Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  “But you won’t make any money this way.”

  “Sometimes goodwill is more important than money.”

  “Not to us it isn’t!”

  Rahman smiled and muttered something in the local dialect. The local equivalent of “tough shit,” no doubt.

  I wasn’t quite ready to give up. “But we’d agreed to sell any artifacts we found and split the profits!”

  “That is not correct,” Rahman said, rather coldly. “If you read your contract, you’ll see that you participate in the sale of artifacts only if we do in fact decide to sell. But the decision is entirely up to us.”

  He was right about the wording of the contract. But who could have guessed that they wouldn’t sell?

  I realized the wisdom of Rahman’s move—from his point of view—about a year later, after the CIA, working with the Indonesian authorities, busted him for the international dope trafficking. The fix must have been in. He got off with a fine.

  Gomez and I followed orders and brought the Eryx to Microsoft-IBM in Seattle, the biggest private research facility in the States. We told them about the engine, said that if our inference was correct, this thing had indeed influenced its operation.

  Well, at Microsoft-IBM, the guys in white coats ran tests from here to hell and back on the thing, and the more they saw the more excited they got, and they called in bigshot scientists from universities all around the world, and Microsoft-IBM was glad to pay for it because it gave them publicity like you couldn’t believe, and besides, soon enough the government began funding it.

  Gomez and I were superfluous. After taking our statement, nobody needed anything else from us. The Indonesian group went out of the spaceship business; it was save your ass time, and they were going to be busy for a long time. They gave us a pretty good bonus, however. I was already negotiating for new backers and a new ship and a better deal, and between us we had just enough money to swing it.

  And then Gomez got himself killed in a traffic accident in Gallup, New Mexico, of all places, and his family were his heirs and I was in legal stuff up to the giggie. The court never believed that Gomez had verbally deeded his share to me, and it cost me a fortune in lawyers to finally not be able to prove it and have half of what was supposed to be our seed money go to some uncle Gomez had never even met down in Oaxaca, Mexico.

  So I was on my own, and in what they call straitened circumstances. I managed to make a deal with some South African diamond people and took a new ship, the Witwatersrand, back to Alquemar to look for more stuff. That was when Stebbins, the company man the South Africans had forced on me, got killed in a cave collapse, and I got blamed. It was really unfair. I’d been sitting in the ship playing solitaire when he went out without authorization to the site, trying to make something on the side for himself, I doubt not. But they trumped up a case of negligence against me in Johannesburg and I lost my license.

  So I came up empty on that one and suddenly people didn’t want to hire me anymore for anything. So what with one thing and another I wasn’t around when the white coats were making some of their most important discoveries about the Eryx. During that period I was doing six months in Lunaville on a trumped-up charge of embezzlement. So I had my hands full with my own problems when Guillot at the Sorbonne, working with Clayton Ross’s New Rosetta stone, came up with a translation of the writing on the Eryx paper. And got promptly suppressed by court injunction while the Microsoft-IBM people sought corroborating evidence before releasing it. I heard about it while I was in jail. Everybody on Earth heard about it. (Except for you, my adorable Julie, caught up in your larcenous dreams.)

  I got out on good behavior (I’m no troublemaker) and drifted around Luna City for a while, working as a dishwasher. My spaceship piloting career seemed to be dead. No license, and no one would have hired me if I’d had one.

  But you can’t keep a good man down. A change of administration on Luna gave me the opportunity to regain a pilot’s license restricted to the inner solar system. This was accomplished by my employer at the time, Edgar Duarte, the owner of Luna Tours, who thought to use my fame or notoriety to enhance his tourist business. And so I got a job taking day trippers out to the asteroid belt, a far fall indeed for one who had discovered the Eryx.

  I took it with equanimity, however: I’ve long known that fortune’s a whore and life itself a kind of stupid muddle. I am not a religious man. Far from it. I hold, if anything, a belief which I believe was once ascribed to the Gnostics: that Satan won out over God, not the other way around, and the Dark Prince runs things in the dismal and disastrous way that suits his nature. I knew that everything was just chance and bad luck, in a universe in which things were stacked against us and even our ruling deity hated us.

