“Let's get out of this riot and go home to supper,” a man said to his wife. She slapped him silly. “Why'd you do that?” he asked, peering up from the sidewalk.
“No man can talk to me like that,” she said.
“But I just meant—”
“How am I to know what you meant? You ought to be shot. You can't talk to me like that.”
“But I'm your husband.”
“I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know what that means.”
“I don't know either. It seems like I've always been saying it.”
They walked off in opposite directions.
Then it broke clear down. The fires began and smallpox broke out. Whenever anything basic is disrupted for a bit, solid brick walls will burn, and triply-inoculated persons will begin to die of smallpox before you can count to a thousand.
How are you going to put out fires when you can't tell the firemen from anyone else or the fire-wagons from other vehicles? How is a fireman going to go about it if he can't understand orders? Why doesn't everyone shut up if nobody can understand what they're saying?
“I'm the mayor of the city,” said a man at a shambles. “Let's attack the problem in a front-headed manner.” “What's that mean?” asked a commissioner.
“I don't know,” said the mayor. “I've been saying it for a long time. Look the words up in a book. It might tell.”
“The time for words is past,” said the police chief. “This is the time for action. It seems that I've always said that too.”
“What do you mean by action?” asked the Commissioner of Parks and Sewers.
“I mean this,” said the police chief, and he began to punch the Commissioner of Parks and Sewers around.
“Let us attack the problem in a forceful manner,” said the mayor.
“How forceful you want him to get?” asked the Commissioner of Parks and Sewers.
The meeting broke up without adjourning. They hadn't been getting anyplace.
“What paper did you say you worked for, young man?” Professor Hegeman asked the reporter. “The Summit City Sun. I write science features, as I keep telling you. But my time isn't wasted here. You two throw away enough in conversation to keep me in material for months.”
“Hegeman, that's the paper whose edition was rather odd tonight,” said Professor Bott-Grabman. “We both commented on it.”
“I haven't seen it,” said the reporter. “Is that it?”
“Very little to see,” said Hegeman. “Thirty-nine blank pages, and only the name of the paper and some words in large type on the front page. ‘IF YOU THINK YOU CAN DO BETTER YOU COME AND TRY—THE EDITOR,’ is what it says.”
“Something is wrong!” yowled the reporter. “I'd better get back.”
“I thought you'd come for a story,” said Batt-Grabman.
“I have. It's the biggest thing I've come on for a long time, but there must be something wrong back at the paper.”
“Likely there wasn't much news today, and the editor just didn't feel like putting out much of a paper,” said Hegeman. “Some days I am listless and don't feel like doing much either.”
“My radio!” cried the reporter. “Let me hear if there's something wrong in town.”
“You can't get a thing here,” said Bott-Grabman. “You've no idea how well we are shielded. That's necessary for our evening's experiment. Now, forget about everything else! We are not inclined to chew our words twice here. We'll try to give you a story, but you have a distorted idea of what we are working on.”
“Everyone says you're working on telepathy,” said the reporter.
“Well, for our present step, we're working off it, not on it. Please get hold of one thing. We have always been telepathic.”
“Both you and Professor Hegeman?”
“Why of course both of us! Do you think one or the other of us is a freak? Of late I've been so disgusted with people that I hesitate to do any more lecturing. ‘Will we ever be telepathic?’ they ask us—those wool-headed sheep. ‘You already are,’ I tell them patiently.
‘Then why don't we know it?’ they bumble out. ‘I wonder you even know which end of you to put your hats on,’ I tell them, and sometimes this way of talking alienates them. ‘Telepathy is thinking to a distance, but you can't think to a distance if you can't think at all. Most of you can't think from one end of your brain to the other,’ I explain it to them, ‘you can't project what you haven't got, you bleating pecori,’ I say, ‘but, for all that, some of it comes through with you.’ I tell them all this, but I am unable to make them understand it. I haven't a good platform manner.”
“No, you haven't, Professor Bott-Grabman,” said the reporter. “That is why I am so interested in being able to interpret you. As I understand it, certain gifted persons already have the sense of telepathy—to an extent. What you must do is give the public a real demonstration of it.”
“We have tried, young man,” said Professor Hegeman. “The existence of telepathy should be as easy to demonstrate as the existence of a tree. But how to prove the existence of anything to those who close their eyes and stuff their hands in their ears? We have tried to demonstrate this simple thing till we are blue in the face—or (more accurately) I turn blue and Bott-Grabman takes on rather an ashen hue. In our desperation, we are putting on a little demonstration this evening and tonight. It should amuse. And perhaps it will convince some. When the existence of the sense is proved to the public, then we will be better able to work towards the development of it.”
“Then you are sending out waves—” began the reporter.
“No. We are inhibiting waves,” said Professor Hegeman firmly. “We are scrambling all personal waves everywhere in the city.”
“And that will somehow bring out the latent telepathy of the people?” asked the reporter.
“Quite the contrary, young man,” said Bott-Grabman. “It will completely block every manifestation of telepathy in the city. We work backwards.”
