Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  Honorious was dismayed; in August he had filed an Extension of Current Status form, which should have been routinely accepted. It would have given him another six months for his selection of a wife. Now he had a scant two weeks left in which either to comply with the Directive or light out quick for Mexico. And that was not a really desirable alternative in the year 2038.

  Damnation!

  Over lunch that day Honorious discussed the situation with his oldest friend, Earl Ungerfjord. “It’s damned unfair of them,” Honorious said. “Somebody up there is persecuting me. But why? I’m no rebel. I know as well as anyone that marriage is the minimum social transaction and the foundation of the State’s security. Hell, I even want to get married! I just haven’t found the right one yet.”

  “Perhaps you’re being too fussy,” Ungerfjord suggested. He had been married for almost a month. Human relationships looked quite simple to him.

  Honorious shook his head. “Right now I’d settle for anything short of a disaster. The trouble is, despite computer profiles and modern matchup techniques, you can’t tell whether you’ll pick a good one until you try it out, and then it’s too late to do anything about it.”

  “Yes,” Ungerfjord said complacently, “that is the situation most people find themselves in.”

  “Are there exceptions?”

  “As a matter of fact, there is a way around a good deal of the uncertainty. I used it myself. It’s how I found Janie. I hadn’t mentioned it before because I know you don’t like to do illegal things.”

  “Of course I try to live ethically,” Honorious said. “But this is really important and I’m prepared to be flexible. Who do I have to kill?”

  “It’s not as bad as that,” Ungerfjord said. He scribbled an address. “Go and speak to Mr. Euler. He is head of Clandestine Computer Services. Tell him I sent you.”

  Clandestine Computer Services had located for the moment in a suite of dusty offices in the derelict Lincoln Center area, where it masqueraded under the title “Used Softwear Jobbers, Inc.” Euler’s secretary, a pretty and efficient young woman named Dinah Grebs, showed Honorious into Euler’s private office. Euler was a short, plump, balding, friendly, red-cheeked little man with intelligent brown eyes and a disarming manner. He had decorated his office to look like an English drawing room, but had succeeded only in making it look like a corner of a furniture warehouse.

  “You’ve come to the right place,” Euler assured him, once the problem had been explained. “The State demands that we marry for the sake of social stability, since it is well-known that most malcontents, rebels, psychopaths, child molesters, social reformers, anarchists, and the like are single, unmarried persons who have nothing to do but selfishly care for themselves and plot the overthrow of the State. Marriage is therefore the obligatory act of loyalty to one’s government. And of course no one disputes this or any of the other findings of the National Board of Mothers. We all accept the necessity of marriage; we stipulate only that it should be a good one, or at least tolerable, since that best serves both the individual and the State.”

  “Yes,” Honorious said, “that is why I came here. Do you have any practical—”

  Euler was not to be robbed of his peroration. “What is needed is a scientific means of taking the guesswork out of marriage. The computerized matchups are not good enough; we need a way to look at the actual events of one’s proposed marriage, and then to make up one’s mind about it. We need to see how it plays before we set it to running in our homes for sixty or seventy years.”

  “If only we could!” Honorious said. “But it is impossible. Or do you happen to know a talented gypsy with a working crystal ball?”

  “There is a way,” Euler said, smiling.

  “Has someone invented a time machine?”

  “You know it under a different name. You call it the Political Factors Synthesizer and Simulator.”

  “I’ve heard about it,” Honorious said. “It’s that super computer hidden under a mountain in North Dakota that’s always figuring out what one country is going to perpetrate on some other country. But I don’t see what it could say about my future wife unless she happened to be a general or something.”

  “Consider, Mr. Honorious! Here is a machine designed to predict and simulate interactions between various groups and subgroups of people. What if it were used to predict and simulate the probable interactions between two individuals.”

  “That would be great,” Honorious said. “But the PFSS is guarded tighter than Fort Knox.”

