The Book of Philip Jose Farmer

by Philip José Farmer

  Linda rose from the chair and took a step towards Johnny.

  "What do you mean?"

  Johnny bit his lip and started to turn away. But Linda caught him by the shoulder and, with a strength surprising for such a small woman, spun him around to face her.

  "What do you mean by saying he isn't going to come back from the dead?"

  "I'll give it to you straight, Linda," said Johnny. "Doc Grandtoul can't any more put life into a corpse than you or I can!"

  Linda gave a little shriek and swayed back and forth for a minute. Johnny caught her in his arms and pulled her to him.

  "Oh, Linda, darling, don't be mad at me! I'm a cheat, a liar, a crook! And Skeeter and Doc Grandtoul are cheats, liars, and crooks, too! This whole business is a fraud!"

  He dropped his arms from around her and began pacing around the room while he talked loudly and furiously. He would not look directly at her. He seemed to be ashamed and to be afraid he might see scorn on her face.

  "I met Doc and Skeeter about six months ago," he said. "In Jumpoff, Nevada. I'd been prospecting and hadn't had any luck. I was broke and hungry. Doc took me in, fed me, clothed me, taught me to be a good poker player. He and Skeeter were dealing for the house in the poker games at the High Stepper Saloon. But Doc wasn't satisfied. He wanted to make more money and faster. He's a great reader, is Doc, well educated. In fact, he's a real doctor, got his M.D. from an Eastern university, though he comes from an old New Orleans family.

  "Doc had read something in one of his history books that gave him an idea. It seems that in the Middle Ages there was a band of sharpers that traveled from village to village, announcing they intended to raise the dead from the local cemetery. And things happened there and then just like they did here and now. Nobody was anxious for the dead to come back. In fact, they were determined they wouldn't come back. Why? Because they'd cause too much consternation and turmoil, make too many problems.

  "Doc said people hadn't changed a bit since the 13th century. We have gunpowder and steam trains and telegraph and gas lights. But people are just as superstitious and gullible as in the old days. They don't want their lives disrupted any more than can be helped.

  "So Doc, who's a smart man even if he is as crooked as a snake's path, made some hollow wax bullets with red dye in the hollows. When they're fired, the wax doesn't hurt the man it hits, just stings. And the wax just spreads out and splatters the red dye so it looks like a bullet wound."

  Linda had seated herself on a chair. She had been staring at him as if she could not understand what he was telling her. But when he paused for breath, she said, "What about Doc Evans? He pronounced you dead. How'd you fool him?"

  Johnny, still not looking at her, grinned crookedly. He said, "Skeeter and I always travel ahead of Doc Grandtoul. We stop in a town and look it over. If the local doctor can be bribed or if there ain't no doctors, we stay. Acheron was a setup for us. Old Doc Evans hasn't much money, and he likes his whiskey too well. He agreed to go along with us if we gave him a good cut of the loot. He said he could send his grandson through medical school with the money and have enough to retire on, too."

  "Then the whole quarrel over me was arranged by you and Skeeter?"

  For the first time since he had started talking, Johnny looked directly at her. Desperately, he said, "Yes! But I wasn't fooling when I said I loved you! I do love you!"

  "And just what did you expect me to do when you had to leave town before everybody found out you were a fraud?" she said scornfully. "Go with you? A cheat and a liar!"

  "Now, honey," said Johnny, "if you'll think about it, you'll remember that Doc said he'd raise only those that the revitalizing machine can raise. And since it can't raise anybody, well... And he also said he wouldn't take a red cent for raising anybody. He won't, either. He's just taken money not to raise certain dead people. Nothing really dishonest in that. Like Doc says, you can't cheat an honest man."

  "I don't know what you mean," she said.

  "Here's what I mean," said Johnny angrily as he picked up the carpetbag and dumped its contents on the top of the table. "See all this money? Piles and piles of money? This all comes from the people that saw Doc this morning.

