The People Trap

by Sheckley, Robert;

  “It’s possible,” Malley agreed. “An unsuccessful compromise—but what could it mean?”

  “Chaos.” Cercy remembered Darrig’s mentioning that word in his telephone call. “That was the original state of the universe in Greek myth, wasn’t it? The formlessness out of which everything came?”

  “Something like that,” Malley said. “And Medusa was one of those three sisters with the horrible faces.”

  Cercy stood for a moment, staring at the paper. Chaos… Medusa.. .and organizing principle! Of course!

  “I think—” He turned and ran from the room. Malley looked at him; then loaded a hypodermic and followed.

  In the control room, Cercy shouted Harrison into consciousness.

  “Listen,” he said, “I want you to build something, quick. Do you hear me?”

  “Sure.” Harrison blinked and sat up. “What’s the rush?”

  “I know what Darrig wanted to tell us,” Cercy said. “Come on, I’ll tell you what I want. And Malley, put down that hypodermic. I haven’t cracked. I want you to get me a book on Greek mythology. And hurry it up.”

  Finding a Greek mythology isn’t an easy task at two o’clock in the morning. With the aid of FBI men, Malley routed a book-dealer out of bed. He got his book and hurried back.

  Cercy was red-eyed and excited, and Harrison and his helpers were working away at three crazy-looking rigs. Cercy snatched the book from Malley, looked up one item, and put it down.

  “Great work,” he said. “We’re all set now. Finished, Harrison?”

  “Just about.” Harrison and ten helpers were screwing in the last parts. “Will you tell me what this is?”

  “Me too,” Malley put in.

  “I don’t mean to be secretive,” Cercy said. “I’m just in a hurry. I’ll explain as we go along.” He stood up. “Okay, let’s wake up the Ambassador.”

  They watched the screen as a bolt of electricity leaped from the ceiling to the Ambassador’s bed. Immediately, the Ambassador vanished.

  “Now he’s a part of that stream of electrons, right’“ Cercy asked.

  “That’s what he told us,” Malley said.

  “But still keeping his pattern within the stream,” Cercy continued. “He has to, in order to get back into his own shape. Now we start the first disrupter.”

  Harrison hooked the machine into circuit and sent his helpers away.

  “Here’s a running graph of the electron stream,” Cercy said. “See the difference?” On the graph there was an irregular series of peaks and valleys, constantly shifting and leveling. “Do you remember when you hypnotized the Ambassador? He talked about his friend who’d been killed in space.”

  “That’s right,” Malley nodded. “His friend had been killed by something that had just popped up.”

  “He said something else,” Cercy went on. “He told us that the basic organizing force of the universe usually stopped things like that. What does that mean to you?”

  “The organizing force,” Malley repeated slowly. “Didn’t Darrig say that was a new natural law?”

  “He did. But think of the implications, as Darrig did. If an organizing principle is engaged in some work, there must be something that opposes it. That which opposes organization is—”

  “Chaos!”

  “That’s what Darrig thought and what we should have seen. The Chaos is underlying, and out of it there arose an organizing principle. This principle, if I’ve got it right, sought to suppress the fundamental Chaos, to make all things regular.

  “But the Chaos still boils out in spots, as Alfern found out. Perhaps the organizational pattern is weaker in space. Anyhow, those spots are dangerous, until the organizing principle gets to work on them.”

  He turned to the panel. “Okay, Harrison. Throw in the second disrupter.” The peaks and valleys altered on the graph. They started to mount in crazy, meaningless configurations.

  “Take Darrig’s message in the light of that. Chaos, we know, is underlying. Everything was formed out of it. The Gorgon Medusa was something that couldn’t be looked upon. She turned men into stone, you recall, destroyed them. So, Darrig found a relationship between Chaos and that which can’t be looked upon. All with regard to the Ambassador, of course.”

  “The Ambassador can’t look upon Chaos!” Malley cried.

  “That’s it. The Ambassador is capable of an infinite number of alterations and permutations. But something—the matrix—can’t change, because then there would be nothing left. To destroy something as abstract as a pattern, we need a state in which no pattern is possible. A state of Chaos.”

