The Robot Who Looked Like Me

by Robert Sheckley

  The man picked up the automatic and pointed it at Gleister.

  “Hey, wait a minute, don’t fool around with that thing,” Gleister said. Already he was beginning to feel a faint twist of sickness in his stomach. He was afraid that he knew all too well what was happening.

  “Hand over that white box of yours,” the man said. “Handle it real slow and don’t try to push any buttons.”

  “Who are you?” Gleister asked.

  “I’m known by various names in various regions of the Earth,” the man said. “But I’m best known as Mingus.”

  “You’re the Emperor!” Gleister said.

  “At your service,” the bearded man said. “Now, very slowly, give me the box.”

  Gleister’s forefinger rested on the operation button. He could feel the Emperor’s eyes on his hand, daring him to press the button. Gleister remembered that there was a lag between turning the machine on and physically leaving a place. He decided that he had no chance at all. Slowly he began to extend the white box.

  “That’s it, slow and easy,” the Emperor said.

  Then Gleister noticed a shimmering in the air some ten feet behind the Emperor. Something was about to happen, and, considering the circumstances, it could only help Gleister.

  “Look,” he said, “can’t we talk this over? Maybe we could reach a compromise.”

  “What are you up to?” Mingus’s forefinger tightened on the trigger. An involuntary movement of Gleister’s eyes warned him that something was happening. He whirled just as another Gleister materialized behind him.

  The Emperor fired at the new arrival at pointblank range, but with no apparent effect. Charlie Gleister, noticing the faint red haze around the newcomer, had realized in an instant that it was not an actual corporeal person; obviously, to the trained eye, it was a solidified pseudo-doppler reflection caused by Gleister’s passage through time. As he watched, the image disappeared.

  The Emperor turned toward him again; but Gleister had already punched the OPERATE button of his time machine.

  Gleister Main Line Sequence Time Track One Sub One Low Probability Closed Loop 12:

  Nothing goes right when you’re in a hurry. Charlie Gleister hit the OPERATE button so hard that he broke the interlock on the OVERRIDE assembly. Unrationalized power surged crazily through the time machine, turning the primary circuits into roulette accelerometers, and causing an instant multiplication of geometric accumulators. Energy flooded the available networks of n-dimensional pasts/ presents/futures, then searched for new outlets and found them by jumping an entire magnitude—to the universe of low-probability actualities.

  When Gleister came to himself, he was standing on a flat, featureless plain. The glaring white sky above pulsated with bulges of darkness. He could hear a low, melancholy crooning. It seemed to come from a piece of white limestone rock near his right foot.

  “Is that you singing?” Gleister asked.

  “Yeah, baby, it’s me,” the limestone rock answered in a deep mournful voice. “I been singing the blues ever since the world began.”

  “How long has that been?” Gleister asked.

  “About three hundred years, close as I can figure it. You got any idea what or where or why this place is?”

  “I can make an educated guess,” Gleister said. “It seems reasonable to hypothesize that we are in a low-probability universe. The theoretical existence of such a place is quite certain. High and low probability are terms of statistical intuition relative to our experience, of course. Do you follow me so far?”

  “Well, baby, not too closely,” said the limestone rock. “When you said an educated guess, you really meant educated. Could you maybe put it into English for me?”

  “Well...in my own particular case there was like one hell of an explosion and I was blown clean out of the world into this place.”

  “Hey, that’s just what happened to me,” said the limestone rock. “How I came to be playing tenor sax in the Wigwam Club in downtown Hiroshima on that fateful day in 1945 is a story which I won’t go into right now. You got any idea how we get out of here?”

  “I think we must simply wait until it happens,” Gleister said. “In normal high-probability terms, there’s not much chance of that happening. But if this is a universe where low-probability is the law, then all odds are reversed and our chances for getting out of here are very good indeed.”

  “Ask a man a serious question and he jives me,” the limestone rock said.

  “No, I meant what I said quite seriously.”

