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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “I will send Henry,” said David. He nodded to Henry, and Henry left.

  “You have sent Henry, but not for the money.” Hodl smiled as he studied the Island of Icarus of his right hand. “He has gone to collect some comic-strip characters to keep me company. One of them, what we call Homo conventus or mechanical man, will analyze myself and my gaud. Only after you are satisfied with the reports (and I'm told that they miss nothing nowadays) will you go and get the money. I admire your prudence, for this is the way that gentlemen do business.”

  And that is the way that the gentlemen did it. Henry Hazelman returned with three comic-strip characters, and one of them was a machine—a descendant of Structo the Mechanical Man from the strip of that name.

  It was Structo (his name in Hodl's mind only) who affably and left-handedly shook hands with Hodl and engaged him in conversation.

  “It is a fine hand, sir,” said Structo, “(I am told you were saying the same thing about it yourself), and a fine ornament on it. No, do not attempt to withdraw your hand, skyman. It is necessary that I retain my grip in order to analyze yourself and your thing. My own filaments make contact with the crystalline complex, as well as with your own reta. I can read you like a book, to coin a phrase.”

  “Look out for a little double phrase in a middle chapter,” said Hodl.

  “It's an antibunko machine, skyman,” said David Daumier. “It reads you and your stone at the same time. Well, what do you read, Penetrax Nine?”

  “Mr. Daumier, the stone is sound and without flaw,” said Structo (Penta 9). “It rings like a bell.”

  “—to coin a phrase,” said Hodl. “How do I ring?”

  “Yes, that is the question,” said David. “My device, skyman, has appraised the stone, as my eye has done. But at the same time it can read what is in your mind regarding that stone. Should there be a flaw in the stone to escape both myself and my device, my machine will find it in your mind.”

  “Intelligent-looking contrivance, is he not?” said Hodl. “Can he follow a syllogism to the end? Can he recognize a counterman? Can he count the marbles when the game is over?”

  “He can't, but I can,” said David. “His job is to detect, and he does it well. My contrivance can sniff out every newest trick in the world.”

  “Aye, but can he snuffle out the oldest?” Hodl asked. “How do you read me, contrivance?”

  “Yes, is there any doubt in the mind of this man about the stone, Penta?” David asked.

  “Mr. Daumier, I had to travel some distance into his mind to find the stone,” said Structo. “But his mind is serene about the stone. It is good, and he knows it is good. Only—oh, no, sir! Do not attempt to match grips with me, Mr. Skyman, even in fun. I have a grip of iron! I am basically iron. You will be injured if you persist. Or do I have it wrong? Why, you have crushed my hand as if it were an eggshell, to coin a phrase. No matter, I always carry a spare. Now, if you will release me, Mr. Skyman—thank you.”

  “Quite a grip, skyman,” said David Daumier. “You crushed an iron probe that was built for durability. But my contrivance had already answered my question for me. You have no mental reservation as to the stone. I will go get the money now. My people will keep you company, skyman, and the contrived one will repair himself meanwhile.”

  David Daumier left on his errand.

  “I meant to say something else,” chittered Structo (Penta 9) when its master was gone, “but you squeezed the thought out of me. My nexus at the moment was in my hand which you crushed.”

  “You intended to say, gentle contrivance, that I knew the stone was good, too good,” said Hodl, “and that I was laughing in my mind. Of course I was! I'm a merry man, and it gladdens me to give away a thing too good to keep.”

  The contrivance put on another hand and busied himself hooking it up. The two human c.s. characters, glowering gunmen, studied Hodl with sleepy evil eyes and seemed more mechanical than their mechanical comrade.

  After a decent interval, David Daumier returned with a tightly wrapped brown paper package. It was of fair size and was marked with a deformed Greek M, Daumier's own code for the amount in the packet.

  “Now we will make the exchange,” David said softly, and he laid the paper-wrapped package openly on the bar. “Lay the ring beside it. Then I open and count.”

