Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  He stopped. He had been standing beside the door of the shed. As the static crackled, he saw the bird of paradise dive for a closer look. The static stopped when the bird returned to its slow-circling higher altitude.

  “That’s strange,” Drake said. “Did you see that, Bill? The bird came down and the static went on at the same time.”

  “I saw it,” Sorensen said. “Think it means anything?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s see.” Drake took out his field glasses. He turned up the volume of the receiver and stepped outside where he could observe the jungle. He waited, hearing the sounds of the chess game three or four hundred miles away.

  “Come on now, move.”

  “Give me a minute.”

  “A minute? Listen, I can’t stand in front of this bleeding set all night. Make your—”

  Static crackled sharply. Drake saw four wild pigs come trotting out of the jungle, moving slowly, like a reconnaissance squad probing for weak spots in an enemy position. They stopped; the static stopped. Byrnes, standing guard with his rifle, took a snap shot at them. The pigs turned, and static crackled as they moved back into the jungle. There was more static as the bird of paradise swept down for a look, then climbed out of range. After that, the static stopped.

  Drake put down his binoculars and went back inside the shed. “That must be it,” he said. “The static is related to the Quedak. I think it comes when he’s operating the animals.”

  “You mean he has come sort of radio control over them?” Sorensen asked.

  “Seems like it,” Drake said. “Either radio control or something propagated along a radio wavelength.”

  “If that’s the case,” Sorenson said, “he’s like a little radio station, isn’t he?”

  “Sure he is. So what?”

  “Then we should be able to locate him on a radio direction finder,” Sorensen said.

  Drake nodded emphatically. He snapped off the receiver, went to a corner of the shed and took out one of their portable direction finders. He set it to the frequency at which Cable had picked up the Rabaul-Bougainville broadcast. Then he turned it on and walked to the door.

  THE men watched while Drake rotated the loop antenna. He located the maximum signal, then turned the loop slowly, read the bearing and converted it to a compass course. Then he sat down with a small-scale chart of the Southwest Pacific.

  “Well,” Sorensen asked, “is it the Quedak?”

  “It’s got to be,” said Drake. “I located a good null almost due south. That’s straight ahead in the jungle.”

  “You’re sure it isn’t a reciprocal bearing?”

  “I checked that out.”

  “Is there any chance the signal j comes from some other station?”

  “Nope. Due south, the next station is Sydney, and that’s seventeen hundred miles away. Much too far for this RDF. It’s the Quedak, all right.”

  “So we have a way of locating him,” Sorensen said. “Two men with direction finders can go into the jungle—”

  “—and get themselves killed,” Drake said. “We can position the Quedak with RDFs, but his animals can locate us a lot faster. We wouldn’t have a chance in the jungle.”

  Sorensen looked crestfallen. “Then we’re no better off than before.”

  “We’re a lot better off,” Drake said. “We have a chance now.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “He controls the animals by radio,” Drake said. “We know the frequency he operates on. We can broadcast on the same frequency. We can jam his signal.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Am I sure? Of course not. But I do know that two stations in the same area can’t broadcast over the same frequency. If we tuned in to the frequency the Quedak uses, made enough noise to override his signal—”

  “I see,” Sorensen said. “Maybe it would work! If we could interfere with his signal, he wouldn’t be able to control the animals. And then we could hunt him down with the RDFs.”

  “That’s the idea,” Drake said. “It has only one small flaw—our transmitter isn’t working. With no transmitter, we can’t do any broadcasting. No broadcasting, no jamming.”

  “Can you fix it?” Sorensen asked.

  “I’ll try,” Drake said. “But we’d better not hope for too much. Eakins was the radio man on this expedition.”

  We’ve got all the spare parts,” Sorensen said. “Tubes, manual, everything.”

  “I know. Give me enough time and I’ll figure out what’s wrong. The question is, how much time is the Quedak going to give us?”

