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

by R. A. Lafferty

  Colonel Zornig shoved the steel pike two inches more into the belly of Ieska. “I set up a special set of circumstances, Ieska,” he said. “Consider again whether the story may not be told after all.”

  “Who would have believed it?” asked Ieska. “It is a cold day in hell for me—your proverb, not mine. The high sun is shining on a cold winter night, and the South wind blows windlessly out of the West. Were I the hero type it would be different, but I am only Ieska… Surely you have guessed the story or you would not have me stretched out here.”

  “Almost guessed it, Ieska. Did you in some manner temper with General Raddle's mind and make him your partisan?”

  “Maybe is not all lost if you are so dumb. What we know about minds and to tamper with them?”

  “Perhaps very much. How did you manage to bring him to life again anyhow?”

  “Man Colonel, ease off the point stick stuff a little. It only hurts me when I laugh—your folk joke, not mine. Is cruel not to permit me high hilarity over this. How will anyone bring him back to life? And you have said you were not superstitious.”

  “Then you have somehow duplicated him?”

  “Kill me! Run it clear through me! I have to laugh for this even if it kills me.”

  “I'll kill you damned soon if I have no answer. What did you do to General Raddle?”

  “Kill me then, but this is truth: we didn't do anything to him. What could we do? We couldn't any more fix him than anything. After a while he got pretty what you call foul smell and we got rid of him.”

  “Then who has been commanding us?”

  “Like in one of your joke books, man Colonel—‘Who, me driving? I thought you were driving!’ Nobody has been commanding you, man Colonel. We like it that way.”

  “Hold the pike on the little bug,” the colonel told one of the men. “The rest of you come with me, and hurry it along. There's a coup to be pulled, and I sure won't be left out of it. I've turned this in my mind so much that I know just where to pull the string.” He left the room.

  IV

  It was sudden, and it was sure. The trap inside the trap inside the trap can go either way. The Pani had been given enough slack, and they hanged themselves on their own rope. Their plan was set. Nobody could have changed it except Ieska, and Ieska was pinned down in the old guardhouse. It was planned so neatly that the countermoves to it were automatic in the mind of Colonel Zornig. He had seen the threat clearly. He had constructed in his mind just how General Raddle would have to have trapped the trappers in the grand coup—if there had any longer been a General Raddle, if there had been a coup designed in any mind other than that of Colonel Zornig.

  A dozen pockets of Pani infiltrators were taken almost simultaneously. They would have had the humans dead and dispatched. The shambling little shadows had come very close to pulling it off.

  And then there was nothing to it. They were caught flat. They saw their grand plan collapse, and they became once more nothing but surrounded bunches of snuffling bugs—no more a threat, no more anything. But now always to be watched, and their watching to be delegated to experts.

  Colonel Zornig had the putative General Raddle stretched flat on his back beside his fellow conspirator Ieska. He didn't look so much like General Raddle when he was stripped. The Pani mimicry only goes so far. “Where have I slipped up?” asked Ieska. “I thought I could riddle talk you till the time had go by and we have you. How smart alec Colonel know how to dash out and do it while was still time? How you know he is not General Raddle when I double talk you along?”

  “Skuuortflochnung,” said the Pani who was no longer General Raddle.

  “What does your friend say, Ieska?” asked Zornig.

  “He says I have the mouth disease. It means I have talked too much somewhere along the line. How is that possible with a genius like me? Where did I slip, man Colonel?”

  “Very early, Ieska. It was once when you were talking to Doctor Mobley and several of us. You said that you were too pot-bellied to be a tree-climber, too short-winded to be a hunter, too weak to be a porter—”

  “I kidded you, man Colonel. I dissembled so you would not know how capable I am and would not be so suspicious of me. At all these things I exceed.”

  “—too stupid to be a farmer—”

  “And myself the most intellectual of the Pani! Was not that rare jokes I made?”

  “—and too untalented to be a mime.”

  “Ah, there I have dropped the molasses jug, there I have cracked the cooky jar, there was where the excretion hit the air-vanes—your say words all. That we are mimes who can mimic anything—I let that cat out of the carpet bag. In this I was near as stupid as yourself.”

  “We all slip, Ieska. And now what do you suppose will happen to you?”

  “One: you will kill me. Two: You will ship me back to be exhibited as a sort of freak in a zoo.”

  “Which do you prefer?”

  “That you kill me. I have my pride.”

  “And your tongue. You still lie with it. I know which you really prefer, and you win in this. I'd kill you with perfect delight, but we have our instructions as to the handling of interesting specimens. You will be on exhibition. You always have been.”

  “I must find about bookings. Where is multi-list planetary edition of Billboard man soldier have lying around?”

  Mad Man

  The too-happy puppy came bounding up to him — a bundle of hysterical yipes and a waggling tail that would bring joy to the soul of anyone. The pathetic expectation and sheer love in the shining eyes and wooly rump was something to see. The whole world loves a puppy like that. And George Gnevni kicked the thing end over end and high into the air with a remarkably powerful boot. The sound that came from the broken creature as it crash-landed against a wall was a heart-rending wail that would have melted the heart of a stone toad.

