Authors: Robert Sheckley
‘Well, you’ll have to admit that it does look that way.’
‘Maybe it does to you,’ Secuille said, ‘but not to me. To me it looks like the long arm of synchronicity is stirring things into patterns again. Mr. Loomis’s address is 4567 Panderer Way, South Palmetto Shores, West Garden, South Cetesphe. He works daily at the Episodes Division of Pleasure Scenes Galaxy Spectaculars in the Gardens of Rui.’
Crompton was stunned. After a while he muttered, ‘Thank you very much.’
‘You’re entirely welcome,’ Secuille said.
‘And what happens now?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’ve done me a big favor. What do I have to do for you in return?’
‘Just stay as sweet as you are,’ Secuille said.
‘But I thought you needed me in your Game!’
‘That’s not important,’ Secuille said.
‘I never said that I would not help you,’ Crompton said. ‘It’s just that the way it came up –’
Secuille led him gently to the door. ‘Good-bye, Crompton. It may be that we will meet again under different conditions. Feel free to call on me for assistance. And, as much as one temporary combination of bound energies can wish another good luck, I do so wish you.’
He closed the door. And Crompton, feeling completely one-upped, walked out into the disconsolate night.
10
Crompton took a jitney ornihopter to the Episodes Division of Pleasure Scenes Galaxy Spectaculars in the Gardens of Rui. This part of the Gardens was devoted to the needs of humano-form beings and their near-relatives. These included the humans, the alinopods, the gnoles, the subquasfian tadies, the barbizans of Grustark II, the irrepressible double-jointed trelizonds, the insidious and falsely smiling lunters, and their neighbors, the hyperpromenteian muns.
As Crompton passed through the main gate, he saw a lean, intense-looking man in blue jeans and black-rimmed spectacles sitting on a stool and working away at a portable typewriter on his lap. Crompton stared at him with amazement, and the man looked up and said, ‘Yes, what is it?’
‘I’d like to know what you’re doing,’ Crompton asked.
‘I’m writing a novel,’ the man said, typing as he talked. This dialogue goes in, of course. My detractors accuse me of mere fantasizing, but I put in only what I see and hear.’
‘It seems to me –’
‘Never mind,’ the writer said. ‘No line of dialogue beginning ‘It seems to me’ ever turns out to be amusing. Perhaps I should deliver a set speech at this point. There are several delicious ironies that perhaps have not occurred to you to date. For example –’
‘I hate sentences that begin “For example,” ’ Crompton said.
‘I was going to rewrite that, actually. “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself – I am large. I contain multitudes.” How well old Whitman put it! The peculiar relevance of that conception –’
‘I must be going,’ Crompton said.
‘Good-bye,’ the writer said. ‘It’s been a short scene, but a snappy one.’
‘It must be nice being a writer,’ Crompton said.
‘It is like being a slug crawling down an infinite sheet of paper.’
‘That’s too bad,’ Crompton said. ‘Maybe –’
But the writer never listened to sentences that began ‘Maybe.’ His attention had already been captured by the sudden entrance of a fat man clutching the leaden effigy of a black bird to his chest, closely followed by Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, and – in a surprise cameo appearance – Albert Dekker! ‘This is more like it!’ the writer said, and proceeded to type furiously while smoking two cigarettes.
Crompton ambled on. The setting for the Episodes Division was a long, rather indistinct street in an unknown city. As visitors walked along, looking for amusement, fragments of conversation and bits of action unrolled with pleasing ambiguity. They could walk on and see what the next episode would bring, or stop wherever they pleased and take part in the unfolding situation.
Matters didn’t actually work out that well, due to irreconcilable nomenclatural and procedural differences caused by the crowded presence and divergent demands of various humanoform but mutually unviable races. The producers of Episodes welcomed the resultant dense ambiguous proximities while deploring them publicly; for nearness and strangeness forever lure the curious despite their pious protestations. And that means money, a commodity that the Aaians had arbitrarily decided to value for a few centuries just to see if there was anything in it.
As Crompton walked along, he heard a double-joined and irrepressible trelizond in full autumn plumage remark to its three brothers, ‘I’m leaving for Funthris today, may my place in the nest fall vacant!’ Nearby, a pride of gnoles were tickling a subquasfian tadie into paroxysyms, while chanting, ‘We Move Unmoved through Moving Moves,’ to the consternation of the silent alinopod in the tree. Close to them, one human female was saying to another, ‘I don’t know who could help you with a problem like that, Josie.’ Nearby, seven muns were trying to engage in sexual psillicosis by parentian closure – rather pathetically, since they lacked the all-important badminton equipment. There were more ominous matters happening nearby, where a barbizan in leaf mail and pointed olymphat was tapping a message of disillusion on the thorax and subabdominal feelers of an insidious and falsely smiling lunter, caught red-handed in the illicit and impossible act of surrogate transformation.
None of these scenes caught Crompton’s fancy, of course. Each was intended to titillate the senses of a particular deviant of a particular humanoform – but not necessarily human – species. Most of what these creatures were doing to one another was incomprehensible to Crompton, just as what humans do to each other is meaningless to other humanoforms. This is the situation of ultimate reciprocal bewilderment, and it renders our own vaunted incomprehension of ourselves and our fellow man as pretty small potatoes indeed.
Crompton was reduced to staring around him, bewildered, a disembodied intelligence floating through scenes from some surrealistic hell, as this pageant of creatures acted out exotic emotions representative of their indescribable realities.
It was senseless for him to continue in this way. He turned back, pushing past two tadies tap-dancing on the broad, shovel-shaped nose of a molting barbizan, and other, even less savory sights, until he came to the main gate and the typewriting writer.
‘You seem to know a lot,’ Crompton said to him. ‘Maybe you could tell me where I’d find Edgar Loomis?’
