The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty

by R. A. Lafferty

Thursday morning Barnaby had a breakfast date with Jeannie, the outrageously beautiful piano player. “Did Jenny turn you down? Why did you ask me first today?”

  “I always ask you first.”

  “Jenny says you're mad at her because she's friendly with Blackie. But he's so nice. Don't you know that? He's one of the nicest men we ever met.”

  “He is a devil. He makes my flesh crawl.”

  “He is supposed to. But only on the stage, He's a consummate actor. I think that's the word that mama says he is. And mama says for us to keep an eye on you because you're acting so peculiar. We tell her you only act peculiar over her. Don't you think we'd make nice daughters-in-law?”

  “You would be nice anything, Jennie.”

  “And don't you wish you were a sultan and could have us all at once?”

  “Yes I do. I never thought of it, but that's just what I wish.”

  “And the houri too?”

  “How did you know she was an houri? I thought I was the only one who knew.”

  “I'm never sure you're serious. I do have to go, dear. Isn't it too bad that everyone always has to go all the time? You eat the rest of my jelly and egg. Kiss me. Good bye.”

  And it was morning and evening, the fourth day. And in the evening Barnaby sat with a table full of refinery workers. He had brought with him tonight his little six shot loaded. And five were blanks and one was not.

  The refinery workers were named Croesus Kahlmeyer, Midas Morressey, and Money-Bags Muldoon. These are the names that the waitresses gave to them, for refinery workers are the biggest tippers in the world. They tip lavishly. The reason they can do this is that all refinery workers get a hundred hours a week overtime, and the money they make is fantastic.

  Gaiety Garrett was waiting their table. The boys all called her Gaiety Unrestrained. And in a larger sense gaiety unrestrained reigned through the whole of the Golden Gate.

  Now the surf pounded loudly under the pier. It always seemed noisiest when the melodrama was about to start. For after the hours had passed, the lamp lighter turned out the lights in the barroom and flared the torches on the stage. The smell of them came over the room like a weird fog.

  Then Barnaby took the little six-shot from his pocket and fondled it. For the reign of the prince of evil was about to be ended in the world.

  And when the melodrama was at its loudest, and the pistols barked, and the crowd roared like an animal, Barnaby raised his six-shot trembling.

  And fired it six times.

  It is such a little thing to kill a man and brings so much satisfaction, you wonder everybody does not do it. It is like walking through green meadows after an oppressing darkness. Barnaby relaxed and the short hairs subsided on his nape; for the passion had left him. Peace came down on him like white snow.

  “I have killed the villain,” he slid. And he had. The pinions of the vulture had sounded and the soul of the villain had gone.

  But the act was for himself alone. Only he and the victim knew that it had happened.

  For Blackie did not act as though he were killed. He strutted through the drama to its close while the crowd howled and everyone was happy. Yet there was no doubt that the villain was dead, for a great clarity had descended on Barnaby. And Blackie was now more like an odd old friend who needed a shave, and no more a python or a devil.

  Margaret came to the table and she was white faced. “Don't you ever do a thing like that again. Give me that. How could you do that to him? We all love you and thought you loved us.”

  And she looked at him queerly. He liked the way she looked at him: a sort of wild worry beneath the kindness.

  Everybody drank an ocean of beer and sang thousands upon thousands of songs. And when it was late, Clancy O'Clune went over to Gladys, who wore glasses, and sat on her lap and sang “Just a Song at Twilight” for a goodnight song.

  And as always they sang “We Won't Go Home Till Morning”. And as always they went home at midnight.

  5

  Friday morning Barnaby went to work; but there was only a half day's work for him. It often happens that a boy will find only a half day's work after he has laid off for a week and needs it. And in the afternoon he went to the Golden Gate, which was closed in the daytime. He went in the back where deliveries were made.

  The sour ghost of last night's beer permeated the place. And there was another ghost there, loud and wailing.

  It was a terrible noise, a discordant clanging and chording that was the saddest thing he had ever heard: the woeful wailing of a soul that has been in purgatory a long century, and has just been told that it is not purgatory it is in. It was a hopeless crash filled with a deep abiding sorrow that had once been hope.

  Blackie was playing the piano, and there was torture in his eyes. Yet he talked happily.

  “Hello, Barnaby. I love the instrument. I play it every chance I get. Yet I am told that I do not play well. Do I play well, Barnaby?”

  “No, no, you play quite badly.”

  Blackie, that old python who needed a shave, seemed discouraged.

  “I was afraid you would think so. Yet to myself it is beautiful. Do you think it sounds beautiful to anyone?”

  “No. I don't think it would sound beautiful to anyone in the world, Blackie.”

  “I wish it weren't so.”

  “I shot at you last night, Blackie.”

  “I know it. Six shots. I knew you would.”

  “One of them was not a blank.”

  “The third. I knew it would be the third. I dug it out of the plaster this morning.”

  “Does anyone else know?”

  “No. How would anyone else know? I am going away, Barnaby.”

  “Where?”