  “In that case, baby, and excuse my saying it, you are a real weirdo.”

  “At least I’m not a limestone rock,” Gleister said, then added hastily, “not that I consider you in any way inferior because of your igneous appearance.”

  “Sure, baby, sure,” the limestone rock said, with sarcasm so thick that you could cut it with a knife and spread it on a piece of Tibetan barley bread that had just appeared on the low oaken bench that supported the various instruments that Gleister needed to make a reasonable assessment of the validity of his previous statements.

  In a universe of non-sequiturs—which is what low-probability is all about—it is difficult to find continuities, tough to keep a grip on sequences, hard to hang on to certainties. Historically, the low-probability levels have been considered paradise. They are the vacation spots of the hashishin, the mystagogue, the doper. They are usually fun places, which is why most people can’t get into them.

  There are some low-probability worlds in which nothing much happens and the whole thing is as boring as being kept after school. But usually, a good time is enjoyed by all.

  Gleister’s world was a pretty good place. There were always a lot of girls around, asking, “Hey, man, is this Katmandu?” A big rock candy mountain appeared, and a pibil tree, and the congestion cleared up around the synapses affording a view all the way to the lemon factory.

  As the limestone rock remarked, “Maybe it ain’t reality, but it’ll just have to do until the real thing comes along.”

  So it was with a definite sense of regret that Gleister saw one morning, emblazoned across the sky, the words: “Th-th-th-th that’s all, folks!” Quickly he said goodbye to the limestone rock, now revealed as an anti-Gleisterian particle, and to the girls, who were in actuality anima-Gleisterian wave forms. Then he held his breath, quite unnecessarily, for the brief transition that followed.

  Gleister Main Line Sequence plus Multiple Time Track Conjunctions:

  Gleister surfaced in a large, dusty, crowded auditorium located (as he learned later) in the Crich-Kridarin foothills near the ruins of Norfolk. It was some 234 years before the accession of the Emperor Mingus.

  There were perhaps a hundred men in the auditorium. Most of them looked like Gleister. This was only reasonable, since all of them were Gleister.

  Charlie Gleister learned that these people were trying to hold a meeting, but couldn’t figure out how to do it. Obviously, they needed someone to act as chairman: but how can you have a chairman without first having an organization to elect him with? And how can you have an organization without a chairman to be elected by it? It was a perplexing problem, especially for the Gleister line, which had never been strong on social studies.

  Everyone turned to Charlie Gleister, who, as the newest arrival, might have some ideas on the subject.

  “Well,” Charlie said, “I read once that among the Flathead Indians, the tallest brave was usually chosen to lead the war party or the hunting party or whatever there was to do. Or maybe it was among the Shoshones.”

  All the Gleisters nodded in vigorous agreement. They had all known that, of course; they just hadn’t thought about it.

  In no time at all the tallest Gleister was found, elected Chairman ad hoc and pro tem and sent up to the stage.

  “I hereby call this meeting to order,” the tallest Gleister said. “Look, before we get to anything else, it seems to me that we simply cannot all keep on calling ourselves ‘Charlie Gle
ister.’ It’s simply too confusing. For purposes of communication between us, I suggest we all take on different first names. What do you think about that?”

  There was a loud murmur of agreement.

  “May I suggest that we each try to pick an unusual name,” the Chairman said, “since fifty Toms or Georges wouldn’t be much of an improvement over a hundred Charlies. I will start the ball rolling by calling myself Egon. I declare a fifteen-minute recess while the rest of you christen yourselves.”

  After a moment’s thought, Charlie Gleister (the one whose time-track we’ve been following) named himself Hieronymous. He shook hands with Michelangelo Gleister on his right and Chang Gleister on his left. Then the Chairman called the meeting to order.

