Nothing yet!” the doctor called.

  Blaine could sense apprehension in the room, and a hint of fear. The seconds dragged by while the doctors and technicians clustered around the host.

  “Still nothing!” the doctor called, his voice going shrill.

  “What’s happening?” Blaine asked Marie Thorne.

  “As I told you, reincarnation is tricky and dangerous. Reilly’s mind hasn’t been able to possess the host body yet. He doesn’t have much longer.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because a body starts dying the moment it’s untenanted. Irreversible death processes start if a mind isn’t at least dormant in the body. The mind is essential. Even an unconscious mind controls the automatic processes. But with no mind at all—”

  “Still nothing!” the doctor shouted.

  THE body of Fitzsimmons suddenly writhed against the straps. His back arched until they could hear the dry cracking of his spine. His hands wrenched at the arms of the chair and blood spouted from his nose, eyes and ears. Then his body sagged back.

  “Reverse the process!” the doctor screamed. “Put Mr. Reilly back in his own body!”

  The technicians turned to their dials, and the doctor, his face fiery red, bent over Reilly.

  “I think it’s too late now,” Marie Thorne whispered.

  “A tremor!” the doctor said. “I felt a tremor.”

  There was a long silence.

  “I think he’s back in!” the doctor exclaimed. “Now, oxygen, adrenalin!”

  A mask was fitted over Reilly’s face. A hypodermic was slipped into his arm. He stirred, shivered, slumped back, stirred again.

  “He’s made it!” the doctor cried, removing the oxygen mask.

  The directors, as though on cue, hurried out of their chairs and went up on the stage. They surrounded Reilly, who was now blinking his eyes and retching.

  “We’ll try another host, Mr. Reilly.”

  “Welcome back, sir!”

  “Had us worried, Mr. Reilly!”

  Reilly stared at them. He wiped his mouth and said, “My name is not Reilly.”

  The red-faced doctor pushed his way through the directors and bent down beside him.

  “Not Reilly?” he said. “Are you Fitzsimmons?”

  “No. I’m not Fitzsimmons, that poor damned fool! And I’m not Reilly. Reilly and I both tried to enter Fitzsimmons’ body, and we ruined it. Then Reilly tried to get back into his own body, but I was too quick. I got into the body first. It’s my body now.”

  “Who are you?” the doctor snapped.

  The man stood up. The directors stepped away from him, and one man quickly crossed himself.

  “It was dead too long,” Marie Thorne said.

  The face now bore only the faintest and most stylized resemblance to the pale, frightened monkey face of Reilly. There was nothing of his determination, petulance and good humor in that face. It resembled nothing but itself.

  IT was a dead-white face except for black dots of stubble on its cheeks and jaw. The lips were bloodless. A strand of wispy hair was plastered against its cold white forehead. When Reilly had been in residence, the features had blended pleasantly, harmoniously. But now the individual features had coarsened and grown separate.

  The unharmonious white face had a thick and unfinished look, like iron before tempering or clay before firing. It had a slack, sullen, relaxed look because of the lack of muscle tone and tension in the face. The calm, flaccid, unharmonious features simply existed, revealing nothing of the personality behind them. The face seemed no longer completely human. All humanity now resided in the great, patient, unblinking Buddha’s eyes.

  “It’s gone zombie,” Marie Thorne whispered, clinging to Blaine’s shoulder.

  “Who are you?” the doctor asked.

  “I don’t remember,” it said. “I don’t remember at all.” Slowly it turned and started walking down the stage. Two directors moved to bar its path.

  “Leave him alone,” the government man said. “Don’t touch him.”

  “But someone is in Mr. Reilly’s body!” a director objected. “We must find out who.”

  “You know the law,” said the government man. “The possessor of a body is the sole arbiter of its movements. Stand aside.”

  “Leave the poor zombie alone,” the doctor said wearily.

  The directors moved out of its way. The zombie walked to the end of the stage, descended the steps, turned, and walked over to Blaine.

  “I know you!” it said.

  “What? What do you want?
” Blaine stammered nervously.

  “I don’t remember,” the zombie said, staring hard at him. “What’s your name?”

  “Tom Blaine.”

  THE zombie shook its head.