  “Kate's Klondike Bar. They need a villain there. Here they are changing the format. They will call this the Speakeasy. It will be a gin mill with flapper waitresses like John Held Jr. pictures. They will have a lost generation motif and sing lost twenties songs. Clancy is practicing ‘Star Dust’ all the time. I could stay on as a gangster, but I am better as an old time villain. The gay days are about over. The Twenties will be the new era of nostalgia.”

  “I will not like that.”

  He went to find Margaret where she was counting her money in a little room.

  “Blackie says you are going to change this to a Sad Twenties place.”

  “Yes, dear, the Twenties will be all the rage now.”

  “I don't remember them like I do the older times. I wasn't even born yet, in the twenties. Do you remember them, Margaret?”

  “Of course I do. It'll be sweet to have them back. We have some wonderful ideas. The girls play old scratchy records all day long to learn them.”

  “Will you still have the melodrama?”

  “Well, no. But we'll have skits. Well, not skits really; we'll have ukulele players and things like that. You'll like it.”

  “There's only one thing bothers me.”

  “What, dear?”

  “In the Twenties, how did they know who was the villain?”

  “I don't know, dear. Here are the men with the scenery. I have to show them where to put it.”

  But that Friday night it wasn't the same. The girls were all dressed in potato sacks with the belts only three inches from the bottom. Their stockings were rolled and their knees were rouged; and on their heads were sheath-like helmets that made them look like interplanetary creatures with the ears sheared off them. Jenny and Jeannie looked like two peeled onions with not enough hair on their heads to cover them. Oh, that those breathtaking creatures should come to this! They sang “Yes Sir, she's my baby.” They sang “Oh you have no idea.” They sang:

  “You play the Uke,

  You're from Dubuque,

  I go for that.”

  The Speakeasy spoke, but Barnaby could not hear its message. To him it was dismal and deep. And then the long evening was over and the gin glasses were empty.

  Clancy O'Clune was singing a good night song to a boney flapper.
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  “Picture me

  Upon your knee,

  And tea for two,

  And two for tea.”

  But he didn't sit on her lap. All at once none of the ladies were built like that anymore.

  Barnaby went to Blackie's room, Blackie was packing.

  “What town is Kate's Klondike Bar in?”

  Blackie told him the town. But it shall be told to no one else. If it were known, people would go there, and come in every night, and take up room; and it's going to be crowded enough there as it is.

  “That isn't very far,” said Barnaby. “That's only a couple of hundred miles. I'll go there and get a job. Then at night I can come in and listen to them sing, and watch the melodrama.”

  Through Other Eyes

  I

  “I don't think I can stand the dawn of another Great Day,” said Smirnov. “It always seems a muggy morning, a rainy afternoon and a dismal evening. You remember the Recapitulation Correlator?” “Known popularly as the Tune Machine. But, Gregory, that was and is a success. All three of them are in constant use, and they will construct at least one more a decade. They are invaluable.”

  “Yes. It was a dismal success. It has turned my whole life gray. You remember our trial run, the recapitulation of the Battle of Hastings?”

  “It was a depressing three years we spent there. But how were we to know it was such a small affair—covering less than five acres of that damnable field and lasting less than twenty minutes? And how were we to know that an error of four years had been made in history even as recent as that? Yes, we scanned many depressing days and many muddy fields in that area before we recreated it.”

  “And our qualified success at catching the wit of Voltaire at first hand?”

  “Gad! That cackle! There can never be anything new in nausea to one who has sickened of that. What a perverted old woman he was!”

  “And Nell Guinn?”

  “There is no accounting for the taste of a king. What a completely tasteless morsel!”

  “And the crowning of Charlemagne?”

  “The king of chilblains. If you wanted a fire, you carried it with you in a basket. That was the coldest Christmas I ever knew. But the mead seemed to warm them; and we were the only ones present who could not touch it or taste it.”

  “And when we went further back and heard the wonderful words of the divine poetess Sappho.”

  “Yes, she had just decided that she would have her favorite cat spayed. We listened to her for three days and she talked of nothing else. How fortunate the world is that so few of her words have survived.”

  “And watching the great Pythagoras at work.”

  “And the long days he spent on that little surveying problem. How one longed to hand him a slide rule through the barrier and explain its workings.”

  “And our eavesdropping on the great lovers Tristram and Isolde.”

  “And him spending a whole afternoon trying to tune that cursed harp with a penny whistle. And she could talk of nothing but the bear grease she used on her hair, and how it was nothing like the bear grease back home. But she was a cute little lard barrel, quite the cutest we found for several centuries in either direction. One wouldn't be able to get one's arms all the way around her; but I can understand how, to one of that era and region, it would be fun trying.”

  “Ah yes. Smelled like a cinnamon cookie, didn't she? And you recall Lancelot?”

  “Always had a bad back that wouldn't let him ride. And that trick elbow and the old groin wound. He spent more time on the rubbing table than any athlete I ever heard of. If I had a high-priced quarterback who was never ready to play, I'd sure find a way of breaking his contract. No use keeping him on the squad just to read his ten-year-old press clippings. Any farm boy could have pulled him off his nag and stomped him into the dirt.”

