Notions: Unlimited

by Robert Sheckley

  This time, Hanley needed no command from the tiny radio to take her into his arms. He was learning the form and content of the romantic adventure, and the proper manner of conducting a spontaneous yet fated affair.

  They departed at once for her apartment. And as they walked, Hanley noticed a large jewel glittering in her black hair.

  It wasn’t until much later that he realized it was a tiny, artfully disguised transistor radio.

  Next evening, Hanley was out again, walking the streets and trying to quiet a small voice of dissatisfaction within him. It had been a perfect night, he reminded himself, a night of tender shadows, soft hair brushing his eyes, and tears warm upon his shoulder. And yet....

  The sad fact remained that this girl hadn’t been his type, any more than the first girl had been. You simply can’t throw strangers together at random and expect the fiery, quick romance to turn into love. Love has its own rules and enforces them rigidly.

  So Hanley walked, and the conviction grew within him that tonight he was going to find love. For tonight the horned moon hung low over the city and a southern breeze carried the mingled scent of spice and nostalgia.

  Aimlessly he wandered, for his transistor radio was silent. No command brought him to the little park at the river’s edge and no secret voice urged him to approach the solitary girl standing there.

  He stood near her and contemplated the scene. To his left was a great bridge, its girders faint and spidery in the darkness. The river’s oily black water slid past, ceaselessly twisting and turning. A tug hooted and another replied, wailing like ghosts lost in the night.

  His radio gave him no hint. So Hanley said, “Nice night.”

  “Maybe,” said the girl, not turning. “Maybe not.”

  “The beauty is there,” Hanley said, “if you care to see it.”

  “What a strange thing to say...”

  “Is it?” Hanley asked, taking a step toward her. “Is it really strange? Is it strange that I’m here? And that you are here?”

  “Perhaps not,” the girl said, turning at last and looking into Hanley’s face.

  She was young and lovely. Her bronze hair glinted with moonlight and her features were transfigured by the mood, the atmosphere, and the soft, flattering light.

  Her lips parted in wonder.

  And then Hanley knew.

  This adventure was truly fated and spontaneous! The radio had not guided him to this place, had not whispered cues and responses for him to murmur. And looking at the girl, Hanley could see no tiny transistor radio on her blouse or in her hair.

  He had met his love, without assistance from the New York Romance Service! At last, his dark and fitful visions were coming true.

  He held out his arms. With the faintest sigh, she came into them. They kissed, while the lights of the city flashed and mingled with the stars overhead, and the crescent moon dipped in the sky, and foghorns hooted mournful messages across the oily black river.

  Breathlessly, the girl stepped back. “Do you like me?” she asked.

  “Like you!” exclaimed Hanley. “Let me tell you—”

  “I’m so glad,” said the girl, “because I am your Free Introductory Romance, given as a sample by Greater Romance Industries, with home offices in Newark, New Jersey. Only our firm offers romances which are truly spontaneous and fated. Due to our technological researches, we are able to dispense with such clumsy apparatus as transistor radios, which lent an air of rigidity and control where no control should be apparent. We are happy to have been able to please you with this sample romance.

  “But remember—this is only a sample, a taste, of what Greater Romance Industries, with branch offices all over the world, can offer you. In this brochure, sir, several plans are outlined. You might be interested in the Romance in Many Lands package, or, if you are of an enterprising imagination, perhaps the piquant Romance through the Ages package is for you. Then there is the regular City Plan and—”

  She slipped a brightly illustrated pamphlet into Hanley’s hand. Hanley stared at it, then at her. His fingers opened and the brochure fluttered to the ground.

  “Sir, I trust we haven’t offended you!” the girl cried. “These businesslike aspects of romance are necessary, but quickly over. Then everything is purely spontaneous and fateful. You receive your bill each month in a plain, unmarked envelope and—”

  But Hanley had turned from her and was running down the street. As he ran, he plucked the tiny transistor radio from his lapel and hurled it into a gutter.

