Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley

by Robert Sheckley

  “I don’t see anything,” Anders thought, but the voice was right. It was as though he had a clear line of inspection into Judy’s mind. Her feelings were nakedly apparent to him, as meaningless as his room had been in that flash of undistorted thought.

  “I really was thinking about you,” she repeated.

  “Now look,” the voice said.

  Anders, watching the expressions on Judy’s face, felt the strangeness descend on him. He was back in the nightmare perception of that moment in his room. This time it was as though he were watching a machine in a laboratory. The object of this operation was the evocation and preservation of a particular mood. The machine goes through a searching process, invoking trains of ideas to achieve the desired end.

  “Oh, were you?” he asked, amazed at his new perspective.

  “Yes ... I wondered what you were doing at noon,” the reactive machine opposite him on the couch said, expanding its shapely chest slightly.

  “Good,” the voice said, commending him for his perception.

  “Dreaming of you, of course,” he said to the flesh-clad skeleton behind the total gestalt Judy. The flesh machine rearranged its limbs, widened its mouth to denote pleasure. The mechanism searched through a complex of fears, hopes, worries, through half-remembrances of analogous situations, analogous solutions.

  And this was what he loved. Anders saw too clearly and hated himself for seeing. Through his new nightmare perception, the absurdity of the entire room struck him.

  “Were you really?” the articulating skeleton asked him.

  “You’re coming closer,” the voice whispered.

  To what? The personality? There was no such thing. There was no true cohesion, no depth, nothing except a web of surface reactions, stretched across automatic visceral movements.

  He was coming closer to the truth.

  “Sure,” he said sourly.

  The machine stirred, searching for a response.

  Anders felt a quick tremor of fear at the sheer alien quality of his viewpoint. His sense of formalism had been sloughed off, his agreed-upon reactions bypassed. What would be revealed next?

  He was seeing clearly, he realized, as perhaps no man had ever seen before. It was an oddly exhilarating thought.

  But could he still return to normality?

  “Can I get you a drink?” the reaction machine asked.

  At that moment Anders was as thoroughly out of love as a man could be. Viewing one’s intended as a depersonalized, sexless piece of machinery is not especially conducive to love. But it is quite stimulating, intellectually.

  Anders didn’t want normality. A curtain was being raised and he wanted to see behind it. What was it some Russian scientist—Ouspensky, wasn’t it—had said?

  “Think in other categories.”

  That was what he was doing, and would continue to do.

  “Good-bye,” he said suddenly.

  The machine watched him, open-mouthed, as he walked out the door. Delayed circuit reactions kept it silent until it heard the elevator door close.

  “You were very warm in there,” the voice within his head whispered, once he was on the street. “But you still don’t understand everything.”

  “Tell me, then,” Anders said, marveling a little at his equanimity. In an hour he had bridged the gap to a completely different viewpoint, yet it seemed perfectly natural.

  “I can’t,” the voice said. “You must find it yourself.”

  “Well, let’s see now,” Anders began. He looked around at the masses of masonry, the convention of streets cutting through the architectural piles. “Human life,” he said, “is a series of conventions. When you look at a girl, you’re supposed to see—a pattern, not the underlying formlessness.”

  “That’s true,” the voice agreed, but with a shade of doubt.

  “Basically, there is no form. Man produces gestalts, and cuts form out of the plethora of nothingness. It’s like looking at a set of lines and saying that they represent a figure. We look at a mass of material, extract it from the background, and say it’s a man. But in truth, there is no such thing. There are only the humanizing features that we—myopically—attach to it. Matter is conjoined, a matter of viewpoint.”

  “You’re not seeing it now,” said the voice.

  “Damn it,” Anders said. He was certain that he was on the track of something big, perhaps something ultimate. “Everyone’s had the experience. At some time in his life, everyone looks at a familiar object and can’t make any sense out of it. Momentarily, the gestalt fails, but the true moment of sight passes. The mind reverts to the superimposed pattern. Normalcy continues.”

