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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Small loss if you did. Gah! What a head!” Crispin shouted.

  And yet they were still in accord a little bit. People truly in love will always be a little bit in accord. There was something valiant about their response. Both of them realized at the same time what to do with the ritual objects. Each one of them put one mitten on his end of the 3.05 meter pole and the other mitten on his hand to hold it. They rigged the length of wire between the two tin cans and made a kids telephone. Crispin and Sharon had been children together and had talked on tin-can phones before. They still cared for each other slightly, but oh how they both did stink! Was there any possible way that the 3.05 meter pole would be long enough? They should have put 3.05 kilometers between each other.

  But when they talked to each other on the tin-can telephones much of the ugly, sound-clashing horror had gone out of their voices. Here was a sound filter that nobody knew about except themselves. Their words had a rusty sound, but they were not otherwise offensive. Here was something that all the Person-Projector companies had overlooked. If they had known about it they would have done a job on tin cans also, to make any sound coming through them repellent.

  The two Babcocks headed into a stiff wind that blew the smell off them pretty well. Why, this would be almost bearable, this life together-apart! Only ten feet apart, and they could breathe. They were hooded and shrouded, of course, and could never actually see each other again, but remembered appearances came to them that were a little less horrible than they had been used to in more recent times. Each pressed his end of the pole with mittened hand, and it was almost like holding hands again.

  They even became a little bit jocular in their rusty-voiced banter back and forth.

  “Ship to shore, ship to shore!”

  “My wife is a rot-headed, smelly bore,” Crispin bawled into his tin can, and they both laughed. ‘Ship to shore’ and ‘shore to ship’ had been their tin-can telephone code when they were children.

  “Shore to ship! Shore to ship!”

  “With his wobbly brains and his wobbly lip,” Sharon laughed a rusty jeer.

  Oh, somehow things would still be tolerable between them, despite the fact that they were the smelliest and lowest outcasts in the land! Even the birds veered away from them in the air. But if they kept a firm grip on the pole they could keep from flying apart. If the strong breeze held forever (they needed that to keep their smell from building to critical intensity), if they didn't begin to think about the situation again, if there was not another assault to drive them finally into sick insanity, if—

  There was another assault, the fourth heavy wave of killing stench and hatred. And both fell to the ground. This would be the death of them, and the joy of many millions of people who had picked up the tang and rhythm of the drama and disintegration.

  But the last problem of Crispin and Sharon was holding off that ultimate hatred. Could they delay the mortal hatred for each other until merciful death should have taken them?

  No, of course they couldn't delay it. It was the mortal hatred that killed them. The Hand with One Hundred Fingers will not be cheated by any last minute tricks.

  Fog In My Throat

  I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

  —Eliot, The Waste Land

  Fear death? — to feel the fog in my throat,

  The mist in my face.

  —Browning, Prospice

  “I have never known a person who feared death when he finally came to it,” Cornelius Rudisijl said. This Rudy was a vital old man of overflowing facilities. By the year count he shouldn't have been too far from death, or at least from the thought of it: but it would be hard to imagine him afraid of that terminator or of anything else.

  “I'm afraid of death,” said Gretchen Schrik with a shudder. “There's no denying it. It's my strongest obsession, this fear.”

  “And you're twenty years old,” Rudisijl said, “and probably seventy years away from death. You will not be afraid of it when it comes. Nobody ever is. That's the mystery of it.”

  The strong, sad, and sonorous ‘Song of Job’ was heard in the near distance. Job was one of the clinic rats who had received a certain specific, but Job had been an accident-prone rat before that. Now he played his strange and agonizing music on the glass harp and he also raised his voice in his despairful song.

  “What if I should die suddenly?” Gretchen shivered. “What if I should die today? Even the talk of it scares me.”

  “Well, what if death does come to you today?” Rudisijl asked. “I tell you that you will not be afraid of it when it comes.”

  Jubilee and Halleiluiah, two other clinic rats who had received the specific, were raising their voices and their instruments in songs somewhat more hopeful than the ‘Song of Job’, but nevertheless they were very intricate songs, for rats at least.

  “Gretchen is afraid of death,” Rita Malley said in friendly mockery. “And my own consultant tells me that I'm afraid of life.”

  Three and a half miles away, across town, another comparatively young person was worrying about death. He also was near twenty years of age and had a normal expectancy of another seventy years of life. A normal expectancy, but the life that he lived wasn't normal. An actuary wouldn't have given him seventy more years: probably not five years unless he changed his ways. The young man's name was Lucius Flammus and he was lean and mean. He was a legend among the young and sudden and passioned people. He was their duke; he was their flame. Sometimes they called him the Angel of Death. He was involved with death often and he feared it pathologically. This Flammus was going over his long handguns with care and intensity. The guns were like other souls to him and he would not neglect them. He had the feel of tall excitement whenever he touched them.

  “I will kill a man today,” Flammus said, and this statement of his always marked a high pleasure-pain in anticipation. “And he will die in terror, in total terror. This is the special part, the part that hasn't happened before. Ah, this will be the greatest one ever! Or the first of my great ones.”

