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

by R. A. Lafferty

  He admonished him not to waste precious months in trying to devise the perfect apple corer; there will never be a perfect apple corer. He begged him not to build a battery bobsled. There would be things far swifter than a bobsled.

  Let others make the new hide scrapers and tanning salts. Let others aid the carter and the candle molder and the cooper in their arts. There was need for a better hame, a better horse block, a better stile, a better whetstone. Well, let others fill those needs. If our button-hooks, our firedogs, our whiffletrees, our bootjacks, our cheese presses are all badly designed and a disgrace, then let someone else remove that disgrace. Let others aid the cordwainer and the cobbler. Let Higgston do only the high work that nobody else would be able to do.

  There would come a time when the farrier himself would disappear, as the fletcher had all but disappeared. But new trades would open for a man with an open mind.

  Then the old man got specific. He showed young Higgston a design for a lathe dog that would save time. He told him how to draw, rather than hammer wire; and advised him of the virtues of mica as insulator before other material should come to hand.

  “And here there are some things that you will have to take on faith,” said the old man, “things of which we learn the ‘what’ before we fathom the ‘why’.”

  He explained to him the shuttle armature and the self-exciting field, and commutation; and the possibilities that anternation carried to its ultimate might open up. He told him a bejammed lot of things about a confounded huge variety of subjects.

  “And a little mathematics never hurt a practical man,” said the old gaffer. “I was self-taught, and it slowed me down.”

  They hunkered down there, and the old man cyphered it all out in the dust on the top of Devil's Head Mountain. He showed him natural logarithms and rotating vectors and the calculi and such; but he didn't push it too far, as even a smart boy can learn only so much in a few minutes. He then gave him a little advice on the treatment of Audrey, knowing it would be useless, for the art of living with a shrew is a thing that cannot be explained to another.

  “Now hood your hawk and go down the mountain and go to work,” the old man said. And that is what young Higgston Rainbird did.

  The career of the Yankee inventor, Higgston Rainbird, was meteoric. The wise men of Greece were little boys to him, the Renaissance giants had only knocked at the door but had not tried the knob. And it was unlocked all the time. The milestones that Higgston left are breathtaking. He built a short high dam on the flank of Devil's Head Mountain, and had hydroelectric power for his own shop in that same year (1779). He had an arc light burning in Horse-Head Lighthouse in 1781. He read by true incandescent light in 1783, and lighted his native village, Knobknocker, three years later. He drove a charcoal fueled automobile in 1787, switched to a distillate of whale oil in 1789, and used true rock oil in 1790. His gasoline powered combination reaper-thresher was in commercial production in 1793, the same year that he wired Centerville for light and power. His first diesel locomotive made its trial run in 1796, in which year he also converted one of his earlier coal burning steamships to liquid fuel.

  In 1799 he had wired Philadelphia for light and power, a major breakthrough, for the big cities had manfully resisted the innovations. On the night of the turn of the century he unhooded a whole clutch of new things, wireless telegraphy, the televox, radio transmission and reception, motile and audible theatrical reproductions, a machine to transmit the human voice into print, and a method of sterilizing and wrapping meat to permit its indefinite preservation at any temperature.

  And in the spring of that new year he first flew a heavier-than-air vehicle.

  “He has made all the basic inventions,” said the many-tongued people. “Now there remains only their refinement and proper utilization.”

  “Horse hokey,” said Higgston Rainbird. He made a rocket that could carry freight to England in thirteen minutes at seven cents a hundredweight. This was in 1805. He had fissionable power in 1813, and within four years had the price down where it could be used for desalting seawater to the eventual irrigation of five million square miles of remarkably dry land.

  He built a Think Machine to work out the problems that he was too busy to solve, and a Prediction Machine to pose him with new problems and new areas of breakthrough.

  In 1821, on his birthday, he hit the moon with a marker. He bet a crony that he would be able to go up personally one year later and retrieve it. And he won the bet.

  In 1830 he first put on the market his Red Ball Pipe Tobacco, an aromatic and expensive crimp cut made of Martian lichen. In 1836 he founded the Institute for the Atmospheric Rehabilitation of Venus, for he found that place to be worse than a smokehouse. It was there that he developed that hacking cough that stayed with him till the end of his days.

  He synthesized a man of his own age and disrepute who would sit drinking with him in the after-midnight hours and say, “You're so right, Higgston, so incontestably right.”

  His plan for the Simplification and Eventual Elimination of Government was adopted (in modified form) in 1840, a fruit of his Political and Economic Balance Institute.

  Yet, for all his seemingly successful penetration of the field, he realized that man was the one truly cantankerous animal, and that Human Engineering would remain one of the never completely resolved fields.

  He made a partial breakthrough in telepathy, starting with the personal knowledge that shrews are always able to read the minds of their spouses. He knew that the secret was not in sympathetic reception, but in arrogant break-in. With the polite it is forever impossible, but he disguised this discovery as politely as he could.

  And he worked toward corporal immortality and the apotheosis of mankind, that cantankerous animal.

