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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “But how can you read all those hard names in the paper when you couldn't even read the story about the little kitten?”

  “Mama, with things going the way they are, I think there's a pretty good chance that that damned kitten will get what's coming to her.”

  Far out, very far out, there was a conversation. This was on a giant world of extreme sophistication and non-dependence on matter. It was such a world as which Laudermilk's Hypothesis was built. That such a world existed, even in a contingent sense, was a triumph for Laudermilk.

  “Then you have invested one?” asked Sphaeros, an ancient rotundity of that advanced world.

  “I have invested one,” said Acu, the eager young sharpie, and bowed his forehead to the floor. The expression was figurative, since there was neither forehead nor floor on that world.

  “And you are certain that you have invested the correct one?”

  “You toy with me. Naturally I am not certain. Every investiture may not be successful, and every seed may not grow. One learns by experience, and this is my first experience on such a mission.

  “I examined much of that world before I found this person. I thought first that it would be among the masters of the contrapuntal worlds — for even there they have such and masters of such. But none of these persons — called by themselves actors and impresarios and promoters and hacks—none of these qualified. None had the calm assurance that is the first requisite. What assurance they had was of another sort, and not valid. Also, their contrapuntal worlds were not true creations in our sense — not really worlds at all.”

  “Then where did you look?” asked Sphaeros.

  “I looked to the heads of the apparatus. On retarded worlds there is often an apparatus or ‘government.’ On that world there were many. But the leaders of these — though most showed an avidity for power — did not show the calm assurance that should go with it. Their assurance, if it could be called such, was of an hysterical sort. Also, most of them were venal persons, so I rejected them.”

  “And then?”

  “Then I explored remote possibilities. Those who employ in their work a certain power over another species — jockeys, swineherds, beekeepers, snake-charmers. But with them I didn't find what I looked for—the perfect assurance of the truly superior being.”

  “And then, Acu?”

  “Then I went into instruments, not trusting my own judgment. I set the Calm Assurance Indicator on automatic and cruised about that world. And on that whole world I found only one person with perfect assurance — one impervious to doubt of any kind and totally impervious to self-doubt. On this one I made the investiture and conferred the concept of great Power and Sharpness.”

  “You have made a mistake. Fortunately it is not a great mistake as it is not a great world. You were too anxious to make a good showing on your first attempt. When nothing can be found, you should leave that world alone. On very many of them nothing can be found. Assurance is not the only quality that makes up this competence; it is simply the quality for which we look first on alien spheres.

  “The one on whom you made the Investiture, though full of assurance, was not full of other qualities equally important. It was in fact a pupa form, a child of the species, known locally as a kid. Well, it's done and cannot be undone. Fortunately such power conferred carries its own safety factor. The worst it can do is destroy its own world and seal it off safely from others. You made the Investiture correctly?”

  “Yes. I left the Red Cap, the symbol of authority and power. There was instant acceptance and comprehension.”

  “Now we'll do the big towns,” screamed Carnadine Thompson in the clubhouse of the Bengal Tigers. “Peas and Beans—

  New Orleans!”

  She jabbed the needle into New Orleans on the map, and the great shaft a hundred thousand miles long came down into the middle of the Crescent City.

  A needle? Not a pin? No. No. Pins won't work. They're of base metal. Needles! Needles!

  “Candy store—

  Baltimore,” howled Carnadine and jabbed in another needle, and the old city was destroyed. But there was never a place that screamed so loudly over its own destruction or hated so much to go.

  “Fatty's full of bolonio—

  San Antonio.”

  And Carnadine stuck it in with full assurance of her powers, red cap atilt, eyes full of green fire. There were some of us who liked that place and wished that it could have been spared.

  “Eustace is a sisty—

  Corpus Christi.”

  “I know one,” said Eustace, and he clapped the red cap on his own head:

  “Eggs and Batter—

  Cincinnater.”

  He rhymed and jabbed, manfully but badly.

  “That didn't rhyme very good,” said Carnadine. “I bet you botched it.”

  He did. It wasn't a clean-cut holocaust at all. It was a clumsy, bloody, grinding job—not what you'd like.

  “Eustace, go in the house and get the big world map,” ordered Carnadine, “and some more needles. We don't want to run out of things.”

  “Peewee is a sapolis—

  Minneapolis.”

  “Let me do one,” pleaded Peewee, and he snatched the red cap:

  “Hopping Froggo—

  Chicago.”

  “I do wish that you people would let me handle this,” said Carnadine. “That was awful.”

  It was. It was horrible. That giant needle didn't go in clean at all. It buckled great chunks of land and tore a ragged gap. Nothing pretty, nothing round about it. It was plain brutal destruction.

  If you don't personally go for this stuff, then pick a high place near a town that nobody can find a rhyme for, and go there fast. But if you can't get out of town in the next two minutes, then forget it. It will be too late. Carnadine plunged ahead:

  “What the hecktady—

  Schenectady.”

  That was one of the roundest and cleanest holes of all.

  “Flour and Crisco—

  San Francisco.”

