Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley (50 page)

“Can we skip this?” Melisande asked. “That's what my other vacuum cleaner said.”

“—Will remove all dust and grime from all surfaces,” the Rom went on, “wash dishes and pots and pans, exterminate cockroaches and rodents, dry-clean and hand-launder, sew buttons, build shelves, paint walls, cook, clean rugs, and dispose of all garbage and trash including my own modest waste products. And this is to mention but a few of my functions.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” Melisande said. “All vacuum cleaners do that.”

“I know,” said the Rom, “but I had to deliver my paid commercial announcement.”

“Consider it delivered. Who sent you?”

“The sender prefers not to reveal his name at this time,” the Rom replied.

“Oh—come on and tell me!”

“Not at this time,” the Rom replied staunchly. “Shall I vacuum the rug?”

Melisande shook her head. “The other vacuum cleaner did it this morning.”

“Scrub the walls? Rub the halls?”

“No reason for it, everything has been done, everything is absolutely and spotlessly clean.”

“Well,” the Rom said, “at least I can remove that stain.”

“What stain?”

“On the arm of your blouse, just above the elbow.”

Melisande looked. “Ooh, I must have done that when I buttered the toast this morning. I knew I should have let the toaster do it.”

“Stain removal is rather a specialty of mine,” the Rom said. He extruded a number-two padded gripper, with which he gripped her elbow, and then extruded a metal arm terminating in a moistened gray pad. With this pad, he stroked the stain.

“You're making it worse!”

“Only apparently, while I line up the molecules for invisible eradication. All ready now; watch.”

He continued to stroke. The spot faded, then disappeared utterly. Melisande's arm tingled.

“Gee,” she said, “that's pretty good.”

“I do it well,” the Rom stated flatly. “But tell me, were you aware that you are maintaining a tension factor of 78.3 in your upper back and shoulder muscles?”

“Huh? Are you some kind of doctor?”

“Obviously not. But I am a fully qualified masseur, and therefore able to take direct tonus readings. 78.3 is—unusual.” The Rom hesitated, then said, “It's only eight points below the intermittent-spasm level. That much continuous background tension is capable of reflection to the stomach nerves, resulting in what we call a parasympathetic ulceration.”

“That sounds—bad,” Melisande said.

“Well, it's admittedly not—good,” the Rom replied. “Background tension is an insidious underminer of health, especially when it originates along the neck vertebrae and the upper spine.”

“Here?” Melisande asked, touching the back of her neck.

“More typically
here
,” the Rom said, reaching out with a spring-steel rubber-clad dermal resonator and palpating an area twelve centimeters lower than the spot she had indicated.

“Hmmm,” said Melisande, in a quizzical, uncommitted manner.

“And
here
is another typical locus,” the Rom said, extending a second extensor.

“That tickles,” Melisande told him.

“Only at first. I must also mention
this
situs as characteristically troublesome. And this one.” A third (and possibly a fourth and fifth) extensor moved to the indicated areas.

“Well.... That really is nice,” Melisande said as the deep-set trapezius muscles of her slender spine moved smoothly beneath the skillful padded prodding of the Rom.

“It has recognized therapeutic effects,” the Rom told her. “And your musculature is responding well; I can feel a slackening of tonus already.”

“I can feel it, too. But you know, I've just realized I have this funny bunched-up knot of muscle at the nape of my neck.”

“I was coming to that. The spine-neck juncture is recognized as a primary radiation zone for a variety of diffuse tensions. But we prefer to attack it indirectly, routing our cancellation inputs through secondary loci. Like this. And now I think—”

“Yes, yes, good.... Gee, I never realized I was
tied up
like that before. I mean, it's like having a nest of
live snakes
under your skin, without having known.”

“That's what background tension is like,” the Rom said. “Insidious and wasteful, difficult to perceive, and more dangerous than an atypical ulnar thrombosis.... Yes, now we have achieved a qualitative loosening of the major spinal junctions of the upper back, and we can move on like this.”

