Space Chantey

by R. A. Lafferty

  “No need to try it till the big money is down,” Roadstrum said plainly. He went to the table with the biggest gamblers of them all and tried to get into the game.

  “How much have you to bet, Captain?” Johnny Greeneyes asked him. “You may be a big space captain and still only a little man for money. This game is not for boys.”

  “I have two space hornets and one million Chancels d’or that is my mustering out pay, and ten thousand of same I had in tip from Maybe Jones,” Roadstrum said with all the pride of a well-heeled space captain.

  “Captain,” said Johnny Greeneyes, “the lowest chip here costs one billion Chancels d’or. It was Maybe Jones himself who set this lower limit when he last played with us. It has to be that way, you understand, to keep the kids out. But there are lower tables for lower folk. There are even some where one may buy a marker for as little as a hundred thousand Chancels.”

  Roadstrum went grumbling and found a lower game. He bet his million and ten thousand Chancels and lost. Then he laughed, reversed it, bet them, and won.

  He had in his pocket the Dong button from his hornet, and with this he could reverse any happening and run it through again with corrected hindsight. Crewman Bramble had completed the Dong with the other half of a floating couple, supposed to reverse things in any really dire emergency. And Captain Roadstrum, with his impassioned participation, turned every gamble into a dire emergency.

  It worked again and again. Sometimes Roadstrum even won a hand without needing the button for replay. When he had several billion Chancels, he went to other tables and other sorts of games, testing it and making sure before he went to try the big boys.

  The device worked again and again. At dicing, Roadstrum sometimes had to turn it back for as many as a dozen different throws to make his point, for he wasn’t a lucky man. It worked perfect at roulette. That was simple one-repeat stuff. It worked well at roustabout poker. Roadstrum had more trouble at other poker games, the feedback of his own gaming affecting the betting and drawing of the other players. Sometimes he had to run it through twenty times before he won a hand; he wasn’t a very good poker player.

  It would seem that all this replaying took a lot of time, but it didn’t. One goes into time, one backs out of it again, and time is as when one started. Nor did others even notice the dong of Roadstrum’s button; all things in the sequence were forgotten by the others and remembered only by Roadstrum the principle.

  Then Roadstrum went back to the table with the big gamblers. He convinced them that he was now a man of substance, and they played with him. Golganger was now in the game. Golganger was a creature of a species with a difficult name. He was peculiar in the extreme, and he had thirty thumbs on each hand. How that fellow could shuffle and deal.

  But Roadstrum noticed with satisfaction that all thirty pair of Golganger’s thumbs had been broken somewhere along the way. And that Asteroid bird had had his talons broken more than once, that was clear. Sammy the Snake had a crook in his forked tongue that he had not been born with, and all the men of them, Pyotr, Johnny Greeneyes, Willy Wuerfelsohn, had had their thumbs broken several times in their lives. On Roulettenwelt, as on most of the worlds, a shifty dealer will finally be spotted; he will be dragged out by honest men, and they will break his thumbs painfully; and he cannot be a shifty dealer for another month or so.

  “Ah, you gentry of the broken thumbs,” Roadstrum mocked, “you have been taken before, all of you, and I will take you now. I work you like putty in the palm!”

  They played, and Roadstrum won. The big gambling men smiled at him and played some more, and Roadstrum won some more. Then the big men began to play seriously. Roadstrum had to run one set through more than fifty times to beat Johnny Greeneyes on it. Roadstrum’s own thumb was quite sore from pushing the Dong button so many times. And still Roadstrum won.

  “You have won all the money we have with us,” Pyotr Igrokovitch finally said, and he shot himself through the head. “It isn’t really much money, but to keep the game going we will let it stand for a medium-sized world. All right, does everybody bet one medium-sized world?”

  “You fellows really own worlds?” Roadstrum asked.

  “Of course we do,” said Sammy the Snake. “Money is only for the warm-up. The game doesn’t start till the title-tokens to worlds come onto the table. Are you nervous, Little Captain of the Early Luck?”

  “No, no, I’m not nervous. It’s just that I never played for worlds before.”

