Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  NOTES ON THE PERCEPTION OF IMAGINARY DIFFERENCES

  1.

  Hans and Pierre are in prison. Pierre is a Frenchman, Hans is a German. Pierre is short and plump with black hair. Hans is tall and thin with blond hair. Pierre has sallow skin and a black mustache. Hans has a clear complexion and a blond mustache. Hans is twelve inches shorter than Hans, who is a foot taller than Pierre.

  2.

  Hans and Pierre have just heard that a general amnesty has been declared. Under the terms of the amnesty, Pierre will be released immediately. No mention was made of Germans, so Hans will have to stay in prison. This saddens both men. And they think, if only we could get Hans out instead of Pierre . . .

  (Hans, the German prisoner, is an expert locksmith. Once outside, he could rescue his friend from the prison. The Frenchman is a professor of astrophysics and is unable to help anyone, even himself. He is a useless man, but a pleasant one; the German considers him the finest human being he has ever met. Hans is determined to be released from prison in order to help his friend to escape.)

  There is a way to accomplish this. If they can deceive the guard into believing that Hans is Pierre, then Hans will be released. Hans will then be able to return to the prison and help Pierre to escape. To this end they have formulated a plan.

  Now they hear the sound of footsteps coming down the corridor. It is the guard! They put the first phase of their plan into action by exchanging mustaches.

  3.

  The guard enters the cell and says, “Hans, step forth.”

  Both men step forth.

  The guard says, “Which is Hans?”

  Both prisoners answer, “Me.”

  The guard looks them over. He sees a tall, thin blond man with a black mustache and a fair complexion, standing beside a short, plump, black-haired man with a blond mustache and a sallow complexion. He stares at them suspiciously for several seconds, then picks out the tall man as the German and orders the other man, the Frenchman, to come along.

  The prisoners have been prepared for this. Quickly they dart behind the guard and exchange toupees.

  The guard looks them over, grins, unalarmed, and checks his prisoner identification list. He decides that the tall, black-haired, black-mustached man with the clear-skinned leanness is the German.

  The prisoners confer in whispers. They run around behind the guard. Hans kneels and Pierre stands on his toes. The guard, who is very stupid, slowly turns around to look at them.

  It is not so easy this time. He sees two men of identical height. One has blond hair, blond mustache, sallow skin, plumpness. The other has black hair, black mustache, fair skin, thinness. Both men have blue eyes, a coincidence.

  After some reflection, the guard decides that the first man, the blond-haired, blond-mustached, sallow-skinned, plump one, is the Frenchman.

  The two prisoners slip away again behind his back and hold a hasty conference. (The guard has bad eyesight, dropsy, fallen arches; his reactions have been impaired due to scarlet fever suffered in his youth. He turns slowly, blinking.)

  The prisoners exchange mustaches again. The sallow man pats dust onto his skin, while the light man darkens his face with soot. The plump one stands up higher on his toes, and the thin one slouches down lower on his knees.

  The guard sees one plump man of slightly above average height, with a black mustache, blond hair, and light skin. To his left is a sallow fellow of slightly below average height, with a blond mustache and black hair. The guard stares at them hard, frowns, purses his lips, takes out his instructions and reads them again. Then he picks out the light-skinned man of slightly above average height with the black mustache as the Frenchman.

  The prisoners scurry away, and the taller man ties his belt tightly around his waist, while the shorter man loosens his belt and stuffs rags under it. They decide to exchange hair and mustaches again, just for luck.

  The guard notices at once that the plumpness-thinness factor has diminished in importance. He decides to match up blond-dark characteristics, but then observes that the blond-haired man has a black mustache, while the dark-haired man has a blond mustache. The blond man is slightly below average height, and his skin could be considered sallow. The man on his right has dark hair and blond mustache (slightly askew) and a clearish skin, and he is slightly above average height.

  The guard can find nothing in the rules to cover this. Frantic, he takes an old edition of Prisoner Identification Procedures from his pocket, searches for something relevant. Finally he finds the notorious Regulation 12CC of 1878: “The French prisoner shall always stand to the left, the German prisoner to the right.”

  “You,” the guard says, pointing to the prisoner on the left. “Come with me, Frenchie. As for you, Kraut, you stay here in the cell.”

  4.

  The guard marches his prisoner outside, fills in various papers, and releases him.

  Later that night, the remaining prisoner escapes.

  (It is easy, the guard is disastrously stupid, not only stupid, he drinks himself into a drunken stupor every night, and takes sleeping pills besides. He is an incredible guard, but it is all easily explainable—he is the son of a famous attorney and Party member. As a favor to his father the authorities gave this job to his incompetent and physically handicapped son. They also decided that he could do it alone. That is why there is no other guard to relieve him, no commandant to check up on him. No, he is all alone, drunk, filled with sleeping pills, and nobody on Earth can awaken him while the prison break is taking place, and that is my last word on the subject of the guard.)

  5.

  The two former prisoners are sitting on a park bench some miles from the prison. They still look as they looked when we saw them last.

  One says, “I told you it would work! With you on the outside—”

  “Of course it worked,” said the other. “I knew it was for the best when the guard picked me, since you could escape from your cell anyhow.”

