Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  “Famous?” the counterman sneered. “That’ll be the day.”

  “Then this is the day,” Papazian replied. “Your hot dogs have a galaxy-wide reputation. I know beings who have traveled a thousand light-years solely to eat those hot dogs.”

  “Nut,” the counterman said.

  “Nut, am I? It may interest you to know that half of your customers at this moment are extraterrestrial beings. In disguise, of course.”

  Half the customers at the lunch counter turned pale.

  “What are you, some kind of a foreigner?” the counterman asked.

  “I’m Aldeberanese on my mother’s side,” Papazian said.

  “That accounts for it,” the counterman said.

  4.

  Papazian walked down the street knowing nothing. He was really enjoying his ignorance. His own ignorance excited him. It meant that he had a lot of things to learn. It was so marvelous, not to know what you are going to do next, or be, or say.

  “Hey, bud,” a man called out, “will this subway take me to Washington Heights?”

  “I don’t know,” Papazian said, and it was true, he didn’t know, he didn’t even know how to get to Washington Heights! It was a pinnacle in the annals of ignorance.

  But no one can stay that ignorant for long. A woman hurried over and told them how to get to Washington Heights. Papazian found it mildly interesting, but not as interesting as not knowing.

  5.

  The sign on the building said LOFT FOR RENT.

  Papazian went in at once and rented it. He thought that was the proper move. But he hoped it was the improper move, which was bound to be more amusing.

  6.

  The young woman said, “Good day, I am Miss Marsh. The agency sent me. They said you needed a secretary.”

  “That is correct. You are hired.”

  “Just like that?”

  “I can’t think of any other way. What is your first name?”

  “Lillian.”

  “That is satisfactory. Please begin working.”

  “But you don’t have any furniture here, not even a typewriter.”

  “Get what you require. Here is money.”

  “But what am I supposed to do?”

  “You mustn’t ask me that,” Papazian said gently. “I find it hard enough to find out what I am supposed to do. Surely you can run your own life?”

  “What are you supposed to do, Mr. Papazian?”

  “I am supposed to discover what I am supposed to do.”

  “Oh . . . Well, all right. I guess you’ll need desks, chairs, lamps, a typewriter, other stuff.”

  “Marvelous, Lil! I had the feeling that you knew what you were supposed to do all along. Were you aware that you are a very pretty young lady?”

  “No . . .”

  “Then perhaps you aren’t. If you don’t know, how can I tell?”

  7.

  Papazian woke up and changed his name to Hal. He was in the Village Central Hotel. He had spent an exciting evening listening to the cockroaches rap about the tenants. Cockroaches are natural mimics and can be extremely funny.

  Hal sloughed a layer of skin and left it under the bed for the chambermaid. It was faster than washing.

  He went to his loft. Lillian was already there, and some furniture had arrived. Lillian said, “There’s a customer in the anteroom, Mr. Papazian.”

  “I’ve changed my name to Hal,” Hal said. “Send in the customer.”

  The customer was a short round man named Jaspers.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Jaspers?” Hal asked.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” Jaspers said. “Some unaccountable impulse sent me here.”

  Hal remembered now that he had forgotten where he had left his Unaccountable Impulse Machine.

  “Where did you get this unaccountable impulse?” Hal asked.

  “On the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 18th Street.”

  “Near the mailbox? I thought so! You have done me a service, Mr. Jaspers! How may I help you?”

  “I told you, I don’t know. It was an unaccountable—”

  “Yes. But what would you like?”

  “Time,” Jaspers said sadly. “Isn’t that what we all would like?”

  “No, it is not,” Hal said firmly. “But still, maybe I can help you. How much time do you want?”

  “I’d like another hundred years,” Jaspers said.

  “Come back tomorrow,” Hal said. “I’ll see what I can do for you.”

  After Jaspers had gone, Lillian asked, “Can you really do something for him?”

  “Find out tomorrow,” Hal said.

  “Why tomorrow?”

  “Why not tomorrow?”

  “Because you’ve left Mr. Jaspers and me hanging, and that’s not nice.”