  “My boy, it is easy to guard gold, but difficult to hide information, even if you put a mountain over it! In the hands of corrupt or idealistic operators, the very input channels upon which the Simulator depends for information can be converted to output. I won’t even hint as to how: we have our ways. I will only say that the Simulator can lay out your probable future with any woman whatsoever, and simulate the results for you alone.”

  “I don’t see how you can get within ten miles of the Simulator.”

  “We don’t have to. We are in possession of a captive terminal outlet.”

  Honorious whistled softly under his breath, marveling at the cool effrontery of this pleasant little man. “Mr. Euler, when can I begin?”

  The matter of fee was quickly settled and Euler consulted a schedule. “Since your case is urgent, I can give you ten minutes of computer time the day after tomorrow. Be here at noon and Miss Grebs will take you to the terminal and instruct you in the procedure. Don’t forget to bring the data cards for yourself and your prospective wives!”

  Honorious was prompt for his appointment. In an envelope he carried data cards for fifteen prospective wives. These women had been selected for him by Computerized Marriage Matchup Services, an exclusive Madison Avenue Agency that had handpicked these fifteen out of the National Availability Pool of American Single Women (NAPASAW) on the basis of answers to 1006 carefully chosen questions. These women were known to Honorious only by their numbers, anonymity being preserved until an Official Pair-Bonding Decision had been made. These women had all elected instant-available status; that meant that all Honorious had to do was signify his willingness to marry any one of them, and that would be that. (Honorious’s data card showed that, among other things, he was tall, curly-haired, good-looking, of stable temperament, kind to children and small animals, and pulled in thirty-five thousand a year as the youngest president in the history of Glip Electronics with unlimited prospects before him. Most candidates were willing to take a chance on specs like these; Honorious was the kind of marital mistake that many women would like to make.)

  Miss Grebs took Honorious to a used car lot on DeKalb Avenue. The computer terminal was hidden there in the back of a furniture van. Two technicians, disguised as derelicts, led Honorious into the blacked-out inner room where the terminal softly hummed. They put him into the command chair and fastened the psychometallic electrodes to his forehead and wrists.

  Miss Grebs took the cards. “You’ll only have time for one of them today,” she said. “You’ll be getting five years’ events compressed into ten minutes of realtime, so stay on your toes. Which card shall I do?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Honorious said. “They’re all alike. The cards, I mean. Take the top one.”

  Miss Grebs fed the card into the terminal. It made soft noises, and Honorious felt a tingling behind his eyes. His vision grew misty. When it cleared, he was looking at himself and a pretty, petite girl with long dark hair. This was Miss 1734-AV-2103C.

  The information was presented to him in a series of visual vignettes and montages. He saw himself and 1734 eating dinner together in a quaint Italian restaurant and then strolling down Bleecker Street hand in hand. Here they were in Washington Square beside the fountain, and she was playing a guitar and singing a folk song. How pretty she was! How happy they seemed! Now they were lying together in front of a tiny fireplace in a small apartment on Gay Street. She had taken to parting her hair in the middle. She wore
sunglasses and was reading a script; she was going to be in a movie! But nothing came of it and next they were living in a stunning apartment on Sutton Place and she was sullenly frying hamburgers. (They had quarreled; they weren’t talking; he read his Wall Street Journal and she studied her astrology books.) And now they lived in Connecticut in a beautiful old house with a big sunny nursery, which they used as a storage room. He did a lot of lonely skiing while she studied tantra at a Buddhist study group in Maryland. When she returned she had cut her hair short and she could sit interminably in full lotus. Her unblinking gaze looked right through him and she found lovemaking an unwelcome distraction from her mandalic visualizations. A year later they didn’t live together anymore. She had joined an ashram outside of Schenectady, and he had a girlfriend in Brattleboro. And that was enough of Miss 1734. The next available Simulator time was three days later.

