In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

Robert Sheckley

The planet obviously had been home to a civilization with a technology advanced far beyond that of Earth, but apparently not much more advanced in other ways, since their records revealed a history of wars. There were no more wars going on now, because all of the inhabitants had disappeared, and those records gave no clue as to what had happened to them. Not that the three humans let the mystery concern them. They were looking for a legendary cache of high-tech weapons more powerful than anything in Earth’s arsenals which they could sell to the highest bidder, and weren’t bothered by that enigmatic disappearance. But they should have been . . .

Robert Sheckley (1928-2005) seemed to explode into print in the early 1950s with stories in nearly every science fiction magazine on the newsstands. Actually, the explosion was bigger than most realized, since he was simultaneously writing even more stories under a number of pseudonyms. His forte was humor, wild and unpredictable, often absurdist, much like the work of Douglas Adams three decades later. His work has been compared to the Marx Brothers by Harlan Ellison®, to Voltaire by both Brian W. Aldiss and J.G. Ballard, and Neil Gaiman has called Sheckley “Probably the best short-story writer during the 50s to the mid-1960s working in any field.” Of course, Robert Sheckley’s ingenious and inventive humor often took very dark turns—as in the story which follows.