  “No, it is not,” Hal admitted. “But it is extremely lifelike. I have observed in my travels that life is precisely the state of hanging. The moral is, you must enjoy everything while hanging, because hanging is all you’ll ever be able to do.”

  “Oh, dear, that’s too deep for me.”

  “Then go type a letter, or whatever it is you think you’re supposed to do.”

  8.

  Hal went down to the Orange Julius on 8th Street for lunch. That particular stand had been recommended in the Interplanetary Gourmet’s Guide to Inexpensive Eating on Earth. Hal found the chili dog superb. He finished and walked to the southeast corner of Sixth Avenue and 8th Street.

  A man with an American flag was standing outside of Nathan’s. A small crowd had gathered. The man was old, and he had a red, seamed face. He was saying, “I tell you that the dead live, and that they are walking the earth this very minute. What do you say to that, eh?”

  “Personally,” Hal replied, “I would have to agree with you, because there is an old gray-haired woman with a withered arm standing beside you in her astral body.”

  “My God, it must be Ethel! She died last year, mister, and I’ve been trying to speak to her ever since! What is she saying?”

  “She said, and I quote, ‘Herbert, stop talking a lot of shit and get back to the apartment on account of that pot of water you left on the stove to boil eggs in hasn’t no water left in it and the whole damned place is going to burn down in another half hour.’“

  “That’s Ethel, all right!” Herbert said. “Ethel! How can you still claim that I am talking shit when you are now a ghost yourself?”

  “She said,” Hal said, “that a man who can’t even boil eggs without burning down his apartment isn’t likely to know much about spirits.”

  “She always got me with her lousy non sequiturs,” Herbert said. “Thanks for the help, mister.”

  He hurried off. Hal said, “Ma’am, weren’t you a little hard on him?”

  Ethel replied, “He never listened to me when I was alive and he won’t now that I’m dead. What could be too hard on a man like that? Nice talking to you, mister, I gotta go now.”

  “Where?” Hal asked.

  “Back to the Home for Aged Spirits, where else?” She departed invisibly.

  Hal shook his head in admiration. Earth! he thought. It’s an exciting place. Too bad it has to be destroyed.

  He walked on. Then he thought, Does it have to be destroyed?

  He realized that he didn’t know. And that also made him happy.

  9.

  Hal took the spatial bypass from West 16th Street to Cathedral Parkway. He had to change once at Yucca, Arizona, a town well-known for possessing the world’s oldest free-standing silo.

  Cathedral Parkway had ten colossal cathedrals—gifts to the people of Earth from the religious reptiles of Sainne II. The cathedrals were disguised as brownstones in order to avoid trouble with the local authorities.

  Many people were sightseeing today. There were Venusians disguised as Germans, and Sagittarians disguised as hippies. No one likes to be taken for a tourist.

  Disquieting note: A fat man (unrelated to any of the other fat men previous
ly encountered) came up to Hal and said, “Excuse me, aren’t you Hal Papazian?”

  Hal looked the man over. He could perceive a slight discoloration on the man’s liver, nothing serious, call it a liver spot. Aside from that, the man seemed to be without distinguishing characteristics, except for fatness.

  “I’m Arthur Ventura,” the man said. “I am your next-door neighbor.”

  “You’re from Aldeberan?” Hal inquired.

  “No, I’m from the Bronx, just like you.”

  “There is no Bronx on Aldeberan,” Hal stated, although he wasn’t much in the mood for simple declarative sentences.

  “Hal, snap out of it. You’ve been gone nearly a week. Ellen is nearly out of her head with worry. She’s going to call the police.”

  “Ellen?”

  “Your wife.”

  Hal knew what was happening. He was having a genuine Confrontation Scene, and also an Identity Crisis. Those were things that the average extraterrestrial tourist never experienced. What a treasured memory this would be, if only he could remember the memory!

  “Well,” Hal said, “I thank you most kindly for this piece of information. I am sorry to have troubled my wife, sweet Melon—”

  “Ellen,” Ventura corrected.

