He had begun to begrudge the time that he must spend at the world's pace. From this time on he was regarded as a recluse. He was silent and unsociable, for he found it a nuisance to come back to the common state to engage in conversation, and in his special state the voices were too slow-pitched to intrude on his consciousness.
Except that of the man whose face he had never seen.
“You are making very tardy progress,” said the man. Once more they were in a dark club. “Those who do not show more progress we cannot use. After all, you are only a vestigial. It is probable that you have very little of the ancient race in you. Fortunately those who do not progress destroy themselves. You had not imagined that there were only two phases of time, had you?”
“Lately I have come to suspect that there are many more,” said Charles Vincent.
“And you understand that one step only cannot succeed?”
“I understand that the life that I have been living is in direct violation of all that we know of the laws of mass, momentum and acceleration, as well as those of conservation of energy, the potential of the human person, the moral compensation, the golden mean, and the capacity of human organs. I know that I cannot multiply energy and experience sixty times without increase of food intake, and yet I do it. I know that I cannot live on eight minutes of sleep in twenty-four hours, but I do that also. I know that I cannot reasonably crowd four thousand years of experience into one lifetime, yet unreasonably I do not see what will prevent it. But you say that I will destroy myself?”
“Those who take only the first step will destroy themselves.”
“And how does one take the second step?”
“At the proper moment you will be given the choice.”
“I have the most uncanny feeling that I will refuse the choice.”
“Yes from present indications you will refuse it. You are fastidious.”
“You have a smell about you, Old Man Without a Face. I know now what it is. It is the smell of the Pit.”
“Are you so slow to learn that? But that is its name.”
“It is the mud from the Pit, the same from which the clay tablets were found, from the old land between the rivers. I've dreamed of the six-fingered hand reaching up from that Pit and overshadowing us all. From that slime!”
“Do not forget that according to another recension Another made the People from that same slime.”
“And I have read, Old Man: ‘The People first counted by Fives and Tens from the number of fingers on their hands. Put before the People the—, for the reason that they had—, counted by Sixes and Twelve,’ But time has left blanks on those tablets.”
“Yes. Time, in one of its manifestations, has deftly and with a purpose left those blanks.”
“I cannot discover the name of the thing that goes into one of those blanks. Can you?”
“I am part of the name that goes into one of those blanks.”
“And you are the Man without a Face. But why is it that you overshadow and control people? And to what purpose?”
“It will be long before you know those answers.”
“When the choice comes to me, it will bear very careful weighing. But tell me, Man without a Face who comes from the Pit, are not pits and men without faces very nineteenth-century Gothic?”
“There was a temper in that century that came very close to uncovering us.”
After that a chill descended on the life of Charles Vincent, for all that he still possessed his exceptional powers. And now he seldom indulged in pranks. Except with Jennifer Parkey.
It was unusual that he should be drawn to her. He knew her only slightly in the common world, and she was at least fifteen years his senior. But she now appealed to him for her youthful qualities, and all his pranks with her were gentle ones.
For one thing this spinster did not frighten, nor did she begin the precaution of locking her doors, never having bothered with such things before. He would come behind her and stroke her hair, and she would speak out calmly with that sort of quickening in her voice:
“Who are you? Why won't you let me see you? You are a friend, aren't you? Are you a man, or are you something else? If you can caress me why can't you talk to me? Please let me see you. I promise I won't hurt you.”
It was as though she could not imagine that anything strange would hurt her. Or again when he hugged her or kissed her on the nape, she would call: “You must be a little boy, or very like a little boy, whoever you are. You are good not to break my things when you move about. Come here and let me hold you.”
It is only very good people who have no fear at all of the unknown.
When Vincent met Jennifer in the regular world, as he now more often found occasion to do, she looked at him appraisingly, as though she guessed some sort of connection.
She said one day, “I know it is an impolite thing to say, but you do not look well at all. Have you been to a doctor?”
“Several times. But I think it is my doctor who should go to a doctor. He was always given to peculiar remarks. But now he is becoming a little unsettled.”
“If I were your doctor, I believe that I would also become a little unsettled. But you should find out what is wrong. You look terrible.”
He did not look terrible. He had lost his hair, it is true, but many men lose their hair by thirty, though not perhaps as suddenly as he had. He thought of attributing it to air resistance. After all, when he was in the state he did stride at some three hundred miles an hour. And enough of that is likely to blow the hair right off your head. And might that not also be the reason for his worsening complexion and the tireder look that appeared in his eyes? But he knew that this was nonsense. He felt no more air pressure when in his accelerated state than when in his normal state.
He had received his summons. He chose not to answer it. He did not want to be presented with the choice; he had no wish to be one with those in the Pit. But he had no intention of giving up the great advantage which he now held over nature.
