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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Why didn't you tell me that the Pantophag was nullifying people?” he ask kind of shrill.

  “I did tell you,” I say. “Nine thousand two hundred and ninety-seven added to forty-four don't come to nine thousand three hundred and fifty-eight. You said so yourself. How are things on the home front, Maurice? That's a joke.”

  “It's no joke,” he say kind of fanatic like. “I have locked myself in a little broom closet, but they're going to break down the door. What can I do?”

  “Why, Maurice, just explain to those people that the folks nullified by the machine were no good for nothing because the machine don't make mistakes.”

  “I doubt that I can convince the parents and spouses and children of the nullified people of this. They're after blood. They're breaking down the door now, Spade. I hear them say they will hang me.”

  “Tell them you won't settle for anything less than a new rope, Maurice,” I tell him. That's an old joke. I switch off the Voxo because Maurice is not making anything except gurgling noises which I cannot interpret.

  A thing like that blow over real fast after they have already hang one guy for it and are satisfied. I am back in town and am rolling all those new ideas around in my head, like a bunch of rocks. But I'm not going to build the Hog-Belly Honey again. It is too logical for safety, and is a little before its time. I am looking to get me another partner. Come into Grogley's if you are interested. I show up there every hour or so. I want a guy as like me as two necks in one noose — what make me think of a thing like that? — a guy look like me and think like me and talk like me.

  Just ask for Joe Spade.

  But the one I hook onto for a new partner will have to be a fellow who understands me when the scuppers are down.

  Bubbles When They Burst

  The Director of Publications for the Institute has stated that devices that succeed are more interesting then devices that fail. This one did succeed several times under conditions that are not practical to duplicate—and when it failed it really failed. But there is a chance that it may yet succeed under normal controlled conditions and it will matter very much if it does. From the case book of the Institute we give that early episode—at the same time a qualified success and a grotesque failure—of the sad death of Cecil Corn:

  PROJECT: Fence Around Us.

  PRINCIPLES: Cecil Corn and others of the Institute.

  PROBLEM: The Speed of Light (The Fence Around Us) as limitor to our hopes of far travel, unless a breakthrough is made, a new framework set up or a new aspect of matter discovered.

  PROCEDURE: As stated by Corn, if anything can be found that travels at a speed greater than light the fence is breached. An examination of all transmission does not reveal anything that travels at a speed greater than light. However, it is discovered that we do not know the speed of one thing: Telepathy or thought transference. Corn examined this.

  He found that telepathy travels at a variety of speeds, from olfactory (bluntly, the speed of smell, for pairs of telepaths whose body auras must be in contact, for transmission) through speed of sound (for certain pairs who convey by pseudo-sound) to Earth-Instantaneous speed (roughly radio-light speed). With the human element present, it was not possible to distinguish Earth-instantaneous from a real instantaneous. Earth did not provide a long enough base line.

  Corn—himself an adequate telepath—set up a number of moon contacts. He convinced himself that telepathy might be truly instantaneous, but he failed to convince others. The human element still ate up what should have been a second and a half time lag between instantaneous telepathy and radio transmission.

  Corn set up contact with a young Chinese named Francis Pung who was on Mars mission. The two were in good rapport. The time lag on test night should have been four and a half minutes. If telepathy were truly instantaneous its message should have been received and recorded completely before the synchronous radio message arrived at Earth. The experiment was well witnessed.

  Corn sat at the symbol machine and began to receive and record. Corn knew these first symbols in advance, but not others. Then his Mars contact went to impassioned voice and Corn recorded the message in almost hysterical words: Corn, believe me that I transmit by mind and at this time. Whatever you will hear about me shortly will not change it. The symbols now become impossible to me…

  Corn recorded the words and sat back bewildered. A four-minute silence ensued and then the radio message began. It gave the first symbols as Corn had recorded them. Then it gave further symbols which were not known in advance and which Corn had not set down. Then it gave the news that Francis Pung had dropped dead in the Mars radio booth just after the beginning of the experiment.

  Corn could not have known that Pung would die. He had received a message of sorts four minutes before the radio message. But the episode became and is still known as the Great Corn Hoax.

  Aloysius Shiplap and others of us persuaded Corn to go on experimenting.

  “This next one has to be it,” Corn said, “Another failure would kill me.”

  Corn set up another Mars contact with Sid Sideral, a man in such perfect health that he was a marvel.

  Concurrently with this final test of Corn's our Valery Mok set up an experiment of her own. She was in rapport with her friend Corn. As the test went on she set down what went through the mind of Corn as he received the message of Sideral, and as he believed he was recording it.

  Valery's notes—which were not time-stamped—are these:

  “Perfect, Sid, nothing will go wrong this time. Why is Aloysius fiddling with my head and mumbling? Receiving and recording nicely, Sid, if only they would let me alone. Why are the idiots taking off my necktie and pouring water over me? Why are they coming at me with a needle? I've had all my shots. Sid, I've beat the jinx. You're a partner too healthy to die on me. Ah, ah, Sid—the jinx had one trick left. I lose again. I died on you.”