  The bright copper disk of the sun was half submerged in the sea. Sunset colors touched the massing thunderheads and faded into the brief tropical twilight. The men began to barricade the copra shed for the night.

  VI

  DRAKE removed the back from the transmitter and scowled at the compact mass of tubes and wiring. Those metal boxlike things were probably condensers, and the waxy cylindrical gadgets might or might not be resistors. It all looked hopelessly complicated, ridiculously dense and delicate. Where should he begin?

  He turned on the set and waited a few minutes. All the tubes appeared to go on, some dim, some bright. He couldn’t detect any loose wires. The mike was still dead.

  So much for visual inspection. Next question: was the set getting enough juice?

  He turned it off and checked the battery cells with a voltmeter. The batteries were up to charge. He removed the leads, scraped them and put them back on, making sure they fit snugly. He checked all connections, murmured a propitiatory prayer, and turned the set on.

  It still didn’t work.

  Cursing, he turned it off again. He decided to replace all the tubes, starting with the dim ones. If that didn’t work, he could try replacing condensers and resistors. If that didn’t work, he could always shoot himself. With this cheerful thought, he opened the parts kit and went to work.

  The men were all inside the copra shed, finishing the job of barricading it for the night. The door was wedged shut and locked. The two windows had to be kept open for ventilation; otherwise everyone would suffocate in the heat. But a double layer of heavy mosquito netting was nailed over each window, and a guard was posted beside it.

  Nothing could get through the flat galvanized-iron roof. The floor was of pounded earth, a possible danger point. All they could do was keep watch over it.

  The treasure-hunters settled down for a long night. Drake, with a handkerchief tied around his forehead to keep the perspiration out of his eyes, continued working on the transmitter.

  AN hour later, there was a buzz on the walkie-talkie. Sorensen picked it up and said, “What do you want?”

  “I want you to end this senseless resistance,” said the Quedak, speaking with Eakins’ voice. “You’ve had enough time to think over the situation. I want you to join me. Surely you can see there’s no other way.”

  “We don’t want to join you,” Sorensen said.

  “You must,” the Quedak told him.

  “Are you going to make us?”

  “That poses problems,” the Quedak said. “My animal parts are not suitable for coercion. Eakins is an excellent mechanism, but there is only one of him. And I must not expose myself to unnecessary danger. By doing so I would endanger the Quedak Mission.”

  “So it’s a stalemate,” Sorensen said.

  “No. I am faced with difficulty only in taking you over. There is no problem in killing you.”

  The men shifted uneasily, working on the transmitter, didn’t look up.

  “I would rather not kill you,” the Quedak said. “But the Quedak Mission is of primary importance. It would be endangered if you didn’t join. It would be seriously compromised if you left the island. So you must either join or be killed.”

  “That’s not the way I see it,” Sorensen said. “If you killed us—assuming that you can—you’d never get off this island. Eakins can’t handle that ketch.”

  “There would be no need
to leave in the ketch,” the Quedak said. “In six months, the interisland schooner will return. Eakins and I will leave then. The rest of you will have died.”

  You’re bluffing,” Sorensen said. What makes you think you could kill us? You didn’t do so well today.” He caught Drake’s attention and gestured at the radio. Drake shrugged his shoulders and went back to work.

  “I wasn’t trying,” the Quedak said. “The time for that was at night. This night, before you have a chance to work out a better system of defense. You must join me tonight or I will kill one of you.”

  “One of us?”

  “Yes. One man an hour. In that way, perhaps the survivors will change their minds about joining. But if they don’t, all of you will be dead by morning.”

  Drake leaned over and whispered to Sorensen, “Stall him. Give me another ten minutes. I think I’ve found the trouble.” Sorensen said into the walkie-talkie, “We’d like to know a little more about the Quedak Cooperation.”

  “You can find out best by joining.”

  “We’d rather have a little more information on it first.”