  The third disrupter was thrown into circuit. The graph looked as if a drunken caterpillar had been sketching on it.

  “Those disrupters are Harrison’s idea,” Cercy said. “I told him I wanted an electrical current with absolutely no coherent pattern. The disrupters are an extension of radio jamming. The first alters the electrical pattern. That’s its purpose: to produce a state of pattemless-ness. The second tries to destroy the pattern left by the first; the third tries to destroy the pattern made by the first two. They’re fed back then, and any remaining pattern is systematically destroyed in circuit—I hope.”

  “This is supposed to produce a state of Chaos?” Malley asked, looking into the screen.

  For a while there was only the whining of the machines and the crazy doodling of the graph. Then, in the middle of the Ambassador’s room, a spot appeared. It wavered, shrank, expanded.

  What happened was indescribable. All they knew was that everything within the spot had disappeared.

  “Switch it off!” Cercy shouted. Harrison cut the switch.

  The spot continued to grow.

  “How is it we’re able to look at it?” Malley asked, staring at the screen.

  “The shield of Perseus, remember?” Cercy said. “Using it as a mirror, he could look at Medusa.”

  “It’s still growing!” Malley shouted.

  “There was a calculated risk in all this,” Cercy said. “There’s always the possibility that the Chaos may go on, unchecked. If that happens, it won’t matter much what—”

  The spot stopped growing. Its edges wavered and rippled, and then it started to shrink.

  “The organizing principle,” Cercy said, and collapsed into a chair.

  “Any sign of the Ambassador?” he asked in a few minutes.

  The spot was still wavering. Then it was gone. Instantly there was an explosion. The steel walls buckled inwards, but held. The screen went dead.

  “The spot removed all the air from the room,” Cercy explained, “as well as the furniture and the Ambassador.”

  “He couldn’t take it,” Malley said. “No pattern can cohere in a state of patternlessness. He’s gone to join Alfern.”

  Malley started to giggle. Cercy felt like joining him, but pulled himself together.

  “Take it easy,” he said. “We’re not through yet.”

  “Sure we are! The Ambassador—”

  “Is out of the way. But there’s still an alien fleet homing in on this region of space. A fleet so strong we couldn’t scratch it with an H-bomb. They’ll be looking for us.”

  He stood up. “Go home and get some sleep. Something tells me that tomorrow we’re going to have to start figuring out some way of camouflaging a planet.”

  GHOST V

  “He’s reading our sign now,” Gregor said, his long bony face pressed against the peephole in the office door.

  “Let me see,” Arnold said.

  Gregor pushed him back. “He’s going to knock—no, he’s changed his mind. He’s leaving.”

  Arnold returned to his desk and laid out another game of solitaire. Gregor kept watch at the peephole.

  They had constructed the peephole out of sheer boredom three months after forming their partnership and renting the office. During that time, the AAA Ace Planet Decontamination Service had had no business—in spite of being first in the telephone book. Planetary decontamination was a
n old, established line, completely monopolized by two large outfits. It was discouraging for a small new firm run by two young men with big ideas and a lot of unpaid-for equipment.

  “He’s coming back,” Gregor called. “Quick—look busy and important!”

  Arnold swept his cards into a drawer and just finished buttoning his lab gown when the knock came.

  Their visitor was a short, bald, tired-looking man. He stared at them dubiously.

  “You decontaminate planets?”

  “That is correct, sir,” Gregor said, pushing away a pile of papers and shaking the man’s moist hand. “I am Richard Gregor. This is my partner, Doctor Frank Arnold.”

  Arnold, impressively garbed in a white lab gown and black horn-rimmed glasses, nodded absently and resumed his examination of a row of ancient, crusted test tubes.

  “Kindly be seated, Mister—”

  “Ferngraum.”

  “Mr. Ferngraum. I think we can handle just about anything you require,” Gregor said heartily. “Flora or fauna control, cleaning atmosphere, purifying water supply, sterilizing soil, stability testing, volcano and earthquake control—anything you need to make a planet fit for human habitation.”