  The voice was silent. Anders walked on, through the gestalt city.

  “There’s something else, isn’t there?” Anders asked.

  “Yes.”

  What could that be, he asked himself. Through clearing eyes, Anders looked at the formality he had called his world.

  He wondered momentarily if he would have come to this if the voice hadn’t guided him. Yes, he decided after a few moments, it was inevitable.

  But who was the voice? And what had he left out?

  “Let’s see what a party looks like now,” he said to the voice.

  The party was a masquerade; the guests were all wearing their faces. To Anders, their motives, individually and collectively, were painfully apparent. Then his vision began to clear further.

  He saw that the people weren’t truly individual. They were discontinuous lumps of flesh sharing a common vocabulary, yet not even truly discontinuous.

  The lumps of flesh were a part of the decoration of the room and almost indistinguishable from it. They were one with the lights, which lent their tiny vision. They were joined to the sounds they made, a few feeble tones out of the great possibility of sound. They blended into the walls.

  The kaleidoscopic view came so fast that Anders had trouble sorting his new impressions. He knew now that these people existed only as patterns, on the same basis as the sounds they made and the things they thought they saw.

  Gestalts, sifted out of the vast, unbearable real world.

  “Where’s Judy?” a discontinuous lump of flesh asked him. This particular lump possessed enough nervous mannerisms to convince the other lumps of his reality. He wore a loud tie as further evidence.

  “She’s sick,” Anders said. The flesh quivered into an instant sympathy. Lines of formal mirth shifted to formal woe.

  “Hope it isn’t anything serious,” the vocal flesh remarked.

  “You’re warmer,” the voice said to Anders.

  Anders looked at the object in front of him.

  “She hasn’t long to live,” he stated.

  The flesh quivered. Stomach and intestines contracted in sympathetic fear. Eyes distended, mouth quivered.

  The loud tie remained the same.

  “My God! You don’t mean it!”

  “What are you?” Anders asked quietly.

  “What do you mean?” the indignant flesh attached to the tie demanded. Serene within its reality, it gaped at Anders. Its mouth twitched, undeniable proof that it was real and sufficient. “You’re drunk,” it sneered.

  Anders laughed and left the party.

  “There is still something you don’t know,” the voice said. “But you were hot! I could feel you near me.”

  “What are you?” Anders asked again.

  “I don’t know,” the voice admitted. “I am a person. I am I. I am trapped.”

  “So are we all,” Anders said. He walked on asphalt, surrounded by heaps of concrete, silicates, aluminum and iron alloys. Shapeless, meaningless heaps that made up the gestalt city.

  And then there were the imaginary lines of demarcation dividing city from city, the artificial boundaries of water and land.

  All ridiculous.

  “Give me a dime for some coffee, mister?” something asked, a thing indistinguishable from any other thing.

  “Old Bishop Berkeley would give a nonexisten
t dime to your nonexistent presence,” Anders said gaily.

  “I’m really in a bad way,” the voice whined, and Anders perceived that it was no more than a series of modulated vibrations.

  “Yes! Go on!” the voice commanded.

  “If you could spare me a quarter—” the vibrations said, with a deep pretense at meaning.

  No, what was there behind the senseless patterns? Flesh, mass. What was that? All made up of atoms.

  “I’m really hungry,” the intricately arranged atoms muttered.

  All atoms. Conjoined. There were no true separations between atom and atom. Flesh was stone, stone was light. Anders looked at the masses of atoms that were pretending to solidity, meaning, and reason.

  “Can’t you help me?” a clump of atoms asked. But the clump was identical with all the other atoms. Once you ignored the superimposed patterns, you could see the atoms were random, scattered.

  “I don’t believe in you,” Anders said.

  The pile of atoms was gone.

  “Yes!” the voice cried. “Yes!”

  “I don’t believe in any of it,” Anders said. After all, what was an atom?

  “Go on!” the voice shouted. “You’re hot! Go on!”