  But since it’s all chance, good things happen from time to time, and, lo and behold, my time seemed to come around. I was running my tourists out to these stupid asteroids, sleeping in a flophouse since Duarte paid me next to nothing, bored out of my mind, when one day I got a letter from Earth.

  This letter was written on genuine paper, not this insubstantial e-mail stuff, but on stiff parchmentlike paper. It was from something that proclaimed itself “The First Church of the Eryx, Universal Pontifex of Everything and All.”

  The letter was not humor, as I had at first supposed, but a serious message from a group that had formed a church for the worship of the Eryx.

  The Eryx was a suprahuman principle, they wrote me, which had revealed itself to those who could see as divinely alien in form and in essence, and this coming had been prophesied long ago because of the self-evident nature of man’s fallen soul.

  In the letter they pointed out how the Eryx was now in a citadel in the Seattle Space Needle which had been acquired for it by Microsoft-IBM. Thousands of people passed in front of it daily, looking for cures to what ailed them. And the Eryx helped many of them. The Eryx had literally thousands of miracles to its credit. Not only could and would it cure any and all human ailments, everything went better in the presence of the Eryx, from machinery (which I had been the first to observe) to the workings of the human mind (of which the writer of the letter was an example, I suppose).

  After quite a bit more of this, the writer, a Mr. Charles Ehrenzveig, got to the point. It had recently come to the Church’s attention (he didn’t say how) that I was the person who had discovered the Body of the Deity and brought it to mankind. For this I was to be honored. It had been some years since I had had any contact with the Source. I had been denied my rightful fame, ignored where I ought to have been praised (my feelings exactly), and forced to live meanly far from Earth, whereas by rights I should take my place as The Discoverer of the Eryx. The letter also implied that there was something holy about me by association and by primogeniture.

  Ehrenzveig closed by saying that they had bought a ticket for me, a passage to Earth. It was waiting in American Express in Luna City. They would be very pleased if I would come to Seattle as their guest, all expenses paid. They promised to reimburse me handsomely if I would come and talk to them about the circumstances of my expedition to Alquemar, my discovery of the Eryx, my feelings during my time of association with it, and so on and so forth.

  Would I come? You bet I would. Luna City had been a drag for quite a while, and I’d had enough of tourists and asteroids to last me a very long time. With great pleasure I told Duarte where he could stick his job, and shortly after that I was on my way to the home planet.

  A few weeks later, I was there.

  Julie, I won’t bore you with my impressions of Earth after an absence of almost ten years. All of that and a lot more is part of my standard lecture. It’s available now both as a book and a CD. If you want, you can look it up for yourself. (But I know you, my darling. Not interested in anyone but yourself, are you?)

  “Dalton! How good that you could come!” That was Ehrenzveig, a big, corpulent man, greeting me literally with open arms. He had a couple of other guys with him. They were all dressed in white. That wa
s one of the marks of the cult, I later found out.

  I was brought by limousine to Eryx House, their own church and residence on a private island in Puget Sound. I was wined and dined. They made much of me. It was very pleasant. Except that there was a strange undertone to everything Ehrenzveig and the others said. What the psych people might call a subtext. They knew something that I and the rest of the human race didn’t know, and they felt very smug about that.

  The next day they brought me to the Space Needle for the Viewing, as they called it. The way it worked for the peasants, they got a ticket (free from the Eryx foundation, but you had to have one), then were searched for weapons, then were allowed to form on the line that went all the way up to the viewing room, which they called the Citadel. I didn’t have to do this. But Ehrenzveig thought I might like to see how it was done.

  I was more than a little surprised at the numbers of sick and crippled people on that line. There were blind folks, people with cancer, and just about everything else. They were all hoping for a miracle cure. A lot of them, Ehrenzveig assured me, were going to get it.