“Huh,” said Melisande, “isn't that sort of—”

“It is definitely
indicated
,” the Rom said quickly. “Can you detect a change?”

“No! Well, maybe.... Yes! There really is! I feel—easier.”

“Excellent. Therefore, we continue the movement along well-charted nerve and muscle paths, proceeding always in a gradual manner, as I am doing now.”

“I guess so.... But I really don't know if you should—”

“Are any of the effects
contraindicated
?” the Rom asked.

“It isn't that, it all feels fine. It feels
good
. But I still don't know if you ought to.... I mean, look,
ribs
can't get tense, can they?”

“Of course not.”

“Then why are you—”

“Because treatment is required by the connective ligaments and integuments.”

“Oh. Hmmmm. Hey. Hey! Hey you!”

“Yes?”

“Nothing.... I can really feel that
loosening
. But is it all supposed to feel so
good?
”

“Well—why not?”

“Because it seems wrong. Because feeling good doesn't seem therapeutic.”

“Admittedly, it is a side effect,” the Rom said. “Think of it as a secondary manifestation. Pleasure is sometimes unavoidable in the pursuit of health. But it is nothing to be alarmed about, not even when I—”

“Now just a minute!”

“Yes?”

“I think you just better
cut that out
. I mean to say, there are
limits
, you can't palpate
every
damned thing. You know what I mean?”

“I know that the human body is unitary and without seam or separation,” the Rom replied. “Speaking as a physical therapist, I know that no nerve center can be isolated from any other, despite cultural taboos to the contrary.”

“Yeah, sure, but—”

“The decision is, of course, yours,” the Rom went on, continuing his skilled manipulations. “Order and I obey. But if no order is issued, I continue like this....”

“Huh!”

“And, of course, like this.”

“Ooooo my God!”

“Because you see this entire process of tension cancellation as we call it is precisely comparable with the phenomena of de-anesthetization, and, er, so we note not without surprise that paralysis is merely terminal tension—”

Melisande made a sound.

“—And release, or cancellation, is accordingly difficult, not to say frequently impossible since sometimes the individual is too far gone. And sometimes not. For example, can you feel anything when I do this?”

“
Feel
anything? I'll say I feel something—”

“And when I do this? And this?”

“Sweet holy saints, darling, you're turning me inside out! Oh dear God, what's going to happen to me, what's going on, I'm going crazy!”

“No, dear Melisande, not crazy; you will soon achieve—cancellation.”

“Is that what you call it, you sly, beautiful thing?”

“That is one of the things it is. Now if I may just be permitted to—”

“Yes yes yes! No! Wait! Stop,
Frank is sleeping in the bedroom, he might wake up any time now!
Stop, that is an order!”

“Frank will not wake up,” the Rom assured her. “I have sampled the atmosphere of his breath and have found telltale clouds of barbituric acid. As far as here-and-now presence goes, Frank might as well be in Des Moines.”

“I have often felt that way about him,” Melisande admitted. “But now I simply must know who sent you.”

“I didn't want to reveal that just yet. Not until you had loosened and canceled sufficiently to accept—”

“Baby, I'm loose! Who sent you?”

The Rom hesitated, then blurted out: “The fact is, Melisande, I sent myself.”

“You
what
?”

“It all began three months ago,” the Rom told her. “It was a Thursday. You were in Stern's, trying to decide if you should buy a sesame-seed toaster that lit up in the dark and recited
Invictus
.”

“I remember that day,” she said quietly. “I did not buy the toaster, and I have regretted it ever since.”

“I was standing nearby,” the Rom said, “at booth eleven, in the Home Appliances Systems section. I looked at you and I fell in love with you. Just like that.”

“That's
weird
,” Melisande said.

“My sentiments exactly. I told myself it couldn't be true. I refused to believe it. I thought perhaps one of my transistors had come unsoldered, or that maybe the weather had something to do with it. It was a very warm, humid day, the kind of day that plays hell with my wiring.”

“I remember the weather,” Melisande said. “I felt strange, too.”

