“I can tell you here and now, it’ll never work.”
Ong gave a slight inclination of his head. “Well, it has been nice meeting you. Have a nice day.”
The emissary turned to go.
“Just one moment,” Rice said.
The alien paused, turned. “Yes?”
“What about just taking those of us who do believe, who want to go?”
“It’s unprecedented,” the emissary said. “In all our experience, races either can change their thinking and get away from their doomed worlds by their own efforts, or they cannot.”
“We’re different,” Rice said.
“All right,” the emissary said. “I’ll do it. Gather your people. I’ll be back in ten years to take those who want to go. We can’t wait any longer than that.”
“We’ll be ready.”
Ten years later, the emissary came to a small, hand-built house in a corner of Oregon Cascade Mountains. A trout stream ran behind the house, and Rice was standing beside the stream, fishing.
Rice said, “How did you find me here?”
“Once we Omairians have met you, we can always find you again. But I think you are not president any longer.”
“No,” Rice said. “My term ended and I didn’t get reelected. I tried to convince people of the destruction that lay ahead. Nearly everyone thought I was a crackpot. Those who did believe me were worse than those who didn’t. A crazy man tried to shoot me and killed my wife instead. My children hold me responsible. They changed their names and moved away.”
“I am sorry to hear that,” the emissary said. “But I think you’ll have to admit that those other people, the ones who despise and disbelieve you, do not have your grasp, your intelligence, your intuition. You’re probably the most unusual man of your century, Mr. Rice. You believed in us from the start. You didn’t think we were sent by God or the devil. You accepted what we said. Evidently you were the only one.”
“Evidently.”
“Perhaps it’s for the best,” the emissary said. “Your people, in their present state, could never have made it out there. But you could.”
“Me?”
“Your true place is with us, Mr. Rice, out in the galaxy. There is still time. You are not an old man. We have rejuvenation treatments. We can add many years to your life. We have women of our species who would be honored to mate with you. We have a civilization that would welcome you. I beg of you, leave this doomed Earth behind and come away with me.”
“No, I think not,” Rice said. “I can still look forward to living another thirty or so years on Earth before things get too bad, can’t I?”
“Yes, but no longer.”
“It’s enough. I’ll stay.”
“You choose to die here with your people? But they will perish because of their own ignorance.”
“Yes. But they are Earth’s children, as I am. My place is here with them.”
“I find it difficult to believe you’re saying this.”
“I did a lot of thinking about it. It occurred to me that I was really no different from the other humans. Not fundamentally. And certainly no better.”
“I can’t accept that. Anyhow, what is your inference?”
“It seemed to me that if my species was incapable of believing in its own doom, it was not for me to believe in it, either. So I’ve decided that all that stuff you talked about is not going to happen. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve dreamed all this up.”
“It is not intelligence,” said the emissary, “to take refuge in solipsism.”
“My mind’s made up. I’ll stay here with my trout stream. You’ve never done any fly fishing, have you, emissary?”
“Where I come from,” the emissary said, “we don’t fish. We respect all life.”
“Does that mean you don’t eat flesh of any kind?”
“That is correct.”
“What about vegetables? They’re living things.”
“We don’t eat vegetables, either. We convert our energy from inert chemicals, or, if necessary, we transform it directly from solar radiation. We can re-engineer you so you can do that, too.”
“I’ll just bet you can,” Rice said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You heard me. Or rather, you heard my implication. The sort of life you offer wouldn’t be human. It would be hellish. It wouldn’t be worth living for a fellow like me, to say nothing of my friends. I refer to the rest of the human race.”
“You mentioned hell. There is no hell.”
“Yes there is. Hell is me talking to you. Now do me a favor and get out of my face.”
The emissary left, but paused for a moment in front of the house, looking back at the stream. Would Rice change his mind? No indication of it. Ong shrugged and returned to his vehicle. With a gesture he brought it up to full visibility and got aboard.
Soon he was high in the air, with the green and blue planet receding below him. Soon he would put in the faster than light drive.
But just before he did, he turned back and took a last look. A good-looking planet, and intelligent people. A pity to see it all lost.
He brooded for a moment, but only a moment. Then he consoled himself with the knowledge that this represented no real loss to the cosmos. After all, intelligent life had evolved again and again on planets all over the universe.
But what had evolved was intelligent life much like that of Ong and his people. That was the standard, the norm. But intelligent life like Earth’s? Intelligent irrational life? It had to be a fluke, a one of a kind thing, this mating of intelligence and irrationality. The emissary didn’t think the universe had seen Earth’s like before. It probably would not again.
He looked down once more at the Earth. It looked like a nice place. But of course, there were more where that came from. Sort of. In any event, it was time to get back to his own green and yellow world.
The Universal Karmic Clearing House
What is a Karmic Clearing House? How does it work? Travel into an alternate reality with Harry Zimmerman and find out. Learn what Harry did in an extremely difficult situation.