  “Doesn’t mean anything to me. But I’ll remember. It’s you, all right. Something . . . My body’s dying, isn’t it? Too bad. I’ll remember before it gives out. You and me, you know, together. Blaine, don’t you remember me?”

  “No!” Blaine shouted, shrinking from the suggested relationship, the idea of some vital link between him and this dying thing. It couldn’t be! What shared secret was this thief of corpses, this unclean usurper hinting at, what black intimacy, what sniggering knowledge to be shared like a dirty crust of bread for just Blaine and himself?

  Nothing, Blaine told himself. He knew himself, knew what he was, knew what he had been. Nothing like this could arise legitimately to confront him. The creature had to be crazy, or mistaken.

  “Who are you?” Blaine asked.

  “I don’t know!” The zombie flung his hands into the air, like a man caught in a net.

  Blaine sensed how his mind must feel, confused, disoriented, nameless, wanting to live and caught in the fleshy dying embrace of a zombie body.

  “I’ll see you again,” the zombie said to Blaine. “You’re important to me. I’ll see you again and I’ll remember about you and me.”

  The zombie representative came forward, took the new zombie’s hand and led him down the aisle and out of the theater. Blaine stared after them until he felt a sudden weight on his shoulder.

  Marie Thorne had fainted. It was the most feminine thing she had done so far.

  VI

  THE head technician and the bearded doctor were arguing near the reincarnation machine, with their assistants ranged respectfully behind them. The battle was quite technical, but Blaine gathered that they were trying to determine the cause of the reincarnation failure. Each seemed to feel that the fault lay in the other’s province.

  The old doctor insisted that the machine settings must have been faulty, or an uncompensated power drop had occurred. The head technician swore the machine was perfect. He felt certain that Reilly hadn’t been physically fit for the strenuous attempt.

  Neither would yield an inch. But, being reasonable men, they soon reached a compromise solution. The fault; they decided, lay in the nameless spirit who had fought Reilly for possession of his body, and had supplanted him.

  “But who was it?” the head technician asked. “A ghost, do you think?”

  “Possibly,” the doctor said, “though it’s damned rare for a ghost to possess a living body. Still, he talked crazy enough to be a ghost.”

  “Whoever he was,” said the head technician, “he took over too late. The body was definitely zombie. Anyhow, no one could be blamed for it.”

  “Right,” the doctor agreed. “I’ll certify to the apparent soundness of the equipment.”

  “Fair enough,” said the head technician. “And I’ll testify to the apparent soundness of the patient.”

  They exchanged looks of perfect understanding.

  The directors were holding an immediate conference of their own, trying to determine what the short-range effects would be upon the Rex corporate structure, and how the announcement should be made to the public, and whether all Rex personnel should be given a day off to visit the Reilly Family Palace of Death.

  Then they noticed Blaine. Lowering their voices, they began to whisper together, glancing at him covertly.

  Fitzsimmons’ body lay back in its chair, beginning to stiffen, wearing a detached, derisive smile.

  Marie Thorne recovered consciousness and promptly took in the situation. “Come on,” she said, leading Blaine out of the theater. They hurried down long gray corridors to a street door. Outside, she hailed a helicab and gave the driver an address.

  “Where are we going?” Blaine asked, as the helicab climbed.

  “I’m not sure. Rex is going to be a madhouse for a while.” She began fussing with her hair. “I don’t know what the directors wanted to do with you, but it’s lucky the government man was there. Let me think a moment.”

  BLAINE settled back against the cushions and looked down on the glittering city. From that height, it looked like an exquisite miniature, a multi-colored mosaic from the Thousand and One Nights. But somewhere down there, walking the streets and levels, was the zombie, trying to remember—him.

  “But why me?” Blaine asked out loud.

  Marie Thorne glanced at him. “Why you and the zombie? Well, why not? Haven’t you ever made any mistakes?”

  “I suppose I have. But they’re finished and done with.”

  She shook her head. “Maybe mistakes ended for good in your time. Today nothing ever dies for certain. That’s one of the great disadvantages of a life after death, you know. One’s mistakes sometimes refuse to lie decently dead and buried. Sometimes they follow you around.”

  “So I see,” Blaine said. “But I’ve never done anything that would bring up that!”

  She shrugged indifferently. “In that case, you’re better than most of us.”

  Never had she seemed more alien to him.

  The helicab began a slow descent. And Blaine brooded over the disadvantages inherent in all advantages.