  “Hmmm, yes. Tell her I will be seeing her as soon as I have completed my task.”

  “What task is that?”

  “Discovery of my task is my task. It is like that with us higher life forms.”

  Hal smiled and tried to walk away. But Arthur Ventura showed a peculiar swarming ability and surrounded Papazian on all sides, and made noises and rushed in reinforcements. Papazian considered inventing a laser beam and killing them all, but of course that would not have been in the spirit of the occasion.

  So, by easy stages, aided by various persons, some wearing uniforms, Papazian was brought to an apartment in the Bronx, and a woman fell into his arms weeping and saying things of a personal and tendentious nature.

  Hal deduced that this woman was Ellen. This was the woman who claimed to be his wife. And she had papers to prove it.

  10.

  At first it was fun to have a wife and an assortment of children and a real honest-to-goodness job, and a bank account, and a car, and several changes of clothing, and all the other things that Earthmen have. Hal played with all of the new things. He was able to perform the role of Ellen’s husband without much difficulty: all of the clues were there for him to pick up on.

  Almost every day she would ask him, “Honey, can’t you really remember anything?”

  And Hal would say, “It’s all gone. But I’m sure I’ll get it back.”

  Ellen would cry. Hal went along with that, too. He was in no position to make value judgements.

  The neighbors were most solicitous, friends were most kind. Everyone made great efforts to conceal their knowledge that he was out of his mind, insane, crazy, a lunatic.

  Hal Papazian learned all of the things that Hal Papazian had once done, and did them. He found even the simplest things thrilling. For what greater experience could there be for an Aldeberanese tourist than to live the life of a Terran, and to be accepted as a Terran by other Terrans?

  He made mistakes, of course. Doing things at the proper times was difficult for him. But he gradually learned that he should not mow the lawn at midnight, should not wake the children up for their nap at 5 am, should not leave for work at 9 pm. He could see no reason for these restrictions, but they did make matters more interesting.

  11.

  At Ellen’s request, Papazian went to see a certain Dr. Kardoman, a person who specialized in reading people’s minds and telling them which of their thoughts were true and good and fruitful and which were false and evil and counterproductive.

  KARDOMAN: How long have you had the feeling that you are an extraterrestrial person?

  PAPAZIAN: It started shortly after my birth on Aldeberan.

  KARDOMAN: You would save us both a lot of time if you would simply realize and face the fact that you are a crazy person with a lot of weirdo ideas.

  PAPAZIAN: It might also save time if you admitted that I am in fact an Aldeberanese male in an unusual situation.

  KARDOMAN: Fuck that noise. Listen to me, buster, this pretense will get you nowhere. Stick to my premises and I’ll normalize you.

  PAPAZIAN: Fuck that noise.

  12.

  The healing process went on apace. Night came, succeeded by day. Week came, subsumed under month. Hal had moments of insight, which Dr. Kardoman applauded, and which Ellen recorded in her manuscript entitled: Return from Deepest Space; One Woman’s Account of Her Life With a Man Who Believed He was from Aldeberan.

  13.

  One day Hal said to Dr. Kardoman, “Hey, I think my past is coming back to me.”

  “Hmmm,” said Dr. Kardoman.

  “I have a bittersweet memory of myself at the age of eight, serving cocoa to an iron flamingo on my parents’ lawn, near the little secret bower where Mavis Healey and I conducted delicious and shameful experiments, and where, not a hundred yards away, the Chesapeake River flowed inexorably into the flaccid depths of Chesapeake Bay.”

  “Screen memory,” Kardoman commented, consulting the dossier which Ellen had put together for him. “At the age of eight you were living in Youngstown, Ohio.”

  “Damn,” Papazian said.

  “But you are going the right way,” Kardoman told him. “Everybody has screen memories, which conceal the horror and pleasure of whatever true experience must be shielded from the shrinking psyche.”

  “I knew it was too good to be true,” Papazian said.

  “Do not discount it. Your screen memory was a helpful indication.”