  Ferngraum still looked dubious. “I’m going to level with you. I’ve got a problem planet on my hands.”

  Gregor nodded confidently. “Problems are our business.”

  “I’m a freelance real-estate broker,” Ferngraum said. “You know how it works—buy a planet, sell a planet, everyone makes a living. Usually I stick with the scrub worlds and let my buyers do their decontaminating. But a few months ago I had a chance to buy a real quality planet—took it right out from under the noses of the big operators.”

  Ferngraum mopped his forehead unhappily.

  “It’s a beautiful place,” he continued with no enthusiasm whatsoever. “Average temperature of seventy-one degrees. Mountainous, but fertile. Waterfalls, rainbows, all that sort of thing. And no fauna at all.”

  “Sounds perfect,” Gregor said. “Microorganisms?”

  “Nothing dangerous.”

  “Then what’s wrong with the place?”

  Ferngraum looked embarrassed. “Maybe you heard about it. The Government catalog number is RJC-5. But everyone else calls it ‘Ghost V.”’

  Gregor raised an eyebrow. “Ghost” was an odd nickname for a planet, but he had heard odder. After all, you had to call them something. There were thousands of planet-bearing suns within spaceship range, many of them inhabitable or potentially inhabitable. And there were plenty of people from the civilized worlds who wanted to colonize them. Religious sects, political minorities, philosophic groups—or just plain pioneers, out to make a fresh start.

  “I don’t believe I’ve heard of it,” Gregor said.

  Ferngraum squirmed uncomfortably in his chair. “I should have listened to my wife. But no—I was gonna be a big operator. Paid ten times my usual price for Ghost V and now I’m stuck with it.”

  “But what’s wrong with it?” Gregor asked.

  “It seems to be haunted,” Ferngraum said in despair.

  Ferngraum had radar-checked his planet, then leased it to a combine of farmers from Dijon VI. The eight-man advance guard landed and, within a day, began to broadcast garbled reports about demons, ghouls, vampires, dinosaurs, and other inimical fauna.

  When a relief ship came for them, all were dead. An autopsy report stated that the gashes, cuts, and marks on their bodies could indeed have been made by almost anything, even demons, ghouls, vampires, or dinosaurs, if such existed.

  Ferngraum was fined for improper decontamination. The farmers dropped their lease. But he managed to lease it to a group of sun worshippers from Opal II.

  The sun worshippers were cautious. They sent their equipment, but only three men accompanied it, to scout out trouble. The men set up camp, unpacked and declared the place a paradise. They radioed the home group to come at once—then, suddenly, there was a wild scream and radio silence.

  A patrol ship went to Ghost V, buried the three mangled bodies and departed in five minutes flat.

  “And that did it,” Ferngraum said. “Now no one will touch it at any price. Space crews refuse to land on it. And I still don’t know what happened.”

  He sighed deeply and looked at Gregor. “It’s your baby, if you want it.”

  Gregor and Arnold excused themselves and went into the anteroom.

  Arnold whooped at once, “We’ve got a job!”

  “Yeah,” Gregor said, “but what a job.”

  “We wanted the tough ones,” Arnold pointed out. “If we lick this, we’re established—to say nothing of the profit we’ll make on a percentage basis.”

  “You seem to forget,” Gregor said, “I’m the one who has to actually land on the planet. All you do is sit here and interpret my data.”

  “That’s the way we set it up,” Arnold reminded him. “I’m the research department—you’re the troubleshooter. Remember?”

  Gregor remembered. Ever since childhood, he had been sticking his neck out while Arnold stayed home and told him why he was sticking his neck out.

  “I don’t like it,” he said.

  “You don’t believe in ghosts, do you?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Well, we can handle anything else. Faint heart ne’er won fair profit.”

  Gregor shrugged his shoulders. They went back to Ferngraum.

  In half an hour, they had worked out their terms—a large percentage of future development profits if they succeeded, a forfeiture clause if they failed.

