Authors: Robert Sheckley
‘Oh! Pleased to meet you. It’s hard to realize … I mean you look just like … I’m John Blount, of course.’
‘I know all about you,’ Stack said. ‘I’ve been browsing through Crompton’s memory files.’
‘Then you know what he did to me.’
‘I know. And it really was not very nice of him,’ Stack said. ‘But of course, he’s really not a nice person. God knows, he’s caused me nothing but trouble and grief ever since he’s talked me into going in with him.’
‘I can well imagine,’ Blount said. ‘You know, Dan, I like you. It would be nice to have you around – if that suited you.’
‘Suits me just fine,’ Stack said.
‘I’ve got no one to talk to about my work, you see.’
‘It’s a lonely job, destroying mankind,’ Stack observed.
‘But we must get rid of that Crompton fellow!’
‘My sentiments, exactly. I think we can figure something out.’ He chuckled. ‘And as long as we’re at it, let’s do for Loomis, too. He’s not worth diddly shit.’
‘You’ve got an interesting mind,’ Blount said, shaking Stack’s hand in both of his. ‘It’s going to be a pleasure working with you. Now let’s go to my War Games Room and initiate Plan Lettra Destructicon. This is the plan in which I eliminate all of the postmen on Earth. I’ve had enough of them withholding my important letters.’
‘Beautiful,’ Stack said. ‘Let’s go.’
47
Just at this moment there was a break in the continuity. It began with a shimmering and a trembling and a shaking. Then clouds of yellowish smoke appeared and coalesced into koala bears that scampered under the furniture. Next the walls began to bubble and sing, and the chairs flashed on and off.
These were the forewarnings of the dreaded REALITYQUAKE, which alters everything, usually for the worst.
The room metamorphosed into the Roman Forum, the Traitor’s Tower, Trader Vic’s in San Francisco, a Stucky’s pecan emporium on U.S. 301 in Georgia, and finally settled down as a Greek Revival room copied loosely from 2001.
In this room, seated around a large redwood table, were a group of men wearing cowboy hats and black silk masks.
A man in a slate-blue sharkskin suit and tennis shoes entered briskly from a concealed doorway on the left. It was Secuille!
‘Gawkkkr,’ Blount said, ashen-faced.
‘Yes,’ Secuille said, ‘the time of reckoning is at hand, Blount. Assembled here is the Committee for the Preservation of the Story Integrity. Perhaps they are better known to you as the
Archetype Vigilantes.
’
‘My God, no!’ Blount said.
‘Blount, you really ought to be ashamed of yourself. Nobody is interested in your crummy
Weltanschauung.
This is Crompton’s story, and you are only a bit player in it.’
‘Well, hell,’ Blount said, ‘a character’s got a right to improve himself, hasn’t he?’
Secuille turned to the Vigilantes. ‘Gentlemen. I think you can see that Blount has egotistically violated the situational premise and thus deflected the story into an unwanted and unprofitable channel.’
One of the Vigilantes said, ‘Yep, it’s clear enough. I reckon we’d better just write him out.’
Another Vigilante said, ‘How would you like to go, Blount? Car accident? Massive coronary? Sleeping pills?’
‘Please don’t write me out!’ Blount pleased. ‘I’m sorry, I repent, I’ll never do it again!’
Secuille said, ‘I wonder if we can trust you. …’
‘I’ll be good! You’ll see! You’ll be proud of me!’
‘Hmmm. …’
Blount waited no longer. Sensing that he was being given an inferential opportunity to escape being written out, he quickly converted all of his assets into cash, gave that away to the poor, and retired to the same cave in Bhutan which housed Otto Grudge, the son of Judge O. T. Grudge. In later years Blount became known as the Weird Monk because of his habit of counting his teeth in public. He plays no further part in this story.
‘Secuille, I don’t know how to thank you,’ Crompton said. ‘Is there any way I can help you in your Game?’
