Short Fiction by Robert Sheckley (interesting novels in english txt) 📕
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Robert Sheckley was one of science fiction’s most prolific short story writers. Though less known today than he was in his heyday, he was a giant of his time and was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards.
Even though many of his stories deal with serious topics, they are most widely remembered for their comedic wit. His writing was compared to that of Douglas Adams, who held Sheckley in high regard: “He’s a very, very funny writer. He’s also a stylist. Very few science fiction writers write English well. Robert Sheckley can.” Sheckley was also well-respected by Kingsley Amis who, in his book New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction, included Sheckley in a list with Frederik Pohl and Arthur C. Clarke, and said their volumes should “be reviewed as general fiction, not tucked away, as one writer has put it, in something called ‘Spaceman’s Realm’ between the kiddy section and dog stories.”
Sheckley wrote about and pioneered many science fiction concepts, such as in his story “Watchbird,” where he explores the ability to detect murder before it happens—three years before Philip K. Dick’s “The Minority Report.” Or in “Ask a Foolish Question,” a story about an all-knowing Answerer to whom people pose the ultimate question of life—twenty-six years before Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Alongside these two stories, this collection includes all of his public domain short fiction ordered by date of first publication.
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- Author: Robert Sheckley
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“Now.” Cercy watched the screen. The Ambassador was still typing.
Suddenly, as Harrison sent home the switch, the room was engulfed in flames. Fire blasted out of concealed holes in the walls, poured from the ceiling and floor.
In a moment, the room was like the inside of a blast furnace.
Cercy let it burn for two minutes, then motioned Harrison to cut the switch. They stared at the roasted room.
They were looking, hopefully, for a charred corpse.
But the Ambassador reappeared beside his desk, looking ruefully at the charred typewriter. He was completely unsinged.
“Could you get me another typewriter?” he asked, looking directly at one of the hidden projectors. “I’m setting down a philosophy for you ungrateful wretches.”
He seated himself in the wreckage of an armchair. In a moment, he was apparently asleep.
“All right, everyone grab a seat,” Cercy said. “Time for a council of war.”
Malley straddled a chair backward. Harrison lighted a pipe as he sat down, slowly puffing it into life.
“Now, then,” Cercy said. “The Government has dropped this squarely in our laps. We have to kill the Ambassador—obviously. I’ve been put in charge.” Cercy grinned with regret. “Probably because no one higher up wants the responsibility of failure. And I’ve selected you three as my staff. We can have anything we want, any assistance or advice we need. All right. Any ideas?”
“How about Plan Three?” Harrison asked.
“We’ll get to that,” Cercy said. “But I don’t believe it’s going to work.”
“I don’t either,” Darrig agreed. “We don’t even know the nature of his defense.”
“That’s the first order of business. Malley, take all our data so far, and get someone to feed it into the Derichman Analyzer. You know the stuff we want. What properties has X, if X can do thus and thus?”
“Right,” Malley said. He left, muttering something about the ascendancy of the physical sciences.
“Harrison,” Cercy asked, “is Plan Three set up?”
“Sure.”
“Give it a try.”
While Harrison was making his last adjustments, Cercy watched Darrig. The plump little physicist was staring thoughtfully into space, muttering to himself. Cercy hoped he would come up with something. He was expecting great things of Darrig.
Knowing the impossibility of working with great numbers of people, Cercy had picked his staff with care. Quality was what he wanted.
With that in mind, he had chosen Harrison first. The stocky, sour-faced engineer had a reputation for being able to build anything, given half an idea of how it worked.
Cercy had selected Malley, the psychiatrist, because he wasn’t sure that killing the Ambassador was going to be a purely physical problem.
Darrig was a mathematical physicist, but his restless, curious mind had come up with some interesting theories in other fields. He was the only one of the four who was really interested in the Ambassador as an intellectual problem.
“He’s like Metal Old Man,” Darrig said finally.
“What’s that?”
“Haven’t you ever heard the story of Metal Old Man? Well, he was a monster covered with black metal armor. He was met by Monster-Slayer, an Apache culture hero. Monster-Slayer, after many attempts, finally killed Metal Old Man.”
“How did he do it?”
“Shot him in the armpit. He didn’t have any armor there.”
“Fine,” Cercy grinned. “Ask our Ambassador to raise his arm.”
“All set!” Harrison called.
“Fine. Go.”
In the Ambassador’s room, an invisible spray of gamma rays silently began to flood the room with deadly radiation.
But there was no Ambassador to receive them.
“That’s enough,” Cercy said, after a while. “That would kill a herd of elephants.”
But the Ambassador stayed invisible for five hours, until some of the radioactivity had abated. Then he appeared again.
“I’m still waiting for that typewriter,” he said.
“Here’s the Analyzer’s report.” Malley handed Cercy a sheaf of papers. “This is the final formulation, boiled down.”
Cercy read it aloud: “The simplest defense against any and all weapons, is to become each particular weapon.”
“Great,” Harrison said. “What does it mean?”
“It means,” Darrig explained, “that when we attack the Ambassador with fire, he turns into fire. Shoot at him, and he turns into a bullet—until the menace is gone, and then he changes back again.” He took the papers out of Cercy’s hand and riffled through them.
“Hmm. Wonder if there’s any historical parallel? Don’t suppose so.” He raised his head. “Although this isn’t conclusive, it seems logical enough. Any other defense would involve recognition of the weapon first, then an appraisal, then a countermove predicated on the potentialities of the weapon. The Ambassador’s defense would be a lot faster and safer. He wouldn’t have to recognize the weapon. I suppose his body simply identifies, in some way, with the menace at hand.”
“Did the Analyzer say there was any way of breaking this defense?” Cercy asked.
“The Analyzer stated definitely that there was no way, if the premise were true,” Malley answered gloomily.
“We can discard that judgment,” Darrig said. “The machine is limited.”
“But we still haven’t got any way of stopping him,” Malley pointed out. “And he’s still broadcasting that beam.”
Cercy thought for a moment. “Call in every expert you can find. We’re going to throw the book at the Ambassador. I know,” he said, looking at Darrig’s dubious expression, “but we have to try.”
During the next few days, every combination and permutation of death was thrown at the Ambassador. He was showered with weapons, ranging from Stone-Age axes to modern high-powered rifles, peppered with hand grenades, drowned in acid, suffocated in poison gas.
He kept shrugging his shoulders philosophically, and continued to work on the new typewriter they had given him.
Bacteria was piped in, first the known germ diseases, then mutated species.
The diplomat didn’t even sneeze.
He was showered with electricity, radiation, wooden weapons, iron weapons, copper weapons, brass weapons, uranium weapons—anything and everything, just to cover all possibilities.
He didn’t suffer a scratch, but his room looked as though a barroom brawl had been going on in it continually for fifty years.
Malley was working on an idea of his
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