  Further attempts at salesmanship were wasted on Hanley. He telephoned an aunt of his, who immediately and with twittering excitement arranged a date for him with a daughter of one of her oldest friends. They met in his aunt’s overdecorated parlor and talked in halting sentences for three hours, about the weather, college, business, politics, and friends they might have in common. And Hanley’s beaming aunt hurried in and out of the brightly lighted room, serving coffee and homemade cake.

  Something about this stiff, formal, anachronistic setup must have been peculiarly right for the two young people. They progressed to regular dates and were married after a courtship of three months.

  It is interesting to note that Hanley was among the last to find a wife in the old, unsure, quaint, haphazard, unindustrialized fashion. For the Service Companies saw at once the commercial potentialities of Hanley’s Mode, graphed the effects of embarrassment upon the psyche, and even assessed the role of the Aunt in American Courtship.

  And now one of the Companies’ regular and valued services is to provide bonded aunts for young men to call up, to provide these aunts with shy and embarrassed young girls, and to produce a proper milieu for all this in the form of a bright, overdecorated parlor, an uncomfortable couch, and an eager old lady bustling back and forth at meticulously unexpected intervals with coffee and homemade cake.

  The suspense, they say, becomes almost overpowering.

  THE LEECH

  The leech was waiting for food. For millennia it had been drifting across the vast emptiness of space. Without consciousness, it had spent the countless centuries in the void between the stars. It was unaware when it finally reached a sun. Life-giving radiation flared around the hard, dry spore. Gravitation tugged at it.

  A planet claimed it, with other stellar debris, and the leech fell, still dead-seeming with its tough spore case.

  One speck of dust among many, the winds blew it around the Earth, played with it, and let it fall.

  On the ground, it began to stir. Nourishment soaked in, permeating the spore case. It grew—and fed.

  Frank Conners came up on the porch and coughed twice. “Say, pardon me, Professor,” he said.

  The long, pale man didn’t stir from the sagging couch. His horn-rimmed glasses were perched on his forehead, and he was snoring very gently.

  “I’m awfully sorry to disturb you,” Conners said, pushing back his battered felt hat. “I know it’s your restin’ week and all, but there’s something damned funny in the ditch.”

  The pale man’s left eyebrow twitched, but he showed no other sign of having heard.

  Frank Conners coughed again, holding his spade in one purple-veined hand. “Didja hear me, Professor?”

  “Of course I heard you,” Micheals said in a muffled voice, his eyes still closed. “You found a pixie.”

  “A what?” Conners asked, squinting at Micheals.

  “A little man in a green suit. Feed him milk, Conners.”

  “No, sir. I think it’s a rock.”

  Micheals opened one eye and focused it in Conners’ general direction.

  “I’m awfully sorry about it,” Conners said. Professor Micheals’ resting week was a ten-year-old custom, and his only eccentricity. All winter Micheals taught anthropology, worked on half a dozen committees, dabbled in physics and chemistry, and still found time to write a book a year. When summer came, he was tired.

  Arriving at his worked-out New York State farm, it was his invariable rule to do
absolutely nothing for a week. He hired Frank Conners to cook for that week and generally make himself useful, while Professor Micheals slept.

  During the second week, Micheals would wander around, look at the trees and fish. By the third week he would be getting a tan, reading, repairing the sheds, and climbing mountains. At the end of four weeks, he could hardly wait to get back to the city.

  But the resting week was sacred.

  “I really wouldn’t bother you for anything small,” Conners said apologetically. “But that damned rock melted two inches off my spade.”

  Micheals opened both eyes and sat up. Conners held out the spade. The rounded end was sheared cleanly off. Micheals swung himself off the couch and slipped his feet into battered moccasins.

  “Let’s see this wonder,” he said.

  The object was lying in the ditch at the end of the front lawn, three feet from the main road. It was round, about the size of a truck tire, and solid throughout. It was about an inch thick, as far as he could tell, grayish black and intricately veined.