  Gregor walked to the door with Ferngraum. “By the way, sir,” he asked, “how did you happen to come to us?”

  “No one else would handle it,” Ferngraum said, looking extremely pleased with himself. “Good luck.”

  Three days later, Gregor was aboard a rickety space freighter, bound for Ghost V. He spent his time studying reports on the two colonization attempts and reading survey after survey on supernatural phenomena.

  They didn’t help at all. No trace of animal life had been found on Ghost V. And no proof of the existence of supernatural creatures had been discovered anywhere in the galaxy.

  Gregor pondered this, then checked his weapons as the freighter spiraled into the region of Ghost V. He was carrying an arsenal large enough to start a small war and win it.

  If he could find something to shoot at…

  The captain of the freighter brought his ship to within several thousand feet of the smiling green surface of the planet, but no closer. Gregor parachuted his equipment to the site of the last two camps, shook hands with the captain, and ‘chuted himself down.

  He landed safely and looked up. The freighter was streaking into space as though the furies were after it.

  He was alone on Ghost V.

  After checking his equipment for breakage, he radioed Arnold that he had landed safely. Then, with drawn blaster, he inspected the sun worshippers’ camp.

  They had set themselves up at the base of a mountain, beside a small, crystal-clear lake. The prefabs were in perfect condition.

  No storm had ever damaged them, because Ghost V was blessed with a beautifully even climate. But they looked pathetically lonely.

  Gregor made a careful check of one. Clothes were still neatly packed in cabinets, pictures were hung on the wall and there was even a curtain on one window. In a corner of the room, a case of toys had been opened for the arrival of the main party’s children.

  A water pistol, a top, and a bag of marbles had spilled to the floor.

  Evening was coming, so Gregor dragged his equipment into the prefab and made his preparations. He rigged an alarm system and adjusted it so finely that even a roach would set it off. He put up a radar alarm to scan the immediate area. He unpacked his arsenal, laying the heavy rifles within easy reach, but keeping a hand-blaster in his belt. Then, satisfied, he ate a leisurely supper.

  Outside, the evening drifted into night. The warm and dreamy land grew dark.
A gentle breeze ruffled the surface of the lake and rustled silkily in the tall grass.

  It was all very peaceful.

  The settlers must have been hysterical types, he decided. They had probably panicked and killed each other.

  After checking his alarm system one last time, Gregor threw his clothes on a chair, turned off the lights and climbed into bed. The room was illuminated by starlight, stronger than moonlight on Earth. His blaster was under his pillow. All was well with the world.

  He had just begun to doze off when he became aware that he was not alone in the room.

  That was impossible. His alarm system hadn’t gone off. The radar was still humming peacefully.

  Yet every nerve in his body was shrieking alarm. He eased the blaster out and looked around.

  A man was standing in a corner of the room.

  There was no time to consider how he had come. Gregor aimed the blaster and said, “Okay, raise your hands,” in a quiet, resolute voice.

  The figure didn’t move.

  Gregor’s finger tightened on the trigger, then suddenly relaxed. He recognized the man. It was his own clothing, heaped on a chair, distorted by the starlight and his own imagination.

  He grinned and lowered the blaster. The pile of clothing began to stir faintly. Gregor felt a faint breeze from the window and continued to grin.

  Then the pile of clothing stood up, stretched itself and began to walk toward him purposefully.

  Frozen to his bed, he watched the disembodied clothing, assembled roughly in man-like form, advance on him.

  When it was halfway across the room and its empty sleeves were reaching for him, he began to blast.

  And kept on blasting, for the rags and remnants slithered toward him as if filled with a life of their own. Flaming bits of cloth crowded toward his face and a belt tried to coil around his legs. He had to burn everything to ashes before the attack stopped.

  When it was over, Gregor turned on every light he could find. He brewed a pot of coffee and poured in most of a bottle of brandy. Somehow, he resisted an urge to kick his useless alarm system to pieces. Instead, he radioed his partner.

  “That’s very interesting,” Arnold said, after Gregor had brought him up to date. “Animation! Very interesting indeed.”