Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  I said, “I too have a confession to make. I have used Mr. Snaithe, too.”

  “Charles! You actually sent a robot here to court me? How could you! Suppose I had really been me?”

  “I don’t think either of us is in a position to express much indignation. Did your robot come home last night?”

  “No. I thought that Elaine II and you—”

  I shook my head. “I have never met Elaine II, and you have never met Charles II. What happened, apparently, is that our robots met, courted and now have run away together.”

  “But robots can’t do that!”

  “Ours did. I suppose they managed to reprogram each other.”

  “Or maybe they just fell in love,” Elaine said wistfully.

  I said, “I will find out what happened. But now, Elaine, let us think of ourselves. I propose that at our earliest possible convenience we get married.”

  “Yes, Charles,” she murmured. We kissed. And then, gently, lovingly, we began to coordinate our schedules.

  I was able to trace the runaway robots to Kennedy Spaceport. They had taken the shuttle to Space Platform 5, and changed there for the Centauri Express. I didn’t bother trying to investigate any further. They could be on any one of a dozen worlds.

  Elaine and I were deeply affected by the experience. We realized that we had become overspecialized, too intent upon productivity, too neglectful of the simple, ancient pleasures. We acted upon this insight, taking an additional hour out of every day—seven hours a week—in which simply to be with each other. Our friends consider us romantic fools, but we don’t care. We know that Charles II and Elaine II, our alter egos, would approve.

  There is only this to add. One night Elaine woke up in a state of hysteria. She had had a nightmare. In it she had become aware that Charles II and Elaine II were the real people who had escaped the inhumanity of Earth to some simpler and more rewarding world. And we were the robots they had left in their places, programmed to believe that we were human.

  I told Elaine how ridiculous that was. It took me a long time to convince her, but at last I did. We are happy now and we lead good, productive, loving lives. Now I must stop writing this and get back to work.

  VOICES

  he had two problems—how to recoup his losses and how to get his teenage niece

  LIKE MANY OF US, Mr. West sometimes found it difficult to make decisions. But unlike many of us, he refused to seek irrational forms of assistance. No matter how acute his problem, he refused to let himself be guided by The I Ching, or by spreading the tarot cards, or by consulting a horoscope. He was a large, glum, secretive man who worked for the New York accounting firm of Adwell, Gipper and Gascoigne and believed that everyone should make up his own mind in a rational manner. The way Mr. West did this was by referring his problems to a Voice in his head. The Voice always told him what to do and the Voice was always right Mr. West’s Voice-in-head system worked well for many years. But trouble came during the week when the engineers were testing the generators in the newly constructed Conglomerate Building across the street from his apartment. It must also he mentioned that sunspot activity was unusually high that week, cosmic-ray output reached a ten-year maximum and the Van Allen belts temporarily shifted four degrees to the south.

  Mr. West had two big problems on his mind. One had to do with Amelia—lovely, desirable, willing and attainable, but also 14 years old, his niece and feebleminded. She was staying with him while her parents were in Europe. The very thought of her made his hands itch and his nose tremble. But then he thought about the penalties for statutory incest-rape and decided to postpone that one.

  The other problem concerned his shares of South African Sweatshops, Ltd. They had been slumping lately and he was thinking of cashing them in and buying International Thanatopsis Corporation.

  To come to a valid market decision. Mr. West had to assess such factors as leverage, margin, seasonal variation, investor confidence, the Dow-Jones averages, alfalfa futures and many other things. No one can he expected to think about those things himself. It was obviously a job for the Voice.

  The Voice considered the problem overnight, then, during breakfast, said, “OK, I think we got a solution. The difficulty was in discounting certain properties that may be induced in tensile web structures.”

  “What?” said Mr. West.

  “Rigidity and flexibility can be combined as a single gradient function.” the Voice went on, “but an absolute one in terms of self-enclosed systems homeostasis. Therefore, molar incrementation will result in exponentially increased product strength.”

  “What are you talking about?” Mr. West asked.

