Citizen in Space

by Robert Sheckley

  “Why did you give the assignment to that particular man?” Mr. Grent asked.

  “Well,” the mayor said, “I figured if anyone could kill, Tom could. He’s a fisher, you know. Pretty gory work.”

  “Then the rest of you would be equally unable to kill?”

  “We wouldn’t even get as far as Tom did,” the mayor admitted sadly.

  Mr. Grent and the inspector looked at each other, then at the soldiers. The soldiers were staring at the villagers with wonder and respect They started to whisper among themselves.

  “Attention!” the inspector bellowed. He turned to Grent and said in a low voice, “We’d better get away from here. Men in our armies who can’t kill….”

  “The morale,” Mr. Grent said. He shuddered. “The possibility of infection. One man in a key position endangering a ship—perhaps a fleet—because he can’t fire a weapon. It isn’t worth the risk.”

  They ordered the soldiers back to the ship. The soldiers seemed to march more slowly than usual, and they looked back at the village. They whispered together, even though the inspector was bellowing orders.

  The small ship took off in a flurry of jets. Soon it was swallowed in the large ship. And then the large ship was gone.

  The edge of the enormous watery red sun was just above the horizon.

  “You can come out now,” the mayor called. Tom emerged from the underbrush, where he had been hiding, watching everything.

  “I bungled it,” he said miserably.

  “Don’t feel bad about it,” Billy Painter told him. “It was an impossible job.”

  “I’m afraid it was,” the mayor said, as they walked back to the village. “I thought that just possibly you could swing it. But you can’t be blamed. There’s not another man in the village who could have done the job even as well.”

  “What’ll we do with these buildings?” Billy Painter asked, motioning at the jail, the post office, the church, and the little red school- house.

  The mayor thought deeply for a moment “I know,” he said. “We’ll build a playground for the kids. Swings and slides and sandboxes and things.”

  “Another playground?” Tom asked.

  “Sure. Why not?”

  There was no reason, of course, why not

  “I won’t be needing this any more, I guess,” Tom said, handing the skulking permit to the mayor.

  “No, I guess not,” said the mayor. They watched him sorrowfully as he tore it up. “Well, we did our best. It just wasn’t good enough.”

  “I had the chance,” Tom muttered, “and I let you all down.”

  Billy Painter put a comforting hand on his shoulder. “It’s not your fault, Tom. It’s not the fault of any of us. It’s just what comes of not being civilized for two hundred years. Look how long it took Earth to get civilized. Thousands of years. And we were trying to do it in two weeks.”

  “Well, we’ll just have to go back to being uncivilized,” the mayor said with a hollow attempt at cheerfulness.

  Tom yawned, waved, went home to catch up on lost sleep. Before entering, he glanced at the sky.

  Thick, swollen clouds had gathered overhead and every one of them had a black lining. The fall rains were almost here. Soon he could start fishing again.

  Now why couldn’t he have thought of the inspector as a fish? He was too tired to examine that as a motive. In any case, it was too late. Earth was gone from them and civilization had fled for no one knew how many centuries more.

  He slept very badly.

  Citizen in Space

  I’m really in trouble now, more trouble than I ever thought possible. It’s a little difficult to explain how I got into this mess, so maybe I’d better start at the beginning.

  Ever since I graduated from trade school in 1991 I’d had a good job as sphinx valve assembler on the Starling Spaceship production line. I really loved those big ships, roaring to Cygnus and Alpha Centaurus and all the other places in the news. I was a young man with a future, I had friends, I even knew some girls.

  But it was no good.

  The job was fine, but I couldn’t do my best work with those hidden cameras focused on my hands. Not that I minded the cameras themselves; it was the whirring noise they made. I couldn’t concentrate.

  I complained to Internal Security. I told them, look, why can’t I have new, quiet cameras, like everybody else? But they were too busy to do anything about it.