  “IT is an indescribable state,” the Quedak said in an urgent, earnest, eager voice. “Can you imagine yourself as yourself and yet experiencing an entirely new series of sensory perceptors. You would, for example, experience the world through the perceptors of a dog as he goes through the forest following an odor which to him—and to you—is as clear and vivid as a painted line. A hermit crab senses things differently. From him you experience the slow interaction of life at the margin of sea and land. His time-sense is very slow, unlike that of a bird of paradise, whose viewpoint is spatial, rapid, cursory. And there are many others, above and below the earth and water, who furnish their own specialized viewpoints of reality. Their outlooks, I have found, are not essentially different from those of the animals that once inhabited Mars.”

  “What happened on Mars?” Sorensen asked.

  “All life died,” the Quedak mourned. “All except the Quedak. It happened a long time ago. For centuries there was peace and prosperity on the planet Everything and everyone was part of the Quedak Cooperation. But the dominant I race was basically weak. Their breeding rate went down; catastrophes happened. And finally there I was no more life except the I Quedak.”

  “Sounds great,” Sorensen said I ironically.

  “It was the fault of the race,” the I Quedak protested. “With sturdier I stock—such as you have on this planet—the will to live will remain intact. The peace and prosperity will continue indefinitely.”

  “I don’t believe it. What happened on Mars will happen again on Earth if you take over. After a while, slaves just don’t care very strongly about living.”

  “You wouldn’t be slaves. You would be functional parts of the Quedak Cooperation.”

  “Which would be run by you,” Sorensen said. “Any way you slice it, it’s the same old pie.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” the Quedak said. “We have talked long enough. I am prepared to kill one man in the next five minutes. Are you or are you not going to join me?” Sorensen looked at Drake. Drake turned on the transmitter.

  Gusts of rain splattered on the roof while the transmitter warmed up. Drake lifted the microphone and tapped it, and was able to hear the sound in the speaker.

  “It’s working,” he said.

  AT that moment something flew against the netting-covered window. The netting sagged; a fruit bat was entangled in it, glaring at them with tiny red-rimmed eyes.

  “Get some boards over that window!” Sorensen shouted.

  As he spoke, a second bat hurried into the netting, broke through it and tumbled to the floor. The men clubbed it to death, but four more bats flew in through the open window. Drake flailed at them, but he couldn’t drive them away from the transmitter. They were diving at his eyes, and he was forced back. A wild blow caught one bat and knocked it to the floor with a broken wing. Then the others had reached the transmitter.

  They pushed it off the table. Drake tried to catch the set, and failed. He heard the glass tubes shattering, but by then he was busy protecting his eyes.

  In a few minutes they had killed two more bats, and the others had fled out the window. The men nailed boards over both windows, and Drake bent to examine the transmitter.

  “Any chance of fixing it?” Sorensen asked.

  “Not a hope,” Drake said. “They ripped out the wiring while they were at it.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Then the Quedak spoke to them over the walkie-talkie. “I must have your answer right now.” Nobody said a word.

  “In that case,” the Quedak said, “I’m deeply sorry that one of you must die now.”

  VII

  RAIN pelted the iron roof and the gusts of wind increased in intensity. There were rumbles of distant thunder. But within the copra shed, the air was hot and still. The gasoline lantern hanging from the center beam threw a harsh yellow light that illuminated the center of the room but left the corners in deep shadow. The treasure-hunters had moved away from the walls. They were all in the center of the room facing outward, and they made Drake think of a herd of buffalo drawn up against a wolf they could smell but could not see.

  Cable said, “Listen, maybe we should try this Quedak Cooperation. Maybe it isn’t so bad as—” “Shut up,” Drake said.

  “Be reasonable,” Cable argued. “It’s better than dying, isn’t it?”

  “No one’s dying yet,” Drake said. “Just shut up and keep your eyes open.”

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” Cable said. “Dan, let me out.”

  “Be sick where you are,” Drake said. “Just keep your eyes open.”

