The port officials, wearing lead mind-shields, questioned the Earthman closely for two weeks. He sweated while he talked because the aliens’ method of disease-prevention, which was one hundred percent effective, was to kill the sick person. His body was then burned and his ashes were buried at midnight in an unmarked grave.
After two weeks of grilling, the head official said, smiling, “You can go out among our people now.”
“You mean I have a clean bill of health?” the Earthman said.
“Nothing to worry about,” the official said. “We’ve heard every idea you have. There isn’t a single one we didn’t think of ten thousand years ago. You must come from a very primitive world.”
Jonathan Swift Somers III, like most great American writers, had been born in the Midwest. His father had been an aspiring poet whose unfinished epic had not been printed until long after his death. Simon had once made a pilgrimage to Petersburg, Illinois, where the great man was buried. The monument was a granite wheelchair with wings. Below was the epitaph:
Somers had been paralyzed from the waist down since he was ten years old. In those days, they didn’t have a vaccine against polio. Somers never left the wheelchair or his native town, but his mind voyaged out into the universe. He wrote forty novels and two hundred short stories, mostly about adventure in space. When he started writing, he described exploits on the Moon and Mars. When landings were made on these, he shifted the locale to Jupiter. After the Jovian Expedition, he wrote about astronauts who traveled to the extreme edge of the cosmos. He figured that in his lifetime men would never get beyond the solar system, and he was right. Actually, it made no difference whether or not astronauts got to the places he described. His books about the Moon and Mars were still read long after voyages there had become humdrum. It didn’t matter that Somers had been one hundred percent wrong about those places. His books were poetic and dramatic, and the people he depicted going there seemed more real than the people who actually went there. At least, they were more interesting.
Somers belonged to the same school of writing as the great French novelist Balzac. Balzac claimed he could write better about a place if he knew nothing of it. Invariably, when he did go to a city he had described in a book, he was disappointed.
Near Somers’ grave was his father’s.
However, the book reviewers had given the son a hard time most of his life. It wasn’t until he was an old man that Somers was recognized as a great artist. When he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, he remarked, “This heals no wounds.” He knew that critics never admit they’re wrong. They’d still give him a hard time.
Simon was worried that he, too, might upset the Shaltoonians. It was true that he never proposed any new ideas to them. All he did was ask questions. But often these can be more dangerous than propaganda. They lead to novel thoughts.
It seemed, however, that he wasn’t going to spark off any novelty in the Shaltoonians’ minds. The adults were, in effect, never around for more than a day. The young were too busy playing and getting educated for the time when they’d have to give up possession of their bodies.
Near the end of his visit, on a fine sunny morning, Simon left the spaceship to visit the Temple of Shaltoon. He intended to spend the day studying the rites being performed there. Shaltoon was the chief deity of the planet, a goddess whose closest Earthly equivalent was Venus or Aphrodite. He walked through the streets, which he found strangely empty. He was wondering what was going on when he was startled by a savage scream. He ran to the house from which it came and opened the door. A man and a woman were fighting to the death in the front room. Simon had a rule that he would never interfere in a quarrel between man and wife. It was a good rule but one which no humanitarian could keep. In another minute, one or both of the bleeding and bruised couple would be dead. He jumped in between them and then jumped out again and ran for his life. Both had turned against him, which was only to be expected.
Since he was followed out on the street, he kept on running. As he sped down the street, he heard cries and shrieks from the houses he passed. Turning a corner, he collided with a swirling shouting mob, everyone of which seemed intent on killing anybody within range of their fists, knives, spears, swords, and axes. Simon fought his way out and staggered back to the ship. When the port was closed behind him, he crawled to the sick bay—Anubis pacing him with whimpers and tongue-licking— where he bandaged his numerous cuts and gashes.
The next day he cautiously ventured out. The city was a mess. Corpses and wounded were everywhere in the streets, and firemen were still putting out the blazes that had been started the day before. However, no one seemed belligerent, so he stopped a citizen and asked him about yesterday’s debacle.
“It was Shag Day, dummy,” the citizen said and moved on.
Simon wasn’t too jarred by the rudeness. Very few of the natives were in a good mood when sober. This was because the carrier’s body was continually abused by the rotating ancestors. Each had to get all the debauchery he could cram into his allotted time between the quitting whistle and the curfew bell. As a result, the first thing the ancestor felt when he took his turn was a terrible hangover. This lasted through the day, making him tired and irritable until he had had a chance to kill the pain with liquor.
Every once in a while, the body would collapse and be carried off to a hospital by drunken ambulance attendants and turned over to drunken nurses and doctors. The poor devil who had possession that day was too sick to do anything but lie in bed, groaning and cursing. The thought that he was wasting his precious and rare day in convalescence from somebody else’s fun made him even sicker.
So the Space Wanderer didn’t wonder at the grumpiness of the citizen. He walked on and presently found a heavily bandaged but untypically amiable woman.
“Everybody, if you go back a few thousand years, has the same ancestors,” she said. “So, every thousand years or so, a day occurs when one particular ancestor happens to come into possession of many carriers. This usually happens to only a few, and we can cope with most of these coincidences. But about five thousand years ago, Shag, a very powerful personality born in the Old Stone Age, took over more than half of the population on a certain day. Since he was an extremely authoritarian and violent man who hated himself, the first Shag Day ended with a quarter of the world’s people killing each other.”
“And what about yesterday’s Shag Day?” Simon said.
“That’s the third. It’s a record breaker, too. Almost half of the population were casualties.”
“From the long-range view, it has its bright side,” Simon said. “You can allow more babies to stay alive now so you can bring the population back to normal.”