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

by R. A. Lafferty

  Colonel Schachmeister left the shabby elegant old man, Malcomb ‘the Marvelous’ McGruder; and he took the miniaturized control station along with him.

  He took it to a most secret laboratory to try it with his peers.

  It worked.

  “The Covenant,” it said. “There are only twenty-seven Goober John Number One peanuts left here. These will last only nine days. Replenish the stock, McGruder, or the Covenant is in danger.”

  “I'll remember to get a package of them at the Rowdy-Dow today,” old McGruder promised.

  Well, there were thirty of the “bullet brains” in operation now, and our enemies could no longer rejoice over us. Their own spectacular stunt had been inhibited; their own dastardly program had been paralyzed. With another thirty of the “bullet brains” in operation, the High Commission of the colonels, the Secret Saviors of the World, would be able to inhibit anything anywhere in the world. It was of most amazing and curious effect that such small things could do such; and the secret of it was in their very smallness. Now, the manner by which they did this — No! No! No! We may not tell it! It is more than classified; it is totally under the ban. It is still possible that it may yet save what is left of us.

  But it was going well for the colonels in that time. And yet they wanted them faster than one a day.

  “We have no desire for personal gain or glory,” said Dinneen, “except myself a little. But if that crazy old man can make one a day, it should be possible for us to make a thousand. Go back to him, Schachmeister. Find out how he does it. We have spied on him, of course, but we can't understand it at all. The control stations seem to form themselves on his table there. They continue to take form even while he is asleep. And there's a further mystery. He never checked out prints of the larger model that was to be miniaturized. What does he work from?”

  “Is it true, Schachmeister, that he once operated a flea circus in New York?” Ludenschlager asked.

  “Yes, it's true enough. He's the same man.”

  “Can there be some possible connection? No, no don't laugh! It cannot be any sillier than what is already happening.”

  “No, men, there isn't a connection. He said to me, and he was speaking the truth, that fleas did not, in any way, have anything to do with the control stations. And, yet, I remember an ugly smear against McGruder from the early years—”

  “What is that Schachmeister?” Dinneen demanded avidly.

  “That he sometimes used mechanical fleas. I did not believe it.”

  “Go to him, Schachmeister,” Dinneen and Ludenschlager both begged. “If you cannot find out how he makes them, at least ask if he cannot make them faster.”

  “The Covenant,” it said. “There are only three Goober Number One peanuts left here. Replenish the stock, McGruder, or the Covenant will come to an end this very day. I'd get you an extension for the affection I have for you, but the numerous members of the smaller orders will not hear of it. There are seven orders, as you know, each smaller than the other. Sometimes they are hard to deal with, particularly the four smaller orders which I cannot see myself. Today, McGruder, Goober Johns!” “I swear I will remember it,” McGruder swore. “I'll get a package at the Rowdy-Dow this very afternoon.”

  Colonel Schachmeister went back to see Malcomb ‘the Marvelous’ McGruder. McGruder was no longer shabby. He was the cream of the old con men with an ivory-colored topper and canary-colored vest and gloves. He gestured with a silver-headed cane. He welcomed Heinie Schachmeister with incredible flourish, and Schachmeister came right to the point. “Will you not tell me how you make the stations, Marvelous? It is important.”

  “No. I will not tell you. It is important, to me, that I slice up this fat hog for myself, and twenty-four dollar slices please me mightily.”

  “Marvelous, you did not check out a set of plans for this thing. From what do you miniaturize?”

  “Well, I was going to, Heinie. I went by the place where the plans were to be had. But I found that the prints for the gadget weighed four hundred pounds, and also that I would have to put down a token deposit of $50,000.00 to check out a set of them. Both these things were too heavy for me. So I slipped a few of my small associates into a packet of plans (I always was a tricky man with my hands, you know), and they recorded the information in their own way.”

  “Your small associates—ah—how long did it take them to record the plans?”

  “About as long as it took me to light a cigar.”

  “And how may of these associates were there?”

  “Don't know, Heinie. They were sixth and seventh order associates, so there must have been quite a few of them.”

  “What do they look like, McGruder?”

  “Don't know. I've never seen them. I can see only the first order ones, and the second order ones through a strong microscope. And each order can see only two orders smaller than itself, by using extreme magnification.”

  “They are not fleas?”

  “Of course not, Heinie! What's the matter with you?”

  “Are they mechanical?”

  “No, not mechanical. But they are mechanically inclined, in the smaller orders of them.”

  “How did you become associated with them, Marvelous?”

  “One of the first order ones was a friend of a flea who once worked with me. The flea introduced us, and we rather took to each other. We both know how to latch onto a good thing when we see it.”

  “Marvelous, would it be possible to make more than one control station a day?”

  “Sure. I just didn't want to milk it dry too soon. Get you a dozen a day, if you want them. All it'll take is a bigger sack of peanuts.”

  “McGruder! Did I hear you right?”

  “I don't know what you heard, Heinie. I said that all it would take would be a bigger sack of peanuts. I'll have twelve of the controls for you tomorrow, but there's no discount for quantity. I stick by my bid. Twenty-four dollars each.”