  "Here's five hundred from rich Mr. Baggs, the banker. Who'd think he was so anxious to make sure his dead partner didn't climb out of the grave and demand his half of the bank back, hah?

  "And here's a hundred from Mrs. Tanner. Her first husband, I understand, died under rather mysterious circumstances. And it wasn't much later that she married her foreman. She must have good reason not to want the old boy to appear and clear up just how he did die.

  "And here's two hundred from old Mr. Krank. He's about ready to be buried himself, but he wants his last few days to be peaceful and quiet. Which they wouldn't be if Mrs. Krank's tongue was freed from the silence of the tomb. She was quite a shrew.

  "And here's five hundred, a contribution of a hundred each from the sons and daughters of Silas Johnson. He was a tyrant and a hypochondriac. Besides, he might want the inheritance back.

  "And here's... well, why go on? It's the same story in every town we've come to."

  "It's not a very nice story," Linda said. "But you've not answered me. What did you expect me to do when you had to leave town?"

  "I was going to tell you as soon as I could get the nerve. But I was afraid you wouldn't want anything to do with me when I told you the truth."

  "What about Doc Grandtoul and Skeeter?" she said. "Did they know you were going to tell me?"

  "No. I supposed they'd be mad at me. However, they couldn't do much about it. Anyway, they've got about as much money as they'll get out of Acheron. They could go on and get another partner somewhere else."

  "And how," she said sarcastically, "did you expect to keep from being lynched when people found out they'd been cheated?"

  "Well," he said slowly, "I was hoping you'd go with me to some other town. We could get a fresh start there. I can't stay here. We'll have to leave tomorrow. Maybe tonight."

  "You must be crazy!" she said. "I can't just run off and leave my father like that! I might go away with you, but not before I explain to my father. But I don't think he'd like me to marry a man like you. You might want to go back to cheating people."

  "Don't say that, Linda. I'll admit I made a mistake. But Doc was so nice to me, and I really didn't know we'd be hurting people so much."

  Linda walked up to Johnny and stood in front of him and looked him in the eye.

  "Johnny, if you'll tell everybody in Acheron what you've done, and say you're sorry, and give them their money back, I'll marry you. But if you don't, we're through!"

  "Use your horse sense," said Johnny. "If I did that, I couldn't ever settle down here. Who'd trust his horses to a man like me? And you couldn't hold your head high in this town, because you'd be the wife of that sharper Johnny Addeson. Give me a chance to straighten this out. I'll go talk with Doc and Skeeter. We'll fix this up somehow. I swear it! And you and I'll be able to live here the rest of our lives. And I'll be good to you, Linda. Good to you and good for this town. You'll be proud of me."

  "All right," said Linda. "I'll give you a chance. I do want to live here. And I don't want anybody scorning you or me. Or our children."

  Johnny smiled like a kid who's been given a sackful of candy for free. He picked up the bag and scooped the money into it and said, "I think Doc'll be able to help me out of this jam. He's a sharper, and he likes to take a dishonest sucker. But he isn't mean. He really does have a good heart. If anybody's smart enough to figure this out, he is."

  He kissed Linda lightly on the lips and then ran out of the room.

  Linda sat down again and waited. After a while she rose and went to the window to look out. She was just in time to see Johnny and Skeeter and Doc Grandtoul come out of the saloon across the street. Johnny was still holding the bag of money, and all three looked grim. Linda couldn't hear what they were saying, but they seemed to be arguing. They were talking a
nd waving their hands when they walked into the livery stable.

  Linda didn't leave the window. In about half an hour Johnny and Skeeter came out of the stable. Johnny was grinning. Neither of the two had the bag of money. They walked down the street and stopped in front of the Lucky Lode to talk to Doc Evans. The three talked earnestly for about ten minutes, but when some men joined them they quit talking to each other and joined in the general conversation.

  The sound of a shot reached Linda through the half-opened window. The men on the street looked startled, milled around for a moment, and then ran towards the stable. Linda raced down the hall and down the steps to the street. When she was halfway to the stable, she heard what the whole town of Acheron knew by then.

