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

by R. A. Lafferty

  All right, you review the events then. And the events (why? What's the matter with grown people crying? It shows that they have sound emotions and frustrations), and the events were, or seemed to be, these:

  “Could someone tell me the name of this course?” the lecturer, Professor Thomas Cromwell, asked the unfamiliar looking students. (Cromwell was a pleasant man with a crooked grin and…) “It is History of Musical Notation,” a ruddy fellow said (… and a whole crooked face)— (Cromwell, not the ruddy young fellow).

  “By the hexed hemispheres themselves, what am I doing teaching such a course?” Cromwell asked with a touch of insincerity (he had a crooked tongue too).

  “We don't know, either, Professor,” a pretty girl answered.

  “I suppose that History of Musical Notation is as good a take-off pad as any,” Cromwell said. “Well, you see, students; there are the approved musical notes that are quite narrow. And then there are the spaces between the notes that are a thousand times as wide.”

  “In what respect do you mean the notes are narrow?” asked a gopher-faced young man. “Do you mean that they are narrow in respect to pitch or tone color or rhythm or melody or harmony or polyphony or mode or measure or signature or score or tablature or what?”

  “I mean they are narrow in respect to width,” Professor Cromwell said. “A person could erect more than a thousand unapproved musical notes between any two approved notes. But the unapproved notes would sound discordant, unpleasant, unnatural, and plain repugnant if they were anywhere near to the approved notes in frequency. They would sound so to me, they would sound so to you, they would sound so to a Hottentot. They would sound discordant and painful to a dog or sheep or a starling or a fish or an earthworm. And if the unapproved notes are not near in frequency to the approved notes, then we will seldom hear them at all. And that's odd, for they are there, available to the ear.”

  “The textbook by Duggle doesn't say anything about unapproved musical notes,” a freckled girl said. Several of the students were looking at Cromwell doubtfully. The ruddy young man whistled a few bars of Rat-catcher Ramble soundlessly. How could he whistle soundlessly?

  “Duggle doesn't mention that a person could fall through the space between two musical notes and be killed?” Professor Cromwell asked. “Well, I will mention it then. We are like people walking on stepping stones with bottomless chasms below for anyone who should miss his step. You step exactly on one of the approved notes, and that is all right. You step a little off-center of one of them, and you receive a slippery warning. But if you miss a note entirely, and the odds should be a thousand to one that you will miss entirely, then the result is your disappearance, and perhaps your destruction and death. So you can see that accepted tone, in the present order of things, is important.”

  Professor Sanger came into the lecture room. He gave a sort of smirk. He arched the brows almost off his head and he cocked his eyes in a way that was supposed to be comic. Then he sat down in the back of the room.

  “Now, young people,” Professor Cromwell continued, “let us consider sounds that are not usually accounted as musical notes. Let us consider the whine of a buzz-saw. John Wellborn, will you put the variable-speed motor on that buzz-saw in the back of the room and then rev the thing up?”

  “John Wellborn isn't in this class,” a pretty girl said, “and there isn't any buzz-saw in this room. Maybe you are mixed up.”

  “By the scrubby Rat-catcher himself, I am never mixed up!” Cromwell argued. “Well, when the buzz-saw is accelerated, it mumbles, and then it sings. It mumbles again, and it sings again. And it does that again and again. It sings when it comes to one of the approved musical notes, and it mumbles when it is going over the thousands of unapproved notes between. When asked to guess, most persons will say that the singing is from ten to fifteen times as loud as the mumbling. But instrumentation proves that they are of the same intensity. And scanning instruments prove one other thing: the constant-acceleration motor with its attached buzz-saw blade does not accelerate constantly. It lingers an unseemly time at the frequency-speed of the approved notes, and it leaps over the unapproved notes as though they were a wasteland.”

  “Really, you go too far, Cromwell,” Professor Sanger said from the back of the room.