  He designed a fabric that would embulk itself on a temperature drop, and thin to an airy sheen in summery weather. The weather itself he disdained to modify, but he did evolve infallible prediction of exact daily rainfall and temperature for decades in advance.

  And he built a retrogressor.

  One day he looked in the mirror and frowned. “I never did get around to making a better mirror. This one is hideous. However (to consider every possibility) let us weigh the thesis that it is the image and not the mirror that is hideous.”

  He called on an acquaintance.

  “Say, Ulois, what year is this anyhow?”

  “1844.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Reasonably sure.”

  “How old am I?”

  “Eighty-five, I think, Higgston.”

  “How long have I been an old man?”

  “Quite a while, Higgston, quite a while.” Higgston Rainbird hung up rudely.

  “I wonder how I ever let a thing like that slip up on me?” he said to himself. “I should have gone to work on corporal immortality a little earlier. I've bungled the whole business now.”

  He fiddled with his prediction machine and saw that he was to die that very year. He did not seek a finer reading.

  “What a saddle-galled splay-footed situation to find myself in! I never got around to a tenth of the things I really wanted to do. Oh, I was smart enough; I just ran up too many blind alleys. Never found the answers to half the old riddles. Should have built the Prediction Machine at the beginning instead of the end. But I didn't know how to build it at the beginning. There ought to be a way to get more done. Never got any advice in my life worth taking except from that nutty old man on the mountain when I was a young man. There's a lot of things I've only started on. Well, every man doesn't hang, but every man does come to the end of his rope. I never did get around to making that rope extensible. And I can't improve things by talking to myself here about it.”

  He filled his pipe with Red Ball crimp cut and thought a while.

  “But I hill-hopping can improve things by talking to myself there about it.”

  Then he turned on his retrogressor and went back and up.

  Young Higgston Rainbi
rd was hawking from the top of Devil's Head Mountain on a June afternoon in 1779. He flew his hawk down through the white clouds, and decided that he was the finest fellow in the world and master of the finest sport. If there was earth below the clouds it was far away and unimportant. The hunting bird came back, climbing the tall air, with a pigeon from the lower regions.

  “Forget the bird,” said the old man, “and give a listen with those outsized ears of yours. I have a lot to tell you in a very little while, and then you must devote yourself to a concentrated life of work. Hood the bird and clip him to the stake. Is that bridle clip of your own invention? Ah yes, I remember now that it is.”

  “I'll just fly him down once more, old man, and then I'll have a look at what you're selling.”

  “No. No. Hood him at once. This is your moment of decision. That is a boyishness that you must give up. Listen to me, Higgston, and I will orient your life for you.”

  “I rather intended to orient it myself. How did you get up here, old man, without my seeing you? How, in fact, did you get up here at all? It's a hard climb.”

  “Yes, I remember that it is. I came up here on the wings of an invention of my own. Now pay attention for a few hours. It will take all your considerable wit.”

  “A few hours and a perfect hawking afternoon will be gone. This may be the finest day ever made.”

  “I also once felt that it was, but I manfully gave it up. So must you.”

  “Let me fly the hawk down again and I will listen to you while it is gone.”

  “But you will only be listening with half a mind, and the rest will be with the hawk.”

  But young Higgston Rainbird flew the bird down through the shining white clouds, and the old man began his rigmarole sadly. Yet it was a rang-dang-do of a spiel, a mummywhammy of admonition and exposition, and young Higgston listened entranced and almost forgot his hawk. The old man told him that he must stride half a dozen roads at once, and yet never take a wrong one; that he must do some things earlier that on the alternative had been done quite late; that he must point his technique at the Think Machine and the Prediction Machine, and at the unsolved problem of corporal immortality.

  “In no other way can you really acquire elbow room, ample working time. Time runs out and life is too short if you let it take its natural course. Are you listening to me, Higgston?”

  But the hawk came back, climbing the steep air, and it had a gray dove. The old man sighed at the interruption, and he knew that his project was in peril.

  “Hood the hawk. It's a sport for boys. Now listen to me, you spraddling jack. I am telling you things that nobody else would ever be able to tell you! I will show you how to fly falcons to the stars, not just down to the meadows and birch groves at the foot of this mountain.”

  “There is no prey up there,” said young Higgston.

  “There is. Gamier prey than you ever dreamed of. Hood the bird and snaffle him.”

  “I'll just fly him down one more time and listen to you till he comes back.”

  The hawk went down through the clouds like a golden bolt of summer lightning.

  Then the old man, taking the cosmos, peeled it open layer by layer like an onion, and told young Higgston how it worked. Afterwards he returned to the technological beginning and he lined out the workings of steam and petro and electromagnetism, and explained that these simple powers must be used for a short interval in the invention of greater power. He told him of waves and resonance and airy transmission, and fission and flight and over-flight. And that none of the doors required keys, only a resolute man to turn the knob and push them open. Young Higgston was impressed.

  Then the hawk came back, climbing the towering air, and he had a rainbird.