The first units of the National Guard arrived in Summit City about ten o'clock that night. The reports from the place had alarmed the governor and everyone else. With riots and murders breaking out everywhere and the police strangely helpless, the executive took quick action. The guardsmen began to set the place in order, but only for a little while. They never got into the heart of the city. They began to come apart. The first reports back had been clear. Then they were muddy. Then they were completely incoherent.
“—cannot make headway. Which way is headway? How will we know the guardsmen from the people? What is wrong is that we keep shooting each other. Is this a departure from our original orders? Instruct how we are to tell us apart—” came the last report from the colonel for the night.
“The man is mad,” said the governor to his aide. “Were not the guards uniformed?”
“They were when they left here,” said the aide. The governor gave up on his guards and appealed to the army. Within an hour, the Central Area Commandos were wheeling towards Summit City.
“Then it is not a demonstration of telepathy that you are to give tonight?” asked the reporter. “What is it then? I don't understand you.” “We are trying to demonstrate the absence of telepathy,” said Hegeman. “Suppose that a tribe lived for generations in the sound of thunder that rolled always in one tone with no break at all. Would they hear it?”
“I don't know,” said the reporter. “They would hear it in a way, I believe.”
“Would they notice it?”
“They might not.”
“But if the all-pervading sound were suddenly turned off, would they notice it then?”
“They would surely notice a difference.”
“Young man, words do not half convey. They are only indicators—hints, small helps, refinements. But we cannot communicate by words alone. Try it! I believe that the people in Summit City are trying just that now—if they have not given up the attempt. Uniforms, sigils, conventions have become meaningless to them. They are c
ut off from direct understanding. All they have left is words, and they can't communicate with them.”
“Then what do people communicate with, Professor Hegeman?”
“What do you smell with? With the nose on the front of your face. What do you see with? With the two marbles that roll around on the forepart of your head. What do you talk with? With the amorphous tongue in your mouth and the mouth box. But what do you actually communicate with? With your brain, you little oaf without one! Words and gestures are only thrown in for good measure.”
General Gestalt came down by copter as his commandos began to enter the city. He was a bitter man who depended mostly on himself. He had little truck with other people. That is what made the difference.
He watched his commandos disintegrate, as the guardsmen had disintegrated. He discovered that they could not understand his orders, and their replies made no sense to him.
“Insanity gas?” he puzzled. “Subliminal confusion broadcasts? Brain-softening bacteria? No, it's too sudden for that. It's coming from somewhere. I've got to get a bearing on it. If you can't get a triangulation, the next best thing is a bloodhound. There's one of the best.” General Gestalt caught Corporal Cram by the scruff of the neck and lifted him off his feet.
“Boy, you got the best nose for trouble in the outfit,” the general said. “I see that you don't understand my words, but it won't matter. You can find the middle of a trouble quicker than any half-cooked man I have. All right, lead me to it—
“No, not there, boy. All they're doing is breaking out windows and shooting each other. Lead me to the source of the trouble. We don't want our trouble second hand, do we? Get in the copter with me.”
The general hauled the corporal into the copter.
“Now, boy, we don't want to get into that little trouble down there. That's a derivative. You always had a talent for the genuine. We got to find the Center of the Trouble. Look at me, boy, even if you don't understand me. Let's go where we can get our trouble wholesale. You'll like that. Nose it out! Point!”
The corporal didn't understand the words but he did have the best nose in the outfit for finding the middle of a trouble. He pointed, and the general pointed the copter. They came down near an isolated laboratory on the edge of town. They got out. The corporal followed his nose, and the general followed the corporal.
“I am calm again, young man,” said Professor Hegeman. “Look. It is simple. We have always had telepathy. It is so constant with us that we do not recognize it. But we have to bring it into general recognition before we can bring it to a more significant stage. Everybody is telepathic. Everybody always has been. That is the way that we communicate with each other. Oh, the words and the adjuncts help a little. Bott-Grabman believes as much as fifty percent, I believe much less. We will have a closer idea of it after tonight's experiment. “With our inhibitors, we have set up a special condition in Summit City tonight. For a while, and under this special condition, nobody will be telepathic. They should be having difficulty in communicating with each other right now. Perhaps they are feeling a certain frustration about it all.”
The corporal broke into the room and the general followed him. The general sized it all up immediately with a bitter eye. “Turn that damn thing off!” he ordered. “It's bugging the people.”
They turned it off. The experiment was over with. The people in the city could understand each other again—as well as they ever could.
They began to put out the fires and to bind up their wounds. The cases of smallpox reverted to nervous hives, and people made the best of the curious situation.
But the dead did not come back to life.
Professor Hegeman was blue in the face. Professor Bott-Grabman had taken on rather an ashen hue. They had just been sentenced to death for crimes against humanity and they were disturbed by the sentence. “But the experiment was a success,” Bott-Grabman protested again and again. “It was an excessive success. Even we did not realize how complete was the popular dependence on telepathy. Otherwise we would have used a milder inhibitor. I request that you release us so we can get on with our work. A wide field of experimentation will be opened up as soon as the recognition of the thing seeps down to the doltish public. We have great things ahead of us.”
