“The town is lively, the shows here are great, the people are witty and some of them are even friendly, and it has been the most entertaining summer of my life. Almost it distracts me. Mr. Rudisijl says that death-fears always diminish and disappear with the closer approach of death itself. How does he know? He has not been there for more than I have. We go, one at a time, bent over and deformed, through that door.
“Your hysterical and loving daughter, Gretchen the wretchen.”
Really Gretchen was a normal and well-balanced young woman who was full of the joy of life. Everybody has a bug or two biting'em. And Gretchen's bug may have been the most common of them all, that little old death bug so often disguised. She had an interesting job. She was a degreed doctor while still quite young. She was working at one of the clinics where the greatest breakthroughs ever will be made in just a day or two, or have already been made in fact, and need only a bit more testing before being put into effect. The greatest breakthrough ever was working on the animals, and it would surely work on the people. Why do the animals always get the best of everything first?
And those animals! What do you make of gallant animals?—for that is what they seemed to be. What do you make of guinea pigs and hamsters and rats that acquire a sudden air of responsibility, of fairness, of nobility, of thoughtfulness, of deep seriousness, and this accompanied by the removal of all their little frustrations? Well, what do you make of them? It was as if the treated animals were now all possessed of a secret, of a sad secret even, and were resolved to behave all the better for knowing that secret.
There was some argument about the new mental attitude of the laboratory animals that had received the clarifying specific, but nobody argued that they had not become better and more intricate animals with their infusions. Rita Malley (it was she who had made the little glass harps that the animals could play by gnawing on the ends of the glass reeds) was sure that the animals had become more intelligent, and in ways beyond that showed by their improved test scores.
“And the animals are making themselves as agreeable as possible,” Rita said that day. “I wonder why. They have all picked up the habit of bringing to me, and to you others, too, I'm sure, bright objects that they pick up in their recreation area. They bring these things and they present them as offerings. Really they do! And there's something else that you must have noticed: the appearance of art with them. We will have to devise equipment and means and opportunities to see just how deep this new artistic impulse goes in them. They play the harps and they sing individually and in chorus. They make pictures in their recreation areas out of pebbles and rocks and sticks. They begin to build stepped pyramids out of their play-toy blocks. I'm not sure, but I believe that some of their scurrying around, and standing still in queer attitudes, and mock fighting, and chittering in a variety of different voices, I believe that is a form of drama. They're putting on plays, that's what they're doing. Why?”
“For sheer joy, for intense joy,” Doctor Rudisijl said. “They are completely free of all fears and frustrations now, so they live in an intensity of joy.”
“You're wrong, Rudy,” Doctor Renier said thoughtfully. “There is a fear element in their intensity.”
“There is not,” Rudisijl said. “And I am never wrong.”
Well, the test animals had entered a period of blooming culture and endeavor, and they all partook thoroughly of it. Except one, except one more.
For Gretchen found one more dead animal, a hamster this time, just before noon that day. It seemed to have died of black-water fever, but that is seldom fatal in a hamster. Whatever it had died of, the body and head and face were contorted by a horror-fear that was really beyond accepting. It had been an insane and killing fear that had put an end to that hamster: the vestiges of black-water fever were only trifles.
But there should have been two dozen of the animals dying of natural causes during the period of the experiments, and there had only been these two. Gretchen destroyed it, and she went to the other people while hesitating as to whether she should tell them about it.
At high noon that day, there was a crash of glass in one of the little meeting rooms of the clinic, and the noonday devil stood in the midst of them holding two smoking long-pistols. The noonday devil was a young man named Lucius Flammus, sometimes called by the sudden people of his crowd the Angel of Death. He needn't have come crashing through that little glass screen. It was an ornamental thing only. He could have gone around it. And his long-pistols were not smoking from recent use. They were smoking from a piece of dry ice placed, for effect, in the barrel of each of them. But Flammus played the role of some torrid avenger well. He was a striking and menacing appearance there.
“I've come for the big stuff, the heavy stuff, the straight stuff,” this Flammus spat from behind his pistols.
“No, that's not what you've come for,” Rita Malley said, and she was white and shaking with fright. “Which one of us? Oh, which one of us?” she asked.
“You'll never get away with this, man,” Doctor Renier jibbered out of a terrified mouth.
“Why certainly he'll get away with it,” Doctor Rudisijl said easily. “We will give him several kilos of the big stuff, and then he will go. It happens every day. It happens at this clinic two or three times a year. Why are you all so terrified?”