  He did. Cecil Corn died at the beginning of the experiment and he had recorded nothing. What Valery Mok recorded was not clocked. But she made affidavit that Corn had been receiving from Sideral exactly the same data that came by radio four minutes later that she had heard it as an undercurrent to the thoughts of Corn with whom she was in rapport.

  The press does not usually call a lady a shameless liar, but in this case it did. The incident is still known as the Great Mok Mockery.

  FURTHER PROCEDURE: Those of us who would like to believe have had our faith shaken. We have made a dozen further tests of simultaneous distant radio and telepathic transmission. In every case we have found that telepathic transmission over great distance is at radio-light speed and not beyond it. We cannot believe that the two incidents were conscious frauds, but they may have been unconscious ones.

  CONCLUSION: Draw your own.

  DISPOSAL OF CASE: Open, and subject to review.

  EXPECTATIONS: Meager.

  And that is the way it remained in the Case Book. But the case did remain in the open file and Gregory Smirnov of the Institute pulled it out once a year to review it. He did so now with a quorum present. “It always makes me sad to see that folder on Cecil,” said Valery. “He was such a sweet man. You remember the funny way he had of scattering cigar ashes over everything? And his little trick of falling asleep in the middle of a sentence? Well, you've done your duty, Gregory. Put it away for another year.”

  “No. I'm thinking of reopening the experiment,” said Gregory.

  “You're crazy,” Glasser said.

  “Not crazy. A little odd, perhaps. I wouldn't be director of the Institute if I weren't. The problem remains. A breakthrough must be made, a new framework set up or a new aspect of matter has to be discovered. If matter is only what we have believed it to be we are limited forever. But there is a missing factor. All we need is a proper sort of relay to make the idea work.”

  “And do you know where to find such a relay?” Aloysius asked.

  “I believe it could be found in a hundred impractical places every minute,” Gregory said
. “First we must somehow catch that relay on the fly and prove that it does work. Then we will have to synthesize it and have it always ready. It will not solve our problem. It will only enable us to state our problem seriously and go to work on it. We will prove that there is one special case of instantaneous speed—beyond radio-light speed. Then we will seek means to bring other things to that speed. We will have broken out of our framework and set the problem in its proper context.”

  “You speak as though the relay already existed,” said Valery.

  “Why, it does,” Gregory said. “That is, it exists sometimes. That is, I think it does.”

  “If it exists, then use it,” said Glasser. “Make the test.”

  “I intend to if I can. But the relay is tricky and hard to come by. Epiktistes, who has analyzed a million or so cases of its operation, believes that it has an effective life of between five and thirty seconds—no more.”

  “Well, Gregory, you will have to acquire a number of the relays to experiment effectively,” Aloysius said, “or you will have to find ways of extending their life. The relays—are they expensive?”

  “Not as you mean it, Aloysius.”

  “Does it take long to construct one?”

  “About ninety years on an average.”

  (On the same day that Gregory Smirnov reopened the Cecil Corn Case, the Nine Conspirators of Nebula Proxima were sentenced to death by a Court on Kentauron Mikron. We thought you might not have heard of it.)

  Gregory Smirnov nibbled at mountains of data for days. He seemed to make a dozen false starts. All Institute people were clammy when they were onto something that wasn't yet ripe. They would never give an honest man a hint of what they were onto. But somebody had to bring Smirnov out of his trance. “Just what are you working on, Gregory?” asked Glasser after a routine meeting of the Institute people. “Or rather—since it's apparent that you're not doing any work at all—what are you thinking about?”

  “About electric eels when they die,” said Gregory.

  “Oh? I didn't know you were interested in them? And what else?”

  “Gegenschein, condensers, bird entrails, missing factors, oracular pythons, thanatakolouthia (death-trains or death-echoes), backlash, young wives' tales, shackling emancipation from frameworks, hysteresis, collapsing fields, bubbles when they burst.”

  “Oh, come now!” protested Valery.

  “Atoms or systems into ruin hurl'd,

  And now a bubble burst, and now a world,” issued the machine Epiktistes.

  “What? What?” demanded Glasser. “Who is making less sense, the man or the machine?”

  “It's from A. Pope,” issued Epiktistes. “I thought it was pertinent.”

  “One riddle at a time,” said Charles Cogsworth, the humble husband of Valery. “What of the shackling emancipation from frameworks, Gregory?”

  “One framework actually—that in which we live. The Baconian and Comptean Revolutions freed us from the old frameworks centuries before we were born. But they prisoned us in a tighter one—that of doctrinaire materialism. Now we are forbidden to have superstitions at all, so a most interesting field is closed to us. We cannot get out of our present frame, we cannot even come near its borders—but there are some answers to be found in those borderlands.”

  “To those of us who like bird entrails—and there are less than two of us in the world—your interest is welcome,” said Aloysius. “But what is your interest, Gregory?”

  “The emphasis on speed,” said Gregory Smirnov. “In reading fortunes from bird entrails, great speed was necessary. The living bird was ripped open and studied. Whatever happened, it happened fast.”