  “The ring won't come off easily,” said Hodl. He worked and turned it vigorously. It was quite tight. “There is an amusing story of how the ring came off the finger of the last owner,” Hodl told them. “I finally used a bolt cutter.”

  “The band doesn't show it,” said David. “An expert must have rejoined it.”

  “The band wasn't cut, the finger was,” said Hodl. “Say, that man did make a noise about it!”

  “I'll send for a jeweler's saw,” said David. “I don't mind the band being cut.”

  “Soap and hot water are quicker,” said Hodl. “It'll slip off easily with that.”

  And soap and hot water were already there. The basin was brought by a counterman in a dirty apron. And who notices a counterman? Especially who notices that he is a pun? So the only one who recognized the man in the dirty apron as Willy McGilly was Hodl.

  Hodl soaked his great hand, and the ring came off. Hodl held it dramatically (while the counterman made his counter unseen) in one of his great hands with their deep lines that betokened genius, and the faint islands in the Head Line that in any other man would indicate something a little peculiar about that genius.

  “It's a nice ring,” said Hodl with regret. “Now we count.”

  Two of the comic-strip characters patted their armpits to indicate that the bulge there had a reason for being, Henry Hazelman the spotter lounged in the doorway of the tavern to spot anything that should come, and David opened the package and began to count out the hundreds. Those bills sing a soft song to themselves when they fall on each other.

  When he had reached the count of thirteen, David's eyelid flickered and he paused, but for much less than a second, only long enough to check and recheck in his rapid mind and to put down a faint surge of panic.

  When David had reached thirty, Hodl reached out and lightly touched one of the bills. “It is nice-looking money,” he said. He removed his hand, and David continued to count.

  Only one who knew the diamond-factor well, or who knew all men well, could have known that David was nervous. Only a very quick eye could have detected that his hand trembled when he passed the fifty mark. And only a consummate genius like Hodl could have known that the throat of David was dry, or have guessed why it was.

  Hodl reached out and touched another bill, the sixty-third or the sixty-fourth, it does not matter which.

  “It is nice-looking money, David. Possibly too nice-looking,” he said. “Continue to count.”

  The comic-strip characters made moves towards their weapons, but David gulped and went on with the count.

  Seventy… eighty… ninety… ninety-nine, one hundred. There was ripe finality about it. And David waited.

  “It's a nice pile,” said Hodl. “I have never seen such pretty money. Who makes your money, David?”

  The comic-strip characters and Henry Hazelman started their moves again, but Hodl froze them at half-reach. There is a proverb that a gun in the hand is worth three in a shoulder holster, and Hodl had one in his hand so fast that it sparkled in all their eyes.

  “I'm surprised at you, Mr. Daumier,” Hodl said softly. “I did not know that you dealt in funny money. To offer a poor price to a poor skyman is one thing. To pay even that in counterfeit is another. The deal is off, sir! I will keep my ring, and you may keep your pile.”

  “It can't be,” David groaned, bedazed. “I never take a bad bill. I sure never took a hundred of them. I myself have just got it from my own safe.”

  “It does look good. It is almost the best I have ever seen,” said Hodl. “But, David, you have handled a million bills. You know what it is.”

  “You switched the package,” said David, hoars
ely.

  “I have not. Your men and your machine have scanned me the whole time. I have nothing on me but this ring now back on my hand, and this little thing back on my other hand. And my pockets which I turn out for me contain nothing but twelve cents Earth coin, a small luck charm (a coney's foot), and a Ganymede guilder. Your machine can read me as to physical things without contact.”

  “That's right, Mr. Daumier,” said Structo (Penta 9). “That's all he's got on him.”

  “I came with this, and with this I leave,” said Hodl.

  They looked at the stocky skyman with the forearms like a lion's and the little gun in one of his deep-lined hands. And they were afraid to jump him.

  David still didn't know how the switch had been made. But now he knew when.

