Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley

by Robert Sheckley

  And so, wearing a brave, artificial little smile, Jackson swung the port open and stepped out to have a little talk.

  “Well now, how y’all?” Jackson asked at once, just to hear the sound of his own voice.

  The nearest aliens shrank away from him. Nearly all of them were frowning. Several of the younger ones carried bronze knives in a forearm scabbard. These were clumsy weapons, but as effective as anything ever invented. The aliens started to draw.

  “Now take it easy,” Jackson said, keeping his voice light and unalarmed.

  They drew their knives and began to edge forward. Jackson stood his ground, waiting, ready to bolt through the hatch like a jet-propelled jackrabbit, hoping he could make it.

  Then a third man (might as well call them “men,” Jackson decided) stepped in front of the belligerent two. This one was older. He spoke rapidly. He gestured. The two with the knives looked.

  “That’s right,” Jackson said encouragingly. “Take a good look. Heap big spaceship. Plenty strong medicine. Vehicle of great power, fabricated by a real advanced technology. Sort of makes you stop and think, doesn’t it?”

  It did.

  The aliens had stopped; and if not thinking, they were at least doing a great deal of talking. They pointed at the ship, then back at their city.

  “You’re getting the idea,” Jackson told them. “Power speaks a universal language, eh, cousins?”

  He had been witness to many of these scenes on many different planets. He could nearly write their dialogue for them. It usually went like this:

  Intruder lands in outlandish space vehicle, thereby eliciting (1) curiosity, (2) fear, and (3) hostility. After some minutes of awed contemplation, one autochthon usually says to his friend: “Hey, that damned metal thing packs one hell of a lot of power.”

  “You’re right, Herbie,” his friend Fred, the second autochthon, replies.

  “You bet I’m right,” Herbie says. “And, hell, with that much power and technology and stuff, this son-of-a-gun could like enslave us. I mean he really could.”

  “You’ve hit it, Herbie, that’s just exactly what could happen.”

  “So what I say,” Herbie continues, “I say, let’s not take any risks. I mean, sure, he looks friendly enough, but he’s just got too damned much power, and that’s not right. And right now is the best chance we’ll ever get to take him on account of he’s just standing there waiting for like an ovation or something. So let’s put this bastard out of his misery, and then we can talk the whole thing over and see how it stacks up situationwise.”

  “By Jesus, I’m with you!” cries Fred. Others signify their assent.

  “Good for you, lads,” cries Herbie. “Let’s wade in and take this alien joker like now!”

  So they start to make their move; but suddenly, at the last second, Old Doc (the third autochthon) intervenes, saying, “Hold it a minute, boys, we can’t do it like that. For one thing, we got laws around here—”

  “To hell with that,” says Fred (a born troublemaker and somewhat simple to boot).

  “—and aside from the laws, it would be just too damned dangerous for us.”

  “Me ’n’ Fred here ain’t scared,” says valiant Herb. “Maybe you better go take in a movie or something, Doc. Us guys’ll handle this.”

  “I was not referring to a short-range personal danger,” Old Doc says scornfully. “What I fear is the destruction of our city, the slaughter of our loved ones, and the annihilation of our culture.”

  Herb and Fred stop. “What you talking about. Doc? He’s just one stinking alien; you push a knife in his guts, he’ll bleed like anyone else.”

  “Fools! Schlemiels!” thunders wise Old Doc. “Of course, you can kill him! But what happens after that?”

  “Huh?” says Fred, squinting his china-blue pop eyes.

  “Idiots! Cochons! You think this is the only spaceship these aliens got? You think they don’t even know whereabouts this guy has gone? Man, you gotta assume they got plenty more ships where this one came from, and you gotta also assume that they’ll be damned mad if this ship doesn’t show up when it’s supposed to, and you gotta assume that when these aliens learn the score, they’re gonna be damned sore and buzz back here and stomp on everything and everybody.”

  “How come I gotta assume that?” asks feeble-witted Fred.