  I must have looked skeptical, because Ehrenzveig said, “Oh, it’s real enough. It’s not a matter of faith; it simply works. The other religions don’t know what to do with us. The Eryx—actually performs miracles. All of the time. Every day. This is a stage that our prophets have written about. We call it the Grace of the Last Days.”

  “The Last Days? What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked him.

  He looked sly. “I’m afraid I can’t discuss the inner doctrine with you.”

  “Why not? I thought you considered me a founder.”

  “A founder, yes, but not a member of our religion. You discovered the Eryx, Mr. Dalton, and for that we will always honor you. But you do not believe in its supernatural message. And because of that, we will not open our hearts and minds to you.”

  I shrugged. What are you going to say when a guy lays a rap like that on you? And anyhow, I didn’t tell that to Ehrenzveig. The guy was my meal ticket, and I didn’t want to get him sore at me. Not yet. Not until I had something going for myself.

  You see, Julie, and I’m sure you’ll appreciate this point, I had gotten a free trip to Earth and I was being put up in what amounted to a fancy resort hotel. But there’s been no talk of money. Scratch. The mojo. The stuff that makes it all go around.

  I didn’t bring this up, however. Not at that time. I was kinda sure Ehrenzveig and his people were going to make me an offer of some kind. After all, without me they wouldn’t have had a religion.

  I spent quite some time in the little room viewing the Eryx through glass. They had it on the cylinder of stone I’d found it on. I hadn’t bothered to bring the cylinder back. They’d made a special expedition to Alquemar to fetch it. The room was designed to look just like the cave in which Gomez and I had made our discovery. Even the lighting was the same. And they’d replaced the cloth the Eryx had rested on. The Eryx was sitting on it again, looking pretty as a picture, the very last word in high-class alien artifacts.

  “I thought somebody was studying that cloth,” I remarked.

  “Guillot, yes. But our foundation was able to suppress his translation and reclaim the cloth. It belongs with the Eryx, you understand. It is part of its substance.”

  “Do you know what the thing says?”

  “We have our surmises.”

  “So?”

  “If you think I am going to tell you, Mr. Dalton, you are very mistaken. That knowledge will be made public when the time is right.”

  “And when will that be?”

  “The Eryx itself will give us the indication.”

  So we stood around for a while watching guys throw away their crutches, and other guys shout, “I can see!” and all the rest of the bullshit. And then they took me back to Eryx House for a really first-rate banquet in my honor. It was after that dinner that Ehrenzveig made the proposition I’d been expecting.

  We were sitting with cigars and brandy in this superluxurious sitting room down the hall from the main dining room. At first it was a bunch of us, me and Ehrenzveig and about ten others who were pretty obviously bigwigs in the organization. Then the others left as if on signal, and Ehrenzveig said, “You’re probably wondering by now what this could possibly have to do with you, Mr. Dalton.”

  “The question did cross my mind,” I said.

  “If I have not read your character amiss,” Ehrenzveig said, “I believe, you would like money. Quite a large amount of money. Or am I being too direct?”

  “Not at all. I’m all for plain speaking and high living.”

  “Excellent. We can give you both.”

  “High living,” I mused. “Does that translate into actual cash of the realm, or do I get paid in religious points in the organization?”

  Ehrenzveig smiled. “We are well aware that you are not a believer. That’s fine. You’re not required to be. Would it make you uncomfortable to know that we’d like to use you as a shill?”

  “Not if there’s any money in it.”

  “Excellent! I appreciate your candor.”

  “You don’t mind, then, that I think your religion of the Eryx is a lot of bullshit, to put it bluntly?”

  “I don’t mind at all. These are modern times, Mr. Dalton, and the test of a modern religion resides in how it performs, not in what it promises. And in a religion such as ours, there’s certainly no moral or ethical code. Such matters have nothing to do with a diety such as ours. The Eryx, whom some call the Great Satan, couldn’t care less about right or wrong, good or bad. He’s here for one thing and one thing only.”

