Robert Sheckley: Stories

"It's well established now that the way you put a question often determines not only the answer you'll get, but the type of answer possible. So. a mechanical answerer, geared to produce the ultimate revelations in reference to anything you want to know, might have unsuspected limitations."

Elwood Caswell, a homicidal maniac who wants to murder his best friend. Knowing it was wrong, he stops to buy a therapeutic machine, one made by General Motors. In a hurry, he buys, for cash, the floor model. The clerk learns that the floor model was gauged for Martians, who knows what effect it would have on a human, and the hunt is on.

When people talk about getting away from it all, they are usually thinking about our great open spaces out west. But to science fiction writers, that would be practically in the heart of Times Square. When a man of the future wants solitude he picks a slab of rock floating in space four light years east of Andromeda. Here is a gentle little story about a man who sought the solitude of such a location. And who did he take along for company? Charles the Robot.

If easy payment plans were to be really efficient, patrons' lifetimes had to be extended!

He said he wasn't immortal--but nothing could kill him. Still, if the Earth was to live as a free world, he had to die.

Of all the irksome, frustrating, maddening discoveries--was there no way of keeping it discovered?

As one of the Guardian ships protecting Earth, the crew had a problem to solve. Just how do you protect a race from an enemy who can take over a man's mind without seeming effort or warning?

What mission had the Quedak been given? Even he couldn't remember any more--but he refused to die till it was completed!

They could eat a horse, only luckily there was none. it might have eaten them first!

Lost in the vast Scorpion Desert of Venus, he needed all the courage a man could own--and every bit of credit he could raise!