Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  His dog—or the Quedak’s dog?

  “Hey there, boy,” Drake said. He wondered if he should drop the direction finder and get the revolver out of his belt. He wondered if the revolver would still work after such a thorough soaking.

  Oro came up and licked his hand. He was Drake’s dog, at least for the duration of the storm.

  They moved on together, and the thunder rumbled distantly in the north. The signal on his RDF was very strong now. Somewhere around here . . .

  He saw light from another flashlight. Sorensen, badly out of breath, had joined him. The jungle had ripped and clawed at him, but he still had his rifle, flashlight and direction finder.

  Oro was scratching furiously at a bush. There was a long flash of lightning, and in it they saw the Quedak.

  DRAKE realized, in those final moments, that the rain had stopped. The lightning had stopped, too. He dropped the direction finder. With the flashlight in one hand and his revolver in the other, he tried to take aim at the Quedak, who was moving, who had jumped—

  To Sorensen’s neck, just above the right collarbone.

  Sorensen raised his hands, then lowered them again. He turned toward Drake, raising his rifle. His face was perfectly calm. He looked as though his only purpose in life was to kill Drake.

  Drake fired from less than two feet away. Sorensen spun with the impact, dropped his rifle and fell.

  Drake bent over him, his revolver ready. He saw that he had fired accurately. The bullet had gone in just above the right collarbone. It was a bad wound. But it had been much worse for the Quedak, who had been in the direct path of the bullet. All that was left of the Quedak was a splatter of black across Sorensen’s chest.

  Drake applied hasty first aid and hoisted Sorensen to his shoulders. He wondered what he would have done if the Quedak had been standing above Sorensen’s heart, or on his throat, or on his head.

  He decided it was better not to think about that.

  He started back to camp, with his dog trotting along beside him.

  THE GIRLS AND NUGENT MILLER

  Robert Sheckley’s last F&SF story—the much praised "The Prize of Peril—told of the beast that might well come out in men in an overpopulated, faded world. Here Mr. Sheckley turns his acute eye on an insanely underpopulated world, and reports on an encounter between a dedicated pacifist and a clutch of particularly unjaded girls.

  NUGENT MILLER BENT DOWN and examined the footprints, gently brushing aside leaves and twigs with his pocket knife. They had been made recently, by a small foot. Perhaps a woman’s foot?

  Staring at the footprints, Miller could glimpse the woman rising from them, could see too vividly the high-arched foot, the narrow ankle and the slender golden legs. Turning the imaginary woman on her imaginary pedestal, Miller admired the long graceful curve of her back, and he could see—

  “That’s enough,” he told himself. He had no proof other than the footprint. Hope could be dangerous, desire could be catastrophic.

  He was a tall, thin, sad-faced man, very sunburned, wearing sneakers, khaki slacks and a blue polo shirt. He had a knapsack on his back and a geiger counter in his hand. He wore horn-rimmed glasses. The left sidepiece had been broken and repaired with a twig and string, and he had reinforced the nosepiece with wire. The glasses seemed secure now, but he still didn’t trust them. He was quite myopic. If a lens broke, he could never replace it. Sometimes he had a nightmare in which his glasses dropped from his nose and he reached for them and just missed and the glasses fell down a mountainside, turning over and over in the air.

  He pressed the glasses more firmly against his nose, walked forward a few yards and examined the ground again. He could detect two or three sets of footprints, maybe more. From the look of the ground they had been made recently.

  Miller found that he was beginning to tremble. He squatted down beside the footprints and reminded himself that he must not hope. The people who made those prints were probably dead.

  Still, he had to make sure. He straightened up and began following the footprints. They led through a stubbled field to the edge of a forest. He stopped for a moment and listened.

  It was a silent, beautiful September morning. The sun beat down on the barren fields, and light glinted from the stripped white branches of the forest. The only sounds he heard were the tired sigh of the wind and the background clicking of his geiger counter.