  “There's another one,” issued the machine Epiktistes: “ ‘All at once, and nothing first, Just as bubbles do when they burst.’ From O. W. Holmes. That's the way the One-Hoss Shay broke down.”

  “What about condensers, backlash, collapsing fields?” asked Cogsworth.

  “Oh, we explain them with equations, but we don't really explain. Why should the old electromagnetic animal kick hardest just after it has died? Why is the echo stronger than the voice?”

  “And young wives' tales?” asked Valery. “I've been a young wife for more years than seems possible.”

  “You came close to it in the Great Mok Mockery,” said Gregory. “An old wife would be too sane to conceive of such an approach.”

  “What does happen when electric eels die?” demanded Glasser. “What does happen to bubbles when they burst?”

  “I don't know,” said Gregory, “but either of them would serve as a relay—for too short an interval. A relay, but not a good enough relay. I need something more intricate than an eel and more tenuous than a bubble. And I need it exactly when it vanishes.”

  That was all the Institute people could get from Gregory Smirnov that day. They tried to find from Epiktistes, the machine resident at the Institute, what sort of relay it was of which he had analyzed millions of cases. “I'm almost as much in the dark as you,” Epiktistes issued. “I've analyzed millions of cases of millions of things for that man. What he calls a relay I may be calling something else.”

  “But what is it that has an effective life of between five and thirty seconds and no more?” insisted Charles Cogsworth.

  “The pledge of a stranger, the allegiance of a Martian, the interest of a dilettante, the love of a gray-eyed woman,” issued Epiktistes.

  “Epikt, you can be as exasperating as a man,” said Valery.

  But Gregory was going ahead with something. He announced to them that he had set up a new test which would have to be the conclusive test.

  “Then you have found a good way of obtaining your relays?” Aloysius asked.

  “No. I have not found out anything new,” Gregory said. “But I have accidentally acquired the use of a bunch of the relays. I believe that they will serve for the test and the proof. Then I will begin my long hard search to synthesize the things and to apply the things to more solid matter—or to prove that matter is less solid than it seems.”

  “Are you still bothered by our framework?” Cogsworth asked.

  “Yes. We are so superstitious that we cower in the middle of our frame. If we are so sure, what are we afraid of? We have insisted that life is no more than chemical-electro-magnetic phenomena, but we are afraid to consider that life may have such backlash as all other similar phenomena show. I wonder how they will play it down when I finally prove it all.”

  It was a major experiment and it involved nine radio receivers, nine conventional telepathic receivers, nine special telepathic receivers. It began.

  The nine special telepaths received and recorded nine separate symbols. This was important. These symbols were not known by anyone on Earth. They were known by only one person on the originating asteroid up to the moment they were given for transmission. They would not be verified until they were received by radio.

  Then the nine special telepaths received and recorded in words—short messages and still shorter—total transmissions from five to thirty seconds, no more. Then silence and the wait for the messages by radio and normal telepathy to begin.

  “Who were they?” asked Aloysius who had the gift of always being in the dark as to details of a project.

  “Oh, the nine conspirators of Nebula Proxima,” said Gregory. “They have just been executed on the asteroid where the conspiracy was planned.”

  “And they are transmitting after they are dead?”

  “Certainly not, Aloysius. We could not believe that and still live in our narrow framework. The instant of the collapsing field is still a part of the life of the field. The bursting of the bubble must still be accounted a phenomenon of the bubble. They serve—just after their apparent deaths—as the instantaneous relay.”

  “This was the missing factor?”

  “Yes. It was the factor of the instantaneous transmission when Francis Pung died on Mars. It was the factor when Cecil Corn died on Earth. The death-instantaneous relay works in both direc
tions.”

  “And you believe that you can synthesize such a relay?”

  “I am too old to break out of the frame, Aloysius. My chilly faith constrains me to believe that everything is material. And anything that is material can be reproduced in matter.”

  “And what if the frame is all a mistake?”

  “In either case, the problem can now be tackled. Those who believe in spirit have never accepted the apparent limits of matter.”

  “It was of this that Epiktistes analyzed a million cases?”

  “Yes. The more clearly verified cases of death-simultaneous apparitions and messages.”

  “How were the nine criminals induced to cooperate?”

  “What had they to lose? They were all reasonable men, save on politics.”

  The slow minutes had trickled away. The radio transmission began to come through. At the same time arrived the messages from trained telepath to trained telepath—all coming at radio-light speed and each received and recorded by an operator in his own cubicle.

  The symbols were those nine already received. This itself was verification. The brief comments of the criminals were also verification. They were flashes of wit and irony sparked by details of their own executions that could not have been known before.

  So instantaneous transmission in a special case was proved. And once proved, it opened the gates? And many men bent their genius to the follow-up, the synthesizing of a comparable relay? Well, no—it didn't happen like that. Gregory Smirnov and Aloysius Shiplap and Valery Mok and a few are working on the follow-up and they are getting some good leads. But the thing was not accepted by the Credentials Society, though they had their own impartial men observing and taking part in the experiment. Three men of the Credentials Society had even served as receivers for three of the criminals.