Untouched by Human Hands

by Robert Sheckley

  “Treat him gently,” Feeder said. “He might be startled by our appearance.” He twitched his tendrils at the idea of a Pusher—one of the strangest sights in the Galaxy, with his multiple organs—being startled at someone else’s appearance.

  Feeder and Doctor hurried to the fallen Pusher, picked him up and carried him back to the Ship.

  The Walls sealed again. They released the Pusher and prepared to talk.

  As soon as he was free, the Pusher sprang to his limbs and ran at the place where the Walls had sealed. He pounded against them frantically, his eating organ open and vibrating.

  “Stop that,” the Wall said. He bulged, and the Pusher tumbled to the floor. Instantly, he jumped up and started to run forward.

  “Stop him,” Talker said. “He might hurt himself.”

  One of the Accumulators woke up enough to roll into the Pusher’s path. The Pusher fell, got up again, and ran on.

  Talker had his filaments in the front of the Ship also, and he caught the Pusher in the bow. The Pusher started to tear at his tendrils, and Talker let go hastily.

  “Plug him into the communication system!” Feeder shouted. “Maybe we can reason with him!”

  Talker advanced a filament toward the Pusher’s head, waving it in the universal sign of communication. But the Pusher continued his amazing behavior, jumping out of the way. He had a piece of metal in his hand and he was waving it frantically.

  “What do you think he’s going to do with that?” Feeder asked. The Pusher started to attack the side of the Ship, pounding at one of the Walls. The Wall stiffened instinctively and the metal snapped.

  “Leave him alone,” Talker said. “Give him a chance to calm down.”

  Talker consulted with Thinker, but they couldn’t decide what to do about the Pusher. He wouldn’t accept communication. Every time Talker extended a filament, the Pusher showed all the signs of violent panic. Temporarily, it was an impasse.

  Thinker vetoed the plan of finding another Pusher on the planet. He considered this Pusher’s behavior typical; nothing would be gained by approaching another. Also, a planet was supposed to be contacted only by a Contact Team.

  If they couldn’t communicate with this Pusher, they never would with another on the planet.

  “I think I know what the trouble is,” Eye said. He crawled up on an Accumulator. “These Pushers have evolved a mechanical civilization. Consider for a minute how they went about it. They developed the use of their fingers, like Doctor, to shape metal. They utilized their seeing organs, like myself. And probably countless other organs.” He paused for effect.

  “These Pushers have become unspecialized!”

  They argued over it for several hours. The Walls maintained that no intelligent creature could be unspecialized. It was unknown in the Galaxy. But the evidence was before them—The Pusher cities, their vehicles...This Pusher, exemplifying the rest, seemed capable of a multitude of things.

  He was able to do everything except Push!

  Thinker supplied a partial explanation. “This is not a primitive planet. It is relatively old and should have been in the Cooperation thousands of years ago. Since it was not, the Pushers upon it were robbed of their birthright. Their ability, their specialty was to Push, but there was nothing to Push. Naturally, they have developed a deviant culture.

  “Exactly what this culture is, we can only guess. But on the basis of the evidence, there is reason to believe that these Pushers are—uncooperative.”

  Thinker had a habit of uttering the most shattering statement in the quietest way possible.

  “It is entirely possible,” Thinker went on inexorably, “that these Pushers will have nothing to do with us. In which case, our chances are approximately 283 to one against finding another Pusher planet”

  “We can’t be sure he won’t cooperate,” Talker said, “until we get him into communication.” He found it almost impossible to believe that any intelligent creature would refuse to cooperate willingly.

  “But how?” Feeder asked. They decided upon a course of action. Doctor walked slowly up to the Pusher, who backed away from him. In the meantime, Talker extended a filament outside the Ship, around, and in again, behind the Pusher.

  The Pusher backed against a Wall—and Talker shoved the filament through the Pusher’s head, into the communication socket in the center of his brain.

  The Pusher collapsed.

  When he came to, Feeder and Doctor had to hold the Pusher’s limbs, or he would have ripped out the communication line. Talker exercised his skill in learning the Pusher’s language.

