Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley (20 page)

Now I was in their game. Some wanted to kill me, some to protect me, but none cared for me, not even the derg. They were interested solely in my value to the game, if that's what it was.

And the situation was my own fault. At the beginning, I had had the accumulated wisdom of the human race at my disposal, that tremendous racial hatred of witches and ghosts, the irrational fear of alien life. For my adventure has been played out a thousand times and the story is told again and again—how a man dabbles in strange arts and calls to himself a spirit. By so doing, he attracts attention to himself—the worst thing of all.

So I was welded inseparably to the derg and the derg to me. Until yesterday, that is. Now I am on my own again.

Things had been quiet for a few weeks. I had held off the feegs by the simple expedient of keeping my closet doors closed. The leeps were more menacing, but the eye of a toad seemed to stop them. And the melgerizer was dangerous only in the full of the moon.

“You are in danger,” the derg said yesterday.

“Again?” I asked, yawning.

“It is the thrang who pursues us.”

“Us?”

“Yes, myself as well as you, for even a derg must run risk and danger.”

“Is this thrang particularly dangerous?”

“Very.”

“Well, what do I do? Snakeskin over the door? A pentagon?”

“None of those,” the derg said. “The thrang must be dealt with negatively, by the avoidance of certain actions.”

By now, there were so many restrictions on me, I didn't think another would matter. “What shouldn't I do?”

“You must not lesnerize,” the derg said.

“Lesnerize?” I frowned. “What's that?”

“Surely you know. It is a simple, everyday human action.”

“I probably know it under a different name. Explain.”

“Very well. To lesnerize is to—” He stopped abruptly.

“What?”

“It is here! The thrang!”

I backed up against a wall. I thought I could detect a faint stirring of dust, but that might have been no more than overwrought nerves.

“Derg!” I shouted. “Where are you? What should I do?”

I heard a shriek and the unmistakable sound of jaws snapping.

The derg cried, “It has me!”

“What should I do?” I cried again.

There was a horrible noise of teeth grinding. Very faintly, I heard the derg say, “
Don't lesnerize!
”

And then there was silence.

So I'm sitting tight now. There'll be an airplane crash in Burma next week, but it shouldn't affect me here in New York. And the feegs certainly can't harm me. Not with all my closet doors closed.

No, the problem is lesnerizing, I must
not
lesnerize. Absolutely not. If I can keep from lesnerizing, everything will pass and the chase will move elsewhere. It must! All I have to do is wait them out.

The trouble is, I don't have any idea what lesnerizing might be. A common human action, the derg had said. Well, for the time, I'm avoiding as many actions as possible.

I've caught up on some back sleep and nothing happened, so that's not lesnerizing. I went out and bought food, paid for it, cooked it, ate it. That wasn't lesnerizing. I wrote this report. That wasn't lesnerizing.

I'll come out of this yet.

I'm going to catch a nap. I think I have a cold coming on. Now I have to sneez

E
DWARD
Danton was a misfit. Even as a baby, he had shown pre-antisocial leanings. This should have been sufficient warning to his parents, whose duty it was to take him without delay to a competent prepubescent psychologist. Such a man could have discovered what lay in Danton's childhood to give him these contra-group tendencies. But Danton's parents, doubtless dramatizing problems of their own, thought the child would grow out of it.

He never did.

In school, Danton got barely passing grades in Group Acculturation, Sibling Fit, Values Recognition, Folkways Judgment, and other subjects which a person must know in order to live serenely in the modern world. Because of his lack of comprehension, Danton could never live serenely in the modern world.

It took him a while to find this out.

From his appearance, one would never have guessed Danton's basic lack of Fit. He was a tall, athletic young man, green-eyed, easy-going. There was a certain something about him which considerably intrigued the girls in his immediate affective environment. In fact, several paid him the highest compliment at their command, which was to consider him as a possible husband.

