A howling, flaming train, a locomotive and one hundred cars, erupted into the lounge where the night hearing was being held. It was the Crack-jack Express itself! It breached every wall of that lounge room and it was crowded with Crom-bomb young people, with demiurges, and with all the more intrepid people of Hamelin College and Hamelin Town.
“His family said he hadn't fallen down a crack at all.” Under-professor Peter Quickshanks was still jabbering. “They said he had died of diphtheria.”
Cromwell and other pipers were piping amplitudes of every sort into the cars of the Crack-jack Express, and it was ready to go on the most spacious journey yet.
“Wardens, be ready for the containment,” Dean Anwalt shouted. “We have our orders that nobody gets into the green meadows. Ah, we'll trap them in the bottle and put the cork in it all.”
“After all, a few of them get by every century or so.” Professor Lustlife gave the ritual disclaimer.
“Yes, and we get a reprimand for it every century or so.” Dean Anwalt gave the ritual reply. “All guards, be ready as myself am ready,” and he flourished his sword-hilt and its rusty outline of a blade.
“Oh, let's some of us go by boat,” Catherine Cromwell cried. There was a boat then, quickly filled with intrepid people, and there was a waterway for it to run on.
“River warden, river warden, who will be the river warden?” Dean Anwalt gave the call.
“I will,” Professor Diller offered in the most heroic moment of his life.
And they broke out of it, the Crom-bombs, the demiurges, the intrepid people, the crackies, they broke out of it in the train named the Crack-jack Express, in the boat named Return to Paradise, in Argosy and Almagest automobiles, and on their own fleet feet. They went through the wide cracks of the world, leaving the pinched residue behind them, and they arrived at the green meadows where everything is made from the extraordinary and spacious notes and substances.
No they didn't. They didn't arrive at any such place.
They arrived in the middle of the second Hemisphere, the multitude of brave people with their flamboyant vehicles and riches, and trains and automobiles and boats, they all arrived in the inside of that sphere that was no more than a meter in diameter. It was crowded in there for the several hundred of them. And seven black-hearted persons, Dean Anwalt, Professors Diller, Sanger, Mandel, Lustlife, Thumbsdown, and Under-professor Quickshanks, gathered around the second Hemisphere and looked in at the trapped adventurers and jeered at them. Essence of high-hackled hyenas, essence of bristling hatred and entrail gore, how they did jeer! Genii have been trapped in bottles for as long a time as a hundred thousand years, and then been no closer to getting out.
“That's too long to wait,” said Tom Cromwell, and he blew that horn.
And other great hornpipers joined in the un-melody: Honker-Conker, Blow-Joe, Josue, Piper Tom and his son Triton (no, none of these were the same, they were all different fellows), Jack Horner, Pied Piper (windows were cracking all over the countryside from the horn-blowing), Gabriel, Roland (streets and houses were cracking from the sound and the anti-sound), Peter Piper, Tin-horn Sport (bottles in particular were cracking everywhere), Tom-Crom and his crumbled horn! Then they all joined together in the strenuous strains of the Rat-catcher Ramble. (People were cracking open from the blast.)
Seven people in particular cracked in their very gullets and entrails, and they tasted their own entrail blood of defeat. They were those learned people: Anwalt, Diller, Sanger, Mandel, Lustlife, Thumbsdown, Quickshanks. They looked at the crowded and cracked people in the first Hemisphere and they saw themselves. They looked into the second Hemisphere and they saw that all the intrepid people had broken their bottle-trap and gone over the hills to the meadows themselves.
The foregoing, having happened in the interstices of both time and space, did not leave any record in acceptable places. And yet it all did happen. There are seven persons and their families who know that it happened. These are seven persons who instruct in the Special Studies School of Hamelin College. They instruct all day, and they try to do it well, they have so much to make up for (they proved to be inept guards on one assignment). But when the day is over, they do not go to their proper homes and families. Instead, they must shrink themselves and go into the narrow glass prison of the first Hemisphere, and they must stay there ‘til morning light.
They do not have happy home lives.