  It wasn’t too hard. All Pusher languages were of the same family, and this was no exception. Talker was able to catch enough surface thoughts to form a pattern.

  He tried to communicate with the Pusher.

  The Pusher was silent.

  “I think he needs food,” Feeder said. They remembered that it had been almost two days since they had taken the Pusher on board. Feeder worked up some standard Pusher food and offered it.

  “My God! A steak!” the Pusher said.

  The Crew cheered along Talker’s communication circuits. The Pusher had said his first words!

  Talker examined the words and searched his memory. He knew about two hundred Pusher languages and many more simple variations. He found that this Pusher was speaking a cross between two Pusher tongues.

  After the Pusher had eaten, he looked around. Talker caught his thoughts and broadcast them to the Crew.

  The Pusher had a queer way of looking at the Ship. He saw it as a riot of colors. The Walls undulated. In front of him was something resembling a gigantic spider, colored black and green, with his web running all over the Ship and into the heads of all the creatures. He saw Eye as a strange, naked little animal, something between a skinned rabbit and an egg yolk—whatever those things were.

  Talker was fascinated by the new perspective the Pusher’s mind gave him. He had never seen things that way before. But now that the Pusher was pointing it out, Eye was a pretty funny looking creature.

  They settled down to communication.

  “What in hell are you things?” the Pusher asked, much calmer now than he had been during the two days. “Why did you grab me? Have I gone nuts?”

  “No,” Talker said, “you are not psychotic. We are a galactic trading ship. We were blown off our course by a storm and our Pusher was killed.”

  “Well, what does that have to do with me?”

  “We would like you to join our crew,” Talker said, “to be our new Pusher.”

  The Pusher thought it over after the situation was explained to him. Talker could catch the feeling of conflict in the Pusher’s thoughts. He hadn’t decided whether to accept this as a real situation or not. Finally, the Pusher decided that he wasn’t crazy.

  “Look, boys,” he said. “I don’t know what you are or how this makes sense. I have to get out of here. I’m on a furlough, and if I don’t get back soon, the U.S. Army’s going to be very interested.”

  Talker asked the Pusher to give him more information about “army,” and he fed it to Thinker.

  “These Pushers engage in personal combat,” was Thinker’s conclusion.

  “But why?” Talker asked. Sadly he admitted to himself that Thinker might have been right; the Pusher didn’t show many signs of willingness to cooperate.

  “I’d like to help you lads out,” Pusher said, “but I don’t know where you get the idea that I could push anything this size. You’d need a whole division of tanks just to budge it.”

  “Do you approve of these wars?” Talker asked, getting a suggestion from Thinker.

  “Nobody likes war—not those who have to do the dying at least.”

  “Then why do you fight them?”

  The Pusher made a gesture with his eating organ, which Eye picked up and sent to Thinker. “It’s kill or be killed. You guys know what war is, don’t you?”

  “We don’t have any wars,” Talker said.

  “
You’re lucky,” the Pusher said bitterly. “We do. Plenty of them.”

  “Of course,” Talker said. He had the full explanation from Thinker now. “Would you like to end them?”

  “Of course I would.”

  “Then come with us. Be our Pusher.”

  The Pusher stood up and walked up to an Accumulator. He sat down on it and doubled the ends of his upper limbs.

  “How the hell can I stop all wars?” the Pusher demanded. “Even if I went to the big shots and told them—”

  “You won’t have to,” Talker said. “All you have to do is come with us. Push us to our base. Galactic will send a Contact Team to your planet. That will end your wars.”

  “The hell you say,” the Pusher replied. “You boys are stranded here, huh? Good enough. No monsters are going to take over Earth.”

  Bewildered, Talker tried to understand the reasoning. Had he said something wrong? Was it possible that the Pusher didn’t understand him?

  “I thought you wanted to end wars,” Talker said.

  “Sure I do. But I don’t want anyone making us stop. I’m no traitor. I’d rather fight.”