  Gnevni was disgusted with himself.

  “Less than ten meters. Should have booted him twelve. I'll kill the blood-sucking cod-headed little cur the next time. Nothing goes right today.”

  It was not a real puppy; it was better than a real one. There is something artificial in the joy and carrying on of a real puppy as well as in its hurt screaming. But the antics of this one rang true. The thing was made by a competent artist, and it was well made. It could be set to go through the same routine again at a moment's notice. A Crippled Old Lady came up shaking with palsy. There was real beauty in her face yet, and a serenity that pain could never take away from her.

  “A glorious morning to you, my good man,” she said to Gnevni.

  And he kicked her crutches out from under her.

  “I am sure that was an accident, sir,” she gasped as she teetered and nearly fell. “Would you be so kind as to hand them to me again? I'm quite unable to stand without them.”

  Gnevni knocked her down with a smacking blow. He then stomped up and down on her body from stem to stern. And with a heavy two-footed jump on her stomach he left her writhing on the pavement.

  Gnevni was again disgusted with himself.

  “It doesn't seem to do a thing for me today,” he said, “not a thing. I don't know what's the matter with me this morning.”

  It was a real lady. We are afraid of dog-lovers, but we are not afraid of people-lovers. There are so few of them. So the lady was not an artificial one. She was real flesh and blood, and the least of both. However, she was neither crippled nor old. She was a remarkably athletic woman and had been a stunt girl before she found her true vocation. She was also a fine young actress and played the Crippled Old Lady role well.

  Gnevni went to his job in the Cortin Institute Building that was popularly known as the Milk Shed.

  “Bring my things, crow-bait,” he grumbled at a nice young lady assistant. “I see the rats have been in your hair again. Are you naturally deformed or do you stand that way on purpose? There's a point, you know, beyond which ugliness is no longer a virtue.”

  The nice young lady began to cry, but not
very convincingly. She went off to get Gnevni's things. But she would bring only a part of them, and, not all of them the right ones.

  “Old George isn't himself this morning,” said the under-doctor Cotrel.

  “I know,” said under-doctor Devon. “We'll have to devise something to get him mad today. We can't have him getting pleasant on us.”

  The required paranexus could not be synthesized. Many substances had been tried and all of them had been found insufficient. But the thing was needed for the finest operation of the Programmeds. It had to be the real thing, and there was only one way to get a steady supply of it. At one time they had simplified it by emphasizing the cortin and adrenalin components of it. Later they had emphasized a dozen other components, and then a hundred. And finally they accepted it for what it was—too complex for duplication, too necessary an accessory for the Programmeds to be neglected, too valuable at its most effective to be taken from random specimens. It could be had only from Humans, and it could be had in fine quality only from a special sort of Humans. The thing was very complex, but at the Institute they called it Oil of Dog.

  Peredacha was a pleasant little contrivance — a “Shadler Movement” or “female” of the species that had once been called homo conventus or robot and was now referred to as “Programmed Person.”

  She had a sound consciousness, hint of developing originality, a capacity for growth and a neatness of mechanism and person. She might be capable of fine work of the speculative sort. She was one of those on whom the added spark might not be wasted.

  Always they had worked to combine the best elements of both sorts.

  The Programmed Persons were in many respects superior to the Old Recension Persons or Humans. They were of better emotional balance, of greater diligence, of wider adaptability, of much vaster memory or accumulation and of readier judgment based on that memory. But there was one thing lacking in the most adept of the Programmed that was often to be found in the meanest of the humans. This was a thing very hard to name.

  It was the little bit extra; but the Programmed already had the very much extra. It had something of the creative in it, though the Programmed were surely more creative than the Humans. It was the rising to the occasion; the Programmed could do this more gracefully, but sometimes less effectively, than could the Humans. It was the breaking out of a framework, the utter lack of complacency, the sudden surge of power or intellect, the bewildering mastery of the moment, the thing that made the difference.

  It was the Programmed themselves who sought out the thing, for they were the more conscious of the difference. It was the Programmed technicians who set up the system. It cost the Humans nothing, and it profited the Programmed very much in their persons and personalities.

  On many of them, of course, it had little effect; but on a select few it had the effect of raising them to a genius grade. And many of them who could never become geniuses did become specialists to a degree unheard of before — and all because of the peculiar human additive.

  It was something like the crossing of the two races, though there could never be a true cross of species so different — one of them not being of the reproductive sort. The adrenal complex sometimes worked great changes on a Programmed.

  There were but a few consistent prime sources of it — and each of them somehow had his distinguishing mark. Often a Programmed felt an immediate kinship, seldom reciprocated, with the Human donor. And Peredacha, a very responsive Programmed, felt the kinship keenly when the additive was given to her.

  “I claim for paternity,” she cried. It was a standard joke of the Programmed. “I claim as daughter to my donor! I never believed it before. I thought it only one of those things that everybody says. The donors are such a surly bunch that it drives them really violent til one of us seeks their acquaintance on this pretext. But I'm curious. Which one was it?”