  Then lots of little things started to bother me. Like the tape recorder in my TV set. The F.B.I, never adjusted it right, and it hummed all night long. I complained a hundred times. I told them, look, nobody else’s recorder hums that way. Why mine? But they always gave me that speech about winning the cold war, and how they couldn’t please everybody.

  Things like that make a person feel inferior. I suspected my government wasn’t interested in me.

  Take my Spy, for example. I was an 18-D Suspect—the same classification as the Vice-President—and this entitled me to part- time surveillance. But my particular Spy must have thought he was a movie actor, because he always wore a stained trench coat and a slouch hat jammed over his eyes. He was a thin, nervous type, and he followed practically on my heels for fear of losing me.

  Well, he was trying his best. Spying is a competitive business, and I couldn’t help but feel sorry, he was so bad at it. But it was embarrassing, just to be associated with him. My friends laughed themselves sick whenever I showed up with him breathing down the back of my neck. “Bill,” they said, “is that the best you can do?” And my girl friends thought he was creepy.

  Naturally, I went to the Senate Investigations Committee, and said, look, why can’t you give me a trained Spy, like my friends have?

  They said they’d see, but I knew I wasn’t important enough to swing it.

  All these little things put me on edge, and any psychologist will tell you it doesn’t take something big to drive you bats. I was sick of being ignored, sick of being neglected.

  That’s when I started to think about Deep Space. There were billions of cubic miles of nothingness out there, dotted with too many stars to count. There were enough Earth-type planets for every man, woman, and child. There had to be a spot for me.

  I bought a Universe Light List, and a tattered Galactic Pilot. I read through the Gravity Tide Book, and the Interstellar Pilot Charts. Finally I figured I knew as much as I’d ever know.

  All my savings went into an old Chrysler Star Clipper. This antique leaked oxygen along its seams. It had a touchy atomic pile, and spacewarp drives that might throw you practically anywhere. It was dangerous, but the only life I was risking was my own. At least, that’s what I thought.

  So I got my passport, blue clearance, red clearance, numbers certificate, space-sickness shots, and deratification papers. At the job I collected my last day’s pay and waved to the cameras. In the apartment, I packed my clothes and said goodbye to the recorders. On the street, I shook hands with my poor Spy and wished him luck.

  I had burned my bridges behind me.

  All that was left was final clearance, so I hurried down to the Final Clearance Office. A clerk with white hands and a sunlamp tan looked at me dubiously.

  “Where did you wish to go?” he asked me.

  “Space,” I said.

  “Of course. But where in space?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “Just space. Deep Space. Free Space.”

  The clerk sighed wearily. “You’ll have to be more explicit than that, if you want a clearance. Are you going to settle on a planet in American Space? Or did you wish to emigrate to British Space? Or Dutch Space? Or French Space?”

  “I didn’t know space could be owned,” I said.

  “Then you don’t keep up with the times,” he told me, with a superior smirk. “The United States has claimed all space between coordinates 2XA and D2B, except for a small and relatively unimportant segment which is claimed by Mexico. The Soviet Union has coordinates 3DB to L02—a very bleak region, I can assure yo
u. And then there is the Belgian Grant, the Chinese Grant, the Ceylonese Grant, the Nigerian Grant—”

  I stopped him. “Where is Free Space?” I asked.

  “There is none.”

  “None at all? How far do the boundary lines extend?”

  “To infinity,” he told me proudly.

  For a moment it fetched me up short. Somehow I had never considered the possibility of every bit of infinite space being owned. But it was natural enough. After all, somebody had to own it.

  “I want to go into American Space,” I said. It didn’t seem to matter at the time, although it turned out otherwise.

  The clerk nodded sullenly. He checked my records back to the age of five—there was no sense in going back any further—and gave me the Final Clearance.

  The spaceport had my ship all serviced, and I managed to get away without blowing a tube. It wasn’t until Earth dwindled to a pinpoint and disappeared behind me that I realized that I was alone.

  Fifty hours out I was making a routine inspection of my store, when I observed that one of my vegetable sacks had a shape unlike the other sacks. Upon opening it I found a girl where a hundred pounds of potatoes should have been.