  “The apparent reversal of Frochet’s Law is due to the fact that energy flows through end-oriented web-and-pebble systems can he considered a simple bipolar variable. Once you understand that, the industrial applications for this form of lamination are obvious.”

  “Not to me, they’re not!” Mr. West shouted. “What’s going on here? Who are you?”

  There was no reply from the Voice. It had signed oil.

  During the rest of the day, he could hear numerous Voices in his head. They were saying all sorts of strange things:

  “Martin Bormann is alive and well and working as a Scientology auditor in Manaus, Brazil.”

  “Leaping Lady in the third at Aqueduct.”

  “You are a potential ruler of the solar system, but your evil pseudo parents have trapped you in an unclean mortal body.”

  That sort of talk alarmed Mr. West. He figured that one Voice in the head was rational, normal and perfectly OK. But hearing a lot of Voices was one of the signs of a crazy person. And, worst of all, he couldn’t get any answers from his own individual Voice.

  He kept calm over the next few days and tried to solve his own problems unaided. He sold Sweatshops, Ltd., and it promptly went lip five points. He bought Thanatopsis Corporation and it fell to a record low when Time magazine announced a new immortality scrum as “imminent.”

  He tried to solve the Amelia problem. He rubbed his twitching nose with his sweating hands and thought. “Let’s see, I could sneak into her room at night wearing a black mask. She’d probably know who I was, anyhow, but I could deny the whole thing in court and who’d take the word of a dummy? Or I could tell her that the latest technique in sex education was actual demonstration.”

  But he knew that these solutions were filled with danger. He was simply no good at solving his own problems, and there was no reason he should be. That was work for his Voice—which he pictured as a miniature Mr. West about the size of a pea who sat in the part of his brain labeled CONTROL CENTRAL and looked out at the world through Mr. West’s senses and sorted things out and made decisions.

  That was the normal, rational way that nature had intended. But his own personal Voice was no longer speaking to him, or had disappeared, or simply wasn’t getting through.

  Coward the end of the week, he became impatient. “Solve something, damn you!” he shouted, pounding his forehead with his fist. But nothing happened except that various Voices told him how to fix liquid helium at room temperature, how to build a multiple-take-off substance extractor out of an old washing machine and how to vary his collage technique with overprinted rotogravure backgrounds.

  Then, at last, the generator tests were completed, sunspot activity started to decline, cosmic-ray activity returned to normal, the Van Allen belts shifted four degrees north and Mr. West stopped hearing Voices.

  The last two messages he received were these:

  “Try wearing a strapless push bra one size too small. If that doesn’t get his attention, nothing will!”

  And:

  “Go forth, then, and lead My Children to Sanctuary on Mount Alluci, and tell them to render praises unto Me, for only this Place of Righteousness shall remain after the Evil Nations have destroyed each other with Eire and Plague, and make sure that you buy with Clear Title as much unentailed land as you can. because the price of real estate around h
ere is going logo Sky-High alter the Balloon goes up next year.”

  However, that was not quite the end of the matter. For on the day that the Voices stopped. Mr. West read an interesting item in The New York Times. The item told how a municipal policeman in Rio Grande do Sul, moved by what he called a “message in my head,” went to Manaus and discovered Martin Bormann, alive and well and working as a Scientology auditor.

  Mr. West also glanced at the sports pages and found that Leaping Lady had won the third race at Aqueduct the previous day.

  The following evening, on the seven-o’clock news, Mr. West heard that the Smithsonian had been blown up, with great loss of stuffed animals.

  Mr. West found this disturbing. Me hurried out and bought an armload of newspapers and magazines. In Art Times, he read how Calderon Kelly, in his latest one-man show, hail varied his collage technique with overprinted rotogravure backgrounds, achieving an effect at once profound and lighthearted. And Science Briefs had a column about John Wolping, who had just announced a new form of lamination utilizing energy flows through end-oriented web-and-pebble systems.

  The Wolping Method was expected to revolutionize lamination techniques.