Doctor Renier, Gretchen Schrik, and Rita Malley were indeed terrified, hysterically fearful, on the edge of shrieking. And so was Flammus the Death Angel himself. He was gloriously sick with his fear. Even the chorus of singing guinea pigs in the near distance had the welling hopefulness of their paean cut deeply into by a sharp uneasiness rising into a stark fear. And Renier, Gretchen, Rita, and Lucius Flammus were all in the grip of a shaking grey horror.
“What is all the nonsense?” Rudisijl was asking. “Here! Here's a kilo of it, man. Now be off!” And Rudisijl dropped a packet into the slung shoulder-bag that Flammus wore.
“He did not come for that, Rudy,” Renier spoke in shaking words. “He came to kill one of us. The big stuff is big to him, but killing is bigger. He is a pathological killer.”
“To kill one of you, yes, that's the big thing,” the insane and terror-shook Flammus hammered out through his chattering teeth. “Oh, aw, I—forgot. It's to kill two of you this time. I don't know why.”
Rudisijl laughed with sharp contempt. He looked at those four dread-filled faces with mordant humor. “What difference will it make?” he asked in a hard voice. “A little trashy event is about to take place. Why try to inflate it into something big? There are no big events.”
The fear and horror went out of Gretchen Schrik's face in a twinkling instant. A calmness and a patient serenity came over her instead. But Rudisijl's superior calm was shattered in the same moment. Shattered by the same moment, likely.
“No, no Gretchen!” he shouted. “She's better than we knew. Anybody but Gretchen!”
The death-fear had gone out of Gretchen in a second because she was going to die in another second. And death-calm is automatic with all persons.
Rudisijl struck one of the long-pistols from Flammus' hand and sent it clattering to the floor. Flammus shot Gretchen dead with his other pistol. And there was no slight trace of fear on her dead face.
Then Flammus shot Rudisijl who was grappling with him, and the doctor fell heavily to the floor. The death-terror had now gone out of the pathological Flammus as it had gone out of Gretchen. In a second it was replaced by a wooden look without fear, a look of indifferent acceptance, the closest thing to serenity that could happen to someone like Flammus. The death-fear had gone out of him in a second because he was going to die in another second. And nobody ever fears death when he finally comes to it.
Renier had taken Flammus' first pistol from the floor, and he killed him with it.
Doctor Rudisijl was in double-voiced shouting hysteria. In the lower tone he dribbled out fear-jerky explanations as his life flowed away from him in unstaunchable bleeding. And in his high tone, he screame
d, uncontrollably and horribly. Doctor Renier had given the specific to Doctor Rudisijl at Rudisijl's own dying request. Rudisijl said that he knew he was dying anyhow and he didn't want to go with his curiosity about the effect of the specific unsatisfied. Renier needled it directly into the two large brain-feeding arteries. The effect, for Rudisijl, was instant and devastating.
“The cloud was there for a reason,” the dying man moaned in his lower tone. “We shouldn't have allowed this synthetic and needled clarity to drive it away. I was wrong! What can one do who has been as wrong as I was?”
Then he broke three octaves upward. He shrilled, he howled on the high key, he broke his terrified voice and choked down in heavy death râles. And he moaned words again in his lower tone:
“The animals haven't entered their post-everything age yet. They still have the capacity of belief. They believe we are gods. When the natural cloud in them was driven away and they looked for the first time clearly on the fact of death, they felt that they could propitiate us into giving them ultimate death-salvation. They prayed to us with stepped pyramids and bright objects and harping and singing. That's what all their promising activity was really about. But I am a post-person, and there is no one I can pray to. The normal death-calm is prevented in me by my own clarifying specific. Oh, it's the outright terror that cannot be tolerated either in sanity or in insanity.”
Those were the last understandable words that Rudisijl ever spoke. But, broken voice and all, he was pretty noisy during those last several minutes of his life. The clarifying specific had overcome the mind-cloud that ordinarily insulates against the fear of death, at the instant of death anyhow. Rudisijl had no insulation and no protection now. It was a stark and towering fear that followed him even into insanity.
Ghost-fears and night-horrors were parts of it, hysterical fear of falling was a part of it, strangulation was a part and being buried alive was a part, form-changes and walking corpses and intolerable loneliness were parts of it, and the temptation-choice between extinction and hell, and the choking fog that is a pursuing person.
And the other parts of it — No, no, no! There are aspects of the clarified and cloud-cleared death-vision that cannot—
It was a contorted animal terror that took over what had once been Rudisijl's face. It was a many-tongued para-animal, howling and rowling, that took over what had once been his voice. His eyes distended from the intolerable vision and became bursting-full nodules of blood. And they burst open literally with a gory gushing.
Rudisijl died in grey and deformed terror.
What Big Tears The Dinosaur's
“There's a dinosaur hunt going on over in Arkansas,” said Doctor George Drakos. “Let's go over and get in on