Ellison Wonderland

by Harlan Ellison

  Then too, there was the sucking valley, where the mud ran up over the walls of the canyon and dragged down those unlucky enough to be blown there during the Time of Winds. There were many things that made life hard for the Ruskind. But it was good, too.

  It was good when the triple moons rose in blue and fire–red and white. Then the coolness came. When the long magenta blossoms of the aloo broke forth and shot many feet into the air, showering all the hills till they were carpeted bright and happy with the color. And most of all, Wummel loved the sighing, whispering, chortling winds that blew to him from beyond the mountains. He had often wanted to go there, beyond the stark black mountains, and see the Wind Lord who made the happy puffs that became the wind.

  They wanted to take him from that, all that, and send him hurtling through a black and a dead and a night so deep that no man and no Ruskinda would ever see to its far end.

  He knew of the stars. He had seen them. His people spoke of them. But not to go there. Never that!

  They wanted to make a wanderer of him. They wanted him for show and study on their own base world, their Earth.

  They wanted to cast him from his home and set him — as they did — wandering on that star–road that never ended, but twisted and wound in among the eternal graves of the beings that had wandered to their deaths.

  The tears, thick and oily, started to Wummel’s eyes, even as the Earthmen let the big plug–door sigh shut, blocking away the light of Ruska. And the bolts thrust home.

  Then he felt the shivering, and the roaring, and the hungry urgency of the metal itself, as the ship pleaded to the men, thundered its desire to go. Go, and never return.

  Never stop again on this world of the three moons and the blue, blue seas, and the razor–toothed mountains, and the winds blowing from beyond those mountains. Never come again. And never!

  The takeoff was a sloppy one. Somehow the tapes had been fed in with a bit too much fervency, as though the Drivemaster had wanted away from the tiny world.

  Captain Kovasic stood with his back to the little cage. He stood watching through the viewport as the multicolored world dropped away under them, till it was a picture drawn on a blackboard.

  He felt the thoughts bubbling up in him, and he turned, reluctantly.

  He stared at the little green creature, huddled into a ball, its huge eyes staring. The creature was shivering, mocking the quivers of the ship itself. Kovasic felt that had the being possessed eyelids, it would surely have had them screwed tightly, painfully shut.

  The thoughts roiled and swirled, like dirty oil on an angry sea, and he felt the rising of his own longing in his throat. A longing he had never actually known he possessed.

  He knew, with a startling burst of clarity, the writing in the Book of the Ancestors. He knew of the Ruskind and of the roots that grow deeper, far deeper, than the mere roots of race. He knew he was a wanderer, that all his people were wanderers, and how they would end. He knew, too, what he had done to Wummel.

  He watched as the little creature’s golden eyes frosted over, and its fur ceased quivering.

  The First Mate had not wanted to come to the bridge. He had known the creature was there, and he had not relished the ideas and disturbing thoughts the being seemed to create.

  But he came, because he knew the progress report must be delivered. At all times the Captain must know how far they had come, how fast they were going, how soon they would arrive.

  All the information of running.

  When he stepped onto the bridge, he saw only the Captain’s back, and the blind, blank black face of the viewport. The Captain had deaded it. Space was cut off for the first time since the ship had been launched.

  “Captain . . . ?” His voice was a softness, as though all the fragile glass and spiderweb of the silence hanging between them might shatter.

  “It died,” Kovasic said, staring straight ahead into nowhere.

  “Died? The specimen? How? What could have . . . ?”

  “It couldn’t live away from the planet. We broke its heart. It’s that simple; laugh if you want — breaking its heart — but it died, that’s all. And now we’ll go home. Home.” He said the last word with an odd, thick sound. As though it had been something he had known so very long age, and forgotten, and substituted another meaning for it, and now suddenly had learned what it was again, and knew he was damned because it was beyond him forever.

  “The Command. It’ll be — it’ll get swallowed by the mercantile…” The First began, fumblingly.