  The second one, Miss 3543, was a tall, rangy, merry girl with sandy hair and a fetching spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose. She and Honorious set up housekeeping in Malibu where she played tennis every day and read interior decorating magazines. How beautiful she looked as she served him his Waldorf salad beside the barbecue pit while the cocker spaniel rollicked at his feet! Then they were in Paris, the spaniel had become a sad-eyed dachshund, and she was very drunk in Montparnasse and shouting something abusive at him. Then there were similar scenes in Rome, Villefranche, Ibiza. She was a lush now, and they seemed to have acquired a child but misplaced the dachshund, and then there was another child and two cats, and then a housekeeper to keep it all together while 3543 dried out in a very good sanatorium near Grissons. And here they were in London. She was always sober now, a tall, skinny, serious woman who held her mouth in a funny way while she handed out Scientology leaflets in Trafalgar Square and that was the end of five years with Miss 3543.

  All that Honorious could remember about the third one was that she had begun as a charming shy girl who glorified his Easthampton twilights with her long, sexy silences. Two years later, in a suite at the Cattleman in Tulsa, he was screaming at her, “Say something, dummy! Anything! Just for Chrissakes speak!” Number four discovered her secret talent at age 27 and became a roller derby star. Number five was the suicidal one who never got around to it. Or was that number six?

  By September 29, after viewing fourteen of his potential marriages, Honorious was alarmed and despondent. He went to his final appointment in a state of heavy gloom, almost resigned to contract an alliance with number eleven, the Giggler with the Two Stupid Brothers. At least she was not totally disastrous.

  For security reasons the terminal had been taken from its DeKalb Avenue location and set up in a washroom down the hall from Euler’s office. Honorious plugged in and saw himself walking on a beach at Martha’s Vineyard with 6903, a nice-looking, brown-haired girl who reminded him of somebody he once knew. Here they were walking across the George Washington Bridge, very happy and quite unaware of what lay in store for them as next they ate goat’s cheese and drank wine on a limestone rock that jutted out over the Aegean. Here they were on a long rocky plain with white-capped mountains rising in the distance. Tibet? Pern? And then they were in Miami, she was wearing his raincoat and they were running in the rain, laughing. And then they were in a low white house, very much in love, and he was walking up and down the living room with their colicky baby and that was the end of the five-year forecast.

  Honorious went at once to Euler’s office. “Euler!?” he cried. “I’ve found her at last! I think I’m in love with 6903!”

  “Congratulations, my boy,” Euler said. “I was beginning to worry. When do you want to make the Pair-Bond Agreement?”

  “I’ll do it right now,” Honorious said. “Turn on the Public Records Machine! 6903 is quite an attractive number, isn’t it? I wonder what her name is?”

  “I can find that out for you immediately,” Euler said. “This is Clandestine Computer Services, you know! Let me punch that number into the data processor . . . Right. She is Miss Dinah Grebs of 4885 Railroad Street, Flushing, Queens.”

  “I think I have heard that name before,” Honorious said.

  “So have I,” Euler said. “It’s hauntingly familiar. Grebs, Grebs . . .”

  “Did you call me, sir?” asked Miss Grebs from the other room.

  “It’s you!” Euler cried.

  “It’s her!” Honorious cried. “I thought she looked familiar! She is 6903!”

  It took a moment for Euler to assimilate this. Then he said sternly, “Miss Grebs, can you tell me how your data card happened to get into Mr. Honorious’s selected list of candidates?”

  “I will explain that to Mr. Honorious alone,” she said in a shaky but defiant voice.

  After Euler left, Honorious and Grebs confronted each other. Honorious said, “Would you mind telling me why, Miss Grebs?”

  “Well, you are a good catch,” said Dinah Grebs. “But actually I fell for you the first time you came here. I could see at once that you and I were perfect for each other. I didn’t need the most complicated machine in the world to tell me that. But your high-class matrimonial service wouldn’t even process my card, and you never looked at me. I wanted you, Honorious, so I did what I had to do in order to get you and I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of!”

  “I see,” Honorious said. “I must tell you that in my opinion you don’t have a valid legal claim on me. However, I will not object to making a reasonable cash settlement for your time and trouble.”

  “Did I really hear that?” Grebs asked. “You’re offering me money to let you go?”