  The old man had lively eyes, but now they took on a new light.

  “Nobody ever gives up pleasure willingly,” he said, “and there is always the sneaking feeling that the bargain may not have been perfect. This is one of the things I have missed. I haven't hawked for sixty-five years. Let me fly him this time, Higgston.”

  “You know how?”

  “I am adept. And I once intended to make a better gauntlet for hawkers. This hasn't been improved since Nimrod's time.”

  “I have an idea for a better gauntlet myself, old man.”

  “Yes. I know what your idea is. Go ahead with it. It's practical.”

  “Fly him if you want to, old man.”

  And old Higgston flew the tercel hawk down through the gleaming clouds, and he and young Higgston watched from the top of the world. And then young Higgston Rainbird was standing alone on the top of Devil's Head Mountain, and the old man was gone.

  “I wonder where he went? And where in apple knocker's heaven did he come from? Or was he ever here at all? That's a danged funny machine he came in, if he did come in it. All the wheels are on the inside. But I can use the gears from it, and the clock, and the copper wire. It must have taken weeks to hammer that much wire out that fine. I wish I'd paid more attention to what he was saying, but he poured it on a little thick. I'd have gone along with him on it if only he'd have found a good stopping place a little sooner, and hadn't been so insistent on giving up hawking. Well, I'll just hawk here till dark, and if it dawns clear I'll be up again in the morning. And Sunday, if I have a little time, I may work on my sparker or my chestnut roaster.”

  Higgston Rainbird lived a long and successful life. Locally he was known best as a hawker and horse racer. But as an inventor he was recognized as far as Boston. He is still known, in a limited way, to specialists in the field and period: known as contributor to the development of the moldboard plow, as the designer of the Nonpareil Nutmeg Grater with the safety feature, for a bellows, for a sparker for starting fires (little used), and for the Devil's Claw Wedge for splitting logs.

  He is known for such, and for no more.

  All The People

  Anthony Trotz went first to the politician, Mike Delado. “How many people do you know, Mr. Delado?” “Why the question?”

  “I am wondering just what amount of detail the mind can hold.”

  “To a degree I know many. Ten thousand well, thirty thousand by name, probably a hundred thousand by face and to shake hands with.”

  “And what is the limit?”

  “Possibly I am the limit.” The politician smiled frostily. “The only limit is time, speed of cognizance, and retention. I am told that the latter lessens with age. I am seventy, and it has not done so with me. Whom I have known I do not forget.”

  “And with special training could one go beyond you?”

  “I doubt if one could — much. For my own training has been quite special. Nobody has been so entirely with the people as I have. I've taken five memory courses in my time, but the tricks of all of them I had already come to on my own. I am a great believer in the commonality of mankind and of near equal inherent ability. Yet there are some, say the one man in fifty, who in degree if not in kind does exceed his fellows in scope and awareness and vitality. I am that one man in fifty, and knowing people is my specialty.”

  “Could a man who specialized still more — and to the exclusion of other things — know a hundred thousand men well?”

  “It is possible. Dimly.”

  “A quarter of a million?”

  “I think not. He might learn that many faces and names, but he would not know the men.”

  Anthony went next to the philosopher, Gabriel Mindel. “Mr. Mindel, how many people do you know?”

  “How know? Per se? A se? Or In se? Per suam essentiam, perhaps? Or do you mean ab alio? Or to know as hoc aliquid? There is a fine difference there. Or do you possibly mean to know in subsiantia prima, or in the sense of comprehensive noumena?”

  “Somewhere between the latter two. How many persons do you know by name, face, and with a degree of intimacy?”

  “I have learned over the years the names of some of my colleagues, possibly a dozen of them. I am now sound on my wife's name, and I seldom stumble over the names of m
y offspring — never more than momentarily. But you may have come to the wrong man for… whatever you have come for. I am notoriously poor at names, faces, and persons. I have even been described (vox faucibus haesit) as absentminded.”

  “Yes, you do have the reputation. But perhaps I have not come to the wrong man in seeking the theory of the thing. What is it that limits the comprehensive capacity of the mind of man? What will it hold? What restricts?”

  “The body.”

  “How is that?”

  “The brain, I should say, the material tie. The mind is limited by the brain. It is skull-bound. It can accumulate no more than its cranial capacity, though not one-tenth of that is ordinarily used. An unbodied mind would (in esoteric theory) be unlimited.”

  “And how in practical theory?”

  “If it is practical, a pragma, it is a thing and not a theory.”

  “Then we can have no experience with the unbodied mind, or the possibility of it?”

  “We have not discovered any area of contact, but we may entertain the possibility of it. There is no paradox here. One may rationally consider the irrational.”

  Anthony went next to see the priest.

  “How many people do you know?” he asked him.

  “I know them all.”

  “That has to be doubted,” said Anthony after a moment.

  “I've had twenty different stations. And when you hear five thousand confessions a year for forty years, you by no means know all about people, but you do know all people.”

  “I do not mean types. I mean persons.