  The Captain whirled, his face half–angry, half–imploring.

  “Don’t you understand, Charlie? Don’t you know? You ran away from the creature, you must have heard what it said.

  “Don’t you see? The Command, the mercantile guilds, Earth, the searching, the always hungering for more more more more . . . ”

  He ground to a stop, as though it all meant what he said it meant. Empty nothing.

  Then he said the one thing that did matter. He said it knowing he was sounding the one truth that was inescapable. The one truth that Wummel had died because he knew had been deprived him:

  “There is no home, if there is no rest. There is no rest if there is no Home.”

  Then he turned back to the viewport. The First Mate moved to leave, but the soft words of the Captain, spoken against the deaded surface, stopped all movement. Staring at the empty surface, he murmured.

  “It died, and the last thing it felt . . . ” He paused.

  “It pitied us, Charlie. That’s all. It didn’t hate us for killing it.

  “It just pitied us.”

  In the original edition of ELLISON WONDERLAND, this space was occupied by a short story appearing under the title, “The Forces that Crush.” Some years later I rewrote it, included it in my collection THE BEAST THAT SHOUTED LOVE AT THE HEART OF THE WORLD, and it appeared under the title Paul Fairman gave it when he published it in Amazing Stories back in the fifties: “Are You Listening?” I didn’t want to let it appear twice so soon, so I’ve pulled out of obscurity a nice little fable about a robot that I’ve always liked. Now, if it weren’t that my old friend Isaac Asimov has written just about everything there is to write about robots (and what Ike didn’t do, Kuttner did as Lewis Padgett), I would have no trepidations, but Ike and I have been gigging each other with love and truculence for almost twenty–five years, and I just know he’ll have some smartass remarks to make the next time I see him, when, with twinkle in eye, he finds some circumlocutious way to compare his famous robotics stories with my humble, yet undeniably brilliant, effort called

  Back to the Drawing Boards

  Perhaps it was inevitable, and perhaps it was only a natural result of the twisted eugenics that produced Leon Packett. In either case, the invention of the perambulating vid–robot came about, and nothing has been at all the same since.

  The inevitability factor was a result of live tri–vid, and the insatiable appetite for novelty of the vid audience. If vid broadcasts came from Bermuda in tri–vid color with feelie and whiff, then they wanted wide–band transmission from the heart of the Sudetenland. If they got that, it wasn’t enough; next they wanted programs from the top of Everest. And when they had accomplished that — God only knows how — the voracious idiot mind of the audiences demanded more. They demanded live casts from the Millstone, circling above the Earth; then it was Lunar fantasies with authentic settings . . . and Mars . . . and Venus . . . and the Outer Cold Ones.

  Finally, Leon Packett stumbled upon the secret of a perfect, self–contained tri–vid camera, operating off a minute force–bead generator; and in his warped way, he struck instantly to the truth of the problem — that the only camera that could penetrate to those inner niches of the universe that the eyes of man demanded to glimpse, was a man himself.

  How completely simple it was. The only gatherer of facts as seen by the eyes of a m
an . . . were the eyes of a man. But since no man would volunteer to have his head sliced open, his brains scooped out, and a tri–vid camera inserted, Leon Packett invented Walkaway.

  In all due to the devil, it was coldly logical, and it was a beautiful bit of workmanship. Walkaway had the form of a human being, even to ball–and–socket joints at the knees and elbows. He stood just under seven feet tall, and his hide was a burnished permanodized alumasteel suit. His hands could be screwed off, and in their stead could be inserted any one of three dozen “duty” hands, withdrawn from storage crypts, located in the limbs. His head was the only part of him that was slightly more than human. Brilliantly so, again offering Satan his plaudits.

  Where the center of the face on a human would have been, the revolving lens wheel with its five turrets bulked strangely. Beneath the lens wheel a full–range audio grid lay with criss–crossed strangeness. The audio pickups were located on either side, as well as front and rear, of the head.

