Robert Sheckley - The Eryx

Ehrenzveig closed by saying that they had bought a ticket for me, a passage to Earth. It was waiting in Ameri-can Express in Luna City. They would be very pleased if I would come to Seattle as their guest, all expenses paid. They promised to reimburse me handsomely if I would come and talk to them about the circumstances of my expedition to Alquemar, my discovery of the Eryx, my feelings during my time of association with it, and so on and so forth.

Would I come? You bet I would. Luna City had been a drag for quite a while, and I’d had enough of tourists and asteroids to last me a very long time. With great pleasure I told Duarte where he could stick his job, and shortly after that I was on my way to the home planet.

A few weeks later, I was there.

Julie, I won’t bore you with my impressions of Earth after an absence of almost ten years. All of that and a lot more is part of my standard lecture. It’s available now both as a book and a CD. If you want, you can look it up for yourself. (But I know you, my darling. Not interested in anyone but yourself, are you?)

“Dalton! How good that you could come!” That was Ehrenzveig, a big, corpulent man, greeting me literally with open arms. He had a couple of other guys with him. They were all dressed in white. That was one of the marks of the cult, I later found out.

I was brought by limousine to Eryx House, their own church and residence on a private island in Puget Sound. I was wined and dined. They made much of me. It was very pleasant. Except that there was a strange undertone to everything Ehrenzveig and the others said. What the psych people might call a subtext. They knew something that I and the rest of the human race didn’t know, and they felt very smug about that.

The next day they brought me to the Space Needle for the Viewing, as they called it. The way it worked for the peasants, they got a ticket (free from the Eryx foundation, but you had to have one), then were searched for weapons, then were allowed to form on the line that went all the way up to the viewing room, which they called the Citadel. I didn’t have to do this. But Ehrenzveig thought I might like to see how it was done.

I was more than a little surprised at the numbers of sick and crippled people on that line. There were blind folks, people with cancer, and just about everything else. They were all hoping for a miracle cure. A lot of them, Ehrenz-veig assured me, were going to get it.

I must have looked skeptical, because Ehrenzveig said, “Oh, it’s real enough. It’s not a matter of faith; it simply works. The other religions don’t know what to do with us. The Eryx—actually performs miracles. All of the time. Every day. This is a stage that our prophets have written about. We call it the Grace of the Last Days.”

“The Last Days? What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked him.

He looked sly. “I’m afraid I can’t discuss the inner doctrine with you.”

“Why not? I thought you considered me a founder.”

“A founder, yes, but not a member of our religion. You discovered the Eryx, Mr. Dalton, and for that we will always honor you. But you do not believe in its supernatural message. And because of that, we will not open our hearts and minds to you.”

I shrugged. What are you going to say when a guy lays a rap like that on you? And anyhow, I didn’t tell that to Ehrenzveig. The guy was my meal ticket, and I didn’t want to get him sore at me. Not yet. Not until I had something going for myself.

You see, Julie, and I’m sure you’ll appreciate this point, I had gotten a free trip to Earth and I was being put up in what amounted to a fancy resort hotel. But there’s been no talk of money. Scratch. The mojo. The stuff that makes it all go around.

I didn’t bring this up, however. Not at that time. I was kinda sure Ehrenzveig and his people were going to make me an offer of some kind. After all, without me they wouldn’t have had a religion.

I spent quite some time in the little room viewing the Eryx through glass. They had it on the cylinder of stone I’d found it on. I hadn’t bothered to bring the cylinder back. They’d made a special expedition to Alquemar to fetch it. The room was designed to look just like the cave in which Gomez and I had made our discovery. Even the lighting was the same. And they’d replaced the cloth the Eryx had rested on. The Eryx was sitting on it again, looking pretty as a picture, the very last word in high-class alien artifacts.

“I thought somebody was studying that cloth,” I remarked.

“Guillot, yes. But our foundation was able to suppress his translation and reclaim the cloth. It belongs with the Eryx, you understand. It is part of its substance.”

“Do you know what the thing says?”

“We have our surmises.”

“So?”

“If you think I am going to tell you, Mr. Dalton, you are very mistaken. That knowledge will be made public when the time is right.”

“And when will that be?”

“The Eryx itself will give us the indication.”

So we stood around for a while watching guys throw away their crutches, and other guys shout, “I can see!” and all the rest of the bullshit. And then they took me back to Eryx House for a really first-rate banquet in my honor. It was after that dinner that Ehrenzveig made the proposition I’d been expecting.

We were sitting with cigars and brandy in this superluxurious sitting room down the hall from the main dining room. At first it was a bunch of us, me and Ehrenzveig and about ten others who were pretty obviously bigwigs in the organization. Then the others left as if on signal, and Ehrenzveig said, “You’re probably wondering by now what this could possibly have to do with you, Mr. Dalton.”

“The question did cross my mind,” I said.

“If I have not read your character amiss,” Ehrenzveig said, “I believe, you would like money. Quite a large amount of money. Or am I being too direct?”

“Not at all. I’m all for plain speaking and high living.”

“Excellent. We can give you both.”

“High living,” I mused. “Does that translate into actual cash of the realm, or do I get paid in religious points in the organization?”

Ehrenzveig smiled. “We are well aware that you are not a believer. That’s fine. You’re not required to be. Would it make you uncomfortable to know that we’d like to use you as a shill?”

“Not if there’s any money in it.”

“Excellent! I appreciate your candor.”

“You don’t mind, then, that I think your religion of the Eryx is a lot of bullshit, to put it bluntly?”

“I don’t mind at all. These are modern times, Mr. Dal-ton, and the test of a modern religion resides in how it performs, not in what it promises. And in a religion such as ours, there’s certainly no moral or ethical code. Such matters have nothing to do with a diety such as ours. The Eryx, whom some call the Great Satan, couldn’t care less about right or wrong, good or bad. He’s here for one thing and one thing only.”

“And that thing is?”

“It will be plain to you in good time,” Ehrenzveig said. “I predict that you will become a believer. And that’ll be a pity, because we’ll have lost ourselves a jovial and cynical rogue.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere,” I said, “unless you accompany it with large sums of money. Don’t worry about supplying me with dancing girls. I’ll take care of details like that myself.”

“The money, yes,” Ehrenzveig said. “How admirably direct you are. But I came prepared for you.”

Ehrenzveig took a billfold out of an inner pocket and counted out ten thousand-dollar bills. He riffled them and handed them to me.