The Robot Who Looked Like Me

by Robert Sheckley

  Pareti looked at himself in the mirror. Again. He seemed to be doing nothing but staring into mirrors today. What stared out at him was himself, bald Pareti. He had the suddenly pleasurable feeling that whatever manner the goo infection in his body was taking to evolve itself, it would probably make him irresistible to women. All at once he could not find it in his heart to think too unkindly of the goo.

  He had happy dreams of what joys and delights were in store for him if the goo, for instance, built him as big as a horse, or if it heightened this already obvious attraction women had for him, or if it—

  He caught himself.

  Uh-uh. No thank you. That was just what had happened to the other five. They had been taken over by the goo. It had done what it had wanted with them. Well, he was going to fight it, battle it from invading him from the top of his bald head to the soles of his uncallused feet.

  He got dressed.

  No indeed not. He wasn’t going to enjoy any more sex like he’d just had. (And it became obvious to him that whatever the goo had done to the attraction-waves of his personality, it had also served to heighten his perceptions in that area. It had been the best he’d ever had.)

  He was going to grab a little fun in East Pyrites, and then buy himself a parcel of land topside, find the right woman, settle down, and buy himself a good position with one of the Companies.

  He went back into the cabin of the lift. The other stewardess was on duty. She didn’t say anything, but the one who had taken Pareti into the toilet did not show herself through the remainder of the flight, and her replacement kept staring at Joe as though she wanted to nibble him with tiny teeth.

  East Pyrites, Nevada, was located eighty-seven miles south of the radioactive ghost town that had been called Las Vegas. It was also three miles below it. It was conservatively rated one of the marvels of the world. Its devotion to vice was obsessive, amounting to an almost puritanical drive to pleasure. In East Pyrites the phrase had been coined:

  PLEASURE IS A STERN DUTY IMPOSED ON US BY THE WORLD.

  In East Pyrites, the fertility cults of antiquity had been revived in deadly seriousness. Pareti found this to be true as he stepped out of the dropshaft on the seventieth underlevel. A mass gangbang was in progress, in the middle of the intersection of Dude Avenue and Gold Dust Boulevard, between fifty male members of the Ishtar Boppers and ten lovely girls who had signed in blood their membership to the Swingers of Cybele.

  He carefully avoided the embroglio. It looked like fun, but he wasn’t going to aid and abet the goo in taking him over.

  He hailed a taxi and stared at the scenery. The Temple of Strangers was served by the virgin daughters of the town’s leading citizens-, executions for impiety were held publicly in the Court of the Sun; Christianity was in disrepute: it wasn’t any fun.

  The old Nevadan custom of gambling was still observed, but had been elaborated, ramified, and extended. In East Pyrites, the saying, “You bet your life,” had real and sinister meanings.

  Many of the practices in East Pyrites were un-Constitutional; others were implausible; and some were downright inconceivable.

  Pareti loved it at once.

  He selected the Round-The-World Combination Hotel, close to the Hall of Perversions, just across the street from the verdant expanse of Torture Garden. In his room, he showered/changed, and tried to decide what to do first. Dinner in the Slaughterhouse, of course; then perhaps a little mild exercise in the cool darkness of the Mudbath Club. After that—

  He suddenly became aware that he was not alone. Someone or something was in the room with him.

  He looked around. There was apparently nothing wrong, except that he could have sworn he had put his jacket on a chair. Now it was on the bed, near him.

  After a moment’s hesitation he reached for the jacket. The garment slid away from him. “Try to catch me!” it said, in a coy, insipid voice. Pareti grabbed for it, but the jacket danced away from him.

  Pareti stared at it. Wires? Magnets? A joke of the management of the Hotel? He knew instinctively that he would find no rational way in which the coat had moved and talked. He gritted his teeth and stalked it.

  The jacket moved away, laughing, dipping like a bat. Pareti cornered it behind the room’s massage unit, and managed to grab a sleeve. I’ve got to have this goddamn thing sent out to be cleaned and burned, he thought insanely.