  “Be quiet, Sanger,” Cromwell ordered. “If you have come to heckle, then I will have to ask you to leave.” That said, he returned to his lecture. “Let us consider a simple, synchronous A. C. motor. It should turn, on sixty-cycle current, and according to theory, at thirty-six hundred revolutions a minute or at eighteen hundred or at nine hundred, depending on the number of pairs of poles that it has. But it doesn't do this. The real speed will differ from the synchronous speed. Even a name-plate may give it at seventeen hundred eighty instead of eighteen hundred. And the usual explanation is that the motor is slowed by drag or slippage. Oh, by the green meadows on the other side, that's nonsense! There cannot be a slippage of synchronicity unless there is a slippage of time itself. How is this possible electrically? It isn't. Well then, how is it possible behavioristically? It is the corrupting effect of animate, and especially human, influence on inanimate equipment that forces the motor to break synchronous speed to match the frequency of the nearest approved note.”

  “Cromwell—may the Rat-catcher get you! — I must get started with my class,” Sanger said.

  “Go ahead,” said Cromwell. “Now then, young people, we have a cosmic mystery. Why do people all over the world hear only very narrow and widely separated sounds, noises, notes? Why do they fail to hear the thousand times more numerous notes and sounds that stand between them? Why do Africans, American Indians, Australian Aborigines, Chinese, Polynesians all hold the same notes to be approved and hearable? Why do they consider the edges of those notes to be dissonances and unpleasantnesses? And why do they not hear the great numbers of notes in between at all? How could such collusion have come about, and why?”

  “Why do birds and animals accept the same small number of notes and reject the same large number? Why, why, why?”

  “Aw, hemophilic bleeding hemispheres, come along now, Cromwell!” Professor Sanger barked. “It's time I was teaching my class, and time you were teaching yours.”

  Professor Cromwell looked puzzled for a moment. Then he brightened.

  “Oh, I understand now,” he said. “I'm in the wrong lecture room and talking to the wrong bunch of students. This is your class, Sanger. That's why you're here.”

  “It's because of you, Cromwell, and a very few like you, that the absentminded-professor image has been fastened unjustly on so many of us,” Sanger complained.

  “True,” said Cromwell, “but I can hear sounds, I can smell smells, I can see sights, perhaps I can walk into lands that are forever closed to all you present-minded professors.” And Cromwell walked out of the room.

  “A crackie, that one,” Professor Sanger said. “He says that the cracks in our world are a thousand times as wide as our world itself.” But Sanger did not take over his class immediately. Instead, he called Catherine Cromwell on the room phone.

  “This looks like the day, Catherine,” he said sorrowfully. “We've all been watching his antics and hoping that the worst wouldn't happen. But it is. You should come and get him. It looks as if he is going over the edge.”

  “The phrase we use in this household is ‘through the crack,’ ” Catherine said. “Yes, I hope we can go through the crack today. Oh, there's so much to look forward to!” And she hung up on him with a soundless clatter.

  And Catherine in her own place was taken with both hope and apprehension.

  “Wide meadows of my heart's desire, how I pray that it will work!” she said. “It will all be so much more spacious when we have gone through, and then I may get the things that I have always wanted. Really, I've never wanted much. A castle in the country with lake and beach and yacht basin, a mountain of our own with a superior slope for the winter season, a roomy townhouse (oh, fifty or a hundred rooms, w
e might have company), clothes enough to cover me modestly and elegantly, satellite apartments further downtown and uptown and on the park. Oh yes, and in Washington and New York and New Orleans and San Francisco and Paris and London and Dublin and Rome and Nice. A small number of planes of my own. And dependable servants and aides, and my personal publisher and producer and senator and cardinal. And let us have game-parks as wide as realms. Oh, the stag-hunt days! Oh, the lobster nights! Let me have the respect of all (oh hell, let it be the adulation of all). Let me have a hand in every glove, a thumb in every bowl and a toe in every vat. Yes, and an island in every ocean. Most of all, let me have the kind of money that only money can buy. All this will be easy if you defend us from the Powers and Principalities. Oh, by the Prized Hemispheres, defend us from them! Be good to the Rat-catcher: so many are bad to him. These things I pray for.” Catherine Cromwell and God had an easy way of talking to each other, and they reciprocated favors.