“I will have it both ways,” he said. “I am already a contradiction and an impossibility. ‘You can't have your confection and eat it too.’ The proverb was only the early statement of the law of moral compensation. ‘You can't take more out of a basket than it holds.’ But for a long time I have been in violation of the laws and the balances. ‘There is no road without a turning,’ ‘Those who dance will have to pay the fiddler,’ ‘Everything that goes up comes down.’ But are proverbs really universal laws? Certainly. A sound proverb has the force of universal law, is but another statement of it. But I have contradicted the universal laws. It remains to be seen whether I have contradicted them with impunity.
“ ‘Every action has its reaction.’ If I refuse to deal with them, I will provoke a strong reaction. The Man without a Face said that it was always a race between full knowing and destruction. Very well, I will race them for it.”
They began to persecute him then. He knew that they were in a state as accelerated from his as his was from the normal. To them he was the almost motionless statue, hardly to be told from a dead man. To him they were by their speed both invisible and inaudible. They hurt him and haunted him. But still he would not answer their summons. When the meeting took place, it was they who had to come to him, and they materialized there in his room, men without faces.
“The choice,” said one. “Well, you force us to be so clumsy as to have to voice it.”
“I will have no part of you,” said Charles Vincent. “You all smell of the Pit, of that old mud of the cuneiforms of the land between the rivers, of the people who were before the People.”
“It has endured a long time,” one of them said, “and we consider it as enduring forever. But the Garden, which was quite in the neighborhood — do you know how long the Garden lasted?”
“I don't know.”
“Not even a day. It all happened in a single day, and before nightfall they were outside. You want to throw in with something more permanent, don't you?”
“No. I don't believe that I do.”
“What have you to lose?”
“Only my hope of eternity.”
“But you don't believe in that. No man has ever really believed in eternity.”
“No man has ever either entirely believed or entirely disbelieved in it,” said Charles Vincent.
“At least it can never be proved,” said one of the faceless men. “Nothing is proved until it is over with. And in this case, if it is ever over with, then it is disproved. And all that time would one not be tempted to wonder ‘What if, after all, it ends in the next minute?’ ”
“I imagine, if we survive the flesh, we will receive some sort of surety,” said Vincent.
“But you are not sure either of surviving or receiving, nor could you accept the surety as sure. Now we have a very close approximation of eternity. When Time is multiplied by itself, and that repeated again and again, does that not approximate eternity?”
“I don't believe that it does. But I will not be of you. One of you has said that I am too fastidious. So now will you say that you'll destroy me?”
“No, we will only let you be destroyed. By yourself, you cannot win the race with destruction.”
After that Charles Vincent somehow felt more mature. He knew he was not really meant to be a poltergeist or a six-fingered thing out of the Pit. He knew that in some way he would have to pay for every minute and hour that he had gained. But what he had gained he would use to the fullest. And whatever could be accomplished by sheer acquisition of human knowledge, he would try to accomplish.
And he now startled Dr. Mason by the medical knowledge he had picked up, the while the doctor amused him by the concern he showed for Vincent. For he felt fine. He was perhaps not as active as he had been, but that was only because he had become dubious of aimless activities. He was still the ghost of the libraries and museums, but was puzzled that the published reports intimated that an old ghost had replaced a young one.
He now paid his mystic visits to Jennifer Parkey less often. For he was always dismayed to hear her exclaim to him in his ghostly form, “Your touch is so changed. You poor thing! Is there anything at all I can do to help you?”
He decided that somehow she was too immature to ever understand him, though he was still fond of her. He transferred his affections to Mrs. Milly Maltby, a widow at least thirty years his senior. Yet here it was a sort of girlishness in her that appealed to him. She was a woman of sharp wit and real affection, and she also accepted his visitations without fear, following a little initial panic.
They played games, writing games, for they communicated by writing. Milly would scribble a line, then hold the paper up in the air whence he would cause it to vanish into his sphere. He would return it in half a minute, or half a second of her time, with his retort. He had the advantage of her in time with greatly more opportunity to think up responses, but she had the advantage over him in natural wit and was hard to top.
They also played checkers, and he often had to retire apart and read a chapter of a book on the art between moves; and even so she often beat him. For natural talent is likely to be a match for accumulated lore and codified procedure.
But to Milly also he was unfaithful in his fashion, being now interested—he no longer became enamored or entranced—in a Mrs. Roberts, a great-grandmother who was his elder by at least fifty years. He had read all the data extant on the attraction of the old for the young, but he still could not explain his successive attachments. He decided that these three examples were enough to establish a universal law: that a woman is simply not afraid of a ghost, though he touches her and is invisible, and writes her notes without hands. It is possible that amorous spirits have known this for a long time, but Charles Vincent had made the discovery himself independently.
When enough knowledge is accumulated on any subject, the pattern will sometimes emerge suddenly, like a form in a picture revealed where before it was not seen. And when enough knowledge is accumulated on all subjects, is there not a chance that a pattern governing all subjects will emerge?
