Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  “Look at them run,” Dexter said, standing at the port. “How high they leap! It’s almost as though they had wings!”

  “Our scientists did consider giving them wings,” the Captain said. “I believe one or two models were even tried. But discontinued. The weight-to-lift ratios were all wrong. Esthetically pleasing, however. Personally, I’m glad they stuck with the standard model. It’s been around for millions of years, but it’s still the best.”

  “Anything to drink around here?” one of The People asked, pausing at the fringe of the forest.

  Kenny sniffed. “Water a couple of miles away, a lake I think! Straight ahead!” He and the others rushed into the forest.

  Dexter and the Captain watched from the ship. They saw The People enter the woods and vanish from view.

  “Will they come back to report on the water?” Dexter asked.

  “No need,” the Captain said. “I’m in telepathic contact with them. Kenny will report to me.”

  “Convenient,” Dexter said.

  “Saves lugging around a lot of equipment.”

  “What happens if the water poisons them?”

  “We’ll have to do something about that. Or perhaps find another planet.”

  “But The People will be dead.”

  “Plenty more where they came from,” The Captain said.

  Kenny reported, “The water is good, Masters. Everything here is good. Oh, there are some things not good to eat or drink, but they are minor, insignificant, easily avoided, the sort of thing you could find anywhere, even back home. Your own bodies are equipped to handle anything this planet has to offer. Now will you join us?”

  “We can’t land the ship in the forest. But our radar shows an open space a few miles ahead.”

  “I can sense it, Master.”

  “Good. We’ll meet you there.”

  Kenny loped off in the direction of the open space, the other People following. He wondered, not for the first time, why the Masters were so lazy. They went everywhere by machine. And when they needed to check something, they constructed an instrument instead of doing it themselves. Or they created The People to do it for them. The Masters were strange!

  But why had they constructed The People to be able to move around on their own, even to make decisions, to try things out? That was supposed to be the Masters’ job. Why had they given The People intelligence and autonomy, instead of using those things themselves? Was it because they were too lazy? Did they really think it was better to sit around playing games?

  He knew how the Masters thought about them. They considered The People nothing more than intelligent multipurpose instruments, self-propelling. But surely they were more than that? Otherwise, why bother to create them?

  The Captain stood at the port, looking out on the planet. All of The People were out of sight now. He sighed.

  “Well, then,” he said, “shall we get on with it?”

  “To the rendezvous, sir?” Dexter said. “I’m ready.”

  “We’re not going to the rendezvous! Really, Dexter, I thought you’d have caught on by now.”

  “Caught on? I’m afraid I don’t understand, sir.”

  “Where we’re going should be obvious. You young people can be a little obtuse.”

  Dexter was well over a thousand years old. Nothing to the Captain’s estimated five thousand, but old enough to assume maturity. But still, he made no comment.

  “Obvious, sir? Is it obvious to The People as well?”

  “No, not to those dummies!”

  “Is there some other rendezvous point, sir?”

  “Yes. Code name, home.”

  Dexter gaped.

  “Real name, home, too.”

  “I don’t understand, sir.”

  “You don’t? It’s really very simple. We’re going back to our own planet.”

  “But The People—”

  “They’ll stay here, of course.”

  “But no one’s warned them!”

  “They’ll figure it out. Maybe in a month or two, or a year or two, when they finally figure out we aren’t coming back.”

  “But we’re leaving them without any tools—weapons—food—”

  “Plenty to eat here. Kenny said so himself. As for weapons, tools—well, they’ll figure all that out for themselves. Maybe lose a few people, but the rest’ll be okay.”

  Dexter wasn’t so sure. “There are only a hundred of them. They’ve barely scratched the surface of this planet. One bad break and they could all be wiped out.”

  “No matter. We’ll send out another group.”

  “But why not warn them? Prepare them?”

  “You still don’t get it, Dexter. This group, as far as they’re concerned, are the first. The originals. The autochthons. They are The People. They figure out everything for themselves, or they die. They’re not an extension of us. In a few generations, they’ll forget we even existed. Except perhaps for a few unprovable legends. As far as they are concerned, they are a new race. No one came before them. They are the originals.”

  “They’ll never know we created them?”

  The Captain shook his head. “They can conjecture, but they’ll never really know.”

  Dexter watched through the port as the ship lifted. He couldn’t see any of The People. They were off in the forest somewhere. And they’d never know.

  Then he had a thought.

  “Captain, who created us?”

  “There are various theories. You know what our leading thinkers say.

  They talk about ‘The most persuasive conjecture . . .’ But that’s all it is. Conjecture.”

  “Doesn’t anyone know, really?”

  The Captain looked ahead into darkening space. “If they do, they aren’t telling us, Dexter. And we aren’t telling them.”

  2000

  THE NEW HORLA

  Bob Sheckley has been using fiction to give us unusual (that is to say, skewed) perspectives on reality for nearly fifty years now. His last such gift was “Kenny” in our October issue. His new one revisits Guyde Maupassant’s “The Horla” from a contemporary point of view.

