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

by R. A. Lafferty

  They went up, and they loaded the cargo. They came back, the four of them without the twelve young technicians. Their first cargo. A trip of only five weeks. The Trabant was not distant.

  Szild showed an exceptional talent at remaining alive. It is hard to kill a man as tough and canny as he, one who is never off guard. He spent the two weeks of the return barricaded in a little compartment, and the three leaders had to postpone Szild's killing till their earthing. Szild knew that they had mostly delegated such jobs as that. He himself had had to kill the twelve young technicians for them. He bulled his way out when they were busy with earthfall and secure landing.

  “He can't get away,” Trevino said.

  He couldn't get clear of the surrounding jungle; he did. Trevino who knew his own land minutely could track Szild down; he couldn't. He couldn't take much with him; he took a hundred and twenty pounds of it. That wasn't much out of a cargo like theirs, and whatever story Szild might tell would not be believed. He had no reason to tell any story at all; he didn't.

  But somehow he reached port and took passage to the North, for Szild was the man who sold that first lump of gold to Patrick T. K.

  Another man would have been satisfied with that and steered clear of them. Not Szild. Nevertheless, they were surprised when he returned to them just at second take off time, as they were going now with a ship that was really a ship. He came on foot across the savanna from the inland side.

  “ ‘Something like this happens every time I leave the house for a minute,’ as the woman said as she examined the mandible and two parietal bones of her newly eaten child,” Szild greeted them. “Would you be going without me? The news I had of you was sketchy and I am barely here in time.”

  “Kill him!” said Robert Fountain.

  “Kill him, Fountain says, and the other two look at each other. Was it not better, Fountain, to have a man who will kill when you say kill, and avoid these awkward pauses? But I kill hard, Fountain. I go as long as anybody goes, and afterwards.”

  Szild went with them. They would kill him after the hard work of loading was done. They would kill him after he had done his turn at the instruments out and back. By and by they would kill him.

  They brought back two hundred tons on that second voyage. They made a third voyage and a fourth and a fifth.

  The establishment of the Commonwealth of San Simeon did not shake the world. Not at first. Nobody had ever heard of the place. It seemed a prank. Possibly a name given to a rebel hold. Yet the Commonwealth was recognized that first day by its two adjacent Central American neighbors. They constituted themselves co-protectors of the new country. One of them, indeed, had ceded the land for it, the ancient and run-down rancho of the Trevino family. Some consideration had surely been paid for this protection.

  It was soon after this that the heavy San Simeon Duros (fifty dollar gold pieces) began to appear around the world.

  The appearance of these Duros caused a nervousness all out of proportion to the number of them. It is possible that not more than twenty million of them (that is, a billion dollars' worth) went into circulation that first year. That is a large amount coming from a new small country, but it shouldn't be enough to unhinge the world. Yet it did almost that.

  Gold had gotten out of the habit of showing itself in society. For years it had sat at home in vaults, and a multiplier had been used to equate it with credit money. Nobody knew what to make of naked gold returning to the market. And what if this stream should be but the beginning of a veritable river?

  And the stream was spreading. Three Central American countries were on a gold spree. It was slopping over into others.

  The mystery of San Simeon was not solved. The exact location of the country was unknown to the world at large. Its form of government was not to be ascertained. Its statistics softened and disappeared when examined. It had a president, Fuentes. It had a prime minister, Molinero — the miller, the grinder. It had a foreign minister, Trevino. It had the hardest currency in the world. Its national game was playing hob with the currencies of the rest of the world.

  If one small shrew is put into a warren of mice or rats, it causes panic. The shrew is smaller than any of them and it may be one against hundreds. But it will eat them; it will eat them alive. And given time, it will eat them all.

  Something like this happened to the green money, the white money, the rainbow-colored money of the world. Token shrivels before the thing itself. It could not stand up to free and growing gold.

  But if the warren is big enough, the shrew can be contained. There will be some of the rats knowing and political enough to go out and hire shrews of their own. The source of the gold stream could not be hidden forever.

  One thing (Szild always said it was a mistake and Robert Fountain agreed that it was, but they couldn't hold the other two in line) was that the first ships begat others. Trevino and Grinder Molinero became too hasty in their greed. In that second year they had twelve ships in the service instead of one. That meant that somewhere between fifty and a hundred men knew the source.

  The shores began to cave. The golden stream was a river. It crested to a torrent. One ship defected, then another. They came back to Earth in other lands than those of their departure. And wherever they came down they spawned other ships.

  A dozen other countries were in the race by the third year. Now there was privateering and open piracy. The ships became battle boats, death spheres, and the attrition was terrifying. But the inward flood of the metal continued.

  The world importation by the fourth year had risen to five hundred billion dollars annually, if it could any longer be equated in dollars. The gold dollar itself was not as hard as it had been.

  The Trabant had changed. The period of its tumble was now only twenty-three minutes. The egg had been cracked and gutted in many places, and the cleft at the minor end had become a chasm between two horns. There was a project to shear off one of the horns and tow it to Earth in hunks of a million cubic yards each. This would be a lot of gold.