  Doc Grandtoul was dead. He had accidentally shot himself.

  Some stories have happy endings. Any story of young love should have a happy ending. It means two young citizens settling down in a town and raising more happy young citizens.

  And this was what happened in Acheron after the uproar over Doc Grandtoul's sudden and sad demise had quieted down. Doc Grandtoul was pronounced dead by Doc Evans, and the burial took place next day.

  Only Linda thought it was peculiar that, when the coffin lid was closed over Doc Grandtoul, Doc Evans was the sole person present. And she noticed that Skeeter left town the same day. She didn't think it was so peculiar that not a word was said about the money paid to Doc Grandtoul. Those who had paid were not going to raise a fuss. Everybody pulled a long face and said what a pity it was that only Doc

  Grandtoul knew how to operate his machine. But very few moped around because of what had happened.

  For a long time Linda never opened her mouth to Johnny about the incident of the revitalizing machine. She was satisfied that the result had been to make her happy. However, one thing bothered her.

  And one night, years later, when she and Johnny were sitting before the fireplace, after putting the kids to bed, Linda said, unexpectedly, "Johnny, what happened to those people who pronounced you dead in all those towns you three scoundrels fleeced? Weren't they left to face everybody and be branded as sharpers just as Doc Evans would have been if Doc Grandtoul hadn't been killed?"

  Johnny was startled, but after coughing a few times he managed to say, "I'm sorry to say that we didn't worry about them."

  "If Doc Grandtoul had had an 'accident' in every town," she said, "nobody would have been left holding the bag."

  Johnny was silent.

  Linda looked into the fireplace a moment, and then she said, "I wonder where Doc Grandtoul is now?"

  Johnny pretended to misunderstand her.

  "I don't know, darling. I'll bet he went to the Good Place. After all, he brought us together, didn't he?"

  An Exclusive Interview With Lord Greystoke

  A subgenre of biographical literature is that which claims that certain people thought to be fictional are, or were, very much living. Splendid examples of this are Blakeney's Sir Percy Blakeney: Fact or Fiction? (a biography of the Scarlet Pimpernel), Baring-Gould's Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street and Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-Fifth Street, Parkinson's The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower, and the Flashman Papers (three volumes so far) by Fraser. In fact, some public libraries stock these in the "B" or biography section. (The Blakeney book is in the "B" section of the Peoria, Illinois, public library.)

  I've written two such "lives": Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life. (The former is in the biography section of the Yuma City, California, Library.) I plan to write biographies of The Shadow, Allan Quatermain, Fu Manchu, d'Artagnan, Travis McGee, and a number of others. Fu Manchu, by the way, may have been based on a real-life model, a Vietnamese named Hanoi Shan whose operations in early twentieth-century France were every bit as sinister and fantastic as Rohmer's creation. I was informed of this after I'd made the statement in Tarzan Alive that Fu Manchu had no living counterpart.

  This form of apologia is a lot of fun and much hard work. It requires as much imagination as the writing of science fiction but more discipline. Historical facts must not be ignored. Baring-Gould, in writing his Holmes biography, had an enormous amount of scholarship, articles published in The Baker Street Journal and other periodicals, to draw upon. But he had not only to read all these but to study them and make decisions. He found many conflicting theories, and he had to pick the one that seemed most valid. In addition, where theories or speculations were lacking, he had to generate his own. He had to explain discrepancies, which are numerous in Watson's account of Holmes's life. And, I might add, Burroughs, in his semifictional narratives of Greystoke's career, left many discrepancies for the scholar to reconcile, if he could. There are also gaps in the life of the hero which the biographer must fill in. And if the original writer has neglected the hero's genealogy, the biographer must research this.