  What was an atom? An empty space surrounded by an empty space.

  Absurd!

  “Then it’s all false!” Anders said. And he was alone under the stars.

  “That’s right!” the voice within his head screamed. “Nothing!”

  But stars, Anders thought. How can one believe—

  The stars disappeared. Anders was in a gray nothingness, a void. There was nothing around him except shapeless gray.

  Where was the voice?

  Gone.

  Anders perceived the delusion behind the grayness, and then there was nothing at all.

  Complete nothingness, and himself within it.

  Where was he? What did it mean? Anders’s mind tried to add it up.

  Impossible. That couldn’t be true.

  Again the score was tabulated, but Anders’s mind couldn’t accept the total. In desperation, the overloaded mind erased the figures, eradicated the knowledge, erased itself.

  “Where am I?”

  In nothingness. Alone.

  Trapped.

  “Who am I?”

  A voice.

  The voice of Anders searched the nothingness, shouted, “Is there anyone here?”

  No answer.

  But there was someone. All directions were the same, yet moving along one he could make contact ... with someone. The voice of Anders reached back to someone who could save him, perhaps.

  “Save me,” the voice said to Anders, lying fully dressed on his bed, except for his shoes and black bow tie.

  WATCHBIRD

  WHEN GELSEN entered, he saw that the rest of the watchbird manufacturers were already present. There were six of them, not counting himself, and the room was blue with expensive cigar smoke.

  “Hi, Charlie,” one of them called as he came in.

  The rest broke off conversation long enough to wave a casual greeting at him. As a watchbird manufacturer, he was a member manufacturer of salvation, he reminded himself wryly. Very exclusive. You must have a certified government contract if you want to save the human race.

  “The government representative isn’t here yet,” one of the men told him. “He’s due any minute.”

  “We’re getting the green light,” another said.

  “Fine.” Gelsen found a chair near the door and looked around the room. It was like a convention, or a Boy Scout rally. The six men made up for their lack of numbers by sheer volume. The president of Southern Consolidated was talking at the top of his lungs about watchbird’s enormous durability. The two presidents he was talking at were grinning, nodding, one trying to interrupt with the results of a test he had run on watchbird’s resourcefulness, the other talking about the new recharging apparatus.

  The other three men were in their own little group, delivering what sounded like a panegyric to watchbird.

  Gelsen noticed that all of them stood straight and tall, like the saviors they felt they were. He didn’t find it funny. Up to a few days ago he had felt that way himself. He had considered himself a pot-bellied, slightly balding saint.

  He sighed and lighted a cigarette. At the beginning of the project, he had been as enthusiastic as the others. He remembered saying to Macintyre, his chief engineer, “Mac, a new day is coming. Watchbird is the answer.” And Macintyre had nodded very profoundly—another watchbird convert.

  How wonderful it had seemed then! A simple, reliable answer to one of mankind’s greatest problems, all wrapped and packaged in a pound of incorruptible metal, crystal, and plastics.

  Perhaps that was the very reason he was doubting it now. Gelsen suspected that you don’t solve human problems so easily. There had to be a catch somewhere.

  After all, murder was an old problem, and watchbird too new a solution.

  “Gentlemen—” They had been talking so heatedly that they hadn’t noticed the government representative entering. Now the room became quiet at once.

  “Gentlemen,” the plump government man said, “the president, with the consent of Congress, has acted to form a watchbird division for every city and town in the country.”

  The men burst into a spontaneous shout of triumph. They were going to have their chance to save the world after all, Gelsen thought, and worriedly asked himself what was wrong with that.

  He listened carefully as the government man outlined the distribution scheme. The country was to be divided into seven areas, each to be supplied and serviced by one manufacturer. This meant monopoly, of course, but a necessary one. Like the telephone service, it was in the public’s best interests. You couldn’t have competition in watchbird service. Watchbird was for everyone.

  “The president hopes,” the representative continued, “that full watchbird service will be installed in the shortest possible time. You will have top priorities on strategic metals, manpower, and so forth.”