The Doggone Highly Scientific Door
A group of children swarmed down toward the new door. The door swung open. The music was booming and jangling in the park inside, and the children crowded through the door in a happy gang. Elroy Hunt went to follow them through, and the door clanged shut in his face. He felt it, he pushed it, and it wouldn't open. There were no knobs or handles anywhere on that door and it was closed solidly. This was one of the new doors at Whizzer's Amusement Park. Hunt stepped back from the door a ways. He was slightly puzzled. How do you go about working a door that is supposed to work by itself? He sat on a bench that was there just about three steps from that door in the wall of the park. Elroy Hunt liked to tell people that he had never grown up. He was a circus flack and a carnival buff, a comic-book collector and a puppet-show puncher, a citizen of the summertime and a lover of amusement parks. He liked kid amusements.
He liked to eat kid food: Coney Islands, Ding Dongs, Chocolate Cones, Karmelkorn, frozen custards, corn dogs, Goffel-Waffles, Onion Kings, Fickle Pickles, Cracker Jack, Funny Honey, cotton candy, Hoober-Goobers, Cup-Pups, Eskimo-Toes, popcorn. And he had a kid's stomach to match his taste. Save for a few sudden, violent and short-lived stomachaches, he thrived on the junk.
There was another cloud of kids bearing down on the big door of the amusement park, about twenty of them in this bunch. (“I'd better tell them that there's something wrong with the door,” Elroy said to himself. “No, I won't either, let them find it out for themselves.”)
But the door swung open for the kids (“Hey, it does work,” Elroy said. “It must have fixed itself. It must work on some kind of electric eye or scanner.”), and the kids exploded through to the inside of the park. And Elroy Hunt followed closely behind them, so closely that he got a bloody nose when the door slammed shut in his face. Elroy went and sat down on the bench again. “There is a double Dutchman in that woodpile,” he said.
With his love for such things, there had been no holding Elroy back when Whizzer's Amusement Park opened for the summer on May 24 of that year. It was a Friday, and the grade schools had just let out for the year. Elroy had built up eight hours of overtime that week so he took Friday off. Oh well, lots of young men get spring fever toward the end of May every year, and they create excuses to take time off. Some of them go to ball games. Some of them go fishing, or they go tearing around in their cars out in the country. Some of them go to Grogley's Bar. Some of them might even go to Whizzer's Amusement Park. There is no accounting for a young man's fancy in late May.
But Elroy Hunt wasn't exactly a young man. He was forty-nine years old. Yes, and he had been forty-nine years old that year before, and the year before that too.
Another bunch of kids (Elroy knew this bunch) were coming to the big door, just five of them in this bunch, and a little bull terrier. Elroy Hunt fell in immediately behind them. The door swung open, and the kids went through. But the door banged shut again in the faces of Elroy and the little dog. The dog howled out loud, and Elroy did so interiorly.
“You go on home, King!” one of the kids called to the dog from inside the park. “They won't let dogs inside the park this year. Or stay with Mr. Hunt if you want to.”
So the bull terrier named King decided to stay with Elroy Hunt and hook his fortunes to Elroy's. They had been acquaintances but not close friends. Now they looked at each other. They plotted a small plot together in a lightning meeting of minds. Both rushed at the door with absolute shouting-and-barking confidence that it would swing open for them if only they had faith. And both cracked themselves jarring
ly on the closed adamant door (it was really made out of wood and chrome and glass).
One little kid (hardly more than a toddler) approached the door, and it swung wide open. The little kid padded in, and Elroy and King (rushing for the momentary gap) hit the closing door so hard that they both bounced.
Frustrated, they both went over and sat on the bench that was only three long steps from the door. King licked his bruised foreshoulder. Elroy licked the heel of his hand that was bloodied and scraped.
A boy on a bicycle was coming at full speed (if the door didn't open for him it would be all-systems-smash), and the door opened and the boy was in. And the dog King (with the fastest four-footed takeoff in town) was right after that cycling kid. But the door (with the quickest swing-to of any door in town) whanged shut; and King was out (side and cold).
