Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  “Yes, it is,” Lea said. “But it’s also very sad. All those nice boys being killed. I wish I could do something about it.”

  “Well then, why don’t you?”

  “What could I do?”

  “Talk to them. Try to make them understand. Tell them to go somewhere else. There’s plenty of room on this planet. Why must they choose this spot, for heaven’s sake?”

  “But why me?” Lea asked.

  “Because only you can do it. You live in their world.”

  “Iris!” Lea said. “What a shocking thing to say!”

  “But it’s true,” Iris said. “You know it’s true, don’t you?” Lea was going to protest again, to explain that she was pure Ariji, just like Iris. Then she woke up. She was one very disturbed human.

  X.

  I just didn’t know who to talk to about my dreams. I felt that I had to talk to someone, because they were really disturbing me and I was beginning to wonder if I weren’t maybe going crazy. I didn’t feel crazy, but my dreams were crazy. I really needed someone to talk to about them.

  There was the Interdenominational Chaplain, of course. He was the official spiritual advisor for all of us. I had seen him from a distance. He was a middle-aged man, a widower, rather slightly built, and he had a short, gray beard and he wore gold-rimmed glasses, not because his eyes were bad, but because on this planet gold-rimmed glasses were a mark of the clergyman. I decided against speaking to him, however, because I suspected that my dreams were not really a spiritual problem, were not in his province, so to speak.

  I knew several girls at work, but I didn’t know any of them well enough. There was Milus Shotwell, of course, and I knew he liked me. He was a sensible young man and quite good-looking and very much my type. I think that’s very important when you’re discussing intimate things like dreams. So I decided to talk to Milus and I honestly don’t know how it was that I found myself walking down the long dusty corridor that led to the small lab and rather dismal living quarters they had found for Allan Bantry and his unwanted Department of Alien Psychology.

  Allan was working alone in his lab as usual. He had on a grimy lab coat and his frizzy hair was standing on end, the way it gets when he forgets to comb it. But I was pretty glad to see him.

  His lab was a small room with two work tables. His computers and their peripheries and printers occupied all of one table. On the other he had his audio equipment. When I came in he was playing something I knew, Bach’s Little Organ Fugue.

  “Hi,” I said. “How’s military life?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “I’m civilian labor, just like you are.”

  “I’d have thought the Fleet would have its own military psychologists.”

  “Of course it does. But they’re for the member races exclusively. The Fleet has no interest in outside aliens except to kill them.”

  “Then why do they bother hiring an alien psychologist?”

  “In order to demonstrate their interest in the advancement of knowledge. It’s good publicity when the time comes for military appropriations.”

  “Why aren’t you wearing your tharg suit?”

  “Please,” Allan said, “don’t remind me. How was I to know people didn’t wear tharg suits here? So. Have you decided to work for me?”

  I told him I came in order to tell him about a dream I’d had.

  “Why me?” he asked.

  I had been wondering that myself, but I suddenly knew the answer.

  “Because no matter what I say I don’t think you’ll tell me I’m crazy. Or am I crazy to think that?”

  “Lea, sometimes I have difficulty following you. Sit down and tell me your dream,” he said, motioning me to a rather fragile-looking rocking chair.

  I told him all about my imaginary cousin Iris. When I had finished I started to rock furiously while he sat and ran his fingers through his hair, a sure sign he’s thinking. For a terrible moment I thought he was going to say, “Lea, I’m sorry to tell you this but you’re just plain crazy.”

  Instead he said, “Lea, I need you.”

  My heart thrilled to his words. I had already decided that I cared for him a little. I knew that he liked me, but I had not imagined it was to this extent.

  “Oh, Allan,” I said. “Why?”

  “Because,” he said, “you’ve got the highest psi rating among any of us, military or civilian, on Klaxon. This dream convinces me of it. I think it’s an important dream.”

  “But what has that got to do with your needing me?”

  “Lea, I am convinced that only by looking to psi will we get to the bottom of what’s going wrong. Please come and work in my division.”

  I really didn’t know whether to be flattered or not. But I did begin working for Allan Bantry in the Department of Alien Psychology.

  I always record my dreams in a diary. So I had the dates of each of them. But even without the diary, I knew that each dream had come on the eve of some terrible accident. The first was when the new buildings collapsed. Then there had been the destruction of the mill. And then the accident in the car pool. I had even begun to suspect that my dreams were somehow responsible for the terrible things that were going on. But Allan talked me out of that.

  “Forget that nonsense,” he said. “What is happening is obvious. Somehow you are in contact with the people who are causing the accidents. With one of them, at least. Iris.”

  “But those things I dream never happened. Not really.”

  “I believe they happened, but not in the way you remember. The images of your dreams were your mind’s way of making sense out of what you saw.”

  “Allan, you don’t really believe I could be in telepathic contact with the people who are sabotaging our base. I mean, it isn’t even proven yet that anyone is doing it. It could all be like accidents.”

  “There’s very little statistical possibility of their being accidents,” he said. “No, there’s obviously an intelligence behind this.”

  “Then it must be one of our own people. There’s no one on this planet but Fleet people and Fleet civilian workers. Or do you think someone else may be hidden out there?” I gestured in the direction of the great wasteland that surrounded Xanadu.