  “Normal reading,” Miller said to himself. “Whoever came this way must have had a geiger.”

  But they might not have used it properly. Perhaps they were contaminated, perhaps they were dying of radiation sickness. He couldn’t allow himself to hope. He had stayed sane this long by not hoping, not wishing, not desiring.

  “If they’re dead,” he told himself, “I’ll give them decent burial.” That thought exorcised the evil demons of hope and desire.

  Within the forest, he lost the faint trail in the underbrush. He tried to continue in the same direction, but his geiger counter began to chatter furiously. He moved out at right angles, holding the geiger in front of him. When he had bypassed the hot spot he turned again, at an exact right angle, and walked parallel to the direction of the trail. Carefully he counted his paces. It wouldn’t do for him to get caught in a pocket with radiation all around and no clear path out. That had happened to him three months ago, and the geiger’s batteries had been nearly exhausted before he could find a way out. He had spare batteries in his knapsack now, but the danger was still there.

  After about twenty yards he turned again to cross the trail, walking slowly, watching the ground.

  He was lucky. He found the footprints again, and near them a fragment of cloth caught on a bramble bush. He plucked the cloth and put it in his pocket. The footprints looked very fresh. Did he dare allow himself a little hope?

  No, not yet. He still remembered what had happened less than six months ago. He had climbed a small sandstone cliff to forage a warehouse on its top. At sunset he had come back down the cliff, and at the base he had found the body of a man. The man had been dead only a few hours. A submachine gun and a rifle were strapped to his shoulders, and his pockets were stuffed with grenades. They had been no protection against his subtlest enemy. The man had killed himself; the warm revolver was still in his hand.

  Apparently he had been following Miller’s footprints. When he had come to the base of the sandstone cliff, the footprints ended. Perhaps the man’s stamina had been undermined by the harsh radiation burns across his chest and arms; perhaps the instant of shattered hope when the footprints ended in solid stone had been too much for him. Whatever the reason, he had blown out his brains at the foot of the cliff. Hope had killed him.

  Miller had removed the man’s armament and buried him. He thought about the weapons for the better part of a day. He was tempted to keep them. They might be very necessary in this shattered new world.

  But finally he decided against keeping them. He was not going to violate the sternly held pledge of a lifetime; not after all he had seen. Besides, weapons at a time like this were too dangerous to the user. So he threw them into the nearest river.

  That had been less than six months ago. Now it was Miller who followed footprints, through thin forest loam to a narrow stream of running water. When he had crossed it he was able to count, in the stiff mud, five separate sets of footprints. They were so recent that the water was still seeping into them. The people must have passed here within the half-hour.

  He felt the demons of hope and desire stir within him. Surely it wouldn’t be too unwise now to consider the possibility of meeting people? Yes, too unwise. The unleashed demons, once frustrated, turned against you, as they had turned against the man at the base of the sandstone cliff. Hope and desire were his most dangerous enemies. He didn’t dare release the genies from the corked bottle deep in his mind.

  He walked quickly along the trail, certain, from the increasing freshness of the prints, that he was moving faster than the presumed group of people. His geiger
clucked contentedly to itself, satisfied with the low radiation level. The people ahead of him—if they were still alive—must be picking their way through with a geiger.

  Survival had been so simple, really; but so few had managed it.

  Miller had known the end was in sight when the Chinese communists launched their large-scale amphibious assault against Formosa. At the beginning it had looked like a local war, as local as the angry little war being fought in Kuwait, and the U.N. police action on the Turkish-Bulgarian border.

  But it was one war too many. Treaties, like chains, dragged country after country into the conflict. No nuclear weapons had been employed as yet, but their use was imminent.