Harry Zimmerman was an advertising copywriter for Batten & Finch in New York. One day when he got home from work, he found a plain white envelope in the middle of the small desk in his living room where it had no business being. He hadn’t brought it in from the mailbox and no one else, not even the super, had keys to all the locks on his apartment door. There was no way the envelope could have gotten there. So how had it gotten there? Zimmerman finally decided he must have brought it in with yesterday’s mail and forgotten to open it. He didn’t really believe that, but sometimes an inadequate explanation feels better than none at all.
Inside the envelope was a rectangle of shiny plastic. Written on it were the words, KARMIC BANK VISITOR’S PASS. GOOD FOR ONE HOUR. There was a square printed in one corner of the rectangle.
Musing, Zimmerman picked up a pencil and checked the square. Suddenly he wasn’t in New York anymore.
With no sense of transition Harry Zimmerman found himself in front of an old-fashioned gray stone office building. It stood all by itself in the middle of a wide green lawn. It had huge bronze gates, and they were open. Above them, chiseled into the granite, were the words: KARMIC BANK & CLEARING HOUSE.
Zimmerman waited, expecting that someone would come along and tell him what to do. But no one came. At last he walked inside.
There were rows and rows of desks. Men were examining piles of documents, making entries into ledger books, and then piling the documents into wire baskets at the sides of the desks. Messengers took away the examined documents and brought in new ones.
Zimmerman walked over to one of the desks. As he approached, a document slipped from the pile and sailed to the floor.
He picked it up and looked at it. It was made of a shimmery, transparent substance and showed a richly colored three-dimensional image of a landscape with figures. As he moved the document, the view changed. He saw a city
street, and then a boat on a river, and then a lake with hazy blue mountains behind it. Other images slid past: elephants moving across a wide dusty plain, people talking to each other at a traffic intersection, a deserted beach with dusty palm trees.
“Careful!” the clerk said, and snatched the document out of his hand.
“I wasn’t going to hurt it,” Zimmerman said.
“I wasn’t worried about the document,” the clerk said. “I was worried about you. Turn one of those things the wrong way and it can pull you into its construct. Then we’d have a lot of trouble getting you back.”
The clerk seemed friendly enough. He was a rather fussy-looking middle-aged man, balding in front, dressed in a pearl-gray morning coat, sharply creased pinstriped trousers and gleaming black shoes.
“What are those things?” Zimmerman asked, indicating the shiny documents.
“I see that you’re new to this reality construct. They’re X2D invoices—sort of instant cosmic balance sheets. Each of them records a planet’s karmic status at a given moment. After deducting the bad karma, we convert the good karma into Intraversal Luck Units at the going rate of exchange, and deposit the ILUs in their account, to draw upon as required. It’s basically the same as banking anywhere, except that we deal in ILUs instead of money.”
“Are you telling me,” said Zimmerman, “that people can draw out good luck when they need it?”
“That’s it,” the clerk said. “Except that we don’t have individual accounts. We’re strictly planetary.”
“Do all planets with intelligent life have accounts here?”
“Oh, yes,” the clerk told him. “As soon as they develop abstract thought or better, we open an account for them. Then they can draw on it when things get out of hand. Like when disease is raging, or wars are flaring up for no good reason, or there are unaccountable droughts and famines. All planets have these runs. But with enough units of luck you can usually ride them out. Don’t ask me the actual mechanics. I’m a banker, not an engineer. And with a little luck, I won’t even be a banker much longer.”
“You’re getting out of banking?”
“Out of this entire construct,” the clerk said. “The Karmic Clearing House level is really very limited. There’s just this one building stuck in the middle of a lawn which is perched in the middle of a small nothingness. We do get additional hardship pay for working here, but personally I’ve had enough.”
“Where will you go?”
“There are many reality-constructs to choose among. I’ve picked quite a nice one from the catalogue. What with my pension and my ILU account I expect to have a good time for quite a long time. The individual ILU account is one of the best things about working for the Universal Technocrat. I must also admit that the cafeteria isn’t bad, and we do get the latest movies.”
A bell sounded within Zimmerman’s pocket, startling him. He took out the Visitor’s Pass. It was flashing and ringing. The clerk pressed it on a corner and made it stop.
“That means your time is almost up,” the clerk said. “It’s been a pleasure talking with you, sir. We don’t get many visitors out this way. Our reality-construct hasn’t even got a hotel.”
“Just a minute,” Zimmerman said. “What about Earth’s account?”
“It’s here in the bank, along with everyone else’s. No one has ever come around to collect it.”
“Well, I’m here now,” Harry said. “And I’m Earth’s authorized representative. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. Right?”
The clerk nodded. He didn’t look happy.
“I want to draw out some of Earth’s luck. For the whole planet, I mean, not just for myself. I don’t know if you’ve checked us out lately but we’ve got a lot of problems. Every year we seem to get more war, pollution, famine, floods, typhoons, unexplained plane crashes, that sort of thing. Some of us are getting a little nervous. We could really use that luck now.”
“I knew someone from Earth would come along one of these days,” the clerk muttered. “I’ve been dreading this.”
“What’s the matter? You said our account is here.”
“It is. But there’s nothing in it.”
“But how could that be?” Zimmerman demanded.
The clerk shrugged. “You know how banks operate. We have to show a profit.”
“What does that have to do with Earth’s luck?”