A man leading four ponies came to the door, and it opened with perfect courtesy, and the man and the ponies were in. And Elroy Hunt was still outside when the door closed on him with abrupt rudeness.
Elroy sat on the bench again; and King (coming back to dog-consciousness after a while) lay on the grass. They watched a delivery truck go in, they watched a dude and his doll go in, they watched some schoolgirls wearing schoolgirl uniform skirts go in, they watched some mean kids from Berryhill go in; they watched a school bus from district seven, full of children, go in. They watched two mothers with three and a half children each go in, they watched a heavy truck with a load of watermelons and a Texas license plate go in, they watched the clown named Gumbo go in riding on the trick mule named Dumbo. Dumbo snickered at Elroy and King as he went in. He knew something that they didn't.
They tried it again. It still didn't work. They door would open for men and women and children and beasts, and trucks and buses and bicycles and watermelons. But it would not open for Elroy Hunt, and it would not open for the dog named King.
A cheerful man sauntered up. “It's amazing, it's amazing,” he said. “The doors, I mean. Have you noticed the door?”
“Oh, man, have I ever noticed the door!” Elroy Hunt said.
“They are highly scientific, the doors that they have this year,” the man said. “They are highly selective. They will swing wide for all human people. That is their positive operation. They will open with a little insistence for almost anything else. That is their neutral operation. But there's another class of things (I never liked them, I'm glad that they barred them this year) that the doors reject completely. That is their negative operation. They are the newest and most scientific thing in doors. Get away from me, mutt!” The cheerful man said the latter words to King and not to Elroy Hunt.
“Do you have any idea how the doors work?” Elroy asked the man.
“Oh, yes,” the man said. “I understand it. They are highly scientific. They work by scientific electricity and by up-to-date automation.”
The cheerful man strode forcefully at the door, which opened just in the thin whisker of time for him. And Elroy and King—
“Naw, let it go. It's no use,” said Elroy. He didn't try to follow.
“Grumpf,” said King. He didn't try to follow either. They didn't even try it. They were tired of rebuffs. And the door closed very slowly after the entrance of the cheerful man, as though daring them to make a rush for it.
King cocked his head at Elroy, and a bright idea passed between the two of them. There should be other door-gates into Whizzer's Amusement Park. There always had been. They went along Whizzer's Great Walls of China (they were made of pre-stressed adobe) that surrounded the park, and they came to the Marion Street entrance.
There were two dogs there, but no people to see their failure. Elroy and King tried it. The door wouldn't swing open for them: it wouldn't budge. They hammered on it with fists and they bit it with angry teeth. And it still wouldn't open.
There was happy shouting and chatter inside the park, and the loud squealing of the big wheels and rides. There were open-air hamburgers a-frying, and a wide-traveling garlic-and-mustard odor was shilling for them. There was the chanting and gabbing of barks and narks and marks. But they who had loved the parks couldn't get in.
Two little girls came running and the door opened for them. And closed again before Elroy Hunt and his doggy friends could get in. So they all went around to the New Haven Street entrance.
It was the same thing there. There were several bunches of farm kids going in there in pickup trucks. The door opened gladly for the farm kids and their trucks. It opened for all sorts of persons, young and old, and for about every kind of rolling and rambling thing there was. But it wouldn't open for Elroy Hunt. And it wouldn't open for the pariah dogs with him. Sometimes it seemed that there was no way that the door could let everybody else in and keep Elroy and his associates out without cutting someone in half. But it did it. People, that door was fast!
“I brought my students here just to study the highly scientific doors,” said a snooty schoolteacher lady in pince-nez. “They let all people in whoever they are. They let most other things in. And they keep still another class of things out. And they never make a mistake.”
“Ah, sometimes they may make a mistake,” Elroy said. Elroy saw now that the lady wasn't wearing real pince-nez, but carnival gimcrack things instead, and a false nose with them. She took them off to scratch her real nose, and it was seen that she wasn't really snooty in either sense. She seemed rather nice.
“No, the doors never make a mistake,” she said. “Highly scientific things never make mistakes. I really believe that the doors are smarter than most people.” Ah, she didn't really seem too nice after all.