  Two sets of controls were used on Walkaway. One set was imbedded in the right arm (and would snap up at the proper coded pressing of a lock–snit at the wrist) and was chiefly used by Walkaway himself when he was asked to play back what he had heard or seen.

  The other console controls were in the back, and to my knowledge, were never employed after Walkaway’s initial test runs. He disliked being pawed.

  Naturally, there were dissenters when Walkaway was born. “Dissent” ennobles the hysteria. The machine can kill, a few said. They were the most rational of the opponents to giving a thing (their word) with that powerful a metal body . . . volition and “conscience.” But in one of the rare instances of ratiocination and decency subduing the paranoid bestiality humans like to call “common sense,” the neoluddites were shouted down. The creature — well, wasn’t he? — had to have the right of free choice, if he was going to get the story in all its fullness and with a modicum of imagination, which the vid audience demanded.

  So Walkaway was made more human.

  He was able to disagree, to be surprised, to follow instructions almost as they were given, and to select the viewing subjects he wished, when he was filming. Walkaway was a most remarkable . . . what?

  Creature.

  “Leon, you’ve got to do it. Don’t be obstinate, that’s just being foolish. They’ll get him somehow, Leon!”

  Leon Packett spun in the chair, facing the window. His back was very straight, and his neck held a rigid aloofness. “Get out, McCollum. Get out and tell your pony–soldiers to do the same. Leave me alone!”

  Alan McCollum threw up his hands in eloquent frustration. “Lee, I’m trying to get through to you, for God’s sake! All I ask is you listen to them, and then make a decision — ”

  Packett spun in the chair. His feet hit the floor with a resounding clump and he leaned one elbowed arm at McCollum. His index finger was an unwavering spear, the tip of which aimed between McCollum’s sensitive dark brown eyes.

  “Now look, McCollum. I spent fifteen years in a cellar lab, working what I could, and experimenting as best I could, soldering old pieces together because I couldn’t get a Frericks Grant. Then I happened to think of putting two old gadgets together, and I came up with a miracle. Now I’m big time, and the Frericks Foundation uses me in their institutional advertisements.”

  His lean, horsey face was becoming ruby–blotched.

  “But Walkaway is mine, McCollum! Mine! I dreamed him up and I sweated constructing him. I starved for fifteen years, McCollum. Fifteen. You know how long that is? While you and all your MIT buddies were piddling around putting chrome on old discoveries, I was missing all the good things.”

  McCollum’s jaws worked. His eyes dulled with suppressed fury. “That isn’t fair, Lee. You almost enjoy your misery, and you know it.”

  Packett stood up. His face was a crimson and milk patchwork. “Get out!” he snarled. His thin lips worked loosely, and his nostrils flared. “Get out and leave me alone. Walkaway is not going to Carina. Not Epsilon Carinae, not Miaplacidus, nowhere in Carina. Walkaway is staying here, where I can keep getting my commissions, where I can guarantee my future. It’s been too dirty for me to start being patriotic now, McCollum, so you can trot out there and tell your Space Patrol buddies I’m not in the market.”

  McCollum was about to shout an answer, but he stood up instead. Stood up and stared at the contorted features of Leon Packett.

  He turned and took three steps to the slidoor. With his palm — but not fingertips — fitted into the depression, he paused, and looked back at Packett. “There are doctors who can help you, Leon.”

  “Get out, you sonofabitch!”

  A heavy plastex ashtray crashed into the wall beside McCollum’s head. His fingertips touched and the door slid.

  Perhaps he knew it was inevitable. The machinery he had always despised, now ground its wishes out in the dust of his ambitions. He had suffered by his own hand, and had cursed the powers that had overlooked him. But now they wanted his vid–robot, his Walkaway. He knew they would reimburse him handsomely, but that was not what he sought.