  “No one will make you stop. You will just stop because there will be no further need for fighting.”

  “Do you know why we’re fighting?”

  “It’s obvious.”

  “Yeah? What’s your explanation?”

  “You Pushers have been separated from the main stream of the Galaxy,” Talker explained. “You have your specialty—pushing—but nothing to Push. Accordingly, you have no real jobs. You play with things—metal, inanimate objects—but find no real satisfaction. Robbed of your true vocation, you fight from sheer frustration.

  “Once you find your place in the galactic Cooperation—and I assure you that it is an important place—your fighting will stop. Why should you fight, which is an unnatural occupation, when you can Push? Also, your mechanical civilization will end, since there will be no need for it”

  The Pusher shook his head in what Talker guessed was a gesture of confusion. “What is this pushing?”

  Talker told him as best he could. Since the job was out of his scope, he had only a general idea of what a Pusher did.

  “You mean to say that that is what every Earthman should be doing?”

  “Of course,” Talker said. “It is your great specialty.”

  The Pusher thought about it for several minutes. “I think you want a physicist or a mentalist or something. I could never do anything like that. I’m a junior architect. And besides—well, it’s difficult to explain.”

  But Talker had already caught Pusher’s objection. He saw a Pusher female in his thoughts. No, two, three. And he caught a feeling of loneliness, strangeness. The Pusher was filled with doubts. He was afraid.

  “When we reach galactic,” Talker said, hoping it was the right thing, “you can meet other Pushers. Pusher females, too. All you Pushers look alike, so you should become friends with them. As far as loneliness in the Ship goes—it just doesn’t exist. You don’t understand the Cooperation yet. No one is lonely in the Cooperation.”

  The Pusher was still considering the idea of there being other Pushers. Talker couldn’t understand why he was so startled at that. The Galaxy was filled with Pushers, Feeders, Talkers, and many other species, endlessly duplicated.

  “I can’t believe that anybody could end all war,” Pusher said. “How do I know you’re not lying?”

  Talker felt as if he had been struck in the core. Thinker must have been right when he said these Pushers would be uncooperative. Was this going to be the end of Talker’s career? Were he and the rest of the Crew going to spend the rest of their lives in space, because of the stupidity of a bunch of Pushers?

  Even thinking this, Talker was able to feel sorry for the Pusher. It must be terrible, he thought Doubting, uncertain, never trusting anyone. If these Pushers didn’t find their place in the Galaxy, they would exterminate themselves. Their place in the Cooperation was long overdue.

  “What can I do to convince you?” Talker asked.

  In despair, he opened all the circuits to the Pusher. He let the Pusher see Engine’s good-natured gruffness, the devil-may-care humor of the Walls; he showed him Eye’s poetic attempts, and Feeder’s cocky good nature. He opened his own mind and showed the Pusher a picture of his home planet, his family, the tree he was planning to buy when he got home.

  The pictures told the story of all of them, from different planets, representing different ethics, united by a common bond—the galactic Cooperation.

  The Pusher watched it all in silence.

  After a while, he shook his head. The thought accompanying the gesture was uncertain, weak—but negative.

  Talker told the Walls to open. They did, and the Pusher stared in amazement.

  “You may leave,” Talker said. “Just remove the communication line and go.”

  “What will you do?”

  “We will look for another Pusher planet.”

  “Where? Mars? Venus?”

  “We don’t know. All we can do is hope there is another in this region.”

  The Pusher looked at the opening, then back at the Crew. He hesitated and his face screwed up in a grimace of indecision.

  “All that you showed me was true?”

  No answer was necessary.

  “All right,” the Pusher said suddenly. “I’ll go. I’m a damned fool, but I’ll go. If this means what you say—it must mean what you say!”

  Talker saw that the agony of the Pusher’s decision had forced him out of contact with reality. He believed that he was in a dream, where decisions are easy and unimportant.

  “There’s just one little trouble,” Pusher said with the lightness of hysteria. “Boys, I’ll be damned if I know how to Push. You said something about faster-than-light? I can’t even run the mile in an hour.”