  That was a good one. It got all the people at once, and then set up tidal waves and earthquakes all over everywhere.

  “Knife and Fork—

  All But The Words

  The IDT Project had been going on for a dozen years with no real advance toward its ends. It would have been abandoned long before except for its collateral discoveries in other fields. The accidental offshoots that it had produced were well worth the considerable expense of the Project. The Project had assigned to it one great mind and several very good minds; no other project at that time could say as much. The great mind was Gregory Smirnov, and his greatness lay in his instant perception of the possibilities of an idea. He always knew whether an idea or a notion had a spark in it. He discerned where the flightiest, most apparent idiocy carried the ultimate spark, and where the most brilliant and most plausible thesis did not. He played his colleagues like a hand of cards, and he scored every possible point with them.

  The several very good minds associated with the Project were those of: Charles Cogsworth, the inventor of the Recapitulation Correlator, as well as the Cerebral Scanner; Aloysius Shiplap, who had been associated with the late Cecil Corn in the experiment which ended Corn's life—which may have been a dead end and may have been an opening door; the stiff-necked Gerald Glasser, the designer of the E. P. Locator; Valery Mok, a woman of vivid eido-creation whose mind had put Cogsworth into a state of shock when he first went into it with his scanner.

  Also associated with the Project was Energine Eimer. Although she had a good mind by ordinary standards, she was not in the class with the others; for it was really an understatement to speak of them as having very good minds. Energine herself was flighty to seeming idiocy, but Smirnov had detected that from her might come the ultimate spark.

  The purpose of the IDT Project was to devise an Instant Distant Translation device, which might be either mechanical or psychic, or something of an entirely different aspect. It was to reach and esta
blish rapport with a distant—a very distant—mind, any mind anywhere beyond the pale. It would have to combine and go far beyond such tools as were already available.

  Extrasensory Perception, now that it was known to be but another aspect of simple sensory perception and of disappointing limitations, was one very inadequate tool. The translation devices themselves would be adequate for ordinary work. They could now interpret roughly the thought processes of earthworms and ferns and even crystals. They could record and even verbalize the apprehensions of metals under stress and, to an extent, the group consciousness of gathering thunderheads. Any language, terrestrial or distant, could be given a cogent interpretation. But something more was required.

  It was the six hundred and twelfth weekly progress meeting of the group.

  “Energine,” said Gregory Smirnov, “it has just come to me how you are different from the rest of us.”

  “In one way she's different from the rest, except myself,” said Valery, “but I'm not sure that you've ever noticed that difference.”

  “I've known about the difference of the sexes for a long time, Valery,” said Smirnov. “I was a precocious child and an early reader of biology. In my own life I have relegated the implications of the difference to a minor corner. There is little enough time in even a long life to do the work I have set for myself, and the ramifications of the sex complex are time-consuming. No, the difference is that Energine likes to talk to people.”

  “Does not almost everyone?” asked Shiplap.

  “Many do, but none of us on the project except Energine,” said Smirnov. “We are not the sort of people who like people, and we talk to them as little as possible. Mostly we talk to ourselves, even when we're nominally talking to others. There is an inhibition in the—ah—cultivated minds. We are a withdrawn bunch, and we tend to become more so as we follow our specialties and our studies. That is the irony of it.”

  “Where is the irony?” asked Cogsworth.

  “We are trying to talk to ‘people’ over cosmic distances, and we do not even like to talk to people near at hand. We do not like to talk to people at all. We aren't the ones for the job. Mostly we are bored with people.”

  “Then who are the ones for the job?” asked Glasser. “Logorrhea is rampant in the world. We could find a billion low folks who love to talk to other low folks.”

  “Possibly those we will ultimately contact will be also be low folks,” said Smirnov. “It is likely that the lowest common denominator of the Universe will be both low and common. Rapport is what we want, and we don't have it. We can study the dragonfly, but are we ever really concerned with the dragonfly's concern for his family? We don't really like the monstrous miniatures. We've no sympathy with the terrified arrogance of the arachnid; how can we have sympathy for really strange creatures? How can we talk to an alien if we don't even like to talk to our own kind?”

  “I have a landlady who even talks to bugs,” said Glasser. “Shall I get her? She'd droodle to a vole on a planet just as well if we pointed her that way. And you believe that she would be better than ourselves who have all the techniques and information?”

  “We have Energine,” said Smirnov. “She has the techniques, such as we all have. And she likes to talk to people. She might just be able to break us out of our restriction.”

  “Then why hasn't she done it?” asked Valery. “She's had as much time on the senders and scanners as any of us, and no more luck.”

  “Because she hasn't let herself go. She has been constrained to use our own approach and formulae. Energine, let yourself go and talk to those people! Now! Tonight! Talk to them!”

  “I will, I will. But how? You mean just like I talk? I've thought of that, but I didn't think you'd allow it. I bet those folks have gotten awful bored with our salutations and mathematical symbols. A circle is a circle, and a square is a square, and so are we. Hey—me third plant out. Who you?—I bet they think we're nutty to use that kind of stuff.