Secuille said, ‘You have already helped me, Crompton, by getting into this ridiculous situation from which I have extricated you, thus winning five hundred red points for three clear overs. How about that?’
‘I’m so glad,’ Crompton said.
‘Well, I’ll be seeing you.’ Secuille folded the Vigilantes into a large brown manila envelope and started toward the door.
‘Wait!’ Crompton cried.
‘Yes, what is it?’
Crompton said. ‘What do I do now?’
‘How should I know? It’s your story. I’m just a subsidiary character of no great relevance.’
‘Secuille, please! I simply can’t go on like this anymore!’
‘There’s really only one thing left to do,’ Secuille said. ‘You boys are just going to have to fight it out until Reintegration takes place, or until one of you succeeds in assimilating the others.’
‘We’ve been fighting continuously ever since we met.’ Crompton said. ‘All it’s doing is driving us crazy.’
‘That’s because you’ve been doing it the bad, old-fashioned way, the way of internalized conflict. But now, modern science has devised a good, easy, up-to-date method of externalizing your innermost conflicts, and thus quickly resolving them.’
‘How?’ Crompton asked.
‘By taking advantage of the Aion Foundation’s ultimate therapeutic weapon – the External Conflicts Simulator.’
‘And what, pray tell, is that?’
‘The External Conflicts Simulator is a device which projects you into a metaphorized space-time construct. You are then free to simulate weaponry and allies to the best of your abilities. It’s as simple as that.’
‘Huh?’ Stack said.
‘To put it even more simply – it projects you into a nescient situation where you can fight out your objectivized dream-wars to the death.’
‘Oh,’ Stack said.
‘It’s equivalent to a classical dueling situation, but in this case, metaphorized weapons-systems are utilized. This allows each of you to fight with the conceptual weapons most appropriate to his skills and strengths. The outcome, I am happy to say, will leave only one of you in sole possession of the Crompton Corpus.’
‘I still do not really understand what we are to do,’ Crompton complained.
‘I’m afraid I don’t have the time to give you an introductory course in simulation theory,’ Secuille said. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll pick it up as you go along. What do you say, fellows?’
‘I say let’s do it,’ Stack said.
‘Fine by me,’ Loomis said.
‘All right,’ Crompton said.
Even Finch contributed a nuance of agreement.
‘Then it’s up up and away!’ Secuille said.
Discontinuity set in like bleed-pictures end-projected onto dissolving filmstrips. Crompton wanted to ask a few more questions, but he found himself falling endlessly through a gray featureless void and he knew that the end had begun at last.
48
The word
parameters
was echoing senselessly in his mind. Crompton looked and saw that he was nowhere. It was a strange and uncanny experience, for in this nowhere there was
nothing at all;
not even Crompton himself.
The problem of describing ‘nothingness’ has haunted writers for centuries. It was not as though Crompton were merely present without anything around him, like a man falling through space.
That
would be easy enough to describe. But in this case, not only was there nothing surrounding Crompton, there was also no person there to be surrounded. There was nothing. There was
only
nothing. And yet, something in this nothing was aware, and this awareness Crompton called ‘I,’ even though it might have been anyone, or even a property of the nothingness itself.
At first it was a good experience: the nonexistence of himself and everything else was fun, like schussing down a million-mile ski run. But presently Crompton grew frightened. Speed kills, doesn’t it? And when you kill nothing, that leaves you with nothing doubled, a truly disastrous position.
Monism was nice, but Crompton saw that he was going to have to get into duality. He experimented cautiously by creating light. That worked out well. Next he needed something to look at, so he simulated the first thing that came to mind – a small teak coffee table. It looked so strange hanging there in nothingness that Crompton quickly simulated a chair, and then he simulated himself and sat down in the chair.
Everything felt more normal once he had a body. But it just wasn’t good enough to be a unique and solitary body sitting at a coffee table in the midst of nowhere. It didn’t really get him anywhere. So he created the Earth as quickly and neatly as possible.
