“When Norah is at her best, it is almost as wonderful as if she were some distance absent,” Simon told himself mysteriously in a pleasant and ghostly half-hour just before dawn.
The next morning Simon Radert abandoned his profitable paper-shuffling for a while and went to visit a friend, Baalbek Tyrone, who was a multilateral scientist. Simon explained the phenomena to Baalbek and then he said, “I know what I saw, Baalbek, and I know what buffos and bodies I've been in. If it is hypnotism or illusion, then it is complete beyond anything else: such contingencies would almost require all life and appearance to be hypnotism or illusion. I'm not asking whether such things could happen: I've experienced them happening. I'm asking whether they could happen within a scientific framework.” “Nah, Radert, not really,” Baalbek said. “Who is this super con-man?”
“Ah, I'd rather not name his name quite yet, Baalbek. For at least two periods I've been that con-man myself, as I told you, so I have to be careful. The things he's doing, someone's likely to kill him for them, and I don't want it to be myself who's killed for him. I don't think an illusion would be trapped by such details, the tightening of the clothes and such. If I had the illusion of taking another man's place, I should have the illusion of taking his place in his clothes. Dammit, Baalbek, it isn't the mind or spirit that goes wandering off to strange places: I could almost understand that. It's the bodies that go wandering off to slip into strange clothes (and those clothes not missing a stride in their moving and doing) and to surround strange minds. Or it is a strange body that comes suddenly both to infest and to surround me. And how does my own body vanish so slickly at the same time?”
“What is the name of the con-man, Radert? Where does he live?”
“I told you that I wouldn't give you his name just yet, and he lives entirely too close to me. This man cannot be a mental giant. He's only a creep who bounces around on his heels. There is something besides mentality involved here. Could an absolute stumble-bum stumble onto a cosmic secret, and all the erudite scientists miss it completely?”
“Sure he could. If he did it, then he could. And scientists aren't so erudite as all that, Radert. What is the name of this prestidigitator?”
“Why must you know?”
“A couple other gentlemen have also tossed me half a trail on him. I want a whole trail or none. But some of the fruit of his vine sounds pretty tasty. I want in on it. But we'll have to know more about it to go for all of it. We have to be able to make the transfers ourselves, or to put ourselves in the way of their being made. I want to be you when you (I) confront him. Do you understand?”
“Yes, though I'm not sure I want to be done out of it. If I find out enough so that we can use a piece of the trick to go for the whole trick, I'll let you know. But, Baalbek, is any of this possible scientifically?”
“Any wild or distorted view of anything can have a picture-frame fitted around it. Then it becomes an ordered view of a possible thing. Our own out-seeing eyes are a binocular-shaped picture-frame that can turn any portion of the world into a reasonable picture. And every scientific discipline is such a picture-frame. If there is a somehow misshapen scene, then we may need a misshapen frame to go around it. Let us consider the science of somamorphology (the shuffling or re-shaping of bodies). It's a science of a very funny shape, but it fits around our weird scene exactly. Sure, Radert, the things you describe could fit into a scientific framework, that of the science of somamorphology.”
“Well, is there such a science, Baalbek?”
“There is now. I just founded it. Don't laugh, Radert. Name me a science that began on a firmer basis.”
Simon Radert went to see Monsignor Tupper. Simon described the complex of happenings of the last several days. Then he asked, “Do you suppose that these things could happen from a scientific viewpoint?” “If diabolism is a science, then they certainly could happen,” Msgr. said. “And I guess that they have been happening. The science of devilry has as slippery a content as any of the other sciences. Don't smile like that, Radert. Don't you know that the devil has been out for so long that he's in again now? Time and Tempest Magazine has an article (favorable, of course, in accord with the views of T & T) in this week's issue, and he's generally had quite a bit of notice lately. He's on some new kick, and that's always been as murderous as it is tedious. He was always a mean one, but since he's read that new book he's been off on some really weird jags.”
“What new book?” Simon asked. Monsignor Tupper named the book.