But even the flightiest girl could not ignore Danton's lacks. He was liable to weary after only a few hours of Mass Dancing, when the fun was just beginning. At Twelve-hand Bridge, Danton's attention frequently wandered and he would be forced to ask for a recount of the bidding, to the disgust of the other eleven players. And he was impossible at Subways.

He tried hard to master the spirit of that classic game. Locked arm in arm with his teammates, he would thrust forward into the subway car, trying to take possession before another team could storm in the opposite doors.

His group captain would shout, “Forward, men! We're taking this car to Rockaway!” And the opposing group captain would scream back, “Never! Rally, boys! It's Bronx Park or bust!”

Danton would struggle in the close-packed throng, a fixed smile on his face, worry lines etched around his mouth and eyes. His girlfriend of the moment would say, “What's wrong, Edward? Aren't you having fun?”

“Sure I am,” Danton would reply, gasping for breath.

“But you aren't!” the girl would cry, perplexed. “Don't you realize, Edward, that this is the way our ancestors worked off their aggressions? Historians say that the game of Subways averted an all-out hydrogen war.
We
have those same aggressions and we, too, must resolve them in a suitable social context.”

“Yeah, I know,” Edward Danton would say. “I really do enjoy this. I—oh, Lord!”

For at that moment, a third group would come pounding in, arms locked, chanting, “Canarsie, Canarsie, Canarsie!”

In that way, he would lose another girlfriend, for there was obviously no future in Danton. Lack of Fit can never be disguised. It was obvious that Danton would never be happy in the New York suburbs which stretched from Rockport, Maine, to Norfolk, Virginia; nor in any other suburbs, for that matter.

Danton tried to cope with his problems, in vain. Other strains started to show. He began to develop astigmatism from the projection of advertisements on his retina, and there was a constant ringing in his ears from the sing-swoop ads. His doctor warned that symptom analysis would never rid him of these psychosomatic ailments. No, what had to be treated was Danton's basic neurosis, his antisociality. But this Danton found impossible to deal with.

And so his thoughts turned irresistibly to escape. There was plenty of room for Earth's misfits out in space.

During the last two centuries, millions of psychotics, neurotics, psychopaths, and cranks of every kind and description had gone outward to the stars. The early ones had the Mikkelsen Drive to power their ships, and spent twenty or thirty years chugging from star system to star system. The newer ships were powered by GM subspatial torque converters, and made the same journey in a matter of months.

The stay-at-homes, being socially adjusted, bewailed the loss of anyone, but they welcomed the additional breeding room.

In his twenty-seventh year, Danton decided to leave Earth and take up pioneering. It was a tearful day when he gave his breeding certificate to his best friend, Al Trevor.

“Gee, Edward,” Trevor said, turning the precious little certificate over and over in his hands, “you don't know what this means to Myrtle and me. We always wanted two kids. Now because of you—”

“Forget it,” said Danton. “Where I'm going, I won't need any breeding permit. As a matter of fact, I'll probably find it impossible to breed,” he added, the thought having just struck him.

“But won't that be frustrating for you?” Al asked, always solicitous for his friend's welfare.

“I guess so. Maybe after a while, though, I'll find a girl pioneer. And in the meantime, there's always sublimation.”

“True enough. What substitute have you selected?”

“Vegetable gardening. I might as well be practical.”

“You might as well,” Al said, “Well, boy, good luck, boy.”

Once the breeding certificate was gone, the die was cast. Danton plunged boldly ahead. In exchange for his Birthright, the government gave him unlimited free transportation and two years' basic equipment and provisions.

Danton left at once.

He avoided the more heavily populated areas, which were usually in the hands of rabid little groups.

He wanted no part of a place like Korani II, for instance, where a giant calculator had instituted a reign of math.

Nor was he interested in Heil V, where a totalitarian population of 342 was earnestly planning ways and means of conquering the Galaxy.

He skirted the Farming Worlds, dull, restrictive places given to extreme health theories and practices.