  Ah, let us step into this crack here for a moment (it's roomy enough, once you're in it, and the time passed there doesn't count) and be informed about the Hemispheres. The two Hemispheres were very old and of disputed origin, and they were prized possessions of the college. In form, each was a perfect sphere, and yet they were called hemispheres: It was said they had originally existed in the same spherical space and that they had then been separated. They were of heavy glass, each at least a meter in diameter. One of them was crammed with creatures, rats, rat-faced people, proper people; but their faces were bigger than their bodies and the eyes were bigger than the faces. They seemed alive and avid to burst out. Most of the bodies and faces and eyes were cracked and shattered (you know that it was done by an eye-cracking sound), broken like glass and the pieces falling out of them. Yet they seemed alive and flexible, not rigid. They didn't seem at all miniaturized, but there were hundreds of them in that hemisphere. The other spherical hemisphere was all green meadows and game-parks and cities and oceans, unoccupied, but waiting for visitation.

  Ah, out of the crack again. But be careful: Don't mention that stuff.

  Nah, Professor Cromwell didn't go to his own lecture room after the fiasco with the class of Professor Sanger. He went to still another room full of bright-faced students, and he found Professor J. F. E. (Killer) Diller already lecturing there. Cromwell held up his hand to halt that prattle, and he stepped into the breach. “That's enough, Killer,” he said briskly. “I'll take over now. Will somebody please tell me the name of this course?”

  “It is Middle Mayan Archeology, Professor Cromwell,” a gentle-voiced, pop-eyed young lady said. “We didn't know that you were interested in it.”

  “By the Square Hills of Quintana Roo, I'm interested in everything!” Cromwell declared. “Sure, a Middle Mayan pyramid will make a fine take-off base for my expansive views. Surely you have already noticed that the Mayan world is mostly hidden and that only a bit of it sticks above the surface. And you surely have wondered about the reason for this. Well, you might notice that our own world is also mostly hidden and that only a very small bit of it sticks above the surface. Have any of you young people noticed that there are often ghosts in photographs of Middle Mayan sites? These are best seen on films that are developed immediately and examined immediately. Later, the ghosts blur: It's really a subjective blurring, though it happens to an objective film. Ghosts, or educated blurs, appear on photographs of all sites whatsoever, and why should Middle Mayan sites be an exception? There is a conspiracy, carried on by humans and associates-of-humans and directed by principalities and powers, to reject vast areas of the world and to paint them over with little black brushes to make them look like no more than cracks. Well, I know ways to oppose that conspiracy and to lead many people out of the narrow and mundane desert and into the interdicted green meadows.”

  “Professor Cromwell, everybody has been saying that you have gone crackie,” Professor Diller protested, “and it certainly does seem—”

  “Certainly, I've gone crackie,” Cromwell cried joyously. “I believe that there are whole universes concealed in every crack. Some time back you were calling me the Mad Moth, and it's true that I have an obsessive attraction-repulsion for light. I believe that if one gets out of rhythm with approved light then one will become invisible. Yea, I'm going to lead a bunch into a really rewarding disappearance.”

  “How will you do it?” a girl asked.

  “Gray magic,” Cromwell said. “I'm afraid of the black, and I'm too compromised a fellow to attain the white. We will answer the question, ‘Where are the Principalities and the Powers hidden?’ and we will steer clear of the shoals of them. We will answer the question, ‘Who are the rats and who is the Rat-catcher?’ And we will take a hand in their battle also.”

  “Tom-Crom, get out of here!” Professor Diller snapped in total exasperation. “This is my assigned lecture room. It isn't yours. It is my job to knock knowledge into this particular bunch of nascent noggins. It isn't yours. Get out of here right now. There's the door.”

  “Nah, I don't think so,” Cromwell laughed. “In the wrong room again, am I? Somehow I'd rather go out one of the unapproved doors, though.”

  It isn't certain how Professor Cromwell left that room, and it isn't certain what he meant by an unapproved door. But, with a hazy sort of suddenness, he was gone. It was as if all the folks there had dust blown in their eyes for a moment. Professor Cromwell always had thrown a lot of dust in a lot of eyes.

