Robert Sheckley - The Eryx

Rahman met us in the Disneyland Hotel in Jogjakarta. He thought the Eryx was pretty. But you could tell he wasn’t impressed. Or maybe it was because he had a lot of other stuff on his mind. I only learned later that the CIA and local narcotics feds had become very interested in Rahman and his partners. I guess Rahman saw trouble coming. Because he said, “I’m sure we could sell this and realize a fine profit. But I have a better idea. I’ve consulted with my partners. We’re going to give this object to a big American research company, to hold in the public trust, to study for the benefit of all mankind.”

“That’s very civic-minded of you,” I said. “But why would you want to do that?”

“We’d like to stay on the good side of the Americans,” Rahman said. “It could be useful later.”

“But you won’t make any money this way.”

“Sometimes goodwill is more important than money.”

“Not to us it isn’t!”

Rahman smiled and muttered something in the local dialect. The local equivalent of “tough shit,” no doubt.

I wasn’t quite ready to give up. “But we’d agreed to sell any artifacts we found and split the profits!”

“That is not correct,” Rahman said, rather coldly. “If you read your contract, you’ll see that you participate in the sale of artifacts only if we do in fact decide to sell. But the decision is entirely up to us.”

He was right about the wording of the contract. But who could have guessed that they wouldn’t sell?

I realized the wisdom of Rahman’s move—from his point of view—about a year later, after the CIA, working with the Indonesian authorities, busted him for the international dope trafficking. The fix must have been in. He got off with a fine.

Gomez and I followed orders and brought the Eryx to Microsoft-IBM in Seattle, the biggest private research facility in the States. We told them about the engine, said that if our inference was correct, this thing had indeed influenced its operation.

Well, at Microsoft-IBM, the guys in white coats ran tests from here to hell and back on the thing, and the more they saw the more excited they got, and they called in bigshot scientists from universities all around the world, and Microsoft-IBM was glad to pay for it because it gave them publicity like you couldn’t believe, and besides, soon enough the government began funding it.

Gomez and I were superfluous. After taking our statement, nobody needed anything else from us. The Indone-sian group went out of the spaceship business; it was save your ass time, and they were going to be busy for a long time. They gave us a pretty good bonus, however. I was already negotiating for new backers and a new ship and a better deal, and between us we had just enough money to swing it.

And then Gomez got himself killed in a traffic accident in Gallup, New Mexico, of all places, and his family were his heirs and I was in legal stuff up to the giggie. The court never believed that Gomez had verbally deeded his share to me, and it cost me a fortune in lawyers to finally not be able to prove it and have half of what was supposed to be our seed money go to some uncle Gomez had never even met down in Oaxaca, Mexico.

So I was on my own, and in what they call straitened circumstances. I managed to make a deal with some South African diamond people and took a new ship, the Witwatersrand, back to Alquemar to look for more stuff. That was when Stebbins, the company man the South Africans had forced on me, got killed in a cave collapse, and I got blamed. It was really unfair. I’d been sitting in the ship playing solitaire when he went out without authorization to the site, trying to make something on the side for him-self, I doubt not. But they trumped up a case of negligence against me in Johannesburg and I lost my license.

So I came up empty on that one and suddenly people didn’t want to hire me anymore for anything. So what with one thing and another I wasn’t around when the white coats were making some of their most important discoveries about the Eryx. During that period I was doing six months in Lunaville on a trumped-up charge of embezzlement. So I had my hands full with my own problems when Guillot at the Sorbonne, working with Clayton Ross’s New Rosetta stone, came up with a translation of the writing on the Eryx paper. And got promptly suppressed by court injunction while the Microsoft-IBM people sought corroborating evidence before releasing it. I heard about it while I was in jail. Everybody on Earth heard about it. (Except for you, my adorable Julie, caught up in your larcenous dreams.)

I got out on good behavior (I’m no troublemaker) and drifted around Luna City for a while, working as a dish-washer. My spaceship piloting career seemed to be dead. No license, and no one would have hired me if I’d had one.

But you can’t keep a good man down. A change of administration on Luna gave me the opportunity to regain a pilot’s license restricted to the inner solar system. This was accomplished by my employer at the time, Edgar Duarte, the owner of Luna Tours, who thought to use my fame or notoriety to enhance his tourist business. And so I got a job taking day trippers out to the asteroid belt, a far fall indeed for one who had discovered the Eryx.

I took it with equanimity, however: I’ve long known that fortune’s a whore and life itself a kind of stupid muddle. I am not a religious man. Far from it. I hold, if anything, a belief which I believe was once ascribed to the Gnostics: that Satan won out over God, not the other way around, and the Dark Prince runs things in the dismal and disastrous way that suits his nature. I knew that every-thing was just chance and bad luck, in a universe in which things were stacked against us and even our ruling deity hated us.

But since it’s all chance, good things happen from time to time, and, lo and behold, my time seemed to come around. I was running my tourists out to these stupid asteroids, sleeping in a flophouse since Duarte paid me next to nothing, bored out of my mind, when one day I got a letter from Earth.

This letter was written on genuine paper, not this insubstantial e-mail stuff, but on stiff parchmentlike paper. It was from something that proclaimed itself “The First Church of the Eryx, Universal Pontifex of Everything and All.”

The letter was not humor, as I had at first supposed, but a serious message from a group that had formed a church for the worship of the Eryx.

The Eryx was a suprahuman principle, they wrote me, which had revealed itself to those who could see as di-vinely alien in form and in essence, and this coming had been prophesied long ago because of the self-evident na-ture of man’s fallen soul.

In the letter they pointed out how the Eryx was now in a citadel in the Seattle Space Needle which had been ac-quired for it by Microsoft-IBM. Thousands of people passed in front of it daily, looking for cures to what ailed them. And the Eryx helped many of them. The Eryx had literally thousands of miracles to its credit. Not only could and would it cure any and all human ailments, everything went better in the presence of the Eryx, from machinery (which I had been the first to observe) to the workings of the human mind (of which the writer of the letter was an example, I suppose).

After quite a bit more of this, the writer, a Mr. Charles Ehrenzveig, got to the point. It had recently come to the Church’s attention (he didn’t say how) that I was the per-son who had discovered the Body of the Deity and brought it to mankind. For this I was to be honored. It had been some years since I had had any contact with the Source. I had been denied my rightful fame, ignored where I ought to have been praised (my feelings exactly), and forced to live meanly far from Earth, whereas by rights I should take my place as The Discoverer of the Eryx. The letter also implied that there was something holy about me by association and by primogeniture.