  “Good of you to say so,” Hal said. “But now, back to the old psychic drawing board.”

  14.

  He came up with various other recollections: of his young manhood spent as a cabin boy aboard a British gunboat on the Yangtze Patrol; of his sixth birthday, celebrated at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg; of his twenty-fifth year, when he worked as a short-order cook in the Klondike.

  These were all indisputably Terran memories; but they were not the memories that Dr. Kardoman was looking for.

  15.

  And then, one fine day, a brush salesman came to the door and asked to speak to the “lady of the house.”

  “She won’t be back for a few hours,” Papazian said. “Today is her lesson in demotic Greek, and after that she has a class in intaglio.”

  “Fine,” said the salesman. “I actually wanted to speak to you.”

  “I don’t want any brushes,” Papazian said.

  “To hell with brushes,” the brush salesman said. “I am your holiday liaison officer and I am here to advise you that we are lifting off in exactly four hours.”

  “Lifting off?”

  “All good things must come to an end, even this holiday.”

  “Holiday?”

  “Snap out of it,” the brush salesman, or holiday liaison officer, said. “You Aldeberanese are really too much.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Arcturus. We run a tauter psyche on Arcturus, and we never let our memories slide.”

  “We Aldeberanese always let our memories slide,” Papazian said.

  “That’s why I am a holiday liaison officer and you are a tourist. Have you had a nice time playing with the natives?”

  “I seem to have married one,” Papazian said. “Or to be more precise, I seem to be the mate of one who once had a mate who looked exactly like me.”

  “We provided that,” the Arcturan said. “A genuine Terran mate, it was part of the tour package. Now, are you coming?”

  “It will hurt poor Melon’s feelings,” Papazian said.

  “Her name is Ellen, and she, like most Terrans, spends an incredible amount of time having hurt feelings. I cannot force you to return. If you wish to stay on, another cruise ship will be along in fifty or sixty years.”

  “To hell wit
h that,” Papazian said. “I’ll race you back to the ship.”

  16.

  The spaceship had been cleverly disguised to look exactly like Fairlawn, New Jersey. The real Fairlawn, New Jersey, had been clearly lifted out and put down in India’s Rajasthan province. No one had noticed the difference except the Israelis, who had promptly sent a rabbi and a guerrilla-warfare expert.

  “But I still can’t remember anything,” Hal complained to the holiday liaison officer.

  “That’s natural. You left your memory bank in a locker aboard the ship.”

  “What did I do that for?”

  “In order not to feel out of place. Your old memories fit right over your present memories. I’ll help you sort them out.”

  Everybody was aboard and alive and well except for the inevitable few who had been killed in South American seaports. These unfortunates would be reconstituted later. Except for the hangover, they would be none the worse for the experience.

  The ship lifted off promptly at midnight. The flight was noted by the U.S. Air Force Detection Corps at Scrapple, Pennsylvania. They explained the radar images as being a large accumulation of marsh gas, complicated by a dense flight of swallows.

  Despite the nasty chill of outer space, Hal stayed at the rail and watched Earth recede into the distance. He was going back to the humdrum life of a partial-systems photognomic configurator, back to the wives and kiddy, back to the importunities of rust and lichen.

  But he left without real regret. He knew that Earth was a nice enough place for a vacation; but one couldn’t really live there.

  1972

  ZIRN LEFT UNGUARDED THE JENGHIK PALACE IN FLAMES, JON WESTERLY DEAD

  There is a noble tradition of great and epical adventure in science fiction. Beginning, perhaps, with Edgar Rice Burroughs, it continues through the wide screen space opera epics of E.E. Smith, Ph.D., on through Jack Williamson, and even the very young John W. Campbell, Jr. Lately it has begun to be called “sword and sworcery,” but this is just the most recent protean form the continuing epic tradition has taken. 1 record this all historically because here, that exceedingly fine writer and wielder of a mordant typewriter, Robert Sheckley, has finished off the up until now endless saga, written finis to those mighty tomes, killed the entire literature dead. Read on—if you dare!