  “Now just a minute,” said the first man. “Are you trying to say that the guard, despite our deceptions, took away a Frenchman instead of a German?”

  “That’s it,” the second man said. “And it didn’t matter which of us the guard took, because if the locksmith was released, he could come back and help the professor; whereas if the professor is released, the locksmith can get out by himself. You see, there was no need for us to swap roles, so we didn’t.”

  The first man glared at him. “I think that you are trying to steal my French identity!”

  “Why would I do that?” the second man asked.

  “Because you wish to be French, like me. That is only natural, since there in the distance is Paris, where it is an advantage to be a Frenchman, but no help at all to be a German.”

  “Of course I wish to be a Frenchman,” said the second man. “But that is because I am a Frenchman. And that city out there is Limoges, not Paris.”

  The first man is slightly above average height, dark haired, blond mustache, fair skin, “on the thin side. The second man is below average height, has blond hair, black mustache, sallow complexion, and is on the plump side.

  They look each other in the eye. They can find no distortion or blemish there. Each man looks at the other straightforwardly, and perceives the honesty in the other’s eyes. If neither man is lying, then one of them must be suffering from a delusion.

  “If neither of us is lying,” said the first man, “then one of us must be suffering from a delusion.”

  “Agreed,” said the second man. “And, since we are both honest men, all we have to do is retrace the steps of the disguise. If we do that, we will arrive back at the original state in which one of us was the short, blond German and the other was the tall, dark Frenchman. “

  “Yes . . . But was it not the Frenchman who had the blond hair and the German who was tall?”

  “That is not my recollection of it,” said the second man. “But I think that the harshness of prison life may have affected my memory, to th
e point where I cannot be sure that I remember which are the German qualities and which are the French. Still, I am perfectly willing to discuss the various points with you and to agree to whatever seems reasonable.”

  “Well, then, let’s simply make up our minds, then we can sort out this ridiculous mess. Shouldn’t a German have blond hair?”

  “That’s all right with me. Give him a blond mustache, too, it matches.”

  “What about skin?”

  “Sallow, definitely. Germany has a damp climate.”

  “Color of eyes?”

  “Blue.”

  “Plump or thin?”

  “Plump, decidedly plump.”

  “That makes the German tall, blond, sallow and plump, with blue eyes.”

  “A detail or two may be wrong, but let it stand. Now let us trace back and figure out which of us originally looked that way.”

  6.

  At first glance, the two men may seem identical, or at least interchangeable. This is a false impression; it must always be remembered that the differences between them are real, no matter which man has which qualities. The differences are perfectly real despite being imaginary. These are imaginary qualities which anyone can perceive, and which makes one man a German and the other man a Frenchman.

  7.

  The way to perceive imaginary differences is this: you fix in mind the original qualities of each man, and then you list each of the interchanges. Finally you will arrive at the beginning, and you will know infallibly which is the imaginary German and which is the imaginary Frenchman.

  Basically, it is as simple as that. What you do with this knowledge is a different matter, of course.

  THE MNEMONE

  It was a great day for our village when the Mnemone arrived. But we did not know him at first, because he concealed his identity from us. He said that his name was Edgar Smith, and that he was a repairer of furniture. We accepted both statements at face value, as we receive all statements. Until then, we had never known anyone who had anything to conceal.

  He came into our village on foot, carrying a knapsack and a battered suitcase. He looked at our stores and houses. He walked up to me and asked, “Where is the police station?”

  “We have none,” I told him.

  “Indeed? Then where is the local constable or sheriff?”

  “Luke Johnson was constable here for nineteen years,” I told him. “But Luke died two years ago. We reported this to the county seat as the law requires. But no one has been sent yet to take his place.”

  “So you police yourselves?”

  “We live quietly,” I said. “There’s no crime in this village. Why do you ask?”

  “Because I wanted to know,” Smith said, not very helpfully. “A little knowledge is not as dangerous as a lot of ignorance, eh? Never mind, my blank-faced young friend. I like the look of your village. I like the wooden frame buildings and the stately elms. I like—”

  “The stately what?” I asked him.

  “Elms,” he said, gesturing at the tall trees that lined Main Street. “Didn’t you know their name?”

  “It was forgotten,” I said, embarrassed.

  “No matter. Many things have been lost, and some have been hidden. Still, there’s no harm in the name of a tree. Or is there?”

  “No harm at all,” I said. “Elm trees.”

  “Keep that to yourself,” he said, winking. “It’s only a morsel, but there’s no telling when it might prove useful. I shall stay for a time in this village.”

  “You are most welcome,” I said. “Especially now, at harvest-time.”

  Smith looked at me sharply. “I have nothing to do with that. Did you take me for an itinerant apple-picker?”

  “I didn’t think about it one way or another. What will you do here?”

  “I repair furniture,” Smith said.

  “Not much call for that in a village this size,” I told him.

  “Then maybe I’ll find something else to turn my hand to.” He grinned at me suddenly. “For the moment, however, I require lodgings.”

  I took him to the Widow Marsini’s house, and there he rented her large back bedroom with porch and separate entrance. He arranged to take all of his meals there, too.