  “Don’t touch it,” Conners warned.

  “I’m not going to. Let me have your spade.” Micheals took the spade and prodded the object experimentally. It was completely unyielding. He held the spade to the surface for a moment, then withdrew it. Another inch was gone.

  Micheals frowned, and pushed his glasses tighter against his nose. He held the spade against the rock with one hand, the other held close to the surface. More of the spade disappeared.

  “Doesn’t seem to be generating heat,” he said to Conners. “Did you notice any the first time?”

  Conners shook his head.

  Micheals picked up a clod of dirt and tossed it on the object. The dirt dissolved quickly, leaving no trace on the gray-black surface. A large stone followed the dirt, and disappeared in the same way.

  “Isn’t that just about the damnedest thing you ever saw, Professor?” Conners asked.

  “Yes,” Micheals agreed, standing up again. “It just about is.”

  He hefted the spade and brought it down smartly on the object. When it hit, he almost dropped the spade. He had been gripping the handle rigidly, braced for a recoil. But the spade struck that unyielding surface and stayed. There was no perceptible give, but absolutely no recoil.

  “Whatcha think it is?” Conners asked.

  “It’s no stone,” Micheals said. He stepped back. “A leech drinks blood. This thing seems to be drinking dirt. And spades.” He struck it a few more times, experimentally. The two men looked at each other. On the road, half a dozen Army trucks rolled past.

  “I’m going to phone the college and ask a physics man about it,” Micheals said. “Or a biologist. I’d like to get rid of that thing before it spoils my lawn.”

  They walked back to the house.

  Everything fed the leech. The wind added its modicum of kinetic energy, ruffling across the gray-black surface. Rain fell, and the force of each individual drop added to its store. The water was sucked in by the all-absorbing surface.

  The sunlight above it was absorbed, and converted into mass for its body. Beneath it, the soil was consumed, dirt, stones, and branches broken down by the leech’s complex cells and changed into energy. Energy was converted back into mass, and the leech grew.

  Slowly, the first flickers of consciousness began to return. Its first realization was of the impossible smallness of its body.

  It grew.

  When Micheals looked the next day, the leech was eight feet across, sticking out into the road and up the side of the lawn. The following day it was almost eighteen feet in diameter, shaped to fit the contour of the ditch, and covering most of the road. That day the sheriff drove up in his model A, followed by half the town.

  “Is that your leech thing, Professor Micheals?” Sheriff Flynn asked.

  “That’s it,” Micheals said. He had spent the past days looking unsuccessfully for an acid that would dissolve the leech.

  “We gotta get it out of the road,” Flynn said, walking truculently up to the leech. “Something like this, you can’t let it block the road, Professor. The Army’s gotta use this road.”

  “I’m terribly sorry,” Micheals said with a straight face. “Go right ahead, Sheriff. But be careful. It’s hot.” The leech wasn’t hot, but it seemed the simplest explanation under the circumstances.

  Micheals watched with interest as the sheriff tried to shove a crowbar under it. He smiled to himself when it was removed with half a foot of its length gone.

  The sheriff wasn’t so easily discouraged. He had come prepared for a stubborn piece of rock. He went to the rumble seat of his car and took out a blowtorch and a sledgehammer, ignited the torch and focused it on one edge of the leech.

  After five minutes, there was no change. The gray didn’t turn red or even seem to heat up. Sheriff Flynn continued to bake it for fifteen minutes, then called to one of his men.

  “Hit that spot with the sledge, Jerry.”

  Jerry picked up the sledgehammer, motioned the sheriff back, and swung it over his head. He let out a howl as the hammer struck unyieldingly. There wasn’t a fraction of recoil.

  In the distance they heard the roar of an Army convoy.

  “Now we’ll get some action,” Flynn said.

  Micheals wasn’t so sure. He walked around the periphery of the leech, asking himself what kind of substance would react that way. The answer was easy—no substance. No known substance.

