Our selection of Sheckley’s representative best centers in the 1950s, with just a scattering of stories from subsequent decades. Like the painter Giorgio de Chirico, Sheckley had a period of greatness defined specifically by the application of a formal pressure against the chaos of an instinctive surrealism. In Sheckley’s case, the forms were the motifs of ’50s science fiction: the tales of first contact with aliens; the meticulous exposés of alienation and spectatorship in a burgeoning media culture; the Twilight Zone–style allegories and inversions employed to destabilize the apparent normality of waking life. When in his later stories Sheckley was driven to shake off these generic materials, the results, while often verbally astonishing, suffer from the loss of the structural elegance that makes the earlier work perfect stories of their type.
In an introduction to a gathering of his “greatest hits” that was published in 1979 (one with plenty of overlap with our own selection), Sheckley wrote:
From this position, these stories from a vanished age appear to me safe; acceptable; commodities sanctioned by their own continued existence, and given a mysterious and no doubt spurious air of rightness by the processes of time. Yet when I wrote them, each story involved me in a dangerous movement into an unfamiliar situation, and each story initiated a process in which a concept, itself sometimes barely visible, was to be freighted with words, and perhaps sunk by them.
He added:
I have nothing to say about the stories themselves. To talk about them I would have to reread them, and I went through entirely enough hell writing them ever to want to look at them again. Anyhow, a glance at the contents page brings them all back to me, as well as the dingy rooms in crumbling brownstones in New York where I wrote most of them ...
That’s the sound of Robert Sheckley, morose comedian, raining on his own parade. We wish he could be around to rain on this one.
—ALEX ABRAMOVICH and JONATHAN LETHEM
STORE OF THE WORLDS
THE MONSTERS
CORDOVIR and Hum stood on the rocky mountaintop, watching the new thing happen. Both felt rather good about it. It was undoubtedly the newest thing that had happened for some time.
“By the way the sunlight glints from it,” Hum said, “I’d say it is made of metal.”
“I’ll accept that,” Cordovir said. “But what holds it up in the air?”
They both stared intently down to the valley where the new thing was happening. A pointed object was hovering over the ground. From one end of it poured a substance resembling fire.
“It’s balancing on the fire,” Hum said. “That should be apparent even to your old eyes.”
Cordovir lifted himself higher on his thick tail, to get a better look. The object settled to the ground and the fire stopped.
“Shall we go down and have a closer look?” Hum asked.
“All right. I think we have time—wait! What day is this?”
Hum calculated silently, then said, “The fifth day of Luggat.”
“Damn” Cordovir said. “I have to go home and kill my wife.”
“It’s a few hours before sunset,” Hum said. “I think you have time to do both.”
Cordovir wasn’t sure. “I’d hate to be late.”
“Well then. You know how fast I am,” Hum said. “If it gets late, I’ll hurry back and kill her myself. How about that?”
“That’s very decent of you.” Cordovir thanked the younger man and together they slithered down the steep mountainside.
In front of the metal object both men halted and stood up on their tails.
“Rather bigger than I thought,” Cordovir said, measuring the metal object with his eye. He estimated that it was slightly longer than their village, and almost half as wide. They crawled a circle around it, observing that the metal was tooled, presumably by human tentacles.
In the distance the smaller sun had set.
“I think we had better get back,” Cordovir said, noting the cessation of light complacently.
“I still have plenty of time.” Hum flexed his muscles.
“Yes, but a man likes to kill his own wife.”
“As you wish.” They started off to the village at a brisk pace.
In his house, Cordovir’s wife was finishing supper. She had her back to the door, as etiquette required. Cordovir killed her with a single flying slash of his tail, dragged her body outside, and sat down to eat.
After meal and meditation he went to the Gathering. Hum, with the impatience of youth, was already there, telling of the metal object. He probably bolted his supper, Cordovir thought with mild distaste. After the youngster had finished, Cordovir gave his own observations. The only thing he added to Hum’s account was an idea: that the metal object might contain intelligent beings.
“What makes you think so?” Mishill, another elder, asked.
“The fact that there was fire from the object as it came down,” Cordovir said, “joined to the fact that the fire stopped after the object was on the ground. Some being, I contend, was responsible for turning it off.”
“Not necessarily,” Mishill said. The village men talked about it late into the night. Then they broke up the meeting, buried the various murdered wives, and went to their homes.
Lying in the darkness, Cordovir discovered that he hadn’t made up his mind as yet about the new thing. Presuming it contained intelligent beings, would they be moral? Would they have a sense of right and wrong? Cordovir doubted it, and went to sleep.
The next morning every male in the village went to the metal object. This was proper, since the functions of males were to examine new things and to limit the female population. They formed a circle around it, speculating on what might be inside.
“I believe they will be human beings,” Hum’s elder brother Esktel said. Cordovir shook his entire body in disagreement.
“Monsters, more likely,” he said. “If you take in account—”
“Not necessarily,” Esktel said. “Consider the logic of our physical development. A single focusing eye—”
“But in the great Outside,” Cordovir said, “there may be many strange races, most of them nonhuman. In the infinitude—”
“Still,” Esktel put in, “the logic of our—”
“As I was saying,” Cordovir went on, “the chance is infinitesimal that they would resemble us. Their vehicle, for example. Would we build—”
“But on strictly logical grounds,” Esktel said, “you can see—”
That was the third time Cordovir had been interrupted. With a single movement of his tail he smashed Esktel against the metal object. Esktel fell to the ground, dead.
“I have often considered my brother a boor,” Hum said. “What were you saying?”
But Cordovir was interrupted again. A piece of metal set in the greater piece of metal squeaked, turned, and lifted, and a creature came out.
Cordovir saw at once that he had been right. The thing that crawled out of the hole was twin-tailed. It was covered to its top with something partially metal and partially hide. And its color! Cordovir shuddered.
The thing was the color of wet, flayed flesh.
All the villagers had backed away, waiting to see what the thing would do. At first it didn’t do anything. It stood on the metal surface, and a bulbous object that topped its body moved from side to side. But there were no accompanying body movements to give the gesture meaning. Finally, the thing raised both tentacles and made noises.