  A stowaway. I stared at her, open-mouthed.

  “Well,” she said, “are you going to help me out? Or would you prefer to close the sack and forget the whole thing?”

  I helped her out She said, “Your potatoes are lumpy.”

  I could have said the same of her, with considerable approval. She was a slender girl, for the most part, with hair the reddish blond color of a flaring jet, a pert, dirt-smudged face and brooding blue eyes. On Earth, I would gladly have walked ten miles to meet her. In space, I wasn’t so sure.

  “Could you give me something to eat?” she asked. “All I’ve had since we left is raw carrots.”

  I fixed her a sandwich. While she ate, I asked, “What are you doing here?”

  “You wouldn’t understand,” she said, between mouthfuls.

  “Sure I would.”

  She walked to a porthole and looked out at the spectacle of stars—American stars, most of them—burning in the void of American Space.

  “I wanted to be free,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  She sank wearily on my cot. “I suppose you’d call me a romantic,” she said quiedy. “I’m the sort of fool who recites poetry to herself in the black night, and cries in front of some absurd little statuette. Yellow autumn leaves make me tremble, and dew on a green lawn seems like the tears of all Earth. My psychiatrist tells me I’m a misfit.”

  She closed her eyes with a weariness I could appreciate. Standing in a potato sack for fifty hours can be pretty exhausting.

  “Earth was getting me down,” she said, “I couldn’t stand it—the regimentation, the discipline, the privation, the cold war, the hot war, everything. I wanted to laugh in free air, run through green fields, walk unmolested through gloomy forests, sing—”

  “But why did you pick on me?”

  “You were bound for freedom,” she said. “I’ll leave, if you insist.”

  That was a pretty silly idea, out in the depths of space. And I couldn’t afford the fuel to turn back.

  “You can stay,” I said.

  “Thank you,” she said very softly. “You do understand.”

  “Sure, sure,” I said. “But we’ll have to get a few things straight. First of all—” But she had fallen asleep on my cot, with a trusting smile on her lips.

  Immediately I searched her handbag. I found five lipsticks, a compact, a phial of Venus V perfume, a paperbound book of poetry, and a badge that read: Special Investigator, FBI.

  I had suspected it, of course. Girls don’t talk that way, but Spies always do.

  It was nice to know my government was still looking out for me. It made space seem less lonely.

  The ship moved into the depths of American Space. By working fifteen hours out of twenty-four, I managed to keep my space- warp drive in one piece, my atomic piles reasonably cool, and my hull seams tight. Mavis O’day (as my Spy was named) made all meals, took care of the light housekeeping, and hid a number of small cameras around the ship. They buzzed abominably, but I pretended not to notice.

  Under the circumstances, however, my relations with Miss O’day were quite proper.

  The trip was proceeding normally—even happily—until something happened.

  I was dozing at the controls. Suddenly an intense light flared on my starboard bow. I leaped backward, knocking over Mavis as she was inserting a new reel of film into her number three camera.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  “Oh, trample me anytime,” she said.

  I helped her to her feet. Her supple nearness was dangerously pleasant, and the tantalizing scent of Venus V tickled my nostrils.

  “You can let me go now,” she said.

  “I know,” I said, and continued to hold her. My mind inflamed by her nearness, I heard myself saying, “Mavis—I haven’t known you very long, but—”

  “Yes, Bill?” she asked.

  In the madness of the moment I had forgotten our relationship of Suspect and Spy. I don’t know what I might have said. But just then a second light blazed outside the ship.

  I released Mavis and hurried to the controls. With difficulty I throttled the old Star Clipper to an idle, and looked around.

  Outside, in the vast vacuum of space, was a single fragment of rock. Perched upon it was a child in a spacesuit, holding a box of flares in one hand and a tiny spacesuited dog in the other.

  Quickly we got him inside and unbuttoned his spacesuit.

  “My dog—”he said.

  “He’s all right, son,” I told him.