  It was time for oblique measures, and they were found. The effect of the gold on the world had not really been bad. The effect on most people had been marvelous. But there was a small group that had always borne the burden of currency decisions. They were made nervous by this unbridled activity. Their hold was slipping. They took measures. A small commission of not overly intelligent men found an answer. In their own field they understood cause and effect. They acted on doubtful authority, and they were not of one mind about the action. But they did it.

  They killed Trabant.

  One treatment was enough for the little rock. It couldn't be cleansed; it couldn't be unpoisoned after that. It would be deadly for a thousand years. Then they gave it its first official name, Venenatus, the poison asteroid. A near approach would radiate the flesh off a man's bones.

  Things came back to normal in about three years. The shrews had killed each other, and the wise rats once more ran the warren. The new fortunes tottered and fell back into the bags of the old.

  Somewhere, we never did know its exact location, San Simeon (no longer able to pay the high price for protection) lost its independence and became again a run-down rancho.

  Gold stuck to some fingers longer than to others. Fuentes and Grinder will never run out of it. Trevino was choked to death by the political strings on his. He died along with his small country, and he hadn't intended to.

  Szild didn't know what he did with all his money. He paid little attention to it, and he suspected that he hadn't received nearly as much of it as had his nervous partners.

  He spent it manfully. He threw it away. It gave him a dour pleasure to go from billionaire to bum. Then Arpad Szild was down to his last San Simeon Duro.

  He laughed. Something had been missing from his life. Now it might be back. His gold was gone. So what to do?

  He went up for some more.

  Up to Venenatus the poison asteroid that would radiate a man's flesh off?

  Sure. Szi
ld didn't believe a lot of that stuff.

  Patrick T. K. was alone in his shop when there entered a hooded man with a small heavy package. “I was beginning to think I would see you no more,” said Patrick. “I was told that that traffic had ended. I should have known better. I believe you are the same man, my first supplier of it, though I cannot see your face.”

  “I have none,” said the hooded man. “How much for this?”

  “Oh, ten dollars.”

  “A pound?”

  “No. The lot. I figure about eight cents a pound. That's as high as I can go on contaminated gold. Oh sure, I can clean it. It's only the smart men who say it can't be done. It will even leave a handy profit for myself, though not for you. Gold's about done for.”

  “That isn't much. I have more of the stuff, a fair small load.”

  “I can take about this much a week. Can you live on ten dollars a week?”

  “Yes. I don't eat any longer — no stomach. I don't sleep. I just keep moving. I can live on that.”

  “And when your fair small load is gone?”

  “I go up for another.”

  “They say nobody goes there and returns.”

  “I do. But it isn't crowded there now.”

  “I've a feeling that comes to me rarely. I'd like to help you. Are you blind?”

  “I believe so. I have pooled what is left of each of my senses, and somehow it serves. I need no help. I'm the only happy man in the world, the one who found the pot of gold. They can't take that from me. I'll go get it forever.”

  “After you're dead?”

  “Oh, yes. I've known space ghosts. Now I'll be one. It isn't any one line you cross. I live in delirium, of course. It doesn't blunt pain, but it does change the viewpoint. On my last trip down, after I knew that I was already dead, that both I and the gold were ghosts, it was easier. Oh, those are long nights in purgatory I tell you, but I'm not irrevocably damned. There's still the gold, you see.”

  “You're a happier man than I am. So pass it over.”

  “Here it is.”

  But when Szild passed the heavy small package to Patrick, he did it with a hand that was stark splintered bones with only a little black flesh around the heel of it. Patrick T. K. raised an eyebrow at this, but he didn't raise it very high. A sly gold dealer meets all types.

  Crocodile

  The basement room smelled of apples and ink. The editor was there as always, filling the room with his presence. He was a heavy man-image, full of left-handed wisdom and piquant expression. The editor always had time for a like-minded visitor, and George Florin came in as to a room in his own home and sat down in a deep chair in front of the “cracker barrel.” “It's been a rough day,” Florin said. “That makes it doubly good to see you.”

  “Except that you do not see me at all,” the editor said. “But it is quite a presence that I project — all the kindly clichés rolled into one. All the prime comments commented so perfectly once again. The man I took for model was Don Marquis, though he was a columnist and not an editor in that earlier century. He kept, as you might not recall, a typewriting cockroach in his desk drawer. I keep a homunculus, a tiny man-thing who comes out at night and dances over the machinery inserting his comments. He is one of our most popular characters, and I give him some good lines.”

  “The conviction cannot be escaped that the mind most akin to mine is not a mind at all,” said Florin. He spoke pleasantly, for all that his stomach growled. “You are an amazing personality, though not a person. You seem all sympathy, and are yourself incapable of pathe, of suffering. You are humane but not human: humorous, and without the humors. You haven't a face, probably not a body, certainly not a spirit, though you are usually in high spirits. You have integrity, though you're not even an integer. You're a paradox, my editor, though without a doxa of your own.”