Charles Vincent was caught up in his last enthusiasm. On one long vigil, as he consulted source after source and sorted them in his mind, it seemed that the pattern was coming out clearly and simply, for all its amazing complexity of detail.
“I know all that they know in the Pit,” said Vincent, “and I know a secret that they do not know. I have not lost the race — I have won it. I can defeat them at the point where they believe themselves invulnerable. If controlled hereafter, we need at least not be controlled by them. It is all falling together now. I have found the final truth and it is they who have lost the race. I hold the key. I will now be able to enjoy the advantage without paying the ultimate price of defeat and destruction, or of collaborating with them.
“Now I have only to implement my knowledge, to publish the fact, and one shadow at least will be lifted from mankind. I will do it at once. Well, nearly at once. It is almost dawn in the normal world. I will sit here a very little while and rest. Then I will go out and begin to make contact with the proper persons for the disposition of this thing. But first I will sit here a little while and rest.”
And he died quietly in his chair as he sat there.
Dr. Mason made an entry in his private journal:
Charles Vincent, a completely authenticated case of premature aging, one of the most clear-cut in all gerontology. This man was known to me for many years, and I here aver that as of one year ago he was of normal appearance and physical state, and that his chronology is also correct, I having also known his father. I examined the subject during the period of his illness, and there is no question at all of his identity, which has also been established for the record by fingerprinting and other means. I aver that Charles Vincent at the age of thirty is dead of old age, having the appearance and organic state of a man of ninety.
Then the doctor began to make other notes:
“As in two other cases of my own observation, the illness was accompanied by a certain delusion and series of dreams, so nearly identical in all three men as to be almost unbelievable. And for the record, and no doubt to the prejudice of my own reputation, I will set down the report of them here.”
But when Dr. Mason had written that, he thought about it for a while.
“No, I will do no such thing,” he said, and he struck out the last lines he had written. “It is best to let sleeping dragons lie.”
And somewhere the faceless men with the smell of the Pit on them smiled to themselves in quiet irony.
Goldfish
He didn't know how long he had been a goldfish. Probably not long. A long-term goldfish isn't afraid of drowning, nor would he be frightened of Gwendoline. It seemed he had only gradually become conscious of that underwater state or dream.
Well, he was a goldfish now, and there was no cure for it. He was a goldfish named Cuthbert. And the damndest thing about it was that he himself (in his former guise) had, in a moment of cuteness, named that poor fish with that hideous name.
For now it began to clarify; and memory rolled over him like a green wave.
Actually he was only goldfish per eventa and not per essentia; by accident only, not by true being. In reality he was Leo Skatterly, the world's greatest scientist (with sarcastic intonation); that was the way that Mathilde always said it.
For if he were Leo Skatterly, then he had Mathilde to wife. But again, if he were Cuthbert, then just as surely was he mated to Gwendoline the goldfish, who was now rubbing noses with him. This situation may have been illicit, but bigamy was not now his largest worry.
Part of what had happened was this: — But for all the details we must wait till the afternoon of the last day when the huge angel opens the last book that shows the whole story of everyone written fine. But mostly what happened was this:
On that very day and not an hour before he had been sitting thoughtfully there in his big chair. And he had been Leo Skatterly; he had not been a goldfish.
He really was the world's greatest scientist, in his own opinion, and in that of from four to six others (several of his devotees were fickle); which is to say that in the field of Abstract Cogitational Efficacy he was the greatest; — or at least in a limited corner acre of that field, Implemented Cogitational Transference.
For in that he had done things that nobody else even thought of. Indeed, at the extreme of the thing (and this was his greatest secret), to think was to do. He had been working on it for about twenty years in whatever hours he could steal from sleep, and from the tamer pursuits of teaching and research by which he had his livelihood. And by his concentration in this field he may have neglected, to some degree, lesser things. According to his wife he neglected his wife.
He hadn't meant to neglect her; he liked her a lot; perhaps he even loved her if that was in fashion; it had been in and out of fashion several times, he couldn't keep track. But the fact is that things like that take time. One begins with the most perfunctory display of affection. Then its reciprocation is likely to entail a concatenation of events, cubicular and carnous, whereby one becomes impassioned; and the next thing that one notices is that a quarter or even a half hour has gone by. O it's fun, but how much better could limited time be spent in abstract thought and its implementation in the transfer field.
For it was in perfect detachment that Leo Skatterly excelled. Thought, he knew, was a spiritual activity. It was but accident that it had taken up its dwelling in the brain, a handy site whereby it had access to the senses of a body, but not a necessary site. He would prove Thought a detachable thing; and by perfect abstraction he would reach a state where he himself could briefly leave his body and exist in unbodied thought.
He had achieved this several times, for a few seconds, under ideal conditions. He was on the verge of being able to accomplish it all times under all conditions.
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 28