  “Certainly,” Honorious said. “I want to do the fair thing.”

  “Wow,” Grebs said. “Well, it won’t cost you one cent to get rid of me. As a matter of fact you just lost me.”

  “Now wait a minute,” Honorious said. “I really object to the tone you’re taking in this. I am the injured party, you know, not you.”

  “You are the injured party? I fall in love with you, cheat and perjure myself for you, make a fool of myself in front of you, and you stand there and tell me that you are the injured party!”

  “But you tried to trap me! I suppose you tampered with the data cards, too?”

  “That’s right. I’m sure any of them will be suitable for your simpleminded needs. I recommend number three, the one who doesn’t talk. At least you’ll win some arguments that way.”

  Honorious said something that sounded like a curse and moved closer to her. Grebs swung her fist at him. Honorious seized her wrist and they found themselves, not exactly in each other’s arms, but definitely in contact and breathing hard. They looked at each other.

  Love, the secret and unofficial heart of pair-bonding behavior, is a force to be reckoned with but never predicted. Love supercedes all other directives and cancels previous obligations. The shared look of love is love’s preview, presenting a foretaste of the joys and sorrows to come, and setting into motion the automatic mating machinery upon which the success and stability of the State depends.

  Later Honorious said, “Hey, was that future of ours for real? Or did you doctor up your own data?”

  “You’ll just have to wait and find out,” Dinah told him, not for the last time.

  1978

  IS THAT WHAT PEOPLE DO?

  Eddie Quintero had bought the binoculars at Hammerman’s Army & Navy Surplus of All Nations Warehouse Outlet (“Highest Quality Goods, Cash Only, All Sales Final”). He had long wanted to own a pair of really fine binoculars, because with them he hoped to see some things that he otherwise would never see. Specifically, he hoped to see girls undressing at the Chauvin Arms across the street from his furnished room.

  But there was also another reason. Without really acknowledging it to himself, Quintero was looking for that moment of vision, of total attention, that comes when a bit of the world is suddenly framed and illuminated, permitting the magnified and extended eye to find novelty and drama in what had been the dull everyday world.

&nbs
p; The moment of insight never lasts long. Soon you’re caught up again in your habitual outlook. But the hope remains that something—a gadget, a book, a person—will change your life finally and definitively, lift you out of the unspeakable silent sadness of yourself, and permit you at last to behold the wonders which you always knew were there, just beyond your vision.

  The binoculars were packed in a sturdy wooden box stenciled, “Section XXII, Marine Corps, Quantico, Virginia.” Beneath that it read, “Restricted Issue.” Just to be able to open a box like that was worth the $15.99 that Quintero had paid.

  Inside the box were slabs of Styrofoam and bags of silica, and then, at last, the binoculars themselves. They were like nothing Quintero had ever seen before. The tubes were square rather than round, and there were various incomprehensible scales engraved on them. There was a tag on them which read, “Experimental. Not to Be Removed from the Testing Room.”

  Quintero hefted them. The binoculars were heavy, and he could hear something rattle inside. He removed the plastic protective cups and pointed the binoculars out the window.

  He saw nothing. He shook the binoculars and heard the rattle again. But then the prism or mirror or whatever was loose must have fallen back into place, because suddenly he could see.

  He was looking across the street at the mammoth of the Chauvin Arms. The view was exceptionally sharp and clear; he felt that he was standing about ten feet away from the exterior of the building. He scanned the nearest apartment windows quickly, but nothing was going on. It was a hot Saturday afternoon in July, and Quintero supposed that all the girls had gone to the beach.

  He turned the focus knob, and he had the sensation that he was moving, a disembodied eye riding the front of a zoom lens, closer to the apartment wall, five feet away, then one foot away and he could see little flaws in the white concrete front and pit marks on the anodized aluminum window frames. He paused to admire this unusual view, and then turned the knob again very gently. The wall loomed huge in front of him, and then suddenly he had gone completely through it and was standing inside an apartment.