  That evening in another tavern, and this a secluded one down in Wreckville, Hodl Oskanian and Willy McGilly and some of their friends sat and drank together. And from a bundle of bills similar to David's, Willy McGilly now counted out bills, ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred; and these were valid. “They have multiplied the Earth by billions and made all things intricate,” said Willy. “Men are not the same as their fathers were, and a man would need three brains to comprehend all the new devices. And yet in quiet places, like a Green Valley, some of the simple and wholesome things endure—old friends, old customs, old cons—sweet frauds that are ever young. We are like ancient handicrafters in an automated universe, but we do fine and careful work.

  “They have multiplied it all, but the basic remains the same: the Setting (and the hands of Hodl do set the thing off well); the Bait (and the Stone would have to be the finest ever or we'd have worn it to dust using it for bait); the Warning, to give fun to the game; the Counterplay; and then the Innocent Disclaimer.”

  Hodl once more gazed at his hands, and he spoke.

  “It was a nice touch, Willy, to use his own brown paper to wrap your own bundle, and to tape it so similarly with his own ‘David Daumier Jeweler’ tape. It was nice to find out and reproduce his own peculiar mark for the amount, and to learn all the little details while you were in his establishment, even though you could not get into The Safe Itself. I hope you didn't help yourself to trinkets while you were there. It would be wrong to burglarize his premises, but it is licit to take a taker in honest combat. You were the good switchman, Willy, while I was the strong magnet to hold their eyes.

  “But, Willy, the water was too hot, and the soap was too strong. You are inconsiderate in so many ways.”

  “And you are always perfectly considerate yourself?” Willy McGilly asked, cocking an eyebrow like a soaring hawk.

  “Always,” said Hodl. And he studied his hands with their deep Heart Lines passing through the Mounds of Rectitude and Magnanimity and Piety and Sympathy and Generosity and Gentleness and all the Virtues.

  How They Gave It Back

  He was the mayor of Big Island. Giuseppe Juan Schlome O'Hanlon was his name, John the mayor, a shining black man. He was born into a political family and was given the names to please as many groups as possible. He had once been of imposing appearance and quiet dignity. He was not now. He shrilled and keened and moaned, and sometimes he was irrational. It was his leg that hurt him, and his soul.

  His leg hurt him because of the pin clear through it, the pin that was part of the shackle. This shackle could not be unlocked mechanically. It was a psychic-coded lock on the shackle, and it could only be released when John had somehow fulfilled his job and obtained his own release. The shackle bound his leg not only to his desk but also to a steel stanchion that was part of the steel frame of the building.

  John's soul hurt him because Big Island was no longer the great thing to which he had been devoted. It had never been so in his lifetime. It was neo-jungle now, probably the most savage of them all. Even now there were fires burning on the floor above him and on the floor below him. There were always fires burning somewhere in the building, in every building that still had anything that would burn. There were rats in the room, in every room, but perhaps John saw more of them than were there. He lived in perpetual delirium.

  There were (he knew, though he could no longer go out and see) people unburied in the streets, people knifed down hourly, people crazy and empty-eyed or glitter-eyed. There were horrible horn-music and git-fiddle music and jangle shouting; and he prisoner for life in his own office. This was not to be a great administrator of a great city. The emphasis had somehow shifted. But he had loved the city and the island, or the memory of them. And this hurt his soul.

  “You have to stay on the job and run the place for the rest of your life,” Commissioner Kreger had told John the mayor just before the commissioner had cut and run for it. “There will, of course, be no more elections. The burlesque that brought you in was enough to end the process. It was fiasco.”

  “It was not,” John the mayor moaned in pain. “It was high triumph, the man of the people called to head the people, a noble thing, the climax and sole goal of my life. I won it finally. They can't take that away from me.”

  “How does it taste, John?”

  “I'm dying, do not taunt me. What went wrong?”

  “It went wrong a hundred years before you were born, John. You lived all your life in a dream, and you had better try to re-enter it. You're here for good. You're the ultimate patsy, John.”

  “I'll kill myself.”

  “No, you will not. You were allowed to this job because by temperament and religion, the residue of your dream, you were incapable of suicide. So many of our mayors have taken that easy way out! It was a nuisance, John.”