  “’Cause it’s what you’d do in a deal like that, right?”

  “I guess maybe I would at that,” says Fred with a sheepish grin. “Yeah, I just might do that little thing. But look, maybe they wouldn’t.”

  “Maybe, maybe,” mimics wise Old Doc. “Well, baby, we can’t risk the whole ball game on a goddamned maybe. We can’t afford to kill this alien joker on the chance that maybe his people wouldn’t do what any reasonable-minded guy would do, which is, namely, to blow us all to hell.”

  “Well, I suppose we maybe can’t,” Herbie says. “But Doc, what can we do?”

  “Just wait and see what he wants.”

  2

  A scene very much like that, according to reliable reconstruction, had been enacted at least thirty or forty times. It usually resulted in a policy of wait and see. Occasionally, the contactor from Earth was killed before wise counsel could prevail; but Jackson was paid to take risks like that.

  Whenever the contactor was killed, retribution followed with swift and terrible inevitability. Also with regret, of course, because Earth was an extremely civilized place and accustomed to living within the law. No civilized, law-abiding race likes to commit genocide. In fact, the folks on Earth consider genocide a very unpleasant matter, and they don’t like to read about it or anything like it in their morning papers. Envoys must be protected, of course, and murder must be punished; everybody knows that. But it still doesn’t feel nice to read about a genocide over your morning coffee. News like that can spoil a man’s entire day. Three or four genocides and a man just might get angry enough to switch his vote.

  Fortunately, there was never much occasion for that sort of mess. Aliens usually caught on pretty fast. Despite the language barrier, aliens learned that you simply don’t kill Earthmen.

  And then, later, bit by bit, they learned all the rest.

  The hotheads had sheathed their knives. Everybody was smiling except Jackson, who was grinning like a hyena. The aliens were making graceful arm and leg motions, probably of welcome.

  “Well, that’s real nice,” Jackson said, making a few graceful gestures of his own. “Makes me feel real to-home. And now, suppose you take me to your leader, show me the town, and all that jazz. Then I’ll set myself down and figure out that lingo of yours, and we’ll have a little talk. And after that, everything will proceed splendidly. En avant!”

  So saying, Jackson stepped out at a brisk pace in the direction of the city. After a brief hesitation, his newfound friends fell into step behind him.

  Everything was moving according to plan.

  Jackson, like all the other contactors, was a polyglot of singular capabilities. As basic equipment, he had an eidetic memory and an extremely discriminating ear. More important, he possessed a startling aptitude for language and an uncanny intuition for meaning. When Jackson came up against an incomprehensible tongue, he picked out, quickly and unerringly, the significant units, the fundamental building blocks of the language. Quite without effort he sorted vocalizations into cognitive, volitional, and emotional aspects of speech. Grammatical elements presented themselves at once to his practiced ear. Prefixes and suffixes were no trouble; word sequence, pitch, and reduplication were no sweat. He didn’t know much about the science of linguistics, but he didn’t need to know. Jackson was a natural. Linguistics had been developed to describe and explain things which he knew intuitively.

  He had not yet encountered the language which he could not learn. He never really expected to find one. As he often told his friends in the Forked Tongue Club in New York, “Waal, shukins, there just really ain’t nuthin’ tough about them alien tongues. Leastwise, not the
ones I’ve run across. I mean that sincerely. I mean to tell you, boys, that the man who can express himself in Sioux or Khmer ain’t going to encounter too much trouble out there amongst the stars.”

  And so it had been, to date ...

  Once in the city, there were many tedious ceremonies which Jackson had to endure. They stretched on for three days—about par for the course; it wasn’t every day that a traveler from space came in for a visit. So naturally enough every mayor, governor, president, and alderman, and their wives, wanted to shake his hand. It was all very understandable, but Jackson resented the waste of his time. He had work to do, some of it not very pleasant, and the sooner he got started, the quicker it would be over.

  On the fourth day he was able to reduce the official nonsense to a minimum. That was the day on which he began in earnest to learn the local language.