  Packett knew, and he moved to preserve his will, despite the loss of his invention. Late into the night he worked, on the smallest, most unnoticeable alterations in the printed circuitry of Walkaway’s “mind” and “conscience.” Late into the night on a space of plastex no larger than the surface of an eyeball. And when he fell into an exhausted sleep, as the daylight ribboned across the laboratory walls, Walkaway stood as he had stood.

  Unchanged.

  Apparently.

  But changed.

  Inwardly.

  He managed to salvage his old age. By the simple expedient of refusing to allow ownership to switch from his hands — and after his death the hands of the Frericks Foundation — into the hands of the military, he preserved a hold on Walkaway. The Guard — his terminology “Space Patrol” had long since been aborted, despite the tabloids’ efforts to keep it alive — were forced to hire Walkaway. They signed him on as a civilian employee, paid a monthly wage, a per diem remuneration, as well as travel expenses.

  The wages were to be paid on demand, and books were kept by the Frericks Foundation, whose interest in Packett and Walkaway were more than merely scientific. With the world–famous Leon Packett associated with them, there could be no doubt about doles and grants. The Frericks Foundation had men at its helm whose interests penetrated into other fields than scientific: politics, finance, authority. The men were exceedingly careful to keep books.

  The Guard’s first enterprise in which Walkaway figured prominently was the remote from Bounce Point.

  Bounce Point was the super–satellite constructed out beyond Pluto. It had been thrown up as the last outpost of Solar enterprise. Man’s final touch with what was known, before he leaped off into the unknown.

  From Bounce Point, great and silver and ebony in Pluto’s sky, Walkaway was destined to begin the long ride out.

  McCollum and his contemporaries had not been idle. While Leon Packett nursed his hatred of Authority and the Machine of Empire, they had been hard at work. The warp–drive was ready. Nuzzling the gleaming inner hull of its drive chamber, the warp–drive was larger than later models would surely have to be. It was a giant nest of power units, small inside larger, larger inside still larger, and finally, resting in a brace–socket at the tip of the final unit, a force–bead of incalculable power. That was the random factor. How hard could the warp–drive be pushed by this force–bead?

  What were the effects on a man, sent through not–space?

  For the test, what better guinea pig than a metal man with a camera face. In tri–vid, with audio pickup, what better record could be offered for study.

  The initial flight of W–1 to Carina, lost in the star heaps of space, would be accomplished with no human hand at the controls. The robot would take the bounce.

  Leon Packett lay o
n a dirty bunk in a haven back of the CentralPort space pads. The room was a flop, with the tackboard walls only stretching halfway to the ceiling. The other half of the wall was strand–wire, put in to offer a slight deterrent to thieves in the other cubicles, in no way to offer privacy. Packett lay on the bunk, a half–emptied bottle of Paizley’s rigid between his side and his arm, held upright by his armpit. His long, almost oriental eyes were closed in stupor, and his horsey face was a Madame Toussoud wax reproduction. His breathing was irregular . . .

  … when McCollum found him.

  “Packett!” All civility was gone. There are worse things than insults. The insults had not alienated McCollum. The others had. “Packett! They want you. Get out, Packett!”

  He dragged the bottle with its sour smell from Leon Packett’s armpit, and threw it to the floor. Where the wrench of the bottle had not disturbed the drunken man, where McCollum’s shot–like shouts had not roused him, the soft gurgling emptying of the bottle succeeded.

  Packett came straight up on the bunk, hands in his wild hair, and he screamed. With eyes closed, with deep lined areas about the sockets, he shrieked. “Let me alone!”

  Then he opened his eyes.

  After he had sobbed, and dry–heaved, McCollum got him to his feet, and out of the filthy, wino–odored cubicle. There was a small argument about three days rent, with a ferret–like man behind the cage, but McCollum flashed over a five–note and they went into the street. Where the sounds of traffic overhead on the expressways deafened Packett, rising over him, like the spread, leathery wings of a pterodactyl, and dropped over him with suffocating strength. He tried to bolt back into the building.

  McCollum was forced to hit him.