  Sometimes, a biographer makes a statement which he cannot substantiate. Thus, Baring- Gould said that Holmes was a cousin of Professor Challenger. He has been much criticized by the Sherlockian scholars for this because he presented no evidence from the Canon. Fortunately, in my Tarzan Alive, I was able to validate the relationship. The fact that Tarzan's mother was a Rutherford gave me the clue needed to track down the cousinhood.

  The following article is part of my interview with "Lord Greystoke" and appeared in the April, 1972, issue of Esquire under the title of "Tarzan Lives." It was accompanied by a portrait of Greystoke, a photograph of a painting by Jean-Paul Goude. The staff of Esquire went to great lengths and much trouble to acquire this, for which they should be thanked. The report that Goude got the commission to do the painting because he is a relative of Admiral Paul d'Arnot of the French navy, Greystoke's closest friend, is being checked. It is said that Goude, like Holmes, is a descendant of Antoine Vernet, father of four famous French painters.

  Editor's Note: For a number of years Mr. Farmer, who recorded the following interview, has been engaged in writing a definitive biography of the man Edgar Rice Burroughs called Tarzan of the Apes. Mr. Farmer's book, Tarzan Alive, to be published by Doubleday in April of this year, is similar in method to Baring-Gould's Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street and Parkinson's The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower, with the very important difference that Mr. Farmer firmly avers that "Lord Greystoke" or "Tarzan" is really alive. In fact, Mr. Farmer was able to track his subject to earth in a hotel in Libreville, Gabon, on the coast of Western Africa just above the equator, where he was granted this interview. "I met him," Mr. Farmer tells us, "in his hotel room --fittingly enough, on September 1, Edgar Rice Burroughs' birthday. He is six feet three and, I suppose, about two hundred forty pounds. I did not have the opportunity to see him in action, of course, but just from the way he moved about the room I could guess at his immense physical strength. As Burroughs said, he is much more like Apollo than Hercules; his power lies in the quality not the quantity of his muscles. I don't hesitate to admit that I was awed. I was concerned, of course, that after all my research I might still have been the victim of a hoax; but from the moment I knocked on the door and heard that deep, rich voice say 'Enter,' I knew I had the right man. And of course I was even more convinced when I saw him move --like a leopard, like water falling." The text of Mr. Farmer's interview follows.

  TARZAN: How do you do, Mr. Farmer.

  FARMER: How do you do, Your Grace.

  T: If you don't mind, Mr. Farmer, I should prefer simply to be called John Clayton. I own a good many titles, both real and fictional, but John Clayton, is, as it were, my real name. Though not my true identity, so to speak. As you apparently know. F: Excuse me, sir -- Mr. Clayton. Mr. Clayton, you told me over the phone that you would see me for fifteen minutes only, so I'd better work fast. I'll start asking questions right now, if you don't mind? T: By all means. You don't have a tape recorder on you, do you? No? Good. F: May I ask first, sir, why you were kind enough to grant this interview? T: Mr. Farmer, my reasons are my own. But I will say that I appreciate the very great efforts you have
gone to in researching the details of my life. It is very flattering to me, and I am not entirely immune to that. Besides, you seem to have information about my family that even I myself don't know. Your genealogical researches provoke my own curiosity, which has always been ample. I may ask you a few questions myself. F: Of course. First, though, may I ask how it happens that you seem to speak English as you do, with more or less of an American accent? You speak as though you came from Illinois, which is my own home state. I seem to recall that on the phone you spoke -- well, as I imagine dukes speak, the educated British accent. T: I speak more or less as I am spoken to. You will recall that English is not my first spoken language -- though it was my first written language -- very unusual business, that -- or even my first spoken European language. But the first Englishspeaking country I visited was the United States, Wisconsin in particular, back in 1909. I was not quite twenty-one years old at the time. So when English was fairly new to me, I had rather a large dose of American. Nevertheless, in Britain I do speak British. I have a gift for mimicry, I suppose you might call it, and I conform pretty much to the dialect of my interlocutors. When I gave my first and only speech in the House of Lords I did speak as dukes speak, or at least as dukes think they speak. You seem nervous, by the way. Would you care for a drink? I believe I will join you in a small Scotch.