  “Members of the Gleister Coequality Line of Potentialities,” Egon said, “I bid you welcome. Some of you have searched for and found this place, others stumbled across it apparently by accident, others found themselves here while going somewhere else. This definitely appears to be a Gleister collection-point, for reasons that escape me at the moment. However, let that be. I think I am expressing the common sentiment when I name this the Time-Space Center for Resistance to the Rule of the Emperor Mingus. The Emperor probably knows about this place and what we’re up to. We are the only serious threats to his reign. Many of us have had inexplicable near-fatal accidents at some point before inventing the time machine. Some of those were surely caused by Mingus. We may expect other attempts on our lives.

  “That’s about all I have to say. I would welcome remarks from the floor.”

  A man stood up and identified himself as Chalmers Gleister. “Has anyone learned the identity of this Mingus?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” Egon Gleister said. “He has concealed his origins most effectively. There is an official biography which states that the Emperor was born in Clearwater, Florida, the only child of Anton and Myra Waldheim.”

  “Has anyone checked this?” Chalmers asked.

  A man stood up. “Marcos Gleister. I looked into it. I can tell you that Clearwater was demolished some thirty years before Mingus’s rule, when the Sage Creek reactor went up.”

  “Did you attempt to go to Clearwater before its destruction?”

  “I tried,” Marcos said, “but I didn’t learn anything positive. The Waldheim family might not have been living there at that time, or evidence may have been concealed or Mingus might have picked Clearwater as a convenient cover.”

  Chalmers asked, “Has anyone gone to the Hall of Records in Washington, or the Library of Congress, or whatever their equivalents are now? If the Waldheim records have been removed, it will be important negative evidence as to Mingus’s identity.”

  “It hasn’t been done yet,” said Chairman Egon Gleister, after waiting for a response from the audience. “Perhaps you would care to take on the assignment”

  “I wouldn’t know how to begin,” Chalmers said.

  “None of us would. Our collective talents lie in other directions. But the job ought to be done.”

  “Very well, I’ll try,” Chalmers said sulkily, and sat down.

  There was a great deal of general discussion after that. The Gleisters were thoroughly confused about time travel, its possibilities, ramifications, limits and consequences. Nor could they reconcile the various types and aspects of temporality which they had encountered—subjective time, objective time, past time, future time, multiple time rates, and the paradoxical crossing and recrossing of time tracks. What was the past, what was the future? Were “past,” “present,” and “future” no more than fictions—false separations imposed upon a unified field? And if that were so, how could an individual time traveler orient himself? The situation seemed comparable to a mad chess game in which either opponent could correct any previous moves at any time, in a game which had perhaps been concluded before it had begun.

  Hieronymous Gleister—still our hero despite certain technical difficulties in differentiation and identification—had not paid much attention to the discussion. He was watching the audience, for the Gleisters seemed nearly as remarkable to him as time travel itself.

  There were Gleisters of every apparent age between twenty and sixty years. All possessed the same somatotype. Beyond this, their differences were more striking than their similarities.

  Each Gleister had experienced similar stresses and influences, but at different subjective moments. Events had come upon each man at a particular and unique moment in psychotime, polarizing and modifying the whirling Lullian wheels of his internal world system, producing in each man new and unexpected emotional configurations, modifying and delineating him, and turning him into an individual unlike all the other Gleisters.

  To judge by appearances, there were frightened Gleisters and courageous Gleisters, high-strung ones and phlegmatic ones, sociable and solitary ones, clever and confused ones.

  As he was thinking about these things, a man stood up and introduced himself as Mordecai Gleister. He asked permission to address the audience on certain urgent matters. Egon invited him to the stage.

  “I will make my remarks brief,” Mordecai said. “It seems to me that the matter of the Emperor has not been impartially examined. We have blindly assumed that the man and his goals are evil. Yet is this so evident? Consider—”

  Hieronymous Gleister stared at him. He had seen this confident, bearded man in his fifties before. But where?

  Then it came to him.

  Hieronymous Gleister stood up and ran to the stage. “Grab that man!” he shouted. “He’s Mingus! He’s the Emperor!”

  Egon hesitated for a moment, then made his decision. He and Hieronymous moved toward Mordecai Gleister. Several other Gleisters were on their feet and climbing on to the stage. Then everyone stopped.