  “And that thing is?”

  “It will be plain to you in good time,” Ehrenzveig said. “I predict that you will become a believer. And that’ll be a pity, because we’ll have lost ourselves a jovial and cynical rogue.”

  “Flattery will get you nowhere,” I said, “unless you accompany it with large sums of money. Don’t worry about supplying me with dancing girls. I’ll take care of details like that myself.”

  “The money, yes,” Ehrenzveig said. “How admirably direct you are. But I came prepared for you.”

  Ehrenzveig took a billfold out of an inner pocket and counted out ten thousand-dollar bills. He riffled them and handed them to me.

  “Is this what I’m being paid?”

  “Certainly not. This is just a little walking-around money. We’re going to pay you a lot more than this, Mr. Dalton.”

  “And what am I supposed to do for it?”

  “Just talk to people.”

  “You mean, give lectures?”

  “Whatever you want to call them.”

  “What do you want me to tell them?”

  “Whatever you wish. You might talk about how you discovered the Eryx. But you need not confine yourself to that. Tell them about yourself. Your life. Your opinions.”

  “Why should anyone be interested in my life?”

  “Whatever you care to say will be of interest. In our religion, Mr. Dalton, you hold a very significant place.”

  “I told you I’m not religious.”

  “Important figures in religion frequently are not. Religious people come afterwards. They were the interpreters. But the original cast, the ones who were there in the beginning, they are not necessarily religious. Often they are quite the contrary.”

  “I’ve got a place in your religion? Like Judas, maybe?”

  “Equal in importance, but nothing like him. We refer to you, Mr. Dalton, as the Last Adam.”

  Talking has never been any problem for me, and I didn’t care if they called me the Last Adam or the First Charley. Or the Sixteenth Llewellyn, for that matter. A name is just another container for the wailing pile of shit that is a man. If you’ll pardon my French. But you’ve heard language like this all your life, haven’t you, Julie? It’s the way your father talked, and your mother, and all your friends. They all were a bunch of blasphemers, weren’t they, doll? And you knew right from the
start, right from the get-go, that the only thing to do in this world was to look out for number one, live high and leave a good-looking corpse. You and I are so alike, Julie. That’s why you love me so.

  I guess, as I went on giving my talks in Seattle, I started talking more about you, Julie girl. People started asking me, who is this Julie you’re always raving about? And I’d always tell them, she’s my dream girl, and she knows the way things really are. I told that to the ladies who kept me company during this time. There were a lot of them. I was famous, you see. I was Dalton, the guy who had found the Eryx.

  Thanks to Ehrenzveig and his people, others began to see how important I was. They paid me a lot. They gave me respect.

  “We’re going to fulfill your dreams of avarice, John,” Ehrenzveig said one day. It was a joke, I think, but he made it true. He kept on piling money on me, and I kept on buying things, and people, and more things. I had me a time, let me tell you. It was going so good for me that I didn’t even notice for quite a while that a lot of people were dying.

  When you’re going good, like I was, you sort of overlook what other people are up to. I mean, let’s face it, who gives a damn about other people when there’s number one to be fed and pleasured? And as good as things might get, there’s always room for improvement, right? So I took little notice of the bad stuff that was going on. The die-off, I mean. It was all very tragic. But I couldn’t help thinking that it was for the best, in a weird sort of way, because it freed up a lot of real estate. And of course I wasn’t very interested in why it was happening.

  A lot of people were blaming it on the Eryx. That’s people for you. Always ready to blame something. There were even scientists around eager to get their names in the papers, saying that the Eryx was a living organism, of a type never before seen. Long dormant. Now coming into activity. According to those guys, the Eryx had been releasing viruses since the day I found it. These viruses had traveled around the world, lodging in people’s bodies, not doing any harm, not calling any attention to themselves, the sly little buggers. But this wasn’t out of good nature. This was because this Eryx virus was waiting, waiting until it had spread to the whole Earth, infected everyone. Then it took off like a timed-release capsule.