“True,” said the judge. “The two of you will soon embark on what a mordant humorist once called The Greatest Journey of Them All — Death. You are sentenced for the four hundred deaths you have caused and for the thousands of cases of induced insanity.”
“But it worked! We are vindicated! Everybody is a telepath!” Hegeman cried. “Surely you understand it now.”
“Were I indeed a telepath, perhaps I could see into the twisted minds of you two and comprehend somehow your inhumanity,” said the judge. “Being only a man, I cannot do it. I only pray that your evil and your secret method of destruction will die with you.
“Take them away!”
Pig In A Pokey
This was on Hippodamia. The name isn't important. There were ten thousand asteroid-stations as undistinguished. Netter settled back into the soft live-moss chair and prepared to talk the Creature out of the impasse. Then he saw the big moustached thing on the wall and he began to tremble.
After all, that was one of the things he had come to find—it was part of it. It was the great beefy, bearded, moustached head of Captain Kalbfleish mounted on the wall like a trophy, and amid the other trophies of the room.
“Great God, Man!” — and it wasn't a man to whom he spoke — “That's a human head you have mounted on the wall,” Netter crackled.
“Which Great God, yours or mine?” Porcellus grunted. “They aren't the same, or they have been described badly. Yes, a human head. I had always wanted one. You notice that I have given it the favored position in the center of the great wall. I now have at least one of the heads of every species that interests me. Some of the heads are much larger than that of your friend Kalbfleish and have ornamentals that his lacks. It's a pity that humans don't have sweeping horns; that would make them perfect. But even without them, the head of Kalbfleish is the finest in my collection. It's a truly magnificent head!”
It was. “Kalbfleish has a fine head on him” they went to say, and laugh. The big Captain, for all his remarkable courage and spirit, had not been long on brains. It was a huge, wild, hairy head with a stark and staring expression — as though Kalbfleish had died in terror and agony.
“You killed him, of course,” said Netter dryly as he braided a romal in his nervous hands. “So, one way or the other, I will have to kill you, or you me.
“Not I,” said Porcellus — a moist and hog-fat creature — “I would not even kill an insect. Your friend had a violent heart and it finally ruptured on him. He was uncommonly energetic, especially so on the day of his death.”
“Where is his body, you fat pig?”
“My translator has only a rough idea of pig, and I suppose you intend it for an insult; but I have a tough hide. I couldn't do a thing with his body, Netter, it was putrid in no time. It seems that when you humans know you are going to die you would begin to give yourself the injections three or four basic days before the time; then your bodies would not turn foul after death. I had no idea he had neglected it, so I wasn't prepared. I was lucky to save the head.”
“We humans don't know when we are going to die,” said Netter. “What is this you give me to eat? It's good.”
“Yes, I remember now Kalbfleish saying he didn't know when he would die, but I supposed he spoke in humor. Since you also say it, it must be true of your species. The name of the food would mean nothing to you, but you have a close parallel to its method of preparation. I have read about geese in an Earth book of the captains, though I overlooked pigs. You sometimes put live geese to dance on hot griddles before they are killed. This excites and alarms them, and enlarges their livers. The livers then become delicacies. The creatures whose meat you are eating also died of excitement and alarm, and they are delicious through and
through.”
Well, the meat was certainly delicious. That fat hog of a creature knew how to live well. Netter finished the meal and set it aside. Once more he braided the romal in his hands while he grasped for words.
“I suppose all the creatures whose heads you have here died by accident, Porcellus?” he asked.
“Well, all but one of them died,” said Porcellus, “and I did not kill them. One of them died at a great distance from here; he willed me his head and had it sent to me because I had admired it. And one of them, so far as I know, is still alive. He was a being of multiplex heads. He hacked one of them off quite willingly when I praised it, and he cured and mounted it himself. A queer chap. He is staring down at you now and it will amuse you to guess which he is.”
Porcellus didn't actually speak like that. He spoke in a series of grunts, some verbal and some ventral. But the Console Translator of Netter had a selector dial. Netter could dial translation in pidgin, in cut and dry, in bombast, in diplomatic pleasantry, in old southern U.S. soft-talk or Yiddish dialect if he wished, or in the courtly manner. Whenever he encountered a creature who was repulsive to him — as Porcellus was — he dialed the courtly manner of speech. This was somehow easier on his ears and his nerves.
“We waste time,” Netter told the creature. “I have come to pursue claim to this asteroid. We now need it for a way-station, and it has never worked well for two such different species to share a station. We had first claim here long ago; and we abandoned it. Then you set up your station here; and you also abandoned it.”
“Never,” said Porcellus. “Would I abandon my cozy home and my trophies? Would my masters wish the removal of so fine a station-master as myself? I was called Home on urgent business. I was gone but for a basic year, and the odds were very high against any other claimer coming while I was gone.”
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 52