  “I'll go crazy then,” John the mayor moaned.

  “No, you likely will not do that either, though it would not matter if you did. You are already psychotic, of course, but you will not go off much further. Stay and suffer, kid. You have no choice.”

  “Kreger, isn't there some way we can get shet of this whole island? Sell it, transfer title to it, give it back to someone? Can't we get out from under?”

  “You find a way, John. Those things that we once thought of as abstractions have taken a direct hand now, Final Responsibility, Ultimate Justice, things like that. They must be satisfied. Whatever you do will have to satisfy the psychic-coded lock on your shackles to give you release. Sell the island legal, if you can find someone to sell it to. Transfer it, if you can find someone to accept the transfer. But it must be for Fair Value or Value Justified or Original Value from Original Entailment. The psychic-code thing will know. It's governed by the Equity Factor.”

  Then Commissioner Kreger left John the mayor, left the island, and went to rich fishing in other troubled (but not completely polluted) waters. There was no more profit for that smart man to shake out of the island.

  That had been two years ago, and John the mayor had been the only official on the island since that time. His only contacts with the world were the sharp noises and smells that came in through his broken windows, and the visits of five feudal or wrangle leaders, the Duke, the Sky, the Wideman, the Cloud, and the Lolo.

  Duke Durango was as smooth a gutter-fighter as ever came to the top of his heap, a happy fellow. Lawrence Sky was a fair white man named for the color of his big icy-blue eyes, a shambling giant, a giggling killer. Wideman Wyle was a wide man indeed, a cheerful sadist who told really funny stories and was the most pleasant person in the group. Cloud Clinkenbeard was a dour and stormy fellow, mean and relentless, and always in search of dirty novelty. Lolo Loudermilk was a girl, sort of a girl, a flaming mixed creature full of vitality and noise.

  They were the mayor's only contacts. They were the leaders of one of the gangs that had endured, when the ten thousand gangs had eaten each other up and declined to a hundred.

  All five of them came into the mayor's office, eating noisily.

  “Food train in!” announced the Duke. “We killed just one of the drivers. They say there'll never be another train in if we kill more than one driver at a time. And we had to give up four hosta
ges for it. Isn't four too many, John?”

  “Numbers have no meaning in this evil thing,” said John the mayor. “How many hostages have you left?”

  “Twenty, and a few more, I think. We don't all count the same when we get to the big numbers. But I think four is too many to give for a food train. What will happen when we run out of hostages? Who'll give the big damn to subscribe a train for us then, when we have no more important people to trade to the important people off-island? Here, sign this, limp-leg John, and the Cloud will take it back to them.”

  The mayor read the release and signed it. Each of the five feudal leaders looked it over in turn then. Several of them could read a little (it was for this reason that they were the mayor's contacts), and it would be hard for Mayor John to write anything phony on that release and slip it past them. The mayor had to sign these releases every time a food train came, and he knew what would happen when they ran out of hostages. The blackmail would be over when the last hostage of value or affection to someone off-island had been turned over for a food train. The off-island people would let the island rot. The trains had been the only food source for the island for years.

  The Cloud took the release and went out through the smouldering corridor and into the broken streets to the food train that came once a month through the last not-completely broken tunnel.

  “Something else came on the food train, gimpy John,” the Duke said uneasily.

  “Well, what, what was it? Duke, Duke, you didn't get hold of a saw so I could saw my leg off, did you?”

  “Nah. You're not supposed to saw your leg off. You're supposed to stay here just like you are. Who's going to sign for the food trains and hostage transfers if our mayor saws his leg off and runs away?

  “John Mayor, there's three other men came on that food train. These are funny men. They might even be important enough men that we can hold them for hostages. They brought some heavy kegs and boxes with them, John, and they even conned some of the colts into carrying them over here for them. We can't figure out what kind of men they are, Mayor. They look at us and we look at them, and we both got sparks in our eyes. They are in the building now, Mayor, and they want to see you.”