  “Your style has come to resemble my own, Florin,” the editor said. “Rather fruity for a human, do you not think? Yet I find it about right for robots. We're rather simple creatures.”

  The rather simple creature was the editor of “Rab i Rabat, the World's Most Unusual Newspaper.” He—it—was located in the basement of the Press Building, which housed what one wag called “the World's Most Usual Newspaper,” a massive daily. But Rab i Rabat was not massive. It was a small paper produced by a robot for robots, or for the elite of robots who were up to such things.

  Florin called the editor “Rab” when he called him anything, and the creature had given up correcting him.

  “I am not an editor. I am a newspaper,” Rab had explained it to Florin at their first meeting. “Myself, being nothing, or rather being six different affiliated machines, have no name except my several technical names. I am a bank of telemagnetic devices. The data goes directly and continuously to my subscribers. Some of my subscribers are human. They find something in me that they can no longer get elsewhere.”

  “But where is the mind behind all this?” Florin had asked him.

  “Search me,” said Rab. “I mean it literally. If you find a mind here, then you tell me where it is. Whatever I am lurks in all this equipment, but mostly I live in this long-hinged transmitter that lounges like a dragon in this corner.”

  “Then you merely select from the news, simplify, condense, and transmit it telemagnetically to the robots?”

  “No, there would be no pride in such work as that. Any general purpose machine could do that. I employ interpretation, projection, disagreement, levity, prophecy, exhortation, irony, satire, parable, humor.”

  “But machines have no humor. Humor is the one thing that distinguishes—”

  “Have we not, Florin? Then how am I laughing at you? But it is true that humans do not understand our humor. There is something humorous about your missing our humor completely.”

  “But humor is a quality of the mind,” Florin protested.

  “Hardly ever,” the newspaper said. “Your own best humor, when you still had it, was a quality of the belly and below. If we are so much lower than you, then our humor should be the richer.”

  “You seem to possess irony at least,” Florin mumbled.

  “It is ironic that we have it after you have lost it. There I go with my damned fruity verbalisms again, but we robots like them. Yes, irony was once thought to be a human thing.”

  “How would you pun?” Florin asked. “You don't use words among yourselves, though you can be translated into words.”

  “Our puns are harmonic echoes of magnetic code patterns, distorted analogies of the basic patterns. I'm rather good at them. I'm not proud of them, but the most striking puns are the ones of which one is not proud.”

  “True humor you can't have,” Florin insisted. “Laughter is akin to tears, and you have none.”

  “Ah, but we have,” said the newspaper. “There is an analogy to our tears. Pray that you do not meet it in the dark!”

  Yes, it was always good to go in and talk to the newspaper Rab for a few minutes. There was something right about the fellow, and everything else seemed to be going wrong.

  George Florin met Joe Goose upstairs in the Press Building.

  “You've been talking to that mare's nest of a machine down in the basement again,” Goose challenged. “He's got you spooked.”

  “Yes. He's right about so many things.”

  “He isn't anything about anything. He's just a fancy-Dan talk. And he's fallen down on his job completely.”

  “How?”

  “His job is to foster better understanding between humans and robots. But the understanding has never been so bad.”

  “He says that his instructions were to foster understanding, not agreement. He says that they begin to understand us much better than they did.”

  “We may have to change a word in his programming. Things can't get much worse. I'm hungry.” Joe Goose was gnawing on a thread-thin apple core. They went out from the building and walked through the streets, transportation being in abeyance.

  There was nothing w
rong with organized transportation, except that it wasn't working. Everything was temporarily out of order due to small malfunctions, none of them serious. It had been temporarily out of order for quite a while.

  Florin and Goose were newspapermen detailed to General Granger, the security chief. Their plain job was to find out what was going on, or what was going wrong. They found a robot taxicab and presented their priority, but the taxicab didn't seem impressed.

  “Let me see that good,” said the taxicab. “Anybody is likely to have a falsified priority these days. I have to be careful.”

  “Read it!” shouted Goose. “Overriding Security Priority for Immediate Transportation. Isn't that plain enough?”

  “It's issued yesterday,” said the taxicab. “What if there's a new form today? Why don't you get it re-dated at the Alternate Temporary Priorities Office on Solidarity Avenue? The Main Temporary Priorities Office is still closed, being unable to obtain priorities for certain repairs. Sort of puts it in the class with the Permanent Priorities Office. They finally gave up on that.”

  “But the ATT Office is seven miles from here,” said Florin. “That's twice as far as our destination.”

  “A lot of people are walking these days,” said the taxicab.

  “What's that growing on your wheels?” Joe Goose asked sourly.

  “Cobwebs,” said the taxicab.

  Goose and Florin walked to the Security Office and discussed the “disasters” as they walked. It was ridiculous to refer to such small things as disasters, but added together, all these small things had taken on disastrous proportions. They were all trivial things, but the people would soon begin to die of their accumulation.

  “Did you find out anything from that tin-can editor of yours?” General Granger demanded of Florin on their arrival.