  Mordecai Gleister had taken a blue-steel automatic out of his pocket and was aiming it at Egon.

  “Please resume your seats,” Mordecai said. “All except Chairman Egon and this young man, whose lives depend upon your good behavior. I have a statement to make.”

  Everyone sat down except for Egon and Hieronymous. Mordecai said, “This weapon I am holding is not a projectile weapon, though it is housed in the case of a Colt .45 automatic. It is an invention of mine—or ours—which operates on a laser-diffusion principle. At fifteen feet its first effect is paralysis; death follows seconds later if the beam is not turned off. Whatever you decide to do now, you should take this weapon into your calculations.”

  Mordecai paused to let his words take effect. Then smiling, he said, “My worthy brothers and loyal subjects, the Emperor Mingus greets you.”

  Main Lines Junction No. 2:

  “My reading of the situation,” Mingus said, “is that I invented a time machine and went to a point in the distant future. I underwent various experiences there which shaped my subsequent decisions. The world I came to was a sad, brutish place, depleted of its physical and mental resources, divided into tiny, squabbling kingdoms. I took over. The time machine gave me matchless power, of course. But my success was due to more than that: the times were right for organization, and I was the right man for the job.

  “Those of you who have seen a little of my empire don’t think much of it. But you judge too quickly. You forget the materials I had to work with. I assure you that I aim toward peace and prosperity for everyone; yes, and political freedom as well, as soon as men have the intelligence and self-control to use it.

  “You think that my empire looks like a twentieth-century Latin American or African dictatorship. Granted. But when I took over, this world was in chaos. There was no peace, and strength was the only recognizable law. I have given people a measure of security and continuity from which to rebuild a civilization.

  “All of us here are products of American democracy. ‘Empire’ and ‘Emperor’ are dirty words to us. But I earnestly request that you not judge my work by political reflex. What would you have had me do? Extend the vote to the serfs and slaves and abolish the robber-barons? Even with the time
machine I wouldn’t have lasted a week.

  “Should I have lectured them on all men being equal? Those people knew that all men were not equal, and that justice was the exclusive prerogative of the ruling class. They viewed all egalitarian ideas as devilish perversions, to be resisted to the death.

  “Democracy is not natural law. Men must be educated to it. Democracy is a difficult and advanced concept for men whose instinct is to band together in wolf packs under a single leader. Effective democracy requires the exercise of responsibility and fairness to others. For the people of the future Earth, this was an outlandish concept; others were there only to be used.

  “Given this state of affairs, what would any of you have done? Would you have witnessed the misery and squalor of the world and turned away from it, returning to your own happier times? Or would you have stayed and put together a token democracy, to be overwhelmed as soon as you were no longer in physical control? Or would you have done as I did—formed the only political organization that the people could understand, and then tried to educate them in the difficult practices of freedom and responsibility?

  “I did what I thought was best for the people, not for myself. I took over. But then you Gleisters—my alter egos, my brothers—kept coming up from the past, bent upon assassinating me. I tried to kidnap some of you and re-educate you. But there were too many Gleisters, the dynamics of the situation were against me.

  “I learned about your organization. I came back here and infiltrated it. I have taken it over now.

  “I have explained the situation as fairly as I can. I most sincerely beg you to cooperate with me, assist me, help me to change a regressed and savage Earth into the sort of place we have all dreamed of.”

  There was a long silence. At last Chairman Egon Gleister said, “I believe there may be considerable merit in what you have explained to us.”

  Hieronymous asked, “Have you forgotten already what you saw in his future? All of the suspicion and misery, and all those police!” He turned to Mingus. “Why don’t you just leave them alone? I really don’t care what your motives are. Hasn’t Earth had enough emperors, dictators, generalissimos, war lords, Great Khans, Shahinshahs, Caesars, whatever you want to call them? Some of them had admirable motives—but the only people they really helped were themselves.”