  They played and Roadstrum won. He won and won. He won big. He owned more than a hundred worlds now. He had become a mogul in the universe. Many High-Space-Emperors have fewer worlds. Many Confederation Chiefs rule fewer.

  “I be King Roadstrum now,” he said proudly.

  “King Roadstrum, I want to have a word with you,” said Crewman Bramble.

  “Yes, what is it, Bramble?” Roadstrum asked when they had gone apart to talk.

  “I’ve been following the Dong button on the scope, Captain, that is, King,” Bramble said. “The pulse becomes a little erratic. That Hondstarfer was an inventive kid, but he wasn’t really a careful worker. The button should be worked over. There could be a failure.”

  “Keep watching it, Bramble. I want to make a couple of big grabs before I quit. If the pulse becomes too erratic, let me know.”

  Roadstrum went back to the table and continued to win. Johnny Greeneyes got green all over. The great crest-feathers of the Asteroid Midas wilted down as his spirits fell. Sammy the Snake was suffering the miseries, and there is nothing sicker than a sick snake. Pyotr shot himself through the head six times in quick succession, banged his empty pistol down on the table, and cursed.

  “I quit,” said Willy Wuerfelsohn, Jr. sullenly. “I’ve only three of four worlds left, and I’ll need them to get back in a game in the morning.”

  “One thousand worlds,” Roadstrum said. “I be High Emperor Roadstrum now.”

  “High Emperor Roadstrum, I want a word with you,” said Crewman Bramble.

  “This is it, boys,” Roadstrum told the gamblers. “It has been a pleasure, and I don’t know any man who wins so graciously as I do. —Well, Bramble, it was getting even more erratic, was it? Well, it was a good little button.”

  “No, no, Roadstrum, the pulse has cleared. It’s working perfectly now. Go on with the game. Let the sky be the limit.”

  “I have won skies enough this day, and my eyes are so tired that I can hardly tell the green suits from the blue. Here, take little Dong and put him back in the hornet. And round up the men. We are off to visit other worlds, perhaps even some of the one thousand.”

  Crewman Bramble took the Dong button back to the hornet and began to round up the man. And great Roadstrum went down to the men’s room as he had been meaning to do for some time.

  “Here, here,” he told the attendant. “I’m no commoner. I own a thousand worlds. Put tissue with the Emperor’s Crest on it into the stall for me. I can use no less.”

  “Put a Chancel d’or into my hand and I will,” said the attendant.

  “Double or nothing,” Roadstrum snapped

  The attendant looped a coin and won. They doubled and doubled, and the attendant won. Roadstrum flipped a coin and still the attendant won. Roadstrum no longer had a Dong button in his pocket to reverse his calls with.

  They cut cards for it, and the attendant continued to win.

  “It’s a hundred thousand Chancels now and a bit more,” the attendant said. “Do you want to go ahead?”

  “Sure, double you again. This time I win,” said Roadstrum. But the attendant won.

  “It’s three hundred billion Chancels now,” the attendant said; “do you want to keep on?”

  “I’m about to the end of my cash,” Roadstrum said. “How about title to a medium-sized world?”

  “All right. I always wanted to own a world,” the attendant said. The attendant won the world, then two, then four, then eight, then sixteen, then thirty-two, then sixty-four—


  “But I don’t have anything to worry about,” Roadstrum said. “I only have to win once to come out of it.” But it was the attendant who won and won and won.

  “How many worlds did you say you had?” the attendant asked after a while.

  “One thousand exactly.”

  “You owe me a thousand and twenty-four. Give me the titles to the one thousand, and sign this I.O.U. for twenty-four worlds. I can trust you to supply them in a reasonable time?”

  “Yes, I’ll win them, or buy them somehow, or conquer them. I am a man of my word; I will get you your worlds. Now please, put the Emperor’s Crest tissue into the stall for me. I’ve certainly paid enough for it.”

  “Can’t,” said the attendant. “You’re not an Emperor anymore. You’ve lost all your worlds. You’re a commoner again. Use plain paper.”

  The attendant still owns those worlds today. He is High Emperor and he administers his worlds competently. He is a man of talent.