  F: Thank you. But I'm surprised to find you a drinking man. I thought -T: That I was an abstainer? For many years I was. In my early days among civilized people I not only saw the results of excess but, I'm afraid, committed it myself. For many years I abstained completely. However, I believe the rash impulses of youth are safely behind me now. I can be abstemious without being teetotal. After all, I am -F: You are eighty-two years old. When this interview is published, you will be eighty-three. But I suppose as far as physical appearance is concerned, you look about thirty-five. It must be true, then, that story about the grateful witch doctor who gave you the immortality treatment -T: That was in 1912. I was twenty-four then, so as you see I have apparently aged about ten years since. The treatment merely slows down the aging process. Burroughs exaggerated its effects slightly, as he often did. I'll be an old man by the time I'm a hundred and fifty or so. F: I'd like to return to your physical condition. But since you bring up Burroughs, and since Burroughs is the principal source of information about your life and family -T: You would like to discuss the accuracy of Burroughs? Go ahead. F: In Tarzan of the Apes, the first Tarzan book, Burroughs says that in 1888 your mother, then pregnant, accompanied your father on a secret mission to Africa for the British government. They hired a small ship, but the crew mutinied and stranded your parents on the coast of Africa. They were left on the shores of Portuguese Angola at approximately ten degrees south latitude, or about fifteen hundred miles north of Cape Town. But it seems to me that many of the scenes in the book could not have taken place in Angola. T: That is correct. Actually, my parents were marooned on the shore of this very country, Gabon, which was then part of French Equatorial Africa. I was born about 190 miles south of here, in what is now the Parc National du Petit Loango. Any researcher, I believe, could have deduced that from the facts. There were gorillas in my natal territory, but there are no gorillas south of the Congo, and Angola extends far to the south of the Congo. Also, it was a French cruiser that landed near the same spot years later and rescued the party of Professor Porter, including my wife-to-be Jane, but left behind Lieutenant d'Arnot, my first civilized friend. Why would a French warship be patrolling the shores of Angola, a Portuguese possession? F: Nor are there any lions, zebras, or rhinoceroses in the Gabonese rain forests. What about the lioness whose neck Burroughs said you broke with a full nelson when she was trying to get into your parents' cabin after Jane? T: The lioness was actually a leopard. It was about the size of a small lioness, one of the big leopards that the natives call injogu. I did break its neck. As you know, I had independently invented the full nelson a few months before when I fought the big mangani ape that Burroughs calls Terkoz. F: Well, then, how do you explain the discrepancies between Burroughs and the facts? T: Mr. Farmer, the relationship between my life and Burroughs' narration of my life is exceedingly complex. I don't choose, for various reasons, to tell you all that I know about Burroughs' methods or my own; but I can tell you a number of his motives, some of which you may have figured out for yourself. First of all, Burroughs was essentially a romancer. He was not obligated to stick to the facts, and even if I had chosen to try to compel him, litigation would have been involved, and I would have had to appear in court and submit to questioning, which I would rather not have done. I entirely appreciate the feelings of your own Mr. Howard Hughes in this regard. In fact, after Burroughs wrote Tarzan of the Apes, I communicated with him, and I told him he should continue to make the narratives highly romantic, even fantastic. Jane advised that, because she said that if people found out I was not a fictional character, I would never again have a moment of privacy. In the second place, Burroughs himself was not always fully informed. He first heard of me in the winter of 1911. I had then been known to the civilized world for only perhaps two years, and the records of my existence -- including my father's diary, which he kept until his death in Africa -- were then in England. By the way, here are some photostats of that diary. You may examine them, but you may not take them with you. In any case, Burroughs had not been to England, much less to Africa, and had his information by word of mouth at several removes. In many cases he had to fill in gaps by sheer guesswork, some of which is accurate, some not. For the sake of verisimilitude, Burroughs pretended to be much closer to his sources than was in fact the case.