  “I'll get hold of one of them tonight and tell him all about the new Indonesian restaurant I found. Maybe he found a new restaurant up there and can tell me some of the dishes. Whoever he is I bet he likes to eat, too.”

  “Energine, do you still belong to a Lonely Hearts Club?”

  “Why, I belong to all of them! Just let me read you one letter I got this morning. Why, it's the nicest letter—”

  “Spare us! Protect us! Earth swallow us!” cried Glasser.

  “That, Glasser, is an illustration of what is holding us back,” said Smirnov. “We don't like to talk to people and we don't like to listen to people. It may be that they have been talking to us for a long time and we were not in tune to listen.”

  “Well then, you will surely listen, Mr. Smirnov,” cried Energine. “This is a letter from Eugene upstate—”

  “No, as a matter of fact I will not listen,” said Smirnov. “I am now too old to develop a sympathy for the vital things of life. But what I want you to do, Energine, is to let yourself go; to talk, to send, just as if you were writing to one of your lonely hearts people. Go all the way out, girl. If it doesn't work, only the stars will laugh at you.”

  “Oh, I never minded being laughed at. It shows that people are having fun. I'll tell him about Charley; that's just to make him jealous. You don't know about Charley? Let me read you—well, never mind then. This might be the first extraterrestrial lonely hearts club. I could be president.”

  “Yes, you could be president of it, Energine. Now, the first live blip you get on the scanner, you just let yourself go with all you've got. Send him one of those lonely hearts letters. Make it lavender.”

  “Purple. Oh, I will, I will.”

  And that evening on the scanner Energine picked up either a minor blip or a minor malfunction; it was always impossible to tell which. Those little egg-shaped anomalies—they looked egg-shaped, they sounded egg-shaped, they broke into egg-shaped sine curves—were the only evidence of the sort of target they were seeking. Energine let herself go on the sender. “Dear Albert—since I must call you something and I am sure that your name is very like that—I will try quite hard to reach you, and I beg that you answer me. Your name in the Project now becomes Albert-(Tentative). To others you are only an egg-shaped anomaly, but you are more than that to me.

  “This is the first essay to the establishment of a stellar lonely hearts club, and it just has to be success. In the lonely hearts clubs we write in love and affection to those we would like to know, and we would like to know everyone.

  “I will tell you about our world, and you tell me about yours. I hope that we can get very close together. There is an ecstasy on me when I can grow very close to another. I believe that the only thing of any importance on this world is love. Is not that the only thing of importance on yours?

  “I had another picture of Charley today. He is not as handsome a man as he was in the first picture that he sent. I do not believe that the first picture was even a picture of Charley. But sometimes the first picture that I send is not a picture of me, either. Do you want to see a picture of me? I will send one as soon as I find out how.

  “I went to a Mexican restaurant last night. They had roast kid stuffed with almonds and sauced all over with burnt brown sugar. And they had those little flat pancake things that taste like cardboard. I wonder if you enjoy eating as much as I do.

  “Albert please answer me with anything at all, and we will begin to establish rapport. I feel that we could grow very close together. Albert, I will treasure your answers with those of Fred and Harold and Richard—that one turned out badly but he did write nice letters—and Selby and Roger and Norbert. Do you also save old letters? Answer me. I will stay right here till morning, and if I do not hear from you by then I will wait again tomorrow evening and every evening.

  Signed—Energine.”

  She waited, but she didn't have to wait as long as she had feared. It was only about an hour till the response began to come through. The first sign of it was the dimming of
the lights and the vibration of the building as the auxiliary generators cut in, for the translation device seemed to be laboring under a heavy, unaccustomed load. But the machine had amazing resources. It could translate anything, anything. Then the answer came.

  “Energine,” came the answer. “That call letter? That name? That world? That people? That what?

  “Jubilation here to learn that there is friendly life on your world. Your world previously ignored as little bit sick. You know sick? Word sick? Possibly first word mutually understanding.

  “Comprehending all your communication except the words. What is lonely? What is hearts? What is club? What is grow very close together? What is a Charley? What is picture? What is Mexican? What is kid? What is little flat pancake thing? What is cardboard? What is a Fred and Harold and other entities?

  “Word love understood intuitively. Explain mechanics of thing with you. Extreme variation in different sectors. In ecstasy of symbiosis which one swallow who?

  “Yes, answer, answer, answer, whatever that means. What is Selby? What is Norbert? What means wait right here? What means morning? Rapport also understood intuitively. We be so completely. We how many? You group or integer? Send how to roast kid stuffed. What is roast kid stuffed? Delirious interest here in subject, sure to increase when we know what subject consist of. Also love you already passionately. What is passionately? What is already?—

  KGGLP*Y UU—Albert-(Tentative).”

  He had answered. Albert-(Tentative) had answered. He had understood all of her communication except the words. They were in perfect rapport. The translation device shuddered and groaned after the effort. Then it panted softly and fell to sibilant silence. The building was quiet and the night gathered lovely about it.

  The first and most difficult step of the IDT project had been achieved after twelve years. The rest would follow. Others would venture where Energine had pioneered. The glad news of the achievement was given to the world.