  A thing unseen is on its face unseeable;

  a being, savored not nor heard, unbe-able;

  and be assured there’s naught at all outside of us

  unless perceived by one or by a pride of us,

  nor someone see it move it will not move at all,

  and damn! he had a husky guy to prove it all!

  Ibid

  They were down on Kentron-Kosmon, an insignificant world. And yet, in the middle of Space-Port there (a cow pasture rather; it wasn’t much of a spaceport) there was a nice plaque of electrum and on it was lettered: This is the Exact Center of the Universe.

  Whether or not the plaque spoke the truth, this was the only world that had such a plaque. And the people of Kentron (there weren’t very many of them; it wasn’t a very big world) had a sort of cockey pride over their centrality, or over something.

  But all the hornet men were flush (even Roadstrum had partly recouped his fortunes on Pieuvre World), and they wanted to have some fun. And Kentron had one fame besides its central location. It is always Saturday night there, was a proverb about the place.

  “The fact is, we’re so knob-headed dumb that we can’t count the days,” said a crinkly-haired young female, “so we call them all Saturday.”

  Well, you try to count them. A full day lasted about one equivalent minute. Imagine thirty seconds of daylight and thirty seconds of darkness! If you want to do something in the dark, you’d better do it fast, is another proverb of Kentron, and it has a certain challenge to it. On Kentron they had pace.

  The men explored Kentron quickly. It was only about five kilometers around it. It had twenty-five high class hotels on it, and each man and one houri established himself in one of them as king or queen for the time of the visit. It had about five hundred blind-crows, pubs, winegardens, or beer-cellars, and several of them seemed to be lively. There was a lot of laughter and music going on; the people were fair of face and figure and quite friendly; the weather was almost perfect with its constant variety (one gets neither very hot nor very cold in thirty seconds); the whole little world seemed to be a series of continuing floor shows; and moreover there was challenge.

  Almost central to the planet and to the universe, was a little carnival. There was the Corn-Crib (you had heard all the jokes before, you had met all the girls before somewhere, and you still liked them both); there was the Big Casino with its warning sign Dong buttons disallowed (the word had got around); there was a Wrestle-the-Alligator Tank, a tattoo parlor, and the Booth. The big, good-natured-looking man in the booth was the Challenge, and they all felt it.

  He winked them a great wink and the twenty-four men and one houri winked it back at him. He was a man of their own measure.

  There were signs posted variously about the big fellow’s booth. I’m the guy who keeps it all going. If I weren’t here, you wouldn’t be here either. I know it all, I’m a smart-aleck. Loan-sharking and fencing. Any time I can’t see you, you’ve had it. Country-style wrestling and scuffling done.

  There were, moreover, dozens of telescopes stuck around the booth, one big one pointing straight down into a hole clear through the planet; and the big man moved his eye rapidly from eyepiece to eyepiece, using them all. He had three sets of earphones on his ears, and he was surrounded by whole banks of instruments and scopes that he scanned constantly.

  “Just what is the pitch here, friend?” Roadstrum asked the big fellow. “What is it that you do?”

  “Anything and everything,” said the big man. “I see them all. I do them all. I know them all. I throw them all.”

  “You don’t look very deep to me,” Roadstrum grumbled.

  “Oh, I’m not. It isn’t my profundity that makes me a mental marvel, it’s the amazing detail of my perception. There is nobody else who can keep so many things on his mind at once. Ask me anything, anything at all, Roadstrum.”

  “Big fellow, if you know it all, then you can answer one small question that bothers me. We are on a very small world here; it should not have an atmosphere; it should not have a gravity of any consequence. By rights, we ought to be in our spacesuits now and wearing our static-grip boots. But we move about free and easy, breathing and functioning, and with our usual weight and balance. We have noticed that this is so on many small worlds. We appreciate it, but we do not understand it. How can it be?”

  “You men are from World,” said the big fellow. “Therefore you know of Phelan, who was also from World, and therefore you must understand Phelan’s Corollary.”

  “Certainly we know it, or at least Crewman Bramble does,” said Roadstrum. “He does much of our knowing for us.”