  “HOW DEEP IT IS, THIS MYSTERY of the Invisible. We cannot plump its depths with our wretched senses, with our eyes, which are incapable of perceiving things that are too small, things that are too big, things too far away, the inhabitants of a star—or the inhabitants of a drop of water . . . And our ears deceive us, because they convey to us vibrations in the air in the form of sounds—they are like fairies performing this miracle of changing movement into sound, and through this transformation they give birth to music, turning into melody the silent rhythms of nature . . . And what of our sense of smell, inferior to that possessed by a dog . . . and our sense of taste, which can scarcely detect the age of a wine!

  “Ah! If only we had other sense-organs to work other miracles for us, who can tell how many other things we should discover in the world around us?”

  —“Le Horla,” Guy de Maupassant.

  The train ride from Concord up into the White Mountains was spectacular. The snows were deep, with the tops of the trees poking through like stubble on a dead man’s cheek. We topped the range and came at last into Mountain Station. Here I got off, with my skis, my backpack, and my ski boots.

  There was no one around to greet me. The little station house was empty, though not locked. I went inside and got on my ski boots, put my shoes into my backpack, came out and strapped on my skis. Although I had told Edwin I’d ski down to his chalet without any difficulty, now that I was actually there the idea seemed less than brilliant. It was late in the day, after four P.M., and the sun was already lost in the white sky. We’d been held up almost an hour at Manchester, and hadn’t made up the time across New England. I took the sketch map from an inner pocket, smoothed it out, oriented myself, went over the way I’d go once again.

  It had all seemed perfectly straightforward when I’d arranged with Edwin to use his family’s ski chalet for a few days. We had been ro
ommates at Dartmouth and had remained friends afterward. He had often offered me the use of the chalet. This holiday I took him up on it.

  Originally, I had meant to drive there, and Edwin had carefully laid out the route. But as it turned out, my car was back in the shop with miscellaneous electrical problems. With Edwin’s help, I had worked out a different route. I would take the train to Mountain Station, New Hampshire, and then ski down to the lodge.

  Edwin had been more than a little dubious. “Are you quite sure? I don’t really recommend it.”

  “It’s perfectly straightforward on the map,” I told him. The chalet was only a thousand or so feet below Mountain Station, which stood at the top of Standish Pass in the White Mountains. It was a short run and there were no obstructions.

  “You’ve made the run yourself, so you told me.”

  “Well, yes,” Edwin said, “I have, but I’m acquainted with the area. For a first time . . .”

  “From what you’ve described, there’s nothing to it. Out of the station I face just west of north, with the spire of Stanley Church in sight just to my left, and it’s a straight run down to the dogleg. Then I go left around the construction site and the chalet—white with green trim—is in sight.”

  “It’s just never a good idea, skiing in the mountains alone,” Edwin said.

  “I’ll take it easy,” I assured him. “I’ll snowplow all the way down.” If only I had taken my own light-hearted promise seriously!

  Orienting myself wasn’t difficult. Just to the left of the small station house was a storage shed, painted black. Edwin had told me to use this as my takeoff point. I stood there in front of it for a moment, poised on my skis, checking out the slope. It was steep, but not too steep, a perfect white blanket untouched by any other skiers’ marks. There was a dark clump of trees to the right, about a hundred yards down, and beyond that, just out of sight from here, was the construction site I needed to ski around. I checked my bindings, adjusted my pack, pulled down my goggles, and took off.

  It was a beautiful day for a run. The sky was white, and there was an accumulation of dark clouds to the east, a promise of weather making up over toward the Atlantic Coast. My skis slid smoothly on the surface, not going too rapidly over the somewhat wet snow, then picking up speed as the incline steepened. I leaned into it, enjoying that exhilaration that the first run of the season brings. It was an easy slope and I was in perfect balance going down it.

  After a few minutes I caught sight of the obstruction. It was a mound of building materials, covered in last night’s fresh snow, with here and there a gleam of green canvas where the wind had blown away the cover. I was over too far to my right, and now I bent into a sharp turn that would take me below the building materials. The thrill of leaning into that first turn of the season caused me to cut it a little fine. I straightened out to give the mounded materials a sufficient berth, then crouched to build up speed. Perhaps I wasn’t paying sufficient attention to the terrain. But there was really nothing to see, since the fresh snow covered everything.

  I knew I was in trouble when my skis started chattering on a series of long, slick, rounded objects just beneath the snow. They were like a corduroy road surface, only much higher.

  Later I learned that I had crossed a pile of plastic pipes that had been unloaded only two or three days ago, and had been concealed by last night’s snow. They had been set down at the lower edge of the construction, and I was going right over them.

  All would still have been well if I hadn’t been tucked into my turn. I went across those pipes at an angle. All I knew at the time was that I was crossing a hard, bumpy, unstable surface and my skis were sliding out from under me. The pipes were concealed under an inch or so of fresh snow, and they were frosty and slick. But they hadn’t been on the ground long enough to freeze to the ground, so they slid out from under me and I fell hard, my skis kicking into the air, and I was tumbling over them until at last I came to rest beyond the pipes, in soft snow.