  Mr. West was especially interested in a New York Post feature story about a new religious colony on the northern slope of Mount Alluci in eastern Peru. Two dozen Americans had followed Elihu Littlejohn Carter (known as The Last Prophet) to this desolate place. They were confidently awaiting the end of the world.

  Mr. West put down the newspaper. He felt strange and numb and disoriented. Like a sleepwalker, he picked up the telephone, got the number of Braniff, called and booked a flight to Lima for the following day.

  As he put down the telephone, a clear, unmistakable Voice in his head—his Voice—said to him. “You should never have sold Sweatshops, Ltd., but you can still recoup by doubling tip on Thanatopsis, which is really going to take oil next month.”

  The miniature Mr. West was back at Control Central, “Where have you been?” the big Mr. West asked.

  “I’ve been here all along. I just haven’t been able to get a connection until now.”

  “Mid you happen to hear anything about the world’s coming to an end next year?” Mr. West asked.

  “I don’t listen to that irrational weirdo stuff,” the miniature Mr. West said. “Now, look, about Amelia—all you have to do is spike her Kool-Aid with two Nembutals tonight and you can figure out the rest for yourself.”

  Mr. West canceled his trip to Peru. Thanatopsis Corporation split ten for one at the end of the month and Amelia got hooked on Nembies. Every man must follow the dictates of his own inner Voice.

  A SUPPLIANT IN SPACE

  To become an outcast was all that the alien wanted. Unfortunately, he had space, and spacemen, to contend with!

  I

  DETRINGER had been banished from his home planet of Ferlang for “acts of incredible grossness”—he had sucked his teeth insolently during the Meditation Frolic and had switched his tail widdershins when the Regional Grand Ubiquitor condescended to spit at him.

  These impertinences would normally have earned him no more than a few dozen years of Plenary Ostracism. But Detringer had aggravated his offenses by Willful Disobedience during Godmemory Meeting, at which time he had persisted in audibly reminiscing upon certain of his rather unsavory sexual exploits.

  His final asocial act was unprecedented in the recent history of Ferlang: he had meted out Overt Malevolent Violence upon the person of a Ukanister, thus performing the first act of Open Public Aggression since the primitive era of the Death Games.

  This last repulsive act, resulting in minor bodily injury but major ego damage to the Ukanister, earned Detringer the supreme punishment of Perpetual Banishment.

  Ferlang is the fourth planet from its sun in a fifteen-planet system situated near an edge of the galaxy. Detringer was taken deep into the void between galaxies via starship and set adrift in a tiny, underpowered Sportster. He was voluntarily accompanied by his loyal mechanical servant, Ichor.

  Detringer’s wives—gay, flighty Maruskaa, tall, thoughtful Gwenkifer and floppy-eared, irrepressible Uu—all divorced him in a solemn Act of Eternal Revulsion. His eight children performed the Office of Parental Repudiation—though Deranie, the youngest, was heard to mutter afterward, “I don’t care what you did, Daddy, I still love you.”

  Detringer was not to be afforded the comfort of knowing this, of course. Cast loose upon the infinite sea of space, the inadequate energy systems of his tiny craft inexorably ran down. He came to know hunger, cold, thirst, and the continual throbbing headache of oxygen-deprivation as he voluntarily put himself upon stringent rations. The immense deadness of space spread on all sides of him, broken only by the merciless glare of distant stars. He had turned off the Sportster’s engines immediately—he had seen no use in wasting its small fuel capacity in the intergalactic void that taxed the resources of the enormous starships. He would save his fuel for planetary maneuvering—if that unlikely opportunity should ever be vouchsafed him.

  Time was a motionless black jelly in which he was encased. Deprived of its familiar moorings, a lesser mind must have cracked. But it was a measure of his being that, instead of giving in to the despair whose objective correlatives were all around him, he rallied, forced himself to take an interest in the minutest routines of the dying ship, gave a concert every “night” for his tone-deaf servant Ichor, performed calisthenics, practiced High-speed Meditation, erected elaborate autosexual rituals as set forth in the Solitude Survival Book, and in a hundred ways diverted himself from the crushing realization of his own almost certain death.