  “But I doubt that even he knows the Corollary to Phelan’s Corollary,” the big fellow said. “It states that ‘As regards very small celestial bodies of a light-minded nature, the law of levity is allowed to supersede the law of gravity.’ I call it the compassionate corollary. If I had to sit here all these ages in a spacesuit, I don’t believe I’d make it.”

  “Get out of the way, Captain Roadstrum,” Crewman Trochanter blared. “This fellow advertises country-style scuffling. Let him try great Trochanter at the wrestle. Answer me, fat-face; who is the saltiest sky-dog of them all?”

  “I am,” said the big man. So he and Crewman Trochanter joined in the big wrestle. Trochanter put everything on the big guy, and the big guy twisted around in it like he was made of Rega-rubber. He was always craning his head and neck out of a hold to glance through one of his telescopes or scan a bank of instruments. Trochanter threw him flat on his face, and the man twisted his head for a gawk into the telescope that looked straight down through the planet. “Just in time,” he said. “I almost let a couple of them get away from me that time.” Then he raised Trochanter up and slammed him shatteringly on his back, forming a spread-eagle indentation in the hard ground, seven feet long.

  All the men looked kind of funny then. Trochanter was as good a country scuffler as you’ll find anywhere. But spacemen can’t let a tough carney keep the hop on them. One of them would have to toss him, if they had to go through the whole list.

  “Who is the saltiest sky-dog of them all?” Crewman Clam-digger demanded.

  “I am,” said the big man. “Just a second till I scan all the scopes again and make sure everything is spinning right. All right, man, have at it.”

  That big fellow pinned Crewman Clamdigger so fast that it was spooky. He was good. He knew every trick, and he out-stronged them all. But still it was required that they all try him. “Who is the saltiest sky-dog of them all?” a crewman would demand. “I am,” the big fellow would answer, and then the battle.

  He threw them one after the other. Di Prima, Kolonymous, Boniface, Mundmark, and after each brief set-to the big fellow rushed back to peer through the spyglasses and give a quick listen through the earphones. Burpy, Fracas, Snow, Bramble, he tossed those four mighty quick. Deep John the hobo; that was an odd match. Deep John has a special hold, “the double caboose,” and if the big fellow hadn’t countered it with the “little-Frisco switc
h” he’d have gone down to defeat there. Crabgrass, Oldfellow, Lawrence, Humphrey, each one asked who was the saltiest dog of them all, and each got his thumping answer.

  The match with Margaret the houri was even odder, with preternatural elements sprung in. She turned herself into a brindled wildcat and went for his throat. Got a good piece of it too. But he got her soundly with the “cat-cracker.” And yet, after she was back in her houri form, she was still licking good salty blood off her chops, his not hers, and looking more than half pleased with herself.

  Eseldon, Septimus, Swinnery, Ursley, one, two, three, four, he took them. He took Crewman Threefountains. Then he tangled with Captain Puckett. This was a groaning, bulging, eye-popping contest. It lasted all through a thirty-second night, and all noticed that, when the two grappled strenuously and almost to the death, the stars in the sky dimmed and nearly went out.

  “That was too close,” the big fellow breathed heavily after he had left Captain Puckett unconscious on the ground. “Mind if I strap on my fourteen-direction tele-goggles for our encounter, Roadstrum, and my three pair of earphones? I just can’t allow myself to be held away from it so long.” He put the things on.

  “Use anything you want to,” Roadstrum shouted. “It will avail you nothing. Who is the saltiest sky-dog of them all?”

  “I am,” said the big man. And they went at it.

  Roadstrum was fast as well as mighty. He was stronger than great Trochanter or great Puckett, and faster than Crabgrass or Clamdigger. He knew the “funny-man back-off,” the “gandy grapple,” the “mule-skinners’ mangle” and the “surgical hammer.”

  The big guy countered with the “three-jaw cruncher,” the “bandygo back-breaker” and the “badger-trap.” The short days and nights flickered by, and Roadstrum was looking better and better. He was aware to every possible trick, and a particular awareness came into his mind now.

  “This guy is carrying me,” Roadstrum said to himself. “What does he want?” And he tumbled the big fellow with the “coon-cat crotch-hold.”