  In his own time, he had seen the control of disease in the world’s backward areas result in an exploding birth rate, famine, misery. He had seen nuclear power breed nuclear war. Every advantage generated its own specific disadvantages. Why should it be different today?

  A certified scientific hereafter was undoubtedly an advantage to the race. Manipulation had again caught up with theory. But the disadvantages . . .

  There was a certain inevitable weakening of the, protective barrier around mundane life, some rips in the curtain, a few holes in the dike. The dead refused to lie decently still; they insisted upon mingling with the quick. To whose advantage? Ghosts, too—undoubtedly logical, operating within the boundaries of known natural laws. But that might be cold comfort to a haunted man.

  Today, Blaine thought, whole new strata of existence impinged upon Man’s existence on Earth. Just as the zombie impinged uncomfortably upon his existence.

  Marie Thorne had been thinking hard. She said, “You should stay out of sight a while, until Rex quiets down. I’m going to introduce you to a man. I don’t know him very well, but I’ve been told he’s reliable.”

  Blaine silently wondered if she was reliable. Perhaps not. Perhaps this was a Rex scheme to get rid of him without the knowledge of the government man. But he had no friends in this world, no money, no knowledge. He would have to play along.

  But that didn’t mean he had to trust anyone.

  The helicab landed on a busy street corner. Marie Thorne paid and hurried him into the crowds.

  AT first glance, the city looked like a surrealistic Bagdad. He saw squat palaces of white and blue tile, and slender red minarets, and irregularly shaped buildings with flaring Chinese roofs and spired onion domes. It looked as though an Oriental fad in architecture had swept the city. Blaine could hardly believe he was in New York. Bombay perhaps, Moscow, or even Los Angeles. But not New York. With relief, he saw skyscrapers, simple and direct against the curved Asiatic structures. They seemed like lonely sentinels of the New York he had known.

  The streets were filled with miniature traffic. Blaine saw motorcycles and scooters, cars no bigger than Porsches, trucks the size of Buicks, and nothing larger. He wondered if this was New York’s answer to congestion and air pollution. If so, it hadn’t helped.

  Most of the traffic was overhead. There were vane- and jet-operated vehicles, aerial produce trucks and one-man speedsters, helicopter taxis and floating buses labeled “Skyport 2nd Level” or “Express to Montauk.” Glittering dots marked the vertical and horizontal lanes within which the traffic glided, banked, turned, ascended and descended. Flashing red, green, yellow and blue lights seemed to regulate the flow.

  There were rule
s and conventions; but to Blaine’s inexperienced eye, it was a vast fluttering confusion.

  Fifty feet overhead there was another shopping level. How did people get up there? For that matter, how did anyone live and retain his sanity in this noisy, bright, congested machine? The human density was overpowering. He felt as though he were being drowned in a sea of flesh. What was the population of this super-city? Fifteen million? Twenty million? It made the New York of 1958 look like a country village. He stared around him, his head pounding dully and his eyes beginning to unfocus.

  In a few moments, he was in control of himself again, and slightly more respectful of his strong, phlegmatic body. Perhaps a man from the past needed just that sort of fleshy envelope if he wanted to view the future with equanimity. A low-order nervous system had its advantages.

  He noticed a group of people standing in a line. The men and women on it were poorly dressed, unkempt, unwashed. They shared a common look of sullen despair.

  Was it a breadline?

  He asked Marie where the line was going.

  “To the suicide booths,” she told him, hurrying him past it.

  It was, Blaine decided, a hell of an inauspicious thing to see on his first real day in the future. Suicide booths! Well, he would never enter one willingly, he could be absolutely sure of that. Things surely couldn’t get that bad.

  But what kind of world had suicide booths? And free ones, to judge by the clientele . . .

  He would have to be careful about accepting free gifts in this world.

  BLAINE walked on with Marie, gawking at the sights and slowly growing accustomed to the bright, hectic, boisterous, overcrowded city.

  They came to an enormous building shaped like a Gothic castle, with pennants flying from its upper battlements. On its highest tower was a brilliant green light fully visible against the fading afternoon sun. It looked like an important landmark.

  A man was leaning against the building, lighting a thin cigar. He seemed to be the only man in New York not in a tearing hurry. Marie walked over to him.