  “You can’t give me orders,” Cable said. He started toward the door. Then he jumped back.

  A yellowish scorpion had crept under the inch of clearance between the door and the floor. Recetich stamped on it, smashing it to pulp under his heavy boots. Then he whirled, swinging at three hornets which had come at him through the boarded windows.

  “Forget the hornets!” Drake shouted. “Keep watching the ground!”

  There was movement on the floor. Several hairy spiders crawled out of the shadows. Drake and Recetich beat at them with rifle butts. Byrnes saw something crawling under the door. It looked like some kind of huge flat centipede. He stamped at it, missed, and the centipede was on his boot, past it, on the flesh of his leg. He screamed; it felt like a ribbon of molten metal. He was able to smash it flat before he passed out.

  Drake checked the wound and decided it was not fatal. He stamped on another spider, then felt Sorensen’s hand clutching his shoulder. He looked toward the corner Sorensen was pointing at.

  Sliding toward them were two large, dark-coated snakes. Drake recognized them as black adders. These normally shy creatures were coming forward like tigers.

  THE men panicked, trying to get away from the snakes. Drake pulled out his revolver and dropped to one knee, ignoring the hornets that buzzed around him, trying to draw a bead on the slender serpentine targets in the swaying yellow light.

  Thunder roared directly overhead. A long flash of lightning suddenly flooded the room, spoiling his aim. Drake fired and missed, and waited for the snakes to strike.

  They didn’t strike. They were moving away from him, retreating to the rat hole from which they had emerged. One of the adders slid quickly through. The other began to follow, then stopped, half in the hole.

  Sorensen took careful aim with a rifle. Drake pushed the muzzle aside. “Wait just a moment.”

  The adder hesitated. It came out of the hole and began to move toward them again . . .

  And there was another crash of thunder and a vivid splash of lightning. The snake turned away and squirmed through the hole.

  “What’s going on?” Sorensen asked. “Is the thunder frightening them?”

  “No, it’s the lightning!” Drake said. “That’s why the Qued
ak was in such a rush. He saw that a storm was coming, and he hadn’t consolidated his position yet.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The lightning,” Drake said.

  “The electrical storm! It’s jamming that radio control of his! And when he’s jammed, the beasts revert to normal behavior. It takes him time to re-establish control.”

  “The storm won’t last forever,” Cable said.

  “But maybe it’ll last long enough,” Drake said. He picked up the direction finders and handed one to Sorensen. “Come on, Bill. We’ll hunt out that bug right now.”

  “Hey,” Recetich said, “isn’t there something I can do?”

  “You can start swimming if we don’t come back in an hour,” Drake said.

  IN slanting lines the rain drove down, pushed by the wild southwest wind. Thunder rolled continually and each flash of lightning seemed aimed at them. Drake and Sorensen reached the edge of the jungle and stopped.

  “We’ll separate here,” Drake said. “Gives us a better chance of converging on him.”

  “Right,” Sorensen said. “Take care of yourself, Dan.”

  Sorensen plunged into the jungle. Drake trotted fifty yards down the fringe and then entered the bush.

  He pushed forward, the revolver in his belt, the radio direction finder in one hand, a flashlight in the other. The jungle seemed to be animated by a vicious life of its own, almost as if the Quedak controlled it. Vines curled cunningly around his ankles and the bushes reached out thorny hands toward him. Every branch took a special delight in slapping his face.

  Each time the lightning flashed, Drake’s direction finder tried to home on it. He was having a difficult time staying on course. But, he reminded himself, the Quedak was undoubtedly having an even more difficult time. Between flashes, he was able to set a course. The further he penetrated into the jungle, the stronger the signal became.

  After a while he noticed that the flashes of lightning were spaced more widely apart. The storm was moving on toward the north, leaving the island behind. How much longer would he have the protection of the lightning? Another ten or fifteen minutes?

  He heard something whimper. He swung his flashlight around and saw his dog, Oro, coming toward him.