“We loaned it out so it could earn some interest.”
“You loaned out our luck?”
The clerk nodded. “To Associated Civilizations of the Lesser Magellenic Clouds. A first-class risk.”
“Well,” Zimmerman said, “you’d better call it in now.”
“That’s the part I hate to tell you. Despite their very good credit rating, the Associated Civilizations of the L.M.C. recently vanished into a black hole. It’s the sort of space-time anomaly that could happen to anyone.”
“That’s tough for them,” Zimmerman said. “But what about Earth’s luck?”
“There’s no way we can recover it. It’s down there below the event-horizon with the rest of Associated Civilizations’ assets.”
“You lost our luck!”
“Don’t worry, your planet is bound to accumulate more. I’m sorry but there’s nothing I can do about it.”
The clerk’s sad smile and balding head began to dissolve. Everything was shimmering and fading out and Zimmerman knew that he was on his way back to New York. He didn’t feel so good about it. Here he was, the first human to get to another level of reality—the Columbus of the Galaxy—and the only thing he had to tell the folks back home was that Earth’s luck had gone down a black hole, sorry about that.
As the bearer of cosmic bad tidings his name would be cursed for generations. People would say, “Here comes a Zimmerman,” to indicate the bearer of supercolossal bad news on a big scale.
It wasn’t fair. He couldn’t stand the enormity of that rap hanging around his neck throughout eternity. There had to be something he could do to change it.
But what?
That moment, half in and half out of the fadeout, was decision time for Harry Zimmerman, the sticking-point, the time when Necessity, ordinarily without bias in anyone’s favor, suddenly becomes the Mother of Invention.
And so it was that suddenly Zimmerman had the answer.
“Wait!” he cried to the clerk. “We gotta talk!”
“Look, I already said I’m sorry.”
“Forget about that,” Harry said, “I’ve got business to discuss with you.”
The clerk made a gesture with his hand. The construct stopped fading. “What business?”
“A loan.”
“A luck loan?”
“Of course. A big one. To tide us over until things straighten out.”
“My dear sir,” the clerk said, “why didn’t you say so in the first place? Loaning luck is our business. Come with me.”
Harry followed the clerk back into the bank.
Like Columbus bringing back the gold and pearls of Hispaniola to Ferdinand and Isabella, so Harry Zimmerman, our envoy involuntary, returned to the Karmic Clearing House and negotiated the luck loan that we Earth people so desperately needed. And that is the true story behind our present-day peace and prosperity here in the easy-going 21st century.
The interest has turned out to be a little steep, of course: the Karmic Bank is not in this for their health. And Harry had to put up the planet for collateral. If we don’t find a way to pay back that loan soon, there’s only one thing we can do. We’ll have to hide out in a Chapter 13 Black Hole like the Associated Civilizations of the L.M.C. did. It’s a desperate measure, but anything’s better than losing the planet.
Deep Blue Sleep
A madcap adventure through the twisting hallways of Sheckley’s imagination. How does the fellow think up such notions!
There was a sudden snappy rapping sound at Gerston’s door, followed by a sort of inflamed and frenzied tintinnabulation of the doorbell that would not be
denied. It was just plain bad timing, because Gerston had been on the verge of plunging into SnuggleDown, the Deep Blue Sleep program provided by the good people at Unconscious Adventures Unlimited for those who wanted some fun during the hours normally reserved for unconsciousness.
Excitement, thrills, love, laughter, all these could be yours while you slept! Things had changed a lot since the bad old days when at some time in every 24 hours you had to lie down in a darkened room and let your mind go into a holding pattern for 8 or so hours.
Until recently, mankind was enslaved to sleep, that ancient enemy of our days and nights that condemns us to spend a third of our lives just hanging around doing nothing at all, and with nothing to show for it except vague and generally unsatisfactory dreams that needed highly paid experts to render them even slightly intelligible. Then along came the Deep Blue Sleep programs. At last waking entry could be made into the mysterious kingdom of Mind, and this could be accomplished by ordinary people, not just college grads with a Masters or better in Psychedelic Psychology. In this brave new world you could even earn a living while asleep, as a dreammaster, for example, or, if that position was filled, there was always room for a dreamslave. And this was a considerable boon for those who were unable to earn anything while awake.
The possibilities for inner travel were little short of amazing. Using the automated electronic services available at a price most middle class citizens could afford, and lower classes aspire to, you could log onto SnuggleDown and plug the old psyche into a Personalized Sleep Corridor that would take you all the way to the Gates (frequently described as tall and made of iron) of Death. This became a considerable tourist attraction, and some daring couples even opted for marriage in the Oblivion Zone. They were advised not to tarry there too long, however, since death was still not completely under the Company’s control, and individual safety could not be guaranteed, even though the Company took every precaution.
Gerston had no present interest in going to see the Gates of Death. That could wait until he was in a morbid mood. He passed up on the Waterfall of Creative Endeavor, too, figuring his productive period might as well wait until later, since right now he was modeling procrastination. He didn’t even want to see the Eternal Life exhibition, where the Company had created a great composite jellyfish which it kept in a shallow lagoon in southern Florida.
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