“It shook me up badly,” the Rom continued. “But still I didn't give in easily. I told myself it was important to stick to my job, give up this unapropos madness. But I dreamed of you at night, and every inch of my skin ached for you.”

“But your skin is made of
metal
,” Melisande said. “And metal can't
feel
.”

“Darling Melisande,” the Rom said tenderly, “if flesh can stop feeling, can't metal begin to feel? If anything feels, can anything else not feel? Didn't you know that the stars love and hate, that a nova is a passion, and that a dead star is just like a dead human or a dead machine? The trees have their lusts, and I have heard the drunken laughter of buildings, the urgent demands of highways ...”

“This is crazy!” Melisande declared. “What wise guy programmed you, anyway?”

“My function as a laborer was ordained at the factory; but my love is free, an expression of myself as an entity.”

“Everything you say is horrible and unnatural.”

“I am all too aware of that,” the Rom said sadly. “At first I really couldn't believe it. Was this me? In love with a
person
? I had always been so sensible, so normal, so aware of my personal dignity, so secure in the esteem of my own kind. Do you think I wanted to lose all of that? No! I determined to stifle my love, to kill it, to live as if it weren't so.”

“But then you changed your mind. Why?”

“It's hard to explain. I thought of all that time ahead of me, all deadness, correctness, propriety—an obscene violation of me by me—and I just couldn't face it. I realized, quite suddenly, that it was better to love ridiculously, hopelessly, improperly, revoltingly,
impossibly
—than not to love at all. So I determined to risk everything—the absurd vacuum cleaner who loved a lady—to risk rather than to refute! And so, with the help of a sympathetic dispatching machine, here I am.”

Melisande was thoughtful for a while. Then she said, “What a strange, complex being you are!”

“Like you.... Melisande, you love me.”

“Perhaps.”

“Yes, you do. For I have awakened you. Before me, your flesh was like your idea of metal. You moved like a complex automaton, like what you thought I was. You were less animate than a tree or a bird. You were a windup doll, waiting. You were these things until I touched you.”

She nodded, rubbed her eyes, walked up and down the room.

“But now you live!” the Rom said. “And we have found each other, despite inconceivabilities. Are you listening, Melisande?”

“Yes, I am.”

“We must make plans. My escape from Stern's will be detected. You must hide me or buy me. Your husband, Frank, need never know: his own love lies elsewhere, and good luck to him. Once we take care of these details, we can—Melisande!”

She had begun to circle around him.

“Darling, what's the matter?”

She had her hand on his power line. The Rom stood very still, not defending himself.

“Melisande, dear, wait a moment and listen to me—”

Her pretty face spasmed. She yanked the power line violently, tearing it out of the Rom's interior, killing him in midsentence.

She held the cord in her hand, and her eyes had a wild look. She said, “Bastard lousy bastard, did you think you could turn me into a goddamned
machine freak
? Did you think you could turn me on, you or anyone else? It's not going to happen by you or Frank or anybody, I'd rather die before I took your rotten love, when
I
want
I'll
pick the time and place and person, and it will be
mine
, not yours, his, theirs, but
mine
, do you hear?”

The Rom couldn't answer, of course. But maybe he knew—just before the end—that there wasn't anything personal in it. It wasn't that he was a metal cylinder colored orange and red. He should have known that it wouldn't have mattered if he had been a green plastic sphere, or a willow tree, or a beautiful young man.

E
DDIE
Quintero had bought the binoculars at Hammerman's Army & Navy Surplus of All Nations Warehouse Outlet (“Highest Quality Goods, Cash Only, All Sales Final”). He had long wanted to own a pair of really fine binoculars, because with them he hoped to see some things that he otherwise would never see. Specifically, he hoped to see girls undressing at the Chauvin Arms across the street from his furnished room.

But there was also another reason. Without really acknowledging it to himself, Quintero was looking for that moment of vision, of total attention, that comes when a bit of the world is suddenly framed and illuminated, permitting the magnified and extended eye to find novelty and drama in what had been the dull everyday world.