  “No, I do not,” Allan said. “I don’t think it has anything to do with treachery or sabotage. I suspect we’re dealing with an alien intelligence which is opposing us for reasons of its own.”

  “You mean there are aliens out there on the planet?” I said.

  “There would have to be,” Bantry said. “They could have been here even before we arrived. Remember, this planet was only hastily surveyed. We assume there’s no intelligent life here, but that may just mean that the initial survey didn’t turn up any.”

  It was an idea. Frightening. If Iris and her people really existed, where were they?

  It was ail getting very solemn, but then I thought of something that made me laugh.

  “Does my alien hypothesis strike you as funny?” Allan asked somewhat frostily.

  “Not at all, Allan! But you must admit, it’s just the sort of hypothesis you’d expect of an alien psychologist.”

  He looked very affronted for a minute, and then he grinned. I was glad of that. I think it’s good for a man to have a sense of humor, especially when I’m around.

  “You know something?” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re weird, Lea. Definitely weird.”

  That’s when I knew for sure that he liked me.

  XI.

  I really didn’t want to do the mind exercises. I had a lot of other things to think about. Allan and I had just found each other. That was something to think about. But Allan really didn’t seem quite aware that we had found each other. That was something else to think about. But mainly I didn’t want to think. I was in love and I just wanted to feel good, sort of lazy and laid back, that’s how I felt. Languorous, the poets called it. I felt languorous when I was around Allan.

  But Allan di
dn’t seem to feel romantic around me. I don’t really think it was in his repertoire. He was a serious-minded young science jock and he wanted me to do mind exercises.

  I had to wear funny metal things on my head and stare at ball bearings on a polished glass surface. I was supposed to get them to roll. Can you imagine that?

  I tried. I pushed against them with my mind. Sometimes I could almost feel I was making contact. I could feel the coldness of the steel against—not my real forehead, of course, but the forehead I was projecting against the little steel ball.

  But I couldn’t budge them. I could see that Allan was disappointed. After a week of this I think he was ready to give up on me, until I discovered the trick.

  I called it a trick, though Allan said it was just my individual way of focusing. I imagined a tiny lever, and I stuck one end of it under one of those bearings, and gave a push, and the thing started to move. After that it was easy for me to push it a little faster with my imaginary forehead. I can’t take all the credit. The psi booster I wore on my forehead helped. Thanks, psi booster.

  After the steel balls, Allan wanted me to try to turn keys in locks at a distance. It was easy once I got the hang of directing the force in a sort of twisting way. After that we turned to communication.

  The next time I dreamed, I seemed to be walking down a street in a city which afterward seemed very strange but at the time of dreaming seemed perfectly normal and commonplace. There were a lot of buildings and they were colored white and blue, and there were no entrances or exits. Allan told me later that many of the details probably had no definite correspondence to reality, but were examples of the mind’s analogizing tendency, the way it simulates environment. That’s how alien psychologists talk.

  The streets were made of porcelain cobblestones. There were horses and riders in the streets, though I realized later that they weren’t horses at all.

  I walked down the street and a lot of people were hurrying past me. They weren’t really going anywhere urgent, I knew that somehow, they just always moved around very quickly, it was the way they were. I went on and came into a sort of village square, and there was a fountain in it, and in it was a fountain with a statue, only the statue had no head and water was gushing from its neck. It didn’t seem to me strange at the time because I knew the statue had been there for ages.

  Then I heard a voice saying, “All citizens, assemble at once at the statue in Sector 22 Orange. We have some important news to tell you.”

  I went there and it was a sad sight. A lot of our soldiers were back from the front, and they had been wounded badly, many of them. There were a lot of stretchers, and ambulances kept arriving and leaving. Some of our men were bandaged and moving around on crutches, and some of them were on six legs, some on seven. It broke my heart to see how they had lost legs and could never dance in the May dances again.

  I went on. I thought I had something important to do, someone to meet. There was some reason for me to be there. If I waited, I would remember it. But there was no time to sit around. Just then Iris’s brother Ingendra came over.

  “You’re just in time,” he said. “The council is moving into supreme session. They’re about to make a very important decision.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Come with me,” Ingendra said. “You can see everything.”

  The council hall was a very high-ceilinged room, and it was lit by some sort of indirect lighting. All of the councilors of the city were there, and the President of the Ariji was there, too. She was very fat, and she wore a lot of black eye makeup. She was old, but I thought she was very beautiful. She frightened me, because I thought she could read my mind and everyone else’s. It’s something they can do, the Presidents of the Ariji.

  “So you’re Lea. We were hoping you’d come visit us again.”

  “But why? I’ve always lived here.”

  “No you haven’t, Lea. Try to remember where you really come from.”

  I thought about it, and I got the feeling, there in my dream, that I was dreaming, and that the real me was lying asleep out there in another world, the real world, perhaps.

  “Do you know where you come from?” the President asked.

  “Am I really from the other world?” I asked.

  “Indeed you are, child. It is a wonderful opportunity for us. We had despaired of ever getting into contact with your people. But now there is a chance.”