“Oh, that's one of those that Swag had set out for the trash men to pick up,” Simon said. “I think I've got it at home. You're sure that there's a devil's claw in all this, Monsignor?”
“Oh, sure.”
“And you're sure that the devil read that particular book?”
“Oh, sure. He stole it from the chancery office. He was seen to do it.”
“So much for the experts,” Simon said, and he was back in his business place. “I probably know all that I need to know, anyhow. One needn't be an authority on the color green to turn various things into green money.” Simon worked it out in several days there, some of it when he was in his own office, some of it when he was in Swag's office in the front-lash time of one of the changes or jumps. It was always a puzzle how he got to be in Swag's office. “Does my enemy have a gap in his contrivances?” Simon often questioned himself. “So forgotten a gate in his defense as this one might indicate a trap.” It might, but how did the trap work?
And this business of Swag changing bodies with another person didn't seem to be the regular pattern. Swag always had at least one direct swap going, but the bulk of his business was in placing clients in the places and bodies of various moneyed men for purposes of loot and connivance. Many of the clients reaped good harvests at this stand-in fraud game; and Swag seemed to take far more than the miller's tithe as his share of the profit. After all, at this game, Swag had the only mill in town.
Simon had made certain that he signed naturally with Swag's signature whenever he was in Swag's body, and also that he had Swag's fingerprints. He then stole several of Swag's suits when in Swag's house one day, and he discovered a little room somewhere between Swag's office and his own that he could use for a quick-change stash. He made a much more convincing Swag in Swag's clothes.
Simon familiarized himself with Swag's banking procedures: they seemed open and easy, and perfectly clear for an expert paper-shuffler. Simon cashed a few checks on Swag at Swag's bank, nothing big, a thousand dollars one day, five hundred the next, two thousand the day after that. It was just to be familiar with the procedure.
So the looting of Swag (careful, careful, Simon boy, this is really too easy) went apace. Simon came up with some very original ideas of his own in this, and he discovered an amazing repertoire of looting devices in Swag's own files. They were written in double-talk, of course, but Simon had read double-talk since his childhood. There were several hundred such fine-looking documents in cipher there.
But really, though there are a million different devices and tricks of looting, there are only three degrees of looting. The first step (the weak-weasel step) is estimating how much may be taken with safety and without suspicion from a fortune, and taking only that much from it. The second step consists of determining everything that is in a particular holding, and taking all of it. Would you believe that some of the greatest and most colorful swindlers of times past have not gone beyond this second step?
But the third step (the third step is kinetic or dynamic looting; none of that static stuff here) had to be fast and daring. Really the thing should all be wrapped up in no more than three days of hidden and hectic activity. Simon Radert, in canny third-step activity, began to raise a very large amount of money on the securities and promises of Henry H. Swag. Simon poured some of this new and hasty money into various accounts of Swag, and some into various accounts of his own. What things cannot be done with mortgages and cross-mortgages, with sight-drafts and with simple bank trans
fers! What things cannot be done by plain old-fashioned kiting, if they are done by a firm and perfervid hand! What rampant borrowings cannot a bold and burgeoning man make for very short-term deals! And, in this particular case, what extraordinary money could be raised from special clients who had had previous promises and expectations fulfilled in a most exuberant way!
Simon Radert had guessed that he could raise about five times as much on Henry H. Swag as Swag was really worth, if he did it fast enough. He did it. And he was cutting it very close, for his target date and destination (Project Greener Grass), set up to allow just about three days of action, was almost upon him.
Henry had to be able to manipulate the bodies, and this isn't something that one learns out of a textbook. He had to be able to possess his own body at the critical moment, and he had to be sure of keeping possession of it. There were limits to the distance at which body-shifting could be carried out. Like all things that suffer a scientific explanation, this shifting was subject to the law of inverse squares. Swag's power to compel body-shifting was strong at short range. (Simon's office was only a block from Swag's. Simon's house was next door to Swag's.) When the distance was doubled, the power was divided by four; when the distance was tripled, the power was divided by nine. And Swag's power seemed really effective only within a range of two miles or so. Simon had worked up diagrams of the effective locations of Swag and his clients, and of the paired clients and prey by which the best looting was effected. All were within two miles; most were within one mile.