  “Marvelous, Marvelous, this is marvelous!” Colonel Schachmeister gibbered, and he rattled away from there to bring the glad news to his associates.

  “This puts us over the hump! Two days and we will have the world by its wooly tail!” Colonel Dinneen clattered. “We will have sufficient coverage now to impose our will on all nations. For their own good, we will compel them away from their errors.”

  “We have no thought of personal benefit,” Colonel Ludenschlager exploded with a jingling hiss, “except Colonel Dinneen a little. We will force-feed the world on all benignity and kindness and understanding and good will. We will teach the world true happiness and order, now that we will have the power to do so.”

  “We be the lords of the world now,” cried Colonel Schachmeister, “the High Commission of Colonels, saviors of the country and the world. The President will be glad to shine our very shoes; it will teach him blessed humility. We will shape the whole world like clay in our hands. We will run the world now, and all must come down to our spring to drink. Ah, but the water is sweet, and the people will come to love it!”

  The Greeks named it hybris. And in the Ozarks they call it Peacock Fever. It was Pride. It was the Grand Arrogance, the Warrantless Assumption, the bursting summertime of Giant Pride. And it would have its fall.

  “The Covenant!” it thundered like acorns rattling on the roof, and McGruder almost didn't need the piece screwed into his ear to hear it. “These aren't Goober John Number Ones!” “Ah, they were out of Goober Johns at the Rowdy-Dow,” the Marvelous McGruder soothed. “These are Arizona Spanish Peanuts packaged by the Snack-Sack people. Try them. They're even better than Goober Johns.”

  “The Covenant is voided!” it said sadly. “The involvement with humanity is ended.”

  And Malcomb ‘the Marvelous’ McGruder was never able to establish contact with any of them again; so that, instead of twelve of them that day, there were no control stations at all for evermore. And those already in use blinked out.

  “McGruder, hey McGruder!” Colonel S
chachmeister came to him. “Ah, little Heinie, why are you not in school this day? Oh, I forget always, you are a big boy now. It is all ended, Heinie, all ended. The twenty-four dollars a day and everything is gone. I will have to live by my wits again, and I always hate to get off a comfortable con that has kept me.”

  “McGruder,” the frantic Colonel Schachmeister moaned, “it isn't merely that there will be no more of the stations, it is that those already in service have gone dead or disappeared also. This is not possible. They were made to operate forever.”

  “Don't think so, Heinie, not after the Covenant was broken. I think that the guys in them quit when they heard about the wrong peanuts.”

  “What guys? What peanuts? We've lost the jump on them, McGruder. A third of our country will be gone before we can institute a holding action, without the miniature stations. What made them go dead, McGruder?”

  “I figure it all out now, Heinie. They didn't make any little control stations at all. They took all of us in. They didn't any more know how to make little control stations than I did, but they were smart enough to fake it and make them work. I tell you a thing, Heinie, and you write it down so you remember it when you get big: never trust a bug you can't see.”

  “But they worked, Marvelous! They worked perfectly till they went dead or disappeared. They handled all the data flows perfectly. They responded, they monitored, they inhibited. Certainly they were control stations.”

  “Not really, Heinie. Hey, this old town will be gone in another five minutes, won't it! I bet that one took out thirty square blocks. Man, feel the hot blast from it even here. Your sleeve's on fire, Heinie. Your mother will scold and moan when she sees how it's burned. See, this is the way it was— You know the man who made all the fancy little cars so cheap, and nobody know how he did it?”

  “No, no, McGruder, what is it? Oh, the asphalt is flowing like water in the streets! What do you mean?”

  “A guy that bought one of those little cars lifted up the hood one day. It didn't have a motor in it. It didn't have any works at all in it. It's the same as these little control stations were. It just had a little guy in pedaling the pedals to make it go. Now they quit pedaling, Heinie.”

  Condillac's Statue

  or Wrens in His Head

  Condillac made a man-sized statue. You did not know that he could make a statue? All philosophers can do all things whatsoever, if only they put their hands to it. He made the statue from a thrust of granite that already stood there. This granite seemed sometimes brown, sometimes green, sometimes blue, but always frog-colored, and never lifeless. Three big men did the rough work, a smith, a wood chopper, and a stonecutter; and Condillac himself did the fine work. He intended the statue to be of noble appearance. It would have been noble if cut out of travertine marble; but things cut out of granite can only be comic or outré or grotesque. His friend the brainy doctor Jouhandeau — but that crabby old occultist was a friend of nobody — added a thing to the statue according to the plan they had.

  The statue stood on the edge of Condillac's estate of Flux, near Beaugency, in the small park there just off the mule road that ran north to Châteaudun, and just off the river Loire itself. It was a fine small park with a gushing spring that fed a bucket-cistern and a large horse-trough. And people came there.

  Wagonmen and coachmen and mulemen stopped at this park. It had heavy grass all the way from Flux to the river. Horsemen and honest travelers, vagabonds and revolutionaries stopped there; boatmen from the Loire came there to enjoy a few hours. There were big shade trees and fine water in the summer, and plenty of underwood and stone hearths for the winter. There were old sheep sheds toward the river where one could sleep in the sour hay.