  “Hey, look,” I said, “I’m not sure about all this. Am I supposed to go back there and tell them that I had a dream only it’s real?”

  “They will have to believe you. We have something planned.”

  “What is it?”

  “I can’t tell you yet. But you’ll know when it happens. And then you must speak to us again.”

  “I don’t want to do this!” I shouted at them. And then I woke up and I was back in the lab.

  “You dreamed, didn’t you?” Allan said. He turned on the recorder. “Tell me all about it.” I told him.

  “When is this something supposed to happen?”

  “Very soon, Allan. Maybe we’d better warn the Admiral.”

  “Warn him about what? We don’t know what they’re going to do. He’d just tell us we were crazy.” But he picked up the telephone anyhow and asked for an interview.

  XII.

  Admiral Esplendadore was sitting in his room having late morning coffee. Coffee for the Fleet had to travel a long way to get to Klaxon. It was one crop which had not taken well to alien environments. Esplendadore sipped his mocha Java mixture and looked over the projection printouts which his engineers had given him. He was still behind deadline. It was annoying that things were going as slowly as they were. And there was still no indication of who had been sabotaging the base. Several of his men had theories, but theory wasn’t much good without good solid evidence to back it. What they had was all inference. He was especially annoyed at Bantry’s strange idea. Strange races existed in the galaxy, of course, you couldn’t discount them. At Bantry’s request he had had a thorough aerial survey made of Klaxon’s surface, including probes into its two freshwater oceans. They had turned up no signs of anything that could be called intelligent.

  It was going to get sticky if he didn’t sort this out soon. The top brass had their eyes on him. This was an important mission, one that, properly executed, could set the Weasels back for a good long time, and give the Alliance the decisive advantage it needed to stamp them out once and for all.

  He sipped again at the coffee, then noticed that there was a faint agitation on the surface of the brown liquid. A tremor. As though it were picking up some vibration that his own senses hadn’t yet been able to detect.

  He frowned, went to his desktop computer, punched up a status report. Everything seemed to be all right, although a few sectors gave inconclusive readings.

  Now he could feel the vibration. It seemed to be in the floor of his office. He wondered if someone were building something in one of the lower floors, or running some sort of equipment. He decided to check up on it.

  He picked up his phone. “Haskwell,” he said into it, “come in here. I’ve got some orders for you.”

  There was no answer. Esplendadore realized that the telephone was dead. He tapped it several times. Nothing. He went to the door and pressed the light-sensitive latch. There was no response. He banged on the door. That did nothing. He shouted at the door, “Haskwell, can you hear me? Open this door!”

  There was no response. The door was soundproof, of course. He calmed himself and walked back to his desk. He didn’t bother checking the windows. They were permanently sealed, with steel shutters welded over them for security. The door was the only way in or out, and it was malfunctioning. The telephone was his only means of communication with the outside. And it was dead.

  Except for his computer!

  He logged in and tried to call up another computer on the networking circuit. The machine didn’t respond. Instead, the screen flashed, “Pleas
e stand by. Priority message coming through.”

  There was nothing he could do but wait. As he waited, the tremor in the floor became more pronounced.

  Then, suddenly, Esplendadore’s suite went dark. The darkness was absolute, since he had no window on the outside. He could hear strange buzzing sounds in the walls—something to do with the wiring, no doubt. But the sound persisted. It was not like the crackle-pop of electrical cables. This sound was more like some kind of movement within the walls—rats, perhaps, or something equally obnoxious.

  Esplendadore made his way to his desk, fumbling in the darkness. He located his desk, found the top right-hand drawer, opened it and took out a late-model laser pistol. He adjusted the aperture to wide. Deeper in the drawer was another laser weapon, this one a hand-held lance, a devastating short-range weapon. With these he was ready to fight anything that came at him.

  He wished he knew what was happening to the rest of the base, however. He knew that Wintage, his second in command, was perfectly competent to handle anything routine. But this was far from routine. He just hoped Wintage didn’t panic. The last thing in the world Esplendadore wanted was someone to start sending off a CP to Fleet with some wild story about an invisible invasion. That sort of thing could make him a laughing stock. Of course, it was an invisible invasion. But that didn’t matter. It still sounded bad.

  Sooner or later they’d have to show themselves. Then whoever it was out there was going to get it.

  The Admiral of the Fleet, Baby Blue Esplendadore, was not amused.

  Presently he detected movement. His room seemed to be swaying. Then it lurched, and he had to grab the desk to keep from falling. His entire suite of rooms seemed to be moving. It was impossible, it was unlikely, but it seemed to be the case.

  It was an uncanny feeling, to be within a pitch-black room moving in an unknown direction. What Esplendadore feared was that Khalian agents were somehow effecting this. If that were the case, his career was sunk. It was typical of the man that he thought of his career before he thought of his life. No matter what the outcome, if the Khalia had been able to kidnap him in his own suite of rooms right out of the heart of a military base, he’d never live it down even if he managed to live through it. The room was perfectly soundproof. The only proof of movement he had was the swaying and lurching which the room underwent, and the feeling he had that somehow the whole thing had been lifted and was being born away. By whom? That remained to be seen.