After a short rest he surveyed his handiwork. He saw that he had gotten the North American coastline all bulgy and wrong, and his oak trees resembled dwarf mandarins. There were many other anomalies. It was not a godlike effort, but at least it gave him something to look at.
He was feeling lightheaded and silly now and he couldn’t remember what he was supposed to do next. So he created a place where he could get some lunch and await further developments. This place was Maplewood, New Jersey, in the year 1944. It was the only town on the face of the metamorphized Earth at that time, and Crompton brought to it a rule of equanimity and peace that will long be remembered in the illusory annals of the state.
It was a lazy, good-natured time of long golden autumn afternoons, fading to deep twilight, and then proceeding directly to dawn. Crompton hadn’t mastered linear time yet. In Maplewood it was forever October 1, and might have continued forever that way with no complaints from anyone.
But suddenly it all changed. Just before midday on one of those interminable October firsts, Crompton saw a smudge of oily black smoke on the horizon, and heard a rumble of ominous thunder to the west. Coming down from his ranch-style presidential palace to investigate, Crompton saw column after column of panzer tanks moving down South Orange Avenue. Standing in the foremost tank was Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. Standing beside Rommel and looking very pleased with himself was Daniel Stack.
Then Crompton remembered. This was supposed to be a fight to the death via simulation. While he had been fooling around, Stack had been busy creating Rommel and the Afrika Korps.
It looked as thought this war might be over before it had properly begun.
There was no time to make a plan. Crompton snatched at the first images that came to him, conjuring up a fifty-man Swiss guard armed with pikes, a boatload of Viking berserkers, and a detachment of Hungarian irregular cavalry led by von Suppe. These light forces held the approaches to South Mountains Reservation at the Wyoming Avenue line for twenty minutes, long enough for Crompton to flee to the south.
Stack came thundering after him, his armor cutting through the confused Etruscans, Waziris, Dayaks, Janissaries, and Amboinese that Crompton threw in his path. As he advanced, Stack took control of the metamorphized dream territory of the conflict, changing it into western France and pinning Crompton against the seat at Cherbourg. As Stack reorganized his forces for the killing stroke, Crompton threw all his remaining strength into a last effort.
He managed to wrestle control of the dream territory from Stack, with him on one side of the Guadarrama Mountains and Stack on the other.
Stack was stopped for the moment. Crompton took advantage of the precious respite to simulate fresh troops.
Hastily he created Varus’s lost legion led by Gustavus Adolphus, and a double regiment of Assyrian axmen led by Hammurabi. He knew that these forces were hopelessly inadequate – but the swiftness and fury of Stack’s assault left him no time to ponder military metaphors. Under pressure, he had to use whatever frivolous images his crossword-loving mind sent up. It put him at a considerable disadvantage, since Stack’s natural orientation was toward gory visions and bloody spectacles.
But now the situation changes again. Stack solves the territorial problem by converting his panzers into an enormous army of blank-faced Aztecs armed with sound-swords and wivver pistols, and led by Tezcatlipoca. These forces scramble down the steep Guadarrama slopes on knotted vines, screaming bird-call war cries and making hateful faces.
Crompton’s Assyrians take one look and head back to Babylon as fast as their dromedaries can carry them. Varus’s lost legion close shields and hold their ground. Soon they are engulfed in a sea of copper warriors. Desperately Crompton sends in Tom Mix, Billy the Kid, the Magnificent Seven, Joe Louis, and Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. They are swallowed up piecemeal, and Crompton reels back, exhausted, finished. …
Only to be rescued by the provident arrival of Loomis, who comes charging out of a glade of oak trees with five thousand Kashmiri hashisheens.
Stack contains this thrust by creating and interposing the Membrillo Apaches, with two Zulu impis in support. Loomis is repulsed with heavy losses. But Stack has overreached himself, he falters, his forces waver and slide in and out of focus. Crompton takes over the territoriality motif and creates a wide summer meadow, just the place for the ten squadrons of Cromwell’s Roundheads that he has simulated.