‘You’ve come to the right man,’ the writer said, turning on his cassette recorder and lighting a third cigarette. ‘I am acting as my own
deus ex machina
, you know, so it will do no disservice to the formal elegance of my scheme if I tell you that Mr. Loomis is in the fourth scene to your left, and his drama is even now ending. I fear you must hurry, my friend. But before you go, let me say a word or two about your overall situation.’ There followed a ten-minute lecture on various nuances and subtleties that Crompton had almost certainly overlooked in his appraisal of where it was all at. During this time Crompton stood motionless, not even blinking, due to the small paralysis gun in whose beam he was frozen. This instrument was standard issue to members of the Galactic Writers Guild, and was designed to ensure the respect and attention of unappreciative audiences during the dull but meaningful parts.
At length the writer concluded with a quotation from Rilke and turned off the paralysis gun. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘let’s hear a nice round of applause, plus the Guild minimum fee of one hundred prontics for a nonexclusive one-shot hearing of an impromptu passage of moral import.’
‘Like hell,’ Crompton growled.
‘Pay,’ the writer said sternly, ‘or I shall be forced to turn on the paralysis beam again and give you a ten-minute lecture on Gratitude at standard rates.’
Crompton paid, applauded perfunctorily, and rushed off.
He reached the designated place just in time to see a bearded man in a dhoti declare to the audience: ‘And so on sweet Antione’s tombstone it shall be duly graven: “She never saw it coming!” ’
The audience – thirty-seven middle-aged and jovial people from Phoenix, Arizona – really broke up at that one.
The bearded man bowed and vanished.
Crompton grabbed one of the audience – John Winslow Audience from Flagstaff, by an eerie coincidence – and demanded, ‘The actors! Where did they go?’
John Audience – a portly, jovial man with steely blue eyes and an incongruous dueling scar on his left cheek – pulled his arm free peremptorily.
‘What did you say?’ he demanded.
‘I said, “The actors, where did they go?” ’
‘Oh, I guess they went backstage to get ready for the grand finale, which will be starting any moment now,’ the man said helpfully.
‘Was one of the actors named Edgar Loomis?’
‘I believe I saw that name on the program,’ Audience said, his hard blue eyes becoming momentarily gelid. ‘Yes, by jingo; Loomis, he was one of the actors.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘He had on a silver shirt.’
‘Is that all you remember?’
‘It was the most distinguishing thing about him. You’ll be able to see him in the finale. Look, it’s beginning!’
A large stage had appeared. Crowded on it were all of the humanoforms who had performed in that night’s episodes. Behind them were two symphony orchestras. As Crompton watched, all of these beings threw off their clothing and crowded together, closer, closer, writhing and slipping and sliding over, around, under, and into each other in an unlikely potpourri of arms, thoraxes, feelers, wings, cunts, chitins, claws, tentacles, cocks, shoulders, heads, ovipositors, exo-skeletons, pistils, kneecaps, mandibles, fins, stamens, suckers, and the like. Somehow, despite their contorted and unnatural positions, the humanoforms were able to sing, squeak, whistle, and vibrate the following song:
People and gnoles and hingers and tadies,
Barbizans, trelizonds, lunters, and muns
All in together in sexual friendliness –
Love conquers all, even beastly fat gruns!
A beastly fat gruns now appeared at the top of the quivering mound of flesh, chitin, et cetera. The gruns was grinning! It was a first for the Gardens of Rui!
The audience – sentimentalists all – applauded wildly. Trumpets blared, and a long roll of kettledrums began. The audience watched with bated breath as the great mound of composite flesh, chitins, et cetera, heaved and strained, grunted and groaned, strove and endeavored. …
Crompton caught a glimpse of a silver elbow down near the bottom left-hand corner of the stack. Loomis! It had to be Loomis!
And then the entire great mound of intermingled and interpenetrated humanoforms came simultaneously in a vast greenish white orgasm of various forcibly expelled secretions. The audience really lapped it up, but Crompton, revolted, was already on his way toward the exit, heading as quickly as possible for his hotel room and a game of solitaire.
11
Crompton had not been prepared for the squalid depravity of Loomis’s employ. Now, sitting in the curtained quiet of his hotel room, he was filled with doubts. It had occurred to him to wonder whether he actually wanted a creature like Loomis taking up room in his mind.
Loomis was going to be trouble. He really didn’t want him around. But unfortunately, he had to have him. Reintegration was impossible without all of the original components.
But perhaps it would not be so bad. Dan Stack, the third component of Crompton’s mind, would doubtless serve as an equipoise to Loomis’s base impulses, once he was found and assimilated. And Loomis himself might be expected to show some gratitude for this rescue from his pointless and repetitive existence. If the man possessed the slightest bit of moral rectitude, he might be expected to keep himself under restraint until such time as his qualities had been assimilated into the new and integrated personality that Crompton was planning to become.
Encouraged by this line of thought, Crompton put away his cards and straightened up his room. With set jaw and determined eye, he straightened his tie and went out into the street.
He boarded a cruising ornithopter and gave its driver Loomis’s home address. He was not interested in the alien sights on all sides of him, sights which
Playboy
magazine had voted ‘Most Far-out in the Galaxy’ for three consecutive years. The ornithopter flapped to a graceful landing on the front lawn of aluminium-sided ranch house with car-port, jalousies, a Florida room, a swimming pool, and a hibiscus tree. Crompton paid the driver (a freckled CCNY student on a working vacation). Trying to maintain his composure, he went up to the front door and rang the chimes.
The door opened. A girl of about five in a soiled T-shirt looked up at him. ‘Whaddaya want?’
‘Ah – is Mr. Loomis in?’
‘What do you want him for?’