  After an interminable period the character of space changed abruptly. The doldrums gave way to unsettled conditions. There were elaborate electrical displays, presaging new peril. At last a line-storm hurtled upon him along a narrow front, caught up the Sportster, and swept it pell-mell into the heart of the void.

  The very inadequacy of the little spaceship served to preserve it. Unresistingly driven by the storm’s front, the ship survived by yielding—and when the storm had run its course the ship’s hull still preserved its integrity.

  Little need be said about the ordeal of the occupants at this time, except that they survived. Detringer experienced a period of unconsciousness. Then he opened his eyes and stared groggily around him.

  After that he looked out through the spaceports and studied his navigational instruments.

  “We’ve completely crossed the void,” he told Ichor. “We are approaching the outer limits of a planetary system.”

  Ichor raised himself on one aluminum elbow and asked, “Of what type is the sun?”

  “It is an O type,” Detringer said.

  “Praise be to God’s Memory,” Ichor intoned, then collapsed, due to discharged batteries.

  THE last currents of the storm subsided before the Sportster crossed the orbit of the outermost planet, nineteenth out from the sturdy, medium-sized life-giving O-type sun. Detringer recharged Ichor from the ship’s accumulators, although the mechanical protested that the current might better be saved for a possible ship’s emergency.

  This emergency came sooner than Detringer had imagined. His instrument reading had shown that the fifth planet out from the sun was the only one that could support Detringer’s life-requirements without the assistance of imported artificialities. But it was too far away for the ship’s remaining fuel and now space was doldrum-calm again, affording no impetus to aid them toward their goal.

  One course of action would be to sit tight, wait and hope that a stray inbound current would come their way, or even another storm. This plan was admittedly conservative. It bore the danger that no current or storm would come during the short period in which they could sustain themselves on the ship’s resources. Additionally, there was the risk that if a current or storm should arise it would bear them in an unpromising direction.

  Still, there were risks no matter what course of action was taken. Character
istically, Detringer chose the more enterprising and perhaps more dangerous plan. Plotting the most economical course and speed, he set forth to cover whatever portion of the journey his ship’s fuel would allow, prepared to trust to Providence thereafter.

  By painstaking piloting and hand-metering of the fuel he managed to come within two hundred million miles of his destination. Then Detringer had to shut down the engines, leaving himself only a scant hour’s worth of fuel for intra-atmospheric maneuvering.

  The Sportster drifted through space, still moving toward the fifth planet, but so slowly that a thousand years would barely suffice to bring it within the planet’s atmospheric limits. By a very slight effort of the imagination, the ship could be considered a coffin and Detringer its premature occupant. But Detringer refused to dwell upon this.

  He began again his regime of calisthenics, concerts, High-speed Meditation, and autosexual rituals.

  Ichor was somewhat shocked by all this. Himself of an orthodox turn of mind, he gently pointed out that Detringer’s acts were in-apropos to the situation and therefore insane.

  “You’re quite right, of course,” Detringer replied cheerfully. “But I must remind you that Hope, even though judged incapable of fulfillment, is still considered one of the Eight Irrational Blessings and therefore (according to the Second Patriarch) of a higher order of magnitude than the derived Sanity Injunctions.”

  Confuted by scripture, Ichor gave his grudging assent to Detringer’s practices and even went so far as to sing a hymn in harmony with him (with results as ludicrous as they were cacophonous).

  Inexorably their energy ran down. Half- and then quarter-rations impaired their efficiency and brought them near the point of complete dysfunction. In vain did Ichor beg his master’s permission to drain his own personal batteries into the ship’s chilly heaters.

  “Never mind,” said Detringer, shuddering with cold. “We’ll go out together as equals, in possession of what senses we’ve got, if we go out at all—which I seriously doubt despite impressive evidence to the contrary.”