  She was told.

  “Oh no! Not him of the whole clutch! How droll can you get? He is my new kindred? But never before did I feel so glorious. Never have I been able to work so well.”

  The assigned job of George Gnevni was a mechanical one. In the ordinary course of things this would be all wrong, for George had less mechanical aptitude than any man ever born. George had very little aptitude for anything at all in the world—until his one peculiar talent was discovered. He was an unhandsome and graceless man, and he lived in poverty. Much has been said about the compensations of physical ugliness—mostly the same things that have been said about poverty. It is often maintained that they may be melded behind the dross front, that the sterling character may develop and shine through the adversity.

  It is lies, it is lies! It happens only rarely that these things are ennobling. With persons of the commoner sort it happens not at all. To be ugly and clumsy and poor at the same time will finally drive a man to raving anger against the whole world.

  And that was the idea.

  Gnevni was assigned a mean lodging, and his meal tickets were peculiar ones. He could not obtain what he wanted to eat. He could have only what was on the list for him to eat, and this was evilly contrived to cover everything that disagreed with him. As a result he was usually in gastric pain and in seething anger at his own entrails. He had an ugly nature to begin with, but the form of life forced upon him deepened and nurtured it.

  Gnevni's voice was harsh and jangling, though there was real mastery of resonance in his powerful howling when his anger reached high form. He was denied wifing privileges, and no woman would have had him in any case. He was allowed just enough of bad whoa-johnny whisky to keep him edgy and mean, but not enough to bring him solace.

  He was an oaf — an obscene distasteful clod of humanity. He knew it and he boiled and seethed with the shoddy knowledge. He was no better than a badger in a cage, but those things are terrific snappers.

  For his poor livelihood he was given a quota of mechanical tasks to complete every day, and he had no mechanical aptitude at all. They were simple assembly jobs. A competent Programmed Person could do in minutes what it took Gnevni all day to do. Most children of the human species could do the same things easily and quickly — though some might not be able to do them at all, for the Humans are less uniform in their abilities than the Programmed.

  The things that Gnevni was to assemble were never all there, some of them were the wrong things, and some of them were defective. A Programmed would have spotted the off stuff at once and sent it back, but ugly George had no way of telling whether things were right or not. He sweated and swore his days away at the grotesque labor and became the angriest man alive.

  Joker tools were sometimes substituted on him for the true tools — screwdrivers with shafts as flexible as spaghetti, key-drifts with noses as soft as wax, box-end wrench sets that were sized to fit nothing, soldering guns that froze ice on their tips, mismarked calipers with automatic slippage, false templates, unworkable crimpers, continuity testers that shocked a man to near madness.

  It is a legend that humans have an affinity for mechanical things. But normal humans have an innate hatred for machinery, and the accommodation that has grown up between them is a nervous one. The damned stuff just doesn't work right. You hate it, and it hates you. That's the old basic of it.

  Swift, a wise old mad man, once wrote a piece on the “Perversity of Inanimate Objects.” And they are perverse, particularly to a sick, ugly, ignorant, incompetent, poor man who fights them in a frenzy — and they fight back.

  All day long George Gnevni and a few of his unfortunate fellows attacked their tasks explosively — the air blue with multi-syllabled profanity, and anger dancing about like summer lightning. Now and then, people came and inserted tubes into these unfortunates, and performed some other indignities upon them.

  The paranexus, the complex substance, the “Oil of Dog” that was needed for stimulation of the Programmed, while it could be taken from any Humans, could only be had in its prime form from a depraved, insane sort of Very Angry Men.

  But today Ge
orge Gnevni was not himself. There was only a sullenness in him, not the required flaming purple anger. “We have to prod him,” said under-doctor Cotrel. “We can't waste a whole day on him. He's sick enough. He tests at a high enough pitch of excitement. Why won't he put out? Why won't he get mad?”

  “I have an idea,” said under-doctor Devon. “We have an inner-office memo that one of the Programmed has recognized kinship with him. You remember when Wut was in a slump? We got a Programmed up here who threw an arm around him and called him Uncle Wilbur. The way Wut exploded, seismographs must have recorded the shock at a considerable distance. We had to move fast to prevent him from damaging the Programmed. And then Wut was so mad that we were able to use him around the clock for seventy-two hours. How our Very Angry Men do hate the Programmed! They call them the things.”

  “Good. Anything that worked on Wut ought to work double on Gnevni. Get the Programmed Person up here. We'll have him at ugly George.”

  “Her. She's a Shadler Movement Programmed and so technically a female.”

  “Better yet. I can hardly wait, Gnevni is the most spectacular of them all when he really goes wild. We should get a good production from him.”

  Peredacha, the talented little Shadler Movement Programmed, came to the Cortin Institute Building — the Milk Shed. She understood the situation and enjoyed it. The Programmed have their humor — more urbane than that of Humans, and yet as genuine — and they appreciate the hilarity of an incongruous confrontation.