  Children came there from town and country. Basket-women came out from Beaugency to sell bread and cheese and apples and wine to the travelers. And everybody who came there would like the statue.

  It was a burlesque thing, a boy-man mass with a lumpish loutish body and a very big head on it. It had a grin almost too wide for that head. Its face was slack and vacant most of the time, but in a certain shadow-hour it became a face of curious profundity. It was a clodhopper, a balourd.

  The statue stood there a month, “till it should be accustomed to the site,” as Condillac and Jouhandeau said. After that, the two of them came in deep evening and opened the head of the statue. (Even the kids who climbed on it had not known that the head would open.) Jouhandeau made the first connection in that head. Then they sat on one of the great stone benches of the park and talked about it till the late moon arose.

  “Are you sure it is still alive?” Condillac asked the crabby doctor.

  “I myself do not believe in life,” Jouhandeau said, “but it is still alive, as you understand life.”

  “And you are sure that it was wiped clean?”

  “Oh, absolutely, indiscussably. It gets its first sensory impressions now.”

  “If you can do such a thing, Jouhandeau, then you can do a thousand other things. It shakes me even to think of them.”

  “I can do them, and I will not. I do this only to oblige you, to aid you in your studies. But you will be proved wrong; and you will not admit that you are wrong; so it will all be for nothing.”

  “But others will someday do what you can do now, Jouhandeau.”

  “Perhaps in two hundred years. I am not much more than two hundred years before my time. After all, Cugnot's automobile is regarded as mere curiosity by everyone. It will be more than a hundred years before such things are made commercially. And here is one greater than Cugnot: myself.”

  After a while, night men came out of the boscage of the river meadows to look for prey; and Condillac and Jouhandeau slipped back through the trees to the estate house before the rising moon should discover them to the night thieves.

  And now the statue was getting its first sensory impressions. “Old Rock can smell now,” the kids told the people.

  “How would a statue smell with a stone nose?” the people asked. “Does he snuffle or move or anything? How do you know that he can smell?”

  “We don't know how he can smell with a stone nose,” the kids said, “and he doesn't snuffle or move or anything. But he can smell now, and we don't know how he can.”

  Old Rock could smell now all right. And there was one other thing he seemed to do sometimes, but it was hard to catch him at it.

  Lathered horses, foam-whitened harness, green goop in the horse trough, those were smells of the little park and the big country. Wet flint stones, grackle birds and the mites on them; river grass and marl grass and loam grass; oaks and chestnuts, wagon-wheel grease, men in leather; stone in shade, and stone in sun; hot mules, and they do not smell the same as hot horses, mice in the grass roots, muskiness of snakes; sharpness of fox hair, air of badger holes; brown dust of the Orléans road, red dust of the road to Châteaudun; crows that have fed today, and those who have not; time-polished coach wood; turtles eating low grapes, and the grapes being bruised and eaten; sheep and goats; cows in milk, new stilted colts; long loaves, corks of wine bottles, cicadas in pig-weeds; hands of smiths and feet of charcoal burners; whetted iron on travelers; pungent blouses of river men; oatcakes and sour cream; wooden shoes, goose eggs, now-spread dung, potato bugs; thatchers at work; clover, vetch, hairy logs of bumblebees. There are no two of these things that have the same smell.

  The kids said that the statue could smell even with a stone nose. He stood and smelled for a month, and the smells informed his stone.

  Then Condillac and Jouhandeau came at night, opened the head of the statue, and made the second connection. Afterwards, they sat on one of the stone benches and talked about it till the late moon rose. “I will prove that there are no innate concepts,” Condillac said. “I will confute all foolish philosophers forever. I will prove that there is nothing in the mind but what goes in by the senses. You have obtained prime mature brain matter, snatched out of its dwellings at the moment before its deaths, blended in its several sou
rces, and swept clean by your own techniques. It is an empty house here, and we introduce its dwellers one by one. Why do you say I will be proved wrong, Jouhandeau?”

  “I do not believe that there are any innate concepts either. I do not believe that there are any concepts of any sort, anywhere, ever. But what you call concepts will crawl into that mind, not only by the senses through the stone apertures, but by means beyond you.”

  They argued till the night-bats and the night-sickness flew up from the river to look for prey; then they slipped back through the trees to the estate house.

  “Old Rock can hear now,” the kids told the people. “Oh, cut the clownery, kids,” the people said. “How could a statue hear with stone ears?”

  But he could hear. And there was the other thing that he still seemed to do, and now the kids caught him at it sometimes.

  Ah, a whole catalog of different sounds and noises. Old Rock stood and listened for a month to the manifold noises that were all different. By the sounds and the noises he informed his stone. He began to understand the sounds.

  That month gone by, Condillac and Jouhandeau came at night, made the third connection inside the head of the statue, and sat and talked about it till the late moon rose.

  “Old Rock can see now,” the kids said. “Ah, there is something funny about that statue,” the people agreed. “It no longer has stone eyes, but live eyes that move. But what is so wonderful about seeing? A pig or a chicken can do the same thing.”