Simon had tested it. A quick three-mile taxi ride at noon took him out of Swag's effective range. He could feel Swag tugging at him after a while, Swag wanting his own body back after the noon-hour dalliance, Swag in near panic wanting his body back a half-hour later (the delay must have infringed on his profit somewhere). The times and seasons seemed important in this. This particular time had better be remembered.
But Simon had now chosen his own time and season and destination exactly.
Should he tell Norah? Should he tell (oh, hell no!) Buxom Jean Swag? But he still had the unruly hope of adding Buxom Jean to his ménage when the dead body of Henry H. Swag should have mountains of forgeries and over-reachings and hasty claims and due-bills and attainders and suits and writs and million-dollar shortages heaped upon it.
Project Greener Grass involved a flight to Rio, of course. Simon Radert was a traditionalist, and what paper-shuffler does not have a flight to Rio as the climax of his schemes and shufflings? He did tell Norah about it, in a way, though it was much more the case of her slyly guessing it out of him. But they disguised the plans and set them into a queer context. They put it all into their “Familiars and Strangers” game. That “Familiars and Strangers” game was beginning to cloy a little. Well, that phase would soon be over.
“Yes, Norah, we can have both fun and mystery in our house,” he presented it. “We can be pleasantly mysterious strangers to each other and not let it grow stale in three days or in three thousand years. But to do this, we must keep certain things secret even from ourselves, even from other parts of us. Our Lord gave us the parable of the man who had the secret of happiness: and to have that secret he had to keep many secrets; he could not even let his right hand know what his left hand was doing. This was a generative secret.
“For ourselves it must be very similar. We cannot even let our noontime selves know what our evening selves are up to.”
“What, not even let my stranger-lover know that he is taking me to R-I-O?”
“No, Norah, no! Don't spill one damned bean out of the pot to that damned nooner.”
“Never a bean, no. I'm too sly for that. Oh, I will be sly about it. I—”
“No, Norah, no! Please don't be sly! Not with the nooner. Don't tell him anything at all.”
“Oh, all right, then. But neither will I tell you any of the things that the noontime stranger told me today. I play the same game with you when you come as the noontime person. And he (you) said not to tell you anything.”
“Oh.” This could be a little bit dangerous. Norah was sly, but she was not intelligent. Simon had always liked her the way she was; for the duration of his juggling act at least, he would rather that she be the way she was somewhere else.
And Buxom Jean Swag was also a danger. She wasn't intelligent, either, but she did rattle through things with considerable of that mental energy that often serves in place of intelligence.
“I think I know who you really are these noontimes, Henry,” she said on that last day before the target day. “I think that you are Byron Biggleton. No? Then you are Lambert Hughes, or Simon Radert, or Chester Stork. No? Then you are either Gaspar Okuma or Irving Clive. Yes, you are! You're one of them. Those are the only ones that Henry's doing one-for-one swaps with now. That's what he tells me.”
“At least I am in rich company,” Simon said (to himself, not to Buxom Jean). “They all have a lot of green moss growing on them, and I've been raking it in all this week. But I didn't know about Gaspar. It may not be too late to let him in on a bad thing.”
“Honey, Gaspar honey, I think it is,” Buxom Jean was going on. “I'll tell you something. Henry H. used always to dump an old one and take a new one with him every time. Always in this same good old frame, though. I wonder who wore it first? But since he took up with me I've stayed with him. Twice he thought he'd left me behind for a new one, and each time it turned out that I was the new one. I can copy his tricks. I pick up a lot. And he or whatever will not shake me this time, either. I'll not be left behind. I'm going along.”
Yes, Buxom Jean could be dangerous to the intricate planning. There were a lot of dangers to it. But the planning was complete now. Only the execution remained, and it was going to be carried out relentlessly. And loose ends still hanging out were damnsight going to be bloody stumps.
And now it was the ticklish night before the target day. And then it was the early morning hours of target day itself. And Simon Radert was being menaced by the teeth and hooves of a very skittish nightmare.