  The driver in the lead jeep held up his hand, and the long convoy ground to a halt. A hard, efficient-looking officer stepped out of the jeep. From the star on either shoulder, Micheals knew he was a brigadier general.

  “You can’t block this road,” the general said. He was a tall, spare man in suntans, with a sunburned face and cold eyes. “Please clear that thing away.”

  “We can’t move it,” Micheals said. He told the general what had happened in the past few days.

  “It must be moved,” the general said. “This convoy must go through.” He walked closer and looked at the leech. “You say it can’t be jacked up by a crowbar? A torch won’t burn it?”

  “That’s right,” Micheals said, smiling faintly.

  “Driver,” the general said over his shoulder. “Ride over it.”

  Micheals started to protest, but stopped himself. The military mind would have to find out in its own way.

  The driver put his jeep in gear and shot forward, jumping the leech’s four-inch edge. The jeep got to the center of the leech and stopped.

  “I didn’t tell you to stop!” the general bellowed.

  “I didn’t, sir!” the driver protested.

  The jeep had been yanked to a stop and had stalled. The driver started it again, shifted to four-wheel drive, and tried to ram forward. The jeep was fixed immovably, as though set in concrete.

  “Pardon me,” Micheals said. “If you look, you can see that the tires are melting down.”

  The general stared, his hand creeping automatically toward his pistol belt. Then he shouted, “Jump, driver! Don’t touch that gray stuff.”

  White-faced, the driver climbed to the hood of his jeep, looked around him, and jumped clear.

  There was complete silence as everyone watched the jeep. First its tires melted down, and then the rims. The body, resting on the gray surface, melted too.

  The aerial was the last to go.

  The general began to swear softly under his breath. He turned to the driver. “Go back and have some men bring up hand grenades and dynamite.”

  The driver ran back to the convoy.

  “I don’t know what you’ve got here,” the general said. “But it’s not going to stop a U.S. Army convoy.”

  Micheals wasn’t so sure.

  The leech was nearly awake now, and its body was calling for more and more food. It dissolved the soil under it at a furious rate, filling it in with its own body, flowing outward.

  A large object landed on it, and that became food also. Then suddenly—r />
  A burst of energy against its surface, and then another, and another. It consumed them gratefully, converting them into mass. Little metal pellets struck it, and their kinetic energy was absorbed, their mass converted. More explosions took place, helping to fill the starving cells.

  It began to sense things—controlled combustion around it, vibrations of wind, mass movements.

  There was another, greater explosion, a taste of real food! Greedily it ate, growing faster. It waited anxiously for more explosions, while its cells screamed for food.

  But no more came. It continued to feed on the soil and on the Sun’s energy. Night came, noticeable for its lesser energy possibilities, and then more days and nights. Vibrating objects continued to move around it.

  It ate and grew and flowed.

  Micheals stood on a little hill, watching the dissolution of his house. The leech was several hundred yards across now, lapping at his front porch.

  Goodbye, home, Micheals thought, remembering the ten summers he had spent there.

  The porch collapsed into the body of the leech. Bit by bit, the house crumpled.

  The leech looked like a field of lava now, a blasted spot on the green Earth.

  “Pardon me, sir,” a soldier said, coming up behind him. “General O’Donnell would like to see you.”

  “Right,” Micheals said, and took his last look at the house.

  He followed the soldier through the barbed wire that had been set up in a half-mile circle around the leech. A company of soldiers was on guard around it, keeping back the reporters and the hundreds of curious people who had flocked to the scene. Micheals wondered why he was still allowed inside. Probably, he decided, because most of this was taking place on his land.

  The soldier brought him to a tent. Micheals stooped and went in. General O’Donnell, still in suntans, was seated at a small desk. He motioned Micheals to a chair.

  “I’ve been put in charge of getting rid of this leech,” he said to Micheals.

  Micheals nodded, not commenting on the advisability of giving a soldier a scientist’s job.

  “You’re a professor, aren’t you?”