  A language, as any linguist will tell you, is undoubtedly the most beautiful creation one is ever likely to encounter. But with that beauty goes a certain element of danger.

  Language might aptly be compared to the sparkling, ever-changing face of the sea. Like the sea, you never know what reefs may be concealed in its pellucid depths. The brightest water hides the most treacherous shoals.

  Jackson, well prepared for trouble, encountered none at first. The main language (Hon) of this planet (Na) was spoken by the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants (En-a-To-Na—literally, men of the Na, or Naians, as Jackson preferred to think of them). Hon seemed quite a straightforward affair. It used one term for one concept, and allowed no fusions, juxtapositions, or agglutinations. Concepts were built up by sequences of simple words (“spaceship” was ho-pa-aie-an—boat-flying-outer-sky). Thus, Hon was very much like Chinese and Annamite on Earth. Pitch differences were employed not only intentionally to differentiate between homonyns, but also positionally, to denote gradations of “perceived realism,” bodily discomfort, and three classes of pleasurable expectation. All of which was mildly interesting but of no particular difficulty to a competent linguist.

  To be sure, a language like Hon was rather a bore because of the long word-lists one had to memorize. But pitch and position could be fun, as well as being absolutely essential if one wanted to make any sense out of the sentence units. So, taken all in all, Jackson was not dissatisfied, and he absorbed the language as quickly as it could be given to him.

  It was a proud day for Jackson, about a week later, when he could say to his tutor: “A very nice and pleasant good morning to you, most estimable and honored tutor, and how is your blessed health upon this glorious day?”

  “Felicitations most ird wunk!” the tutor replied with a smile of deep warmth. “Your accent, dear pupil, is superb! Positively gor nak, in fact, and your grasp of my dear mother tongue is little short of ur nak tai.”

  Jackson glowed all over from the gentle old tutor’s compliments. He felt quite pleased with himself. Of course, he hadn’t recognized several words; ird wunk and ur nak tai sounded faintly familiar, but gor nak was completely unknown. Still, lapses were expected of a beginner in any language. He did know enough to understand the Naians and to make himself understood by them. And that was what his job required.

  He returned to his spaceship that afternoon. The hatch had been standing open during his entire stay on Na, but he found that not a single article had been stolen. He shook his head ruefully at this but refused to let it upset him. He loaded his pockets with a variety of objects and sauntered back to the city. He was ready to perform the final and most important part of his job.

  3

  In the heart of the business district, at the intersection of Um and Alhretto, he found what he was looking for: a real-estate office. He entered and was taken to the office of Mr. Erum, a junior partner of the firm.

  “Well, well, well, well!” Erum said, shaking hands heartily. “This is a real honor, sir, a very considerable and genuine privilege. Are you thinking of acquiring a piece of property?”

  “That was my intention,” Jackson said. “Unless, of course, you have discriminatory laws that forbid your selling to a foreigner.”

  “No difficulty there,” Erum said. “In fact, it’ll be a veritable orai of a pleasure to have a man from your distant and glorious civilization in our midst.”

  Jackson restrained a snicker. “The only other difficulty I can imagine is the question of legal tender. I don’t have any of your currency, of course; but I have certain quantities of gold, platinum, diamonds, and other objects which are considered valuable on Earth.”

  “They are considered valuable here, too,” Erum said. “Quantities, did you say? My dear sir, we will have no difficulties; not even a blaggle shall mit or ows, as the poet said.”

  “Quite so,” Jackson replied. Erum was using some words he didn’t know, but that didn’t matter. The main drift was clear enough. “Now, suppose we begin with a nice industrial site. After all, I’ll have to do something with my time. And after that, we can pick out a house.”

  “Most decidedly prominex,” Erum said gaily. “Suppose I just raish through my listings here ... Yes, what do you say to a bromicaine factory? It’s in a first-class condition and could easily be converted to vor manufacture or used as it is.”

  “Is there any real market for bromicaine?” Jackson asked.