  “This is really the morning of the magicians, of the most amateur of them all, the Great Cromwell,” the pretty girl said as Professor Diller set himself to take over the class. “It would be fun to go with him, wherever he goes. Well, is he falling out of rhythm around here, Professor Diller? And will he become invisible?”

  “Yes, he is. He's in trouble, and he probably won't be renewed. I like him, but he dances to the notes of a different flute.”

  This referred to one of Cromwell's antics. He had an alto flute which he would blow with a happy puffing of cheeks and mugging of mug. And not a sound would come out of that flute, but an uneasy sensation would come across anyone nearby.

  Professor Cromwell did finally stick his head into his own lecture room that morning. “Carry on,” he told the Crom-bombs who were his regular students. He had known where they were all the time.

  “Will we ever!” those students cried. “Is there anything we should get ready to take on the journey?”

  “Nothing, nothing, only yourselves,” Cromwell said. “It's like an eye-dropper asking what it should take to an ocean. Where we are going there is always plenty of water. And plenty of salt. But be wary of the Principalities and the Powers! And try to learn which are the rats and which is the Rat-catcher.”

  (But one of the Principalities was very near, in his own den or ward-room or office. He was the Dean of Special Studies of Hamelin College. He was John Michael Anwalt.)

  II

  “You live in scratches on the world,” he said.

  “Be-hark the crooked horn and raise your head!”

  They did what Garden Guards will always do.

  They held a court whose name is Kangaroo.

  —The Original Horn Book

  So they held a fully-toothed hearing on Professor Cromwell that night. It was held by the artificial, flickering, electric torches in the faculty lounge of the Special Studies School. The board of inquiry discussed matters in broad terms before the accused and his wife were brought in. The board was made up of Dean Anwalt, Professors Diller and Sanger (who both swore they liked Tom Cromwell), Professors Dorothy Mandel, Dolph Lustlife, and Rosemary Thumbsdown, and Underprofessor Peter Quickshanks.

  “We will be brief,” said Dean Anwalt, and his face was working as if he were churning small butter. “We are voting the non-renewal of the person Cromwell as professor of this college because of his wan-wittedness and mild insanity. We are voting the disbanding of his scheduling, classes, and positions; and the immediate removal of his person. His position will be oblitera
ted, and his prerequisites and prerogatives will be impounded. His entailments will be divided among the seven of us. We can get away with that part of it, be assured. Has anyone any background statements or questions?”

  “Yes,” said Professor Sanger. “Do we really hear only one note of frequency out of every thousand in our range? Do we really see only one frequency out of a thousand? Do we really taste only one taste out of a thousand? Do we smell only one smell out of a thousand?”

  “Of course, we do,” said Professor Rosemary Thumbsdown in that soft voice of hers. (“She speaks soft as thumbsdown,” someone had said of her, “but she carries a sharp hatchet.”) “We cover the wide spectra in everything, but we pick out samples at approximately every thousandth interval. We do not live in the world itself. We live in shallow scratches, in a refined and judicious sampling of the world. I thought everybody in the top one-thousandth of one percent knew that.”

  “Then Cromwell is right?” asked Professor Diller. “The cracks that we ignore are a thousand times as wide as the world that we inhabit? And the ghosts that are just off of the approved frequencies, they are real? Well, why wouldn't it be better to venture into those cracks and enjoy the real spaciousness of the world itself?”

  “Because our nature tells us to be wary of that,” Dean Anwalt said. “Our fallen nature tells us that we don't want the wideness, that the narrowness is a superior thing. And our exult-in-its-fallenness nature tells us that the wide ways are the extreme danger: It tells us to ban or interdict them when we cannot imprison them.”

  “For every one of us are there a thousand superior genii imprisoned in our sub-mental bottles and stored on the cobwebby shelves of our inattention?” asked Diller. “But, really those genii are free and easy in their spacious green meadows and space-multiplied, gold-flecked cities. Cromwell is right.”