When he came to Hedonia, he considered settling on that notorious planet. But the men of Hedonia were said to be short-lived, although no one denied their enjoyment while they
did
live.

Danton decided in favor of the long haul, and journeyed on.

He passed the Mining Worlds, somber, rocky places sparsely populated by gloomy, bearded men given to sudden violence. And he came at last to the New Territories. These unpeopled worlds were past Earth's farthest frontier. Danton scanned several before he found one with no intelligent life whatsoever.

It was a calm and watery place, dotted with sizeable islands, lush with jungle green and fertile with fish and game. The ship's captain duly notarized Danton's claim to the planet, which Danton called New Tahiti. A quick survey showed a large island superior to the rest. Here he was landed, and here he proceeded to set up his camp.

There was much to be done at first. Danton constructed a house out of branches and woven grass, near a white and gleaming beach. He fashioned a fishing spear, several snares, and a net. He planted his vegetable garden and was gratified to see it thrive under the tropic sun, nourished by warm rains which fell every morning between seven and seven-thirty.

All in all, New Tahiti was a paradisical place and Danton should have been very happy there. But there was one thing wrong.

The vegetable garden, which he had thought would provide first-class sublimation, proved a dismal failure. Danton found himself thinking about women at all hours of the day and night, and spending long hours crooning to himself—love songs, of course—beneath a great orange tropic moon.

This was unhealthy. Desperately he threw himself into other recognized forms of sublimation; painting came first but he rejected it to keep a journal, abandoned that and composed a sonata, gave that up and carved two enormous statues out of a local variety of soapstone, completed them and tried to think of something else to do.

There was nothing else to do. His vegetables took excellent care of themselves; being of Earth stock, they completely choked out all alien growths. Fish swam into his nets in copious quantities, and meat was his whenever he bothered to set a snare. He found again that he was thinking of women at all hours of the day and night—tall women, short women, white women, black women, brown women.

The day came when Danton found himself thinking favorably of Martian women, something no Terran had succeeded in doing before. Then he knew that something drastic had to be done.

But what? He had no way of signaling for help, no way of getting off New Tahiti. He was gloomily contemplating this when a black speck appeared in the sky to seaward.

He watched as it slowly grew larger, barely able to breathe for fear it would turn out to be a bird or huge insect. But the speck continued to increase in size, and soon he could see pale jets, flaring and ebbing.

A spaceship had come! He was alone no longer!

The ship took a long, slow, cautious time landing. Danton changed into his best
pareu
, a South Seas garment he had found peculiarly well adapted to the climate of New Tahiti. He washed, combed his hair carefully, and watched the ship descend.

It was one of the ancient Mikkelsen Drive ships. Danton had thought that all of them were long retired from active service. But this ship, it was apparent, had been traveling for a long while. The hull was dented and scored, hopelessly archaic, yet with a certain indomitable look about it. Its name, proudly lettered on the bow, was
The Hutter People
.

When people come in from deep space, they are usually starved for fresh food. Danton gathered a great pile of fruit for the ship's passengers and had it tastefully arranged by the time
The Hutter People
had landed ponderously on the beach.

A narrow hatch opened and two men stepped out. They were armed with rifles and dressed in black from head to toe. Warily they looked around them.

Danton sprinted over. “Hey, welcome to New Tahiti! Boy, am I glad to see you folks! What's the latest news from—”

“Stand back!' shouted one of the men. He was in his fifties, tall and impossibly gaunt, his face seamed and hard. His icy blue eyes seemed to pierce Danton like an arrow; his rifle was leveled at Danton's chest. His partner was younger, barrel-chested, broad-faced, short, and very powerfully built.

“Something wrong?” Danton asked, stopping.

“What's your name?”

“Edward Danton.”

“I'm Simeon Smith,” the gaunt man said, “military commander of the Hutter people. This is Jedekiah Franker, second-in-command. How come you speak English?”

“I've always spoken English,” said Danton. “Look, I—”

“Where are the others? Where are they hiding?”