  “Speaking for myself,” the president of Southern Consolidated said, “I expect to have the first batch of watchbirds distributed within the week. Production is all set up.”

  The rest of the men were equally ready. The factories had been prepared to roll out the watchbirds for months now. The final standardized equipment had been agreed upon, and only the presidential go-ahead had been lacking.

  “Fine,” the representative said. “If that is all, I think we can—is there a question?”

  “Yes, sir,” Gelsen said. “I want to know if the present model is the one we are going to manufacture.”

  “Of course,” the representative said. “It’s the most advanced.”

  “I have an objection.” Gelsen stood up. His colleagues were glaring coldly at him. Obviously he was delaying the advent of the golden age.

  “What is your objection?” the representative asked.

  “First, let me say that I am one hundred percent in favor of a machine to stop murder. It’s been needed for a long time. I object only to the watchbird’s learning circuits. They serve, in effect, to animate the machine and give it a pseudoconsciousness. I can’t approve of that.”

  “But, Mr. Gelsen, you yourself testified that the watchbird would not be completely efficient unless such circuits were introduced. Without them, the watchbirds could stop only an estimated seventy percent of murders.”

  “I know that,” Gelsen said, feeling extremely uncomfortable. “I believe there might be a moral danger in allowing a machine to make decisions that are rightfully man’s,” he declared doggedly.

  “Oh, come now, Gelsen,” one of the corporation presidents said. “It’s nothing of the sort. The watchbird will only reinforce the decisions made by honest men from the beginning of time.”

  “I think that is true,” the representative agreed. “But I can understand how Mr. Gelsen feels. It is sad that we must put a human problem into the hands of a machine, sadd
er still that we must have a machine enforce our laws. But I ask you to remember, Mr. Gelsen, that there is no other possible way of stopping a murderer before he strikes. It would be unfair to the many innocent people killed every year if we were to restrict watchbird on philosophical grounds. Don’t you agree that I’m right?”

  “Yes, I suppose I do,” Gelsen said unhappily. He had told himself all that a thousand times, but something still bothered him. Perhaps he would talk it over with Macintyre.

  As the conference broke up, a thought struck him. He grinned.

  A lot of policemen were going to be out of work!

  “Now what do you think of that?” Officer Celtrics demanded. “Fifteen years in Homicide and a machine is replacing me.” He wiped a large red hand across his forehead and leaned against the captain’s desk. “Ain’t science marvelous?”

  Two other policemen, late of Homicide, nodded glumly.

  “Don’t worry about it,” the captain said. “We’ll find a home for you in Larceny, Celtrics. You’ll like it here.”

  “I just can’t get over it,” Celtrics complained. “A lousy little piece of tin and glass is going to solve all the crimes.”

  “Not quite,” the captain said. “The watchbirds are supposed to prevent the crimes before they happen.”

  “Then how’ll they be crimes?” one of the policeman asked. “I mean they can’t hang you for murder until you commit one, can they?”

  “That’s not the idea,” the captain said. “The watchbirds are supposed to stop a man before he commits a murder.”

  “Then no one arrests him?” Celtrics asked.

  “I don’t know how they’re going to work that out,” the captain admitted.

  The men were silent for a while. The captain yawned and examined his watch.

  “The thing I don’t understand,” Celtrics said, still leaning on the captain’s desk, “is just how do they do it? How did it start, Captain?”

  The captain studied Celtrics’s face for possible irony; after all, watchbird had been in the papers for months. But then he remembered that Celtrics, like his sidekicks, rarely bothered to turn past the sports pages.

  “Well,” the captain said, trying to remember what he had read in the Sunday supplements, “these scientists were working on criminology. They were studying murderers, to find out what made them tick. So they found that murderers throw out a different sort of brain wave from ordinary people. And their glands act funny, too. All this happens when they’re about to commit a murder. So these scientists worked out a special machine to flash red or something when these brain waves turned on.”