  It lay limp for a moment. Then it curled around and tickled the palm of his hand.

  Pareti giggled involuntarily, then flung the garment away from him and hurried out of the room.

  Descending by dropshaft to the street, he knew that had been the true onset of the Disease. It had altered the relationship between him and an article of clothing. An inanimate object. The goo was getting bolder.

  What would it do next?

  He was in a soft place called The Soft Place. It was a gambling hall whose innovation was an elaborate game called Sticklt. The game was played by seating oneself before a long counter with a round polyethylene-lined hole in the facing panel, and inserting a certain portion of the anatomy therein. It was strictly a man’s game, of course.

  One placed one’s bets on the flickering light-panels that covered the counter-top. These lights were changed in a random pattern by a computer program, and through the intricacies of the betting and odds, various things happened behind the facing panels, to whoever happened to be inserted in the playing-hole. Some of the things were very nice indeed. Some were not.

  Ten seats down to his right, Pareti heard a man scream, high and shrill, like a woman. An attendant in white came with a sheet and a pneumatic stretcher, and took the bettor away. The man to Pareti’s left was sitting forward, up tight against the panel, moaning with pleasure. His amber WINNER light was flashing.

  A tall, elegant woman with inky hair came up beside Pareti’s chair. “Honey, you shouldn’t be wasting anything as nice as you here. Why don’t we go downshaft to my brig and squam a little...”

  Pareti panicked. He knew the goo was at work again. He withdrew from the panel just as the flickering lights went up LOSER in front of him, and the distinct sound of whirring razor blades came out of the playing-hole. He saw his bets sucked into the board, and he turned without looking at the woman, knowing she would be the most gorgeous creature he had ever seen. And he didn’t need that aggravation on top of everything else.

  He ran out of The Soft Place. The goo, and Ashton’s Disease, were ruining his good time of hell-for-leather. But he was not, repeat, not going to let it get the better of him. Behind him, the woman was crying.

  He was hurrying, but he didn’t know where he was going. Fear encased him like a second self. The thing he ran from was within him, pulsing and growing within him, running with him, perhaps moving out ahead of him. But the empty ritual of flight calmed him, left him better able to think.

  He sat down on a park bench beneath an obscenely shaped purple lamp post. The neon designs were gagging and suggestive. It was quiet here—except for the Muzak—he was in the world-famous Hangover Square. He could hear nothing except the Muzak—and the stifled moans of a tourist expiring in the bushes.

  What could he do? He could resist, he could close out the effects of Ashton’s Disease by concentration...

  A newspaper fluttered across the street and plastered itself around his foot. Pareti tried to kick it away. It clung to his foot, and he heard it whisper, “Please, oh please do not spurn me.”

  “Get away from me! “ Pareti screamed. He was suddenly terrified; he could see the newspaper crinkle as it tried to unsnap his shoe-buttons.

  “I want to kiss your feet,” the newspaper pleaded. “Is that so terrible? Is it wrong? Am I so ugly?”

  “Let go!” Pareti shouted, tugging at the paper, which had formed into a pair of giant white lips.

  A man walked past him, stopped, stared, and said, “Jim, that’s the damnedest bit I ever saw. You do that as a lounge act or just for kicks?”

  “Voyeur!” the newspap
er hissed, and fluttered away down the street.

  “How do you control it?” the man asked. “Special controls in your pocket or something?”

  Pareti shook his head numbly. He was so tired suddenly. He said, “You actually saw it kiss my foot?”

  “I mean to tell you I saw it,” the man said.

  “I hoped that maybe 1 was only hallucinating,” Pareti said. He got up from the bench and walked unsteadily away. He didn’t hurry.

  He was in no rush to meet the next manifestation of Ashton’s Disease.

  In a dim bar he drank six souses and had to be carried to the public Dry-Out on the corner. He cursed the attendants for reviving him. At least when he was bagged, he didn’t have to compete with the world around him for possession of his sanity.