  Nugent Miller, associate professor of Ancient History at Laurelville College in Tennessee, read the handwriting on the wall and began to set up caches of food in the Laurelville Caverns. He was thirty-eight at the time, and an ardent, life-long pacifist. When the DEW line radar sent back word of unidentified missiles from the north, Miller was already packed and ready. He went at once to the Laurelville Caverns, one of whose mouths was less than a mile from the college. He was surprised when only fifty or so students and faculty joined him. Surely the warning was clear enough.

  The bombs fell, and drove the group deeper into the labyrinth of caves and tunnels. After a week, the bombs stopped. The survivors started to the surface.

  Miller checked the radiation at the cave mouth and found it lethal. They couldn’t leave. Food had already run out, and radioactive debris was filtering down, forcing them deeper into the caverns.

  By the fourth week, thirty-eight people had starved to death. The radiation at the entrances was still too high to permit leaving. Miller decided to go into the lower levels and try to locate a still-untouched food cache. Three others accompanied him. The rest decided to risk the radiation and break out.

  Miller and his friends climbed deep into the darkness of the caverns. They were very weak, and not one of them was a trained speleologist. Two were killed in a rock fall. Miller and one man clung stubbornly to life. They couldn’t locate the food cache; but they did find a stream of black water, and saw the luminous dots of fish in the water, blind fish who lived all their lives in the caves. They fished, and caught nothing. It was several days before Miller was able to block up a branch of the stream, trap several fish and land them. By then, his friend was dead.

  Miller lived by the stream and worked out ways of catching fish. He kept time as best he could, and climbed painfully to the surface once a week to check the radiation. It took twelve weeks for it to drop enough to allow him to leave.

  He never saw any of the others from the cave, although he did find a few of their bodies.

  Outside, he tried to locate people, anywhere. But hard radiation had caught most of the survivors of the hydrogen bombings. Very few had been equipped with food stores or geiger counters. All, or nearly all, had gone out in search of food before the radiation had dropped to a tolerable level. Doubtless there were some survivors; but where, where?

  For several months he had looked. Then he stopped looking. He assumed there were some people left in parts of Africa and Asia, in South America. He would never see them. Perhaps he would find a few on the North American continent some day. Perhaps not. In the meantime, he would go on living.

  He lived, trekking south in the fall and returning north in the winter, a quiet man who had never wanted war, who hated killing with a passion that many had simulated but few had felt. He was a man who clung to many of his former habits as though the bombs had never fallen. He read books when he could find them, and apologetically collected paintings and sculptures, stealing them from the ghostly caretakers of the empty art galleries.

  He was a man who, long before the Second World War, had promised himself never to kill a fellow human; and who now, after the Third World War, saw no reason to change that resolve. He was an amiable, boyish college type who had survived the death of the fittest and who, after the agonized destruction of a world, was still filled with high resolves and impeccable ideals. He was a man whom circumstance had forced to repress desire and abandon hope.

  The footprints led through sparse underbrush, around a moss-covered granite boulder. He heard sounds.

  “A gust of wind,” he told himself.

  He came around the boulder and stopped. In front of him, only a few yards away, were five people. To his starved eyes they looked like a crowd, an army, a multitude. They were camped around a small fire. It took him several seconds to assimilate this much information.

  “Well I’ll be damned,” one of them said.

  He adjusted. He took in the scene again. Five people, all of them women. Five women, dressed in ragged jeans and denim jackets, with rucksacks on the ground beside them, with crude spears propped up against the rucksacks.

  “Who are you?” one of the women asked. She was the oldest, perhaps fifty years old. She was a short, stocky, strongly built woman with a square face and iron-gray hair, with strongly muscled arms and a brown, sinewy neck, with pince-nez—one lens cracked—perched incongruously on her large nose.

  “Can’t you talk?” the woman asked sharply.

  “Yes, I can talk,” Miller said. “Sorry. I was just surprised. You’re the first women I’ve seen since the bombing.”

  “The first women?” she asked sharply. “Have you seen men?”