  His arrival let loose a flood of gossip and speculation. Mrs. Marsini felt that Smith’s questions about the police went to show that he himself was a policeman. “They work like that,” she said. “Or they used to. Back fifty years ago, every third person you met was some kind of a policeman. Sometimes even your own children were policemen, and they’d be as quick to arrest you as they would a stranger. Quicker!”

  But others pointed out that all of that had happened long ago, that life was quiet now, that policemen were rarely seen, even though they were still believed to exist.

  But why had Smith come? Some felt that he was here to take something from us. “What other reason is there for a stranger to come to a village like this?” And others felt that he had come to give us something, citing the same argument.

  But we didn’t know. We simply had to wait until Smith chose to reveal himself.

  He moved among us as other men do. He had knowledge of the outside world; he seemed to us a far-traveling man. And slowly, he began to give us clues as to his identity.

  One day I took him to a rise which looks out over our valley. This was at midautumn, a pretty time. Smith looked out and declared it a fine sight. “It puts me in mind of that famous tag from William James,” he said. “How does it go? ‘Scenery seems to wear in one’s consciousness better than any other element in life.’ Eh? Apt, don’t you think?”

  “Who is or was this William James?” I asked.

  Smith winked at me. “Did I mention that name? Slip of the tongue, my lad.”

  But that was not the last “slip of the tongue.” A few days later I pointed out an ugly hillside covered with second-growth pine, low coarse shrubbery, and weeds. “This burned five years ago,” I told him. “Now it serves no purpose at all.”

  “Yes, I see,” Smith said. “And yet—as Montaigne tells us—there is nothing useless in nature, not even uselessness itself.”

  And still later, walking through the village, he paused to admire Mrs. Vogel’s late-blooming peonies. He said, “Flowers do indeed have the glances of children and the mouths of old men...Just as Chazal pointed out.”

  Toward the end of the week, a few of us got together in the back of Edmonds’s store and began to discuss Mr. Edgar Smith. I mentioned the things he had said to me. Bill Edmonds remembered that Smith had cited a man named Emerson, to the effect that solitude was impractical, and society fatal. Billy Foreclough told us that Smith had quoted Ion of Chios to him: that Luck differs greatly from Art, yet creates many things that are like it. And Mrs. Gordon suddenly came up with the best of the lot; a statement Smith told her was made by the great Leonardo da Vinci: vows begin when hope dies.

  We looked at each other and were silent. It was evident to everyone that Mr. Edgar Smith—or whatever his real name might be—was no simple repairer of furniture.

  At last I put into words what we were all thinking. “Friends,” I said, “this man appears to be a Mnemone.”

  Mnemones as a distinct class came into prominence during the last year of the War Which Ended All Wars. Their self-proclaimed function was to remember works of literature which were in danger of being lost, destroyed, or suppressed.

  At first, the government welcomed their efforts, encouraged them, even rewarded them with pensions and grants. But when the war ended and the reign of the Police Presidents began, government policy changed. A general decision was made to jettison the unhappy past, to build a new world in and of the present. Disturbing influences were to be struck down without mercy.

  Right-thinking men agreed that most literature was superfluous at best, subversive at worst. After all, was it necessary to preserve the mouthings of a thief like Villon, a homosexual like Genet, a schizophrenic like Kafka? Did we need to retain a thousand d
ivergent opinions, and then to explain why they were false? Under such a bombardment of influences, how could anyone be expected to respond in an appropriate and approved manner? How would one ever get people to obey orders?

  The government knew that if everyone obeyed orders, everything would be all right.

  But to achieve this blessed state, divergent and ambiguous inputs had to be abolished. The biggest single source of confusing inputs came from historical and artistic verbiage. Therefore, history was to be rewritten, and literature was to be regularized, pruned, tamed, made orderly or abolished entirely.

  The Mnemones were ordered to leave the past strictly alone. They objected to this most vehemently, of course. Discussions continued until the government lost patience. A final order was issued, with heavy penalties for those who would not comply.

  Most of the Mnemones gave up their work. A few only pretended to, however. These few became an elusive, persecuted minority of itinerant teachers, endlessly on the move, selling their knowledge where and when they could.

  We questioned the man who called himself Edgar Smith, and he revealed himself to us as a Mnemone. He gave immediate and lavish gifts to our village:

  Two sonnets by William Shakespeare.

  Job’s Lament to God.

  One entire act of a play by Aristophanes.

  This done, he set himself up in business, offering his wares for sale to the villagers.

  He drove a hard bargain with Mr. Ogden, forcing him to exchange an entire pig for two lines of Simonides.

  Mr. Bellington, the recluse, gave up his gold watch for a saying by Heraclitus. He considered it a fair exchange.

  Old Mrs. Heath exchanged a pound of goosefeathers for three stanzas from a poem entitled “Atalanta in Calydon,” by a man named Swinburne.

  Mr. Mervin, who owns the restaurant, purchased an entire short ode by Catullus, a description of Cicero by Tacitus, and ten lines from Homer’s Catalog of Ships. This cost his entire savings.