  “I wasn't too happy about Aristotle the day we caught him. That barbarous north-coast Greek of his! Three hours he had them all busy combing his beard. And his discourse on the Beard in Essential and the Beard in Existential, did you follow that?”

  “No, to tell the truth I didn't. I guess it was pretty profound.”

  They were silent and sad for a while, as are men who have lost much.

  “The machine was a success,” said Smirnov at last, “and yet the high excitement of it died dismally for us.”

  “The excitement is in the discovery of the machine,” said Cogsworth. “It is never in what the machine discovers.”

  “And this new one of yours,” said Smirnov, “I hardly want to see you put it into operation. I am sure it will be a shattering disappointment to you.”

  “I am sure of it also. And yet it is greater than the other. I am as excited as a boy.”

  “You were a boy before, but you will never be again. I should think it would have aged you enough, and I cannot see what fascination this new one will have for you. At least the other recaptured the past. This will permit you to see only the present.”

  “Yes, but through other eyes.”

  “One pair of eyes is enough. I do not see any advantage at all except the novelty. I am afraid that this will be only a gadget.”

  “No. Believe me, Smirnov, it will be more than that. It may not even be the same world when viewed through different eyes. I believe that what we regard as one may actually be several billion different universes, each made only for the eyes of the one who sees it.”

  II

  The Cerebral Scanner, newly completed by Charles Cogsworth, was not an intricate machine. It was a small but ingenious amplifying device, or battery of amplifiers, designed for the synchronous—perhaps “sympathetic” would be a better word—coupling of two very intricate machines: two human brains. It was an amplifier only. A subliminal coupling, or the possibility of it, was already assumed by the inventor. Less than a score of key aspects needed emphasizing for the whole thing to come to life. Here the only concern was with the convoluted cortex of the brain itself, that house of consciousness and terminal of the senses, and with the quasi-electrical impulses which are the indicators of its activity. It had been a long-held opinion of Cogsworth that, by the proper amplification of a near score of these impulses in one brain, a transmission could be effected to another so completely that one man might for an instant see with the eyes of another—also see inwardly with that man's eyes, have the same imaginings and daydreams, perceive the same universe as the other perceived. And it would not be the same universe as the seeking man knew.

  The Scanner had been completed, as had a compilation of the dossiers of seven different brains: a collection of intricate brain-wave data as to frequency, impulse, flux and field, and Lyall-wave patterns of the seven cerebrums which Cogsworth would try to couple with his own.

  The seven were those of Gregory Smirnov, his colleague and counselor in so many things; of Gaetan Balbo, the cosmopolitan and supra-national head of the Institute; of Theodore Grammont, the theoretical mathematician; of E. E. Euler, the many-tentacled executive; of Karl Kleber, the extraordinary psychologist; of Edmond Guillames, the skeptic and bloodless critic; and of Valery Mok, a lady of beauty and charm whom Cogsworth had despaired of ever understanding by ordinary means.

  This idea of his—to enter into the mind of another, to peer from behind another's eyes into a world that could not be the same—this idea had been with him all his life. He recalled how it had first come down on him in all its strength when he was quite small.

  “It may be that I am the only one who sees the sky black at night and the stars white,” he had said to himself, “and everybody else sees the sky white and the stars shining black. And I say the sky is black, and they say the sky is black; but when they say black they mean white.”

  Or: “I may be the only one who can see the outside of a cow, and everybody else sees it inside out. And I say that it is the outside, and they say that it is the outside; but when they say outside they mean inside.”

  Or: “It may be that all the boys I see look like girls to
everyone else, and all the girls look like boys. And I say ‘That is a girl,’ and they say ‘That is a girl'; only when they say a girl they mean a boy.”

  And then had come the terrifying thought: “What if I am a girl to everyone except me?”

  This did not seem very intelligent to him even when he was small, and yet it became an obsession to him.

  “What if to a dog all dogs look like men and all men look like dogs? And what if a dog looks at me and thinks that I am a dog and he is a boy?”

  And this was followed once by the shattering afterthought: “And what if the dog is right?

  “What if a fish looks up at a bird and a bird looks down at a fish? And the fish thinks that he is the bird and the bird is the fish, and that he is looking down on the bird that is really a fish, and the air is water and the water is air?”

  “What if, when a bird eats a worm, the worm thinks he is the bird and the bird is the worm? And that his outside is his inside, and that the bird's inside is his outside? And that he has eaten the bird instead of the bird eating him?”

  This was illogical. But how does one know that a worm is not illogical? He has much to make him illogical.

  And as he grew older Charles Cogsworth came on many signs that the world he saw was not the world that others saw. There came smaller but persistent signs that every person lives in a different world.

  It was early in the afternoon, but Charles Cogsworth sat in darkness. Gregory Smirnov had gone for a walk in the country as he said that he would. He was the only other one who knew that the experiment was being made. He is the only one who would have agreed to the experiment, though the others had permitted their brain-wave dossiers to be compiled on another pretext.

  All beginnings come quietly, and this one was a total success. The sensation of seeing with the eyes of another is new and glorious, though the full recognition of it comes slowly.