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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Cercy was red-eyed and excited, and Harrison and his helpers were working away at three crazy looking rigs. Cercy snatched the book from Malley, looked up one item, and put it down.
“Great work,” he said. “We’re all set now. Finished, Harrison?”
“Just about.” Harrison and ten helpers were screwing in the last parts. “Will you tell me what this is?”
“Me too,” Malley put in.
“I don’t mean to be secretive,” Cercy said. “I’m just in a hurry. I’ll explain as we go along.” He stood up. “Okay, let’s wake up the Ambassador.”
They watched the screen as a bolt of electricity leaped from the ceiling to the Ambassador’s bed. Immediately, the Ambassador vanished.
“Now he’s a part of that stream of electrons, right?” Cercy asked.
“That’s what he told us,” Malley said.
“But still keeping his pattern, within the stream,” Cercy continued. “He has to, in order to get back into his own shape. Now we start the first disrupter.”
Harrison hooked the machine into circuit, and sent his helpers away.
“Here’s a running graph of the electron stream,” Cercy said. “See the difference?” On the graph there was an irregular series of peaks and valleys, constantly shifting and leveling. “Do you remember when you hypnotized the Ambassador? He talked about his friend who’d been killed in space.”
“That’s right,” Malley nodded. “His friend had been killed by something that had just popped up.”
“He said something else,” Cercy went on. “He told us that the basic organizing force of the Universe usually stopped things like that. What does that mean to you?”
“The organizing force,” Malley repeated slowly. “Didn’t Darrig say that that was a new natural law?”
“He did. But think of the implications, as Darrig did. If an organizing principle is engaged in some work, there must be something that opposes it. That which opposes organization is—”
“Chaos!”
“That’s what Darrig thought, and what we should have seen. The chaos is underlying, and out of it there arose an organizing principle. This principle, if I’ve got it right, sought to suppress the fundamental chaos, to make all things regular.
“But the chaos still boils out in spots, as Alfern found out. Perhaps the organizational pattern is weaker in space. Anyhow, those spots are dangerous, until the organizing principle gets to work on them.”
He turned to the panel. “Okay, Harrison. Throw in the second disrupter.” The peaks and valleys altered on the graph. They started to mount in crazy, meaningless configurations.
“Take Darrig’s message in the light of that. Chaos, we know, is underlying. Everything was formed out of it. The Gorgon Medusa was something that couldn’t be looked upon. She turned men into stone, you recall, destroyed them. So, Darrig found a relationship between chaos and that which can’t be looked upon. All with regard to the Ambassador, of course.”
“The Ambassador can’t look upon chaos!” Malley cried.
“That’s it. The Ambassador is capable of an infinite number of alterations and permutations. But something—the matrix—can’t change, because then there would be nothing left. To destroy something as abstract as a pattern, we need a state in which no pattern is possible. A state of chaos.”
The third disrupter was thrown into circuit. The graph looked as if a drunken caterpillar had been sketching on it.
“Those disrupters are Harrison’s idea,” Cercy said. “I told him I wanted an electrical current with absolutely no coherent pattern. The disrupters are an extension of radio jamming. The first alters the electrical pattern. That’s its purpose: to produce a state of patternlessness. The second tries to destroy the pattern left by the first; the third tries to destroy the pattern made by the first two. They’re fed back then, and any remaining pattern is systematically destroyed in circuit … I hope.”
“This is supposed to produce a state of chaos?” Malley asked, looking into the screen.
For a while there was only the whining of the machines and the crazy doodling of the graph. Then, in the middle of the Ambassador’s room, a spot appeared. It wavered, shrunk, expanded—
What happened was indescribable. All they knew was that everything within the spot had disappeared.
“Switch it off” Cercy shouted. Harrison cut the switch.
The spot continued to grow.
“How is it we’re able to look at it?” Malley asked, staring at the screen.
“The shield of Perseus, remember?” Cercy said. “Using it as a mirror, he could look at Medusa.”
“It’s still growing!” Malley shouted.
“There was a calculated risk in all this,” Cercy said. “There’s always the possibility that the chaos may go on, unchecked. If that happens, it won’t matter much what—”
The spot stopped growing. Its edges wavered and rippled, and then it started to shrink.
“The organizing principle,” Cercy said, and collapsed into a chair.
“Any sign of the Ambassador?” he asked, in a few minutes.
The spot was still wavering. Then it was gone. Instantly there was an explosion. The steel walls buckled inward, but held. The screen went dead.
“The spot removed all the air from the room,” Cercy explained, “as well as the furniture and the Ambassador.”
“He couldn’t take it,” Malley said. “No pattern can cohere, in a state of patternlessness. He’s gone to join Alfern.”
Malley started to giggle. Cercy felt like joining him, but pulled himself together.
“Take it easy,” he said. “We’re not through yet.”
“Sure we are! The Ambassador—”
“Is out of the way. But there’s still an alien fleet homing in on this region of space. A fleet so strong we couldn’t scratch it with an H-bomb. They’ll be looking for us.”
He stood up.
“Go home and get some sleep. Something tells me that tomorrow we’re going to have to start figuring out some way of camouflaging a planet.”
The Hour of Battle“That hand didn’t move, did it?” Edwardson asked, standing at the port, looking at the stars.
“No,” Morse said. He had been staring fixedly at the Attison Detector for over an hour. Now he blinked three times rapidly, and looked again. “Not a millimeter.”
“I
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