  In the Taj Mahal he played girls, purposely aiming badly when he threw the dirks and the kris at the rapidly spinning bawds on the giant wheel. He clipped the ear off a blonde, planted one ineffectually between the legs of a brunette, and missed entirely with his other shots. It cost him seven hundred dollars. He yelled cheat and was bounced.

  A head-changer approached him on Leopold Way, and offered the unspeakable delights of an illegal head-changing operation by a doctor who was “clean and very decent.” He yelled for a cop, and the little ratfink scuttled away in the crowd.

  A taxi driver suggested the Vale of Tears and though it sounded lousy, he gave the guy the go-ahead. When he entered the place—which was on the eighty-first level, a slum section of foul odors and wan street lights—he recognized it at once for what it was. A necro-joint. The smell of freshly stacked corpses rose up to gag him.

  He only stayed an hour.

  There were nautch joints, and blind pigs, and hallucinogen bars, and a great many hands touching him, touching him.

  Finally, after a long time, he found himself back in the park, where the newspaper had come after him. He didn’t know how he’d gotten there, but he had a tattoo of a naked seventy-year-old female dwarf on his chest.

  He walked through the park, but found that he had picked an unpromising route. Dogwood barked at him and caressed his shoulders; Spanish Moss sang a fandango; an infatuated willow drenched him in tears. He broke into a run, trying to get away from the importunities of cherry trees, the ardess Western prattle of sagebrush, the languors of poplar. Through him, his disease was acting on the environment. He was infecting the world he passed through; no, he wasn’t contagious to humans, hell no, it was worse than that: he was a Typhoid Mary for the inanimate world! And the altered universe loved him, tried to win him. Godlike, an Unmoved Mover, unable to deal with his involuntary creations, he fought down panic and tried to escape from the passions of a suddenly writhing world.

  He passed a roving gang of juvies, who offered to beat the crap out of him for a price, but he turned them down and stumbled on.

  He came out onto De Sade Boulevard, but even here there was no relief. He could hear the little paving stones whispering about him:

  “Say, he’s cute! “

  “Forget it, he’d never look at you.”

  “You vicious bitch!”

  “I tell you he’ll never look at you.”

  “Sure he will. Hey, Joe—”

  “What did I tell you? He didn’t even look at you!”

  “But he’s got to! Joe, Joe, it’s me, over here—”

  Pareti whirled and yelled, “As far as I’m concerned, one paving stone looks exactly like another paving stone. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ‘em all.”

  That shut them up, by God! But what was this?

  High overhead, the neon sign above cut-rate Sex City was beginning to flash furiously. The letters twisted and formed a new message:

  I AM A NEON SIGN AND I ADORE JOE PARETI!

  A crowd had gathered to observe the phenomenon. “What the hell is a Joe Pareti?” one woman asked.

  “A casualty of love,” Pareti told her. “Speak the name softly, the next corpse you see may be your own.”

  “You’re a twisto,” the woman said.

  “I fear not,” Pareti said politely, a little madly. “Madness is my ambition, true. But I dare not hope to achieve it.”

  She stared at him as he opened the door and went into Sex City. But she didn’t believe her eyes when the doorknob gave him a playful little pat on the ass.

  “The way it works is this,” the salesman said. “Fulfillment is no problem; the tough thing is desire, don’t you dig? Desires die of fulfillment and gotta be replaced by new, different desires. A lotta people desire to have weirdo desires, but they can’t make it on accounta having lived a lifetime on the straights. But us here at the Impulse Implantation Center can condition you to like anything you’d like to like.”

  He had hold of Pareti’s sleeve with a tourisnag, a rubber-lined clamp on the end of a telescoping rod; it was used to snag tourists passing through the Odd Services Arcade, to drag them closer to specific facilities.

  “Thanks, I’ll think it over,” Pareti said, trying without much success to get the tourisnag off his sleeve.

  “Wait, hey, Jim, dig! We got a special bargain rate, a real cheapo, it’s only on for the next hour! Suppose we fix you up with pedophilia, a really high-class desire which has not as yet been over-exploited? Or take bestiality...or take both for the special giveaway price—”

  Pareti managed to pull the snag from his sleeve, and hurried on down the Arcade without looking back. He knew that one should never get Impulse Implantation from boiler-shop operators. A friend of his had made that mistake while on leave from a TexasTower, had been stuck with a passion for gravel, and had died after three admittedly enjoyable hours.