  “Terribly sorry to break in on you this way,” the lad said.

  “Forget it,” I said. “What were you doing out there?”

  “Sir,” he began, in treble tones, “I will have to start at the start. My father was a spaceship test pilot, and he died valiantly, trying to break the light barrier. Mother recently remarried. Her present husband is a large, black-haired man with narrow, shifty eyes and tightly compressed lips. Until recently he was employed as a ribbon clerk in a large department store.

  “He resented my presence from the beginning. I suppose I reminded him of my dead father, with my blond curls, large oval eyes and merry, outgoing ways. Our relationship smoldered fitfully. Then an uncle of his died (under suspicious circumstances) and he inherited holdings in British Space.

  “Accordingly, we set out in our spaceship. As soon as we reached this deserted area, he said to my mother, ‘Rachel, he’s old enough to fend for himself.’ My mother said, ‘Dirk, he’s so young!’ But softhearted laughing mother was no match for the inflexible will of the man I would never call father. He thrust me into my space-suit, handed me a box of flares, put Flicker into his own little suit, and said, ‘A lad can do all right for himself in space these days.’ ‘Sir,’ I said, ‘there is no planet within two hundred light years.’ ‘You’ll make out,’ he grinned, and thrust me upon this spur of rock.”

  The boy paused for breath, and his dog Flicker looked up at me with moist oval eyes. I gave the dog a bowl of milk and bread, and watched the lad eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Mavis carried the little chap into the bunkroom and tenderly tucked him into bed.

  I returned to the controls, started the ship again, and turned on the intercom.

  “Wake up, you little idiot!” I heard Mavis say.

  “Lemme sleep,” the boy answered.

  “Wake up! What did Congressional Investigation mean by sending you here? Don’t they realize this is an FBI case?”

  “He’s been reclassified as a 10-F Suspect,” the boy said. “That calls for full surveillance.”

  “Yes, but I’m here,” Mavis cried.

  “You didn’t do so well on your last case,” the boy said. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but Security comes first.”

  “So they send you,” Mavis said, sobbing now. “A t
welve-year- old child—”

  “I’ll be thirteen in seven months.”

  “A twelve-year-old child! And I’ve tried so hard! I’ve studied, read books, taken evening courses, listened to lectures—”

  “It’s a tough break,” the boy said sympathetically. “Personally, I want to be a spaceship test pilot. At my age, this is the only way I can get in flying hours. Do you think he’ll let me fly the ship?”

  I snapped off the intercom. I should have felt wonderful. Two full-time Spies were watching me. It meant I was really someone, someone to be watched.

  But the truth was, my Spies were only a girl and a twelve-year- old boy. They must have been scraping bottom when they sent those two.

  My government was still ignoring me, in its own fashion.

  We managed well on the rest of the flight Young Roy, as the lad was called, took over the piloting of the ship, and his dog sat alertly in the copilot’s seat Mavis continued to cook and keep house. I spent my time patching seams. We were as happy a group of Spies and Suspect as you could find.

  We found an uninhabited Earth-type planet Mavis liked it because it was small and rather cute, with the green fields and gloomy forests she had read about in her poetry books. Young Roy liked the clear lakes, and the mountains, which were just the right height for a boy to climb.

  We landed and began to settle.

  Young Roy found an immediate interest in the animals I animated from the Freezer. He appointed himself guardian of cows and horses, protector of ducks and geese, defender of pigs and chickens. This kept him so busy that his reports to the Senate became fewer and fewer, and finally stopped altogether.

  You really couldn’t expect any more from a Spy of his age.

  And after I had set up the domes and force-seeded a few acres, Mavis and I took long walks in the gloomy forest, and in the bright green and yellow fields that bordered it.

  One day we packed a picnic lunch and ate on the edge of a little waterfall. Mavis’ unbound hair spread lightly over her shoulders, and there was a distant enchanted look in her blue eyes. All in all, she seemed extremely un-Spylike, and I had to remind myself over and over of our respective roles.