  “Only dead ones,” Miller said. He turned from her and looked at the other four. They were young, somewhere in their twenties, and Miller thought them inexpressibly beautiful. Undoubtedly they were different and distinct from each other; but to Miller, coming upon them as he would encounter an unknown race, they were alike in their alienness. Four comely animals, golden-skinned and long-limbed, with the great calm eyes of panthers.

  “So you’re the only man around,” the older woman said. “Well, that won’t constitute any problem.”

  The girls didn’t speak. They were staring at him. Miller began to feel uncomfortable and selfconscious. He was considering the responsibilities of the situation, and the thoughts excited yet disturbed him.

  “We might as well get introductions over with,” the older woman said in her firm, matter-of-fact voice. “My name is Miss Denis.”

  Miller waited, but Miss Denis didn’t introduce the girls. He said, “My name is Nugent Miller.”

  “Well, Mr. Miller, you’re the first person we’ve encountered. Our story is really very simple. When I heard the alarms, I took the girls to the sub-basement of our school. The Charleton-Vaness School for Young Ladies, that is. I am—I was—an instructor in Etiquette.”

  A colleague, Miller thought wryly.

  “Naturally,” Miss Denis went on, “I had equipped the shelter with supplies, as any prudent person should have done. But as few did. I had several geiger counters, in whose use I had familiarized myself. Some foolish people insisted upon leaving the shelter immediately after the bombs had stopped falling. I succeeded in impressing on these girls the dangers of radiation. It seeped down. We were forced to abandon the subbasement and take refuge in the sewer system further down.”

  “We ate rats,” one of the girls said.

  “That’s right, Suzie,” Miss Denis said. “We ate rats and were very happy to get them. When the radiation subsided to a safe level, we came out. We have been doing nicely ever since.”

  The girls nodded in agreement. They were still watching Miller with their panther eyes. And Miller was watching them. He had fallen in love with all of them simultaneously and quite genuinely, particularly with Suzie because she had a name. But he hadn’t fallen in love with the squat, strong-armed, matter-of-fact Miss Denis.

  “My own experiences were quite similar,” Miller said. “I went into the Laurelville Caverns. I didn’t find any rats to eat, but I did consume some very odd-looking fish. I suppose the next thing is, what do we do?”

  “Is it?” Miss Denis asked.

  “I should think so. We survivors should stick together for mutual support
and assistance. Shall we go to your camp or mine? I don’t know how much foraging you’ve done. I’ve done quite a bit. Assembled a library and a few paintings, and a good stock of food.”

  “No,” Miss Denis said.

  “Well, if you insist upon your camp—”

  “I do indeed. Our camp. And alone. That means without you, Mr. Miller.”

  Miller could hardly believe it. He looked at the girls. They looked back at him warily, their faces unreadable.

  “Now listen,” Miller said, “we need mutual support and assistance—”

  “By which you mean the lasciviousness of the male,” Miss Denis said.

  “I didn’t mean anything of the sort,” Miller said. “If you insist upon talking about that now, I suppose we can just let nature take its course.”

  “Nature has taken its course,” Miss Denis said. “It’s only true course. We are five women. We have done very well together over the last months. Haven’t we, girls?”

  The girls nodded, but their eyes were still fixed upon Miller.

  “We have no need,” Miss Denis said, “of you or any other man. No need and no desire.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Miller said, although he was beginning to.

  “Men are responsible for all this,” Miss Denis said. She waved her thick hand in an all-encompassing gesture. “Men ran the governments, men were the soldiers and the nuclear scientists, men started the war that has wiped out most of the human race. Even before the bombings I always warned my girls to beware of men. A lot of drivel was talked about equality of the sexes; in practice, woman was still man’s chattel and his plaything. But when times were normal I couldn’t explain my theories fully. The school would not have allowed it.”

  “I can understand that,” Miller said.

  “Now times are no longer normal. You men have messed things up once and for all, and you’re not going to get another chance. Not if I have anything I can do about it.”

  “Maybe the girls don’t feel that way,” Miller said.