  The Arcade was teeming, the screams and laughter of weekend freakoffs and smutters rising up toward the central dome of ever-changing light patterns, crapout kliegs, and grass-jets emitting their pleasant, ceaseless streams of thin blue marijuana smoke. He needed quiet; he needed aloneness.

  He slid into a Spook Booth. Intercourse with ghosts was outlawed in some states, but most doctors agreed that it was not harmful if one made certain to wash off the ectoplasmic residue afterward with a thirty-percent alcohol solution. Of course, it was more risky for women (he saw a Douche & Bidet Rest Stop just across the Arcade concourse, and marveled momentarily at the thoroughness of the East Pyrites Better Business Bureau; they took care of every exigency).

  He leaned back in the darkness, heard the beginning of a thin, eerie wail...

  Then the Booth door was opened. A uniformed attendant asked, “Mr. Joseph Pareti?”

  Pareti nodded. “What is it?”

  “Sorry to disturb you, sir. A call for you.” She handed him a telephone, caressed his thigh, and left, closing the door. Pareti held the phone and it buzzed. He put it to his ear. “Hello?”

  “Hi there.”

  “Who is this?”

  “This is your telephone, stupid. Who did you think it was?”

  “I can’t take all this! Stop talking!”

  “It’s not talking that’s difficult,” the telephone said. “The tough thing is finding something to say.”

  “Well, what do you want to say?”

  “Nothing much. I just wanted you to know that somewhere, somehow, Bird lives.”

  “Bird? Bird who? What in hell are you talking about?”

  There was no answer. The telephone had hung up.

  He put the telephone down on the comfort ledge and sank back, hoping to God he could make it in peace and quiet. The phone buzzed again, almost immediately. He did not pick it up, and it went from buzz to ring. He put it to his ear again.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi there,” a silky voice said.

  “Who is this? “

  “This is your telephone, Joe baby. I called before. I thought you might like this voice better.”

  “Why don’t you leave me alone?” Joe almost sobbed.

  “How can I, Joe?” the telephone asked. “I love you! Oh Joe, Joe, I’ve tried so hard to please y
ou. But you’re so moody, baby, I just don’t understand. I was a really pretty dogwood, and you barely glanced at me! I became a newspaper, and you didn’t even read what I wrote about you, you ungrateful thing!”

  “You’re my disease,” Pareti said unsteadily. “Leave me alone!”

  “Me? A disease?” the telephone asked, a hurt note in the silken voice. “Oh, Joe, darling, how can you call me that? How can you pretend indifference after all we’ve been to each other?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Pareti said.

  “You do too know! You came to me every day, Joe, out on the warm sea. I was sort of young and silly then, I didn’t understand. I tried to hide from you. But you lifted me up out of the water, you brought me close to you; you were patient and kind, and little by little I grew up. Sometimes I’d even try to wriggle up the pole handle to kiss your fingers...”

  “Stop it!” Pareti felt his senses reeling, this was insanity, everything was becoming something else, the world and the Spook Booth were whirling around. “You’ve got it all wrong.”

  “I have not!” the telephone said indignantly. “You called me pet names, I was your screwin’ goo! I’ll admit, I had tried other men before you, Joe. But then, you’d been with women before we met, so we mustn’t throw the past up to one another. But even with the other five I tried, I was never able to become what I wanted to be. Can you understand how frustrating that was for me, Joe? Can you? I had my whole life before me and I didn’t know what to do with it. One’s shape is one’s career, you know, and I was confused, until I met you...Excuse me if I babble, darling, but this is the first chance we’ve had for a real talk.”

  Through the gibbering madness of it all, Pareti saw it now, and understood it. They had underestimated the goo. It had been a young organism, mute but not unintelligent, shaped by the powerful desires it possessed like every other living creature. To have form. It was evolving—

  Into what?