  It took me a while to pull myself together. It’s important not to underestimate the shock of a sudden unexpected fall. For a while I felt as though the mountain had exploded under me. I was numb from head to toe, and it was not unpleasant. But I knew, somewhere in the back of my mind, that when this numbness wore off, I was likely to find myself in a sorry state. It had really been quite a fall.

  While I was still numb and feeling no pain, I determined to get to the chalet. It was only a few hundred yards away, down the slope. I tried to get to my feet, and found that my right leg would not support me. I got halfway up and fell. Checking, I found that my right foot was twisted at an odd angle. I also noted various rips in my twill ski pants, and a slow welling of blood from what I took to be a wound in my shoulder, just above the shoulder blade, where the backpack hadn’t protected me.

  I was not at all cold. Nor was I in much pain. But I knew I was not in a good way, and that I needed to get to shelter as soon as possible. Above all, I had to get my ski boots off before the swelling started.

  My first thought was to carry my skis and poles with me and limp down the slope to the chalet, whose roof I could make out at the edge of the fall line. This proved impossible. I was unable to stand up. Nor did I have my skis, as I had first imagined. They were somewhere back up on the slope. All I had was one pole, and my knapsack was still strapped to my back.

  I hobbled and crawled downhill toward the chalet, through snow that became increasingly deep as I descended. I felt all right when I began, but soon began to experience a deep fatigue. The day had grown very dark, and heavy clouds were boiling up over Mount Adams. My left ankle was beginning to ache abominably. And I noticed that I was leaving quite a trail of blood behind me. I couldn’t tell where on my person it came from—I was beginning to hurt in half a dozen places—and this seemed no time to stop and examine myself. I didn’t even have a first aid kit in my knapsack.

  The forerunners of the storm arrived just as I got to the chalet, on my feet now, or rather, on one foot, with the other raised, supporting myself by my remaining ski pole. Overhead were long dark streaky clouds, what the old Scandinavians called the storm’s maidens—those long, thin wild clouds that come out in advance of the main body of wind, snow, and rain. The wind was whipping around my head when I got to the chalet’s front door and searched for the key under the log pile to the left. Edwin had been as good as his word. The key was right where he’d said it would be, under a bit of seasoned oak, and I got the door open and dragged myself inside.

  It was a modern small ski chalet, bright birch and cedar. An A-frame with two guest rooms, a good-sized living room, bathroom and kitchen in the rear. I got my boots off and turned the power switch near the door. Even though it gave a satisfying click, it brought no power. Edwin had promised to have the electricity turned on by the time I got there, but apparently he had forgotten, or hadn’t succeeded.

  I was in better luck with the propane. The chalet ran on its own tank. I made sure the pilot was on, found the valve and turned it, and soon had the living room heaters going nicely. Then and only then did I feel secure enough to look to myself.

  There was no telephone. I had known that beforehand. I wanted to get out of my ski clothes: My elasticized twill pants didn’t want to stretch over my swollen ankle, and I decided not to press the issue. I could keep my pants on for a while. My clothing was torn up enough to make it no difficulty to find where I had been abraded.

  The cuts and scrapes on my sides and legs were painful but not serious, not even especially disabling. It was my ankle that was the problem, that and a puncture wound beneath my right shoulder blade, made by a tree branch, perhaps. Touching it gently, I found it was as big as the small end of a pool cue, and it was oozing blood. Not in a great stream, but steadily.

  For a long time I just lay on the living room carpet in the growing gleam of the early evening. I may have dozed for a little while. It was almost dark when I determined to pull myself together.

  Negotiating
the living room made it seem a very big place indeed. I was quite weak. I had the feeling that I had injured myself worse than I’d first thought. That deep gouge in my back wouldn’t stop bleeding. Finally I gave all my attention to trying to do something about it.

  I made a pad with a small pillow and bound it in place on my back with a sheet I found in one of the drawers under the picture window. That slowed the blood loss some, but it didn’t stop it. Blood continued to leak out of me and whenever I moved the pillow slipped off. I began to wonder how many pints of blood I could lose without passing out or going into shock. No matter what I did, the pillow wouldn’t stay in place. I couldn’t seem to get enough pressure on it, and finally discarded it.

  The heaters soon took the chill off the chalet. I found two candles in the kitchen and brought them out to the living room. I put them in an ashtray and lighted them. By this small dancing light, I saw the shadows of evening gathering swiftly as the storm struck. There commenced a rattle of windows like the devil’s own tattoo. That’s the way my thoughts were trending. I was wounded and depressed and wallowing in my own feeling of stupidity, my embarrassment over this stupid accident with the pipes. It made me feel incompetent. And I was worried about the wound in my back. The flow of blood was slow, but it was steady. How much could I lose before I was in trouble?

  The wind began gusting up and driving tree branches against the windows. Those trees should have been cut back. I was sure it was only a matter of time before a branch broke through. There seemed nothing I could do about it. There were wooden shutters, but I’d have to go outside to get at them, and I doubted my present ability to do that. I just lay there on the floor beside the couch, and felt the hollowness in my stomach, because I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast early that morning in Hanfield Station. I lay there and waited to see if the window would hold.