“Yeah, they're smarter than one people I know,” Elroy admitted bitterly. With his doggy friends, Elroy then went to the Oswego Street entrance, to the Pittsburgh Street entrance, to the Quebec Street entrance. At each place the doors refused to open for them: or, if already opened, they sure did close in quick and firm fashion.
The whipped man Elroy and the whipped dogs (there were six dogs in the party now) went back to the door of first encounter. They were a low-spirited bunch. Then their spirits got a quick lift from a bunch of high-spirited kids bursting out of the door. Elroy knew these kids, and one of them was named Curtis and was the owner of the dog King.
“Hey, King, I won you a dog bowl,” the boy Curtis shrilled. “I won it throwing lopsided baseballs at wooden milk bottles. I sure am good at hitting those bottles.” He gave the fine bowl to King. The bowl had KING written on it in red letters, and King's day was made, in spite of the humiliation of being excluded from the amusement park. And the boy Curtis had two other bowls that he had won. (This boy Curtis was the best grade-school pitcher in the city, and somebody at the ball throw booth was negligent in letting him take so many throws.)
“I sure can hit with those lopsided baseballs,” Curtis said “You throw a sidearm spitball with the lop-side (that's the heavy side) forward, and the weight wobbles but it stays forward. And it sure whams those wooden milk bottles. Hey there, aren't you the Whitneys' dog, Whitey? I got a ‘Whitey’ bowl here.” Curtis gave the bowl to the dog Whitey, and everyone was pleased by the aptness of the act.
“Hey, there's Stubblefield's dog, Spot!” one of other the boys cried his recognition. “Hey, Curt, that white-headed kid won the ‘Spot’ bowl. Hey, there he is now. See if you can trade him.”
“Hey, white-headed kid.” Curtis yelled, and he went and traded a “Fritz” bowl for a “Spot” bowl. He gave the bowl to the dog Spot.
“What other dogs?” he asked then, and he surveyed the bunch. “There's Pepper and Fat Pat and Donnicker. I'll go try to win bowls for them. I sure am good with those lopsided baseballs.”
The kids were back into the park through that free-swinging door; and Elroy Hunt, rushing giddily at the opening, was slapped silly by the nick-of-time closing of that door. That really finished Elroy.
In a hopeless mood, he rejoined the dogs. Three of them were happy with their bowls, and three of them were hopeful. But Elroy Hunt hims
elf was frustrated and bitter. The old complaint “It shouldn't happen to a dog” seemed to take special and sinister significance in his mind.
“Ah, there's another old regular,” a man coming out of the park said to Elroy. “I believe that you and I both make opening date at the amusement park every year. Have you been in yet?”
“No, I—I probably will go in after a while,” Elroy said. “I was just sitting here on the bench watching the people, and the dogs.”
“It's too bad the dogs aren't allowed in the park this year,” the man said. “But there's a new state law that bars dogs from amusement parks. Say, have you noticed the jazzy doors they have this year? Very scientific.”
“Ah, yes, I have noticed the doors,” Elroy said. That other elder lover of amusement parks went away then, and Elroy Hunt sat and wondered what was behind it all.
After a while the boy Curtis came out again with his friends and with two more dog bowls, a “Pepper” bowl and a “Pat” bowl.
“I knocked the bottles down for the ‘Pepper’ bowl,” Curtis said, “and I whipped a little kid and took the ‘Pat’ bowl away from him. They didn't have a ‘Fat Pat’ bowl. A plain ‘Pat’ howl will have to do, Fat Pat.”
Curtis gave the two bowls to the two dogs, Pepper and Fat Pat.
“Hey, there's Hearn's dog, Donnicker,” Curtis said then. “And they do have a ‘Donnicker’ bowl. I didn't think they'd have one with a dumb name like that, but they do. It wasn't out on prize row yet, but they'll put it out with the next bunch. Then I'll win it and bring it to you, Donnicker.”
And Curtis and his friends went back inside. Five of the dogs admired their pretty white and empty bowls.
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 214