It was an old-fashioned sort of dream, all in a monochrome, black and white and gray, as all dreams were before color was introduced into them about a hundred years ago. It was the case in the nightmare that Henry Swag, even after he was dead, had the power to shift bodies one more time. He did it, and he took the live Radert body with the gun still smoking in the hand of it. He also took the sly Radert wife, and he was off on Project Greener Grass with both the stolen things. And the inner Simon Radert (nightmarishly conscious in death, and trapped inside the dead Swag body) was taken away and morgued and slabbed and jabbed and eviscerated and embalmed and buried, and left dead but still conscious and still in agony to remain forever in the suffocating underground terror.
“This bodes ill for the day,” Simon said in stilted fashion as he woke from that grasping and entangling dream (the dream and the language of it had been stilted and archaic, and the inevitability of it had carried over into waking), “but I will not let it bode ill. I'll package all the ill omen of it, like wet garbage, into a plastic sack and leave it on my rack for the trash men to pick up. And I'll have good luck all this day. Good luck is something that can be willed and worked for. Well, I've worked for it hectically these few days, and now I will it strongly. That's all it takes.”
In spite of Simon's resolve not to tip his hand to fate by breaking his daily routine, he went to work earlier than usual on the morning of target day. He was nervous, and he wanted to be doing something. But he knew that everything he could do was already done. The readiness had peaked too soon. It is much easier to keep the necessary balance while still in motion than to maintain it in a static or waiting case. Simon felt compelled to activity, and that is where one makes mistakes. What about a late clipping of Gaspar Okuma, the very wealthy man that Buxom Jean had implied was a client of Swag, but who did not appear in Swag's client lists? Too late, too late for another one. Leave it alone!
Then Simon fell into that bad-luck routine of
rechecking his arrangements, and rechecking them again. They shouldn't need rechecking. One shouldn't even give a glance in their direction. Too much attention to arrangements will alert fate that something fishy is going on. And when fate casts a baleful eye on such things, it is likely to be the end come early.
Besides, a very little bit of rechecking revealed a disturbing thing. Simon wasn't the only one who had been tampering with the Simon Radert accounts. Someone was multiplying Simon, just as Simon had multiplied Henry H. Swag. And the someone who was doing it was using about the same projection that Simon had used. Simon discovered that his momentary worth in his accounts was about five times his actual worth. And the only one who could be tampering was Henry Swag. Swag was the only one who could have disguised himself as Simon. He was the only one who had access to the Simon-body; or so Simon hoped.
Simon was tempted to jerk all the accounts then, at midmorning; to convert them all then and there; to cable them to Rio where he could receive and stash them that evening. No, no, let it stand for the two hours or so. To start trimming down stakes now might be to lose everything. Simon hadn't transferred all the Swag accounts yet, and he couldn't transfer what remained of them until he was Swag again, during the noontime.
“I've made my bet, and I'll ride it out,” Simon swore. “I will be much richer than I expected, or I will be nothing at all. Let us see whether Swag or myself is the strongest snake. Let us see which one will swallow the other.”
But an idling mind is open to thought in the waiting, idle hours. Simon began again to consider the basis of it all. Of course, the switching couldn't have scientific justification. Somamorphology was a made-up science, and diabolism was no science at all. Body-swapping on a realistic basis would require the transfer, in place and order, of billions of molecules, and many more billions of atoms and sub-atomic particles, the transfer without jumbling them, without killing or kinking them, and all of it done over a considerable distance. It would also require the ordering of many other circumstances to effect the swapping of two bodies. Scientifically this simply would not be possible. Omnipotentially it was possible, but Swag wasn't Radert's idea of the omnipotent one. But, if it happened, and it didn't happen on a scientific basis, on what basis could it happen? Oh, “scientific” is but one of many categories. The thing might happen on a contingent basis, on an existential basis, on an implicit basis, on an eidetic basis, on a paraontological basis, on a projective basis, on an epicyclic basis. After all, reality itself remains an unproved theory. There were many bases on which these things could have happened, if strict reality were not required.
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 188