  “Well, bless my muergentan, of course there is! Bromicaine is indispensable, though its sales are seasonable. You see, refined bromicaine, or ariisi, is used by the protigash devolvers, who of course harvest by the solstice season, except in those branches of the industry that have switched over to ticothene revature. Those from a steadily—”

  “Fine, fine,” Jackson said. He didn’t care what a bromicaine was and never expected to see one. As long as it was a gainful employment of some kind, it filled his specifications.

  “I’ll buy it,” he said.

  “You won’t regret it,” Erum told him. “A good bromicaine factory is a garveldis hagatis, and menifoy as well.”

  “Sure,” Jackson said, wishing that he had a more extensive Hon vocabulary. “How much?”

  “Well, sir, the price is no difficulty. But first you’ll have to fill out the ollanbrit form. It is just a few sken questions which ny naga of everyone.”

  Erum handed Jackson the form. The first question read: “Have you, now or at any past time, elikated mushkies forsically? State date of all occurrences. If no occurrences, state the reason for transgrishal reduct as found.”

  Jackson read no further. “What does it mean,” he asked Erum, “to elikate mushkies forsically?”

  “Mean?” Erum smiled uncertainly. “Why, it means exactly what it says. Or so I would imagine.”

  “I meant,” Jackson said, “that I do not understand the words. Could you explain them to me?”

  “Nothing simpler, Erum replied. “To elikate mushkies is almost the same as a bifur probishkai.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Jackson said.

  “It means—well, to elikate is really rather simple, though perhaps not in the eyes of the law. Scorbadising is a form of elikation, and so is manruv garing. Some say that when we breathe drorsically in the evening subsis, we are actually elikating. Personally, I consider that a bit fanciful.”

  “Let’s try mushkies,” Jackson suggested.

  “By all means, let’s!” Erum replied, with a coarse boom of laughter. “If only one could—eh!” He dug Jackson in the ribs with a sly elbow.

  “Hm, yes,” Jackson replied coldly. “Perhaps you could tell me what, exactly, a mushkie is?”

  “Of course. As it happens, there is no such thing,” Erum replied. “Not in the singular, at any rate. One mushkie would be a logical fallacy, don’t you see?”

  “I’ll take your word for it. What are mushkies?”

  “Well, primarily, they’re the object of elikation. Secondarily, they are half-sized wooden sandals which are used to stimulate erotic fantasies among the Kutor religionists.”

  “Now we’re getting someplace!” Jackson cried
.

  “Only if your tastes happen to run that way,” Erum answered with discernible coldness.

  “I meant in terms of understanding the question on the form—”

  “Of course, excuse me,” Erum said. “But you see, the question asks if you have ever elikated mushkies forsically. And that makes all the difference.”

  “Does it really?”

  “Of course! The modification changes the entire meaning.”

  “I was afraid that it would,” Jackson said. “I don’t suppose you could explain what forsically means?”

  “I certainly can!” Erum said. “Our conversation now could—with a slight assist from the deme imagination—be termed a ‘forsically designed talk.’”

  “Ah,” said Jackson.

  “Quite so,” said Erum. “Forsically is a mode, a manner. It means ‘spiritually-forward-leading-by-way-of-fortuitous-friendship.’”

  “That’s a little more like it,” Jackson said. “In that case, when one elikates mushkies forsically—”

  “I’m terribly afraid you’re on the wrong track,” Erum said. “The definition I gave you applies only to conversations. It is something rather different when one speaks of mushkies.”

  “What does it mean then?”

  “Well, it means—or rather it expresses—an advanced and intensified case of mushkie elikidation, but with a definite nmogmetic bias. I consider it a rather unfortunate phraseology, personally.”

  “How would you put it?”

  “I’d lay it on the line and to hell with the fancy talk,” Erum said toughly. “I’d come right out and say: ‘Have you now or at any other time dunfiglers voc in illegal, immoral, or insirtis circumstances, with or without the aid and/or consent of a brachniian? If so, state when and why. If not, state neugris kris and why not.’”