  “Of course you can Push,” Talker assured him, hoping he was right. He knew what a Pusher’s abilities were; but this one....

  “Just try it.”

  “Sure,” Pusher agreed. “I’ll probably wake up out of this, anyhow.”

  They sealed the Ship for takeoff while Pusher talked to himself.

  “Funny,” Pusher said. “I thought a camping trip would be a nice way to spend a furlough and all I do is get nightmares!”

  Engine boosted the Ship into the air. The Walls were sealed and Eye was guiding them away from the planet.

  “We’re in open space now,” Talker said. Listening to Pusher, he hoped his mind hadn’t cracked. “Eye and Thinker will give a direction, I’ll transmit it to you, and you Push along it.”

  “You’re crazy,” Pusher mumbled. “You must have the wrong planet. I wish you nightmares would go away.”

  “You’re in the Cooperation now,” Talker said desperately. “There’s the direction. Push!”

  The Pusher didn’t do anything for a moment He was slowly emerging from his fantasy, realizing that he wasn’t in a dream, after all. He felt the Cooperation. Eye to Thinker, Thinker to Talker, Talker to Pusher, all inter-coordinated with Walls, and with each other.

  “What is this?” Pusher asked. He felt the oneness of the Ship, the great warmth, the closeness achieved only in the Cooperation.

  He Pushed.

  Nothing happened.

  “Try again,” Talker begged.

  Pusher searched his mind. He found a deep well of doubt and fear. Staring into it, he saw his own tortured face.

  Thinker illuminated it for him.

  Pushers had lived with this doubt and fear for centuries. Pushers had fought through fear, killed through doubt.

  That was where the Pusher organ was!

  Human—specialist—Pusher—he entered fully into the Crew, merged with them, threw mental arms around the shoulders of Thinker and Talker.

  Suddenly, the Ship shot forward at eight times the speed of light. It continued to accelerate.

  SEVENTH VICTIM

  Stanton Frelaine sat at his desk, t
rying to look as busy as an executive should at nine-thirty in the morning. It was impossible. He couldn’t concentrate on the advertisement he had written the previous night, couldn’t think about business. All he could do was wait until the mail came.

  He had been expecting his notification for two weeks now. The government was behind schedule, as usual.

  The glass door of his office was marked Morger and Frelaine, Clothiers. It opened, and E.J. Morger walked in, limping slightly from his old gunshot wound. His shoulders were bent; but at the age of seventy-three, he wasn’t worrying much about his posture.

  “Well, Stan?” Morger asked. “What about that ad?”

  Frelaine had joined Morger sixteen years ago, when he was twenty-seven. Together they had built Protec-Clothes into a million- dollar concern.

  “I suppose you can run it,” Frelaine said, handing the slip of paper to Morger. If only the mail would come earlier, he thought.

  “‘Do you own a Protec-Suit?’“ Morger read aloud, holding the paper close to his eyes. “‘The finest tailoring in the world has gone into Morger and Frelaine’s Protec-Suit, to make it the leader in men’s fashions.’“

  Morger cleared his throat and glanced at Frelaine. He smiled and read on.

  “‘Protec-Suit is the safest as well as the smartest. Every Protec- Suit comes with special built-in gun pocket, guaranteed not to bulge. No one will know you are carrying a gun—except you. The gun pocket is exceptionally easy to get at, permitting fast, unhindered draw. Choice of hip or breast pocket.’ Very nice,” Morger commented.

  Frelaine nodded morosely.

  “‘The Protec-Suit Special has the fling-out gun pocket, the greatest modern advance in personal protection. A touch of the concealed button throws the gun into your hand, cocked, safeties off. Why not drop into the Protec-Store nearest you? Why not be safe?”’

  “That’s fine,” Morger said. “That’s a very nice, dignified ad.” He thought for a moment, fingering his white mustache. “Shouldn’t you mention that Protec-Suits come in a variety of styles, single and double-breasted, one and two button rolls, deep and shallow flares?”