  Then Flammus' premonition and excitement clarified itself a little bit.

  “There is more to it,” he barked in sharp excitement. “There is bonus after bonus. I will kill a young woman today for an even sharper scene. Aw, but she will not die in terror. I wonder why she won't.”

  Flammus sometimes said that he wasn't a killer by choice. But sometimes he deceived himself and sometimes he lied. And also these things happened regularly in his trade, and he took what satisfaction he could from them. His satisfaction from killing, however, was always encased in a separate horror and fear of his own:

  “What if I also am killed today?”

  “I will tell you something else,” Dr. Cornelius Rudisijl was saying back at the Advanced Experimental Clinic. “In the seventy years that I have been in the flesh and blood trade, I have seen one hundred thousand people die, or seen them shortly after death. One third of them had died violently, many of them cut off in their primes or youths or even childhoods. I have seen none of them who was afraid of death at the very last minute, and I have never seen even a hint of fear or horror or any dead face. “I have seen persons who were drowned, who were burned to death, who were done in by knife torture in internecine squabbles, who have died in quicksand over their heads. I have seen three who were sliced in half by sharks. I have seen the face of a man who was pinned down by one rockfall and then killed by a second rockfall which he had to see coming down on him. I have seen the faces of steel-workers who fell to their deaths from high buildings and high bridges and who lived the long conscious seconds during their falls. I have seen the faces of sky-guys and stunters whose parachutes failed to open. I have seen the face of a man caught and eaten, from the feet up, by a crocodile. I have seen many thousands of persons die in pain, and others die without the distraction of pain; and none of them died in fear. I have had persons tell me, some time before their deaths, that they were hysterical with the fear of dying. And yet they died serene. Ev
erybody dies serene. That's a final blessing that makes up for a lot.”

  “I simply do not believe that, Rudy,” said Fred Renier who was another of the high doctors at the clinic. “I've surely seen half as many people dying and dead as you have. I cannot, right now, remember one who died in outright terror, but others have seen terror deaths, and the cameras record many of them. I remember one prize-winning photograph of the year past. It still haunts me sometimes. There was—”

  “There have been many such photographs,” Rudisijl said, “and there is only one thing wrong with them. All such pictures were taken too soon. None of them was taken at the absolute moment of death. There was one case a few months back, and it may be the case that you refer to, of a jumping suicide. The picture was taken just as he cleared his ledge on his downward leap to the predictable and stereotyped ‘Jump! Jump! Jump!’ shouts of the happy people below. Yes, the face, as shown in that prize-winning photograph taken by that journalistic photographer as he crept along the ledge to get the best shot, that face did show absolute horror and bottomless fear. But I saw the shattered man after he was laid out. His head and face were broken, as was the rest of him, but the expression on his face was whole. Believe me, it was the expression of serenity. A change had come over that man during his four hundred foot plunge, a beneficent change.”

  Now there was heard the rhythmic chorus of guinea pigs singing. The guineas are normally almost soundless. They do not sing at all in the ordinary course of things, and who ever heard of them singing in chorus? But these guinea pigs had received the specific.

  “Believe me, I wouldn't hit the street with a serene expression after such a leap,” said Rita Malley who was a young lady doctor there. “I fear death as much as Gretchen does, and I bet I can scream louder. There would have been screaming horror on my face.”

  “No, there would not,” Rudisijl insisted. “Sometimes the period seems a little short for what must be a chemical reaction to take place, but it does take place no matter how short the time. I've known it to be within fractions of a second. And what we are working on here at the clinic is something akin to this serenity-in-death reaction. We have come up with the serenity-in-everything specific. Whether it will be required to work in fractions of a second I don't know, but that is possible. We are looking for the specific against all anxiety, against all worry, against all unhappiness, against all frustration. I said long ago that if the specific for all these things was in the zoochemical field that we would find it. Now the three of you confirm it to me that we probably have found the specific.”

  “Oh happy rats!” Gretchen Schrik cried. “By all our happy creatures, I'm sure that we've found it.”

  It really seemed as if they had found the specific. They had created new races of happy rats, of outright delightful rats, of responsible rats, of intelligent rats.

  “And of noble rats,” Gretchen said, “and of thoughtful rats. Yes, I mean it, thoughtful rats, devoted rats, rats that are aware of something very great. These are rats that will not waste their time with small worries.”

  And such races of guinea pigs also had been brought along, and promising races of several other creatures.

  The specific that was being used on these creatures had the simplicity and symmetry of concept that all great specifics possess. It was an electrostatic-condition parahormone that swam in globules of neuroendocrine substance. It was needled into the two main arteries leading into the brain. It worked quickly. It made happy and superior creatures, and it kept them superior.

  With one exception, that only Gretchen knew about. She discovered a specific-treated rat that had died, not from anything connected with the specific, but from simple rat scours. The scours is a rapid wasting disease but it is not painful. And yet the dead rat was contorted and deformed with a look of total horror. Gretchen destroyed the beastie without saying anything to anyone. It was too akin to her in its dying fear. She thought that perhaps she was mistaken, that such an expression in a rat hadn't the same meaning as such an expression in a person. But Gretchen had close feeling for the rats, and deep down she knew that it had died in real horror.

  But that was the only rat that died during the weeks of the experiments with the various forms of the specific. All the other animals were not only healthy but they seemed to be fastidiously healthy. It was almost as if they took the greatest care to avoid sickness and death, to avoid any discomforts that might lead to them.

  “This will be one of the greatest of all advances,” Rudisijl said. “I believe that it is mental clarity that the infusions give to the rats. I believe that it is total freedom from superstition. Yes, of course rats are normally subject to superstition. You aren't familiar with Richard's Rattenaberglaube und Nagetier-psychologie? I believe that a cloud, of unknown function, had entered all minds, animal and human. I believe that our specific will shatter our cloud.”

  “Maybe there is good reason for the cloud,” Gretchen said. “Maybe the obstruction was put there for good cause, and its removal will be dangerous.”

  “No. There cannot be good reason for such a mind-cloud, for such an obstruction. It is a deception and a darkening, however it happened. Our specific will, among so many other things, bring an end to such deceptions and concealments. It will bring the beginning of total clarity.”

  “Maybe it is possible for clarity to be too total,” Gretchen said.

  “I don't think so,” Rudisijl told them. “What are you trying to say, Gretchen? Have your own anxieties and terrors not faded, Gretchen? I believe they have faded just from your observing the removal of so many frustrations and worries in the creatures.”

  “Yes, my own anxieties and terrors have faded, to a great extent,” Gretchen admitted. “But I'm not at all sure that final clarity is what I want. I believe that what I want is to be rescued from that final clarity.”

  Well, Gretchen's anxieties had faded, but they had a long way to fade. Only a month before this she had written a panic-stricken letter to her mother:

  “—it is no good dodging it, mama; it is no good running away from it. It will be with me for as long as there is a me. And then this thing (the fear) will still be here when I am gone. It is an independent entity and it does not need a person to attach to. The dreadful fear, the choking fear is itself a being.

  “It would be no good me coming home again. Traps are set for me there. I have fled from this terror all my life, and it is waiting for me in a ravening form in every place that I have ever fled. I will not outgrow this. I do not believe that anybody is free from this fear. I don't know why we don't all die from the fear of death. Really, I believe that it is what we all die from.

  “Oh, there are things to do. And there are lives to be lived, as you say. I know those things and I do those things. I am the most occupied person ever known. But the main thing is always there waiting. Do not any others fear it as much as I do? My psychologist says that he doesn't know about all the others, but he fears it as much as I do. He is a very honest man. And the fear of death is all the horrors rolled into one.

  “Ghost-fears and night-horrors are part of it, weak surmises of what may be waiting for us when the lights finally go out. But I am pretty sure that the reality, or the terrible screaming unreality, will be worse than any of our surmises.

  “Falling-horror dreams are parts of our death-fear. The hysterical fear of falling does not reside in the threat of crashing at the bottom of the fall: rather it is the dread of not coming to a bottom, ever.

  “Experiences of choking, strangulation, smothering, and drowning are parts of it. It is the suffocating fog in the throat of which the poet wrote. It is the rape of the breath that is the life.

  “Buried-alive terrors are part of it. We will be buried, or we will be burned or otherwise destroyed; but do we hope to be dead forever or to be alive again in our burial?

  “Form-change horror is part of the death-fear. This is the frightfulness of common persons and creatures turning into monsters and snakes and
ravening animals. It is the dread of what we may see when our temporary flesh-masks are gone. And yet all these are the more pleasant of the fearful alternatives: and the least pleasant alternative is to change into nothing.

  “Walking corpses make up one precinct of the personal and universal death-horror dream. But even walking corpses are the best of the several choices. And the worst of them is the corpse, that will not walk again, not in a million aeons.

  “The deprivation of support, especially in the case of small children, the being left alone, is an intrinsic part of it. It is the case of being left alone forever, of going to a place where there are no other places or people, where there have never been others. Death is the longest of all lonelinesses and there is no way that it can be tolerated either in sanity or in madness. It is too extreme to be borne by humans. And is extinction a way of bearing it?

  “But extinction is the most horrible thing possible, to my mind. And it appears that it is the most likely of the sequences. Were I given a choice between extinction and hell, and I am not sure that we are not all given that perpetual standing choice as a part of our eternal torture, I would choose hell again and again and again. And I do mean the screaming-pain hell a billion times magnified and continuing for the infinite exponent of forever.

  “Ah well, I'm sorry to have this little nervous flare-up. It will pass, of course. It always does. And then it will come back seven times more fierce than it ever was before. It always does. You used to say that I was too serious a child. Well, this is what I have always been serious about. What else in life, besides death, is there to be serious about?

  “Everything else going well. Doctor Fred Renier likes me, I think. I can probably land him if I want him. He is rich and successful and a great doctor and a fine man. And he is an ultimate fire-worm like all the rest of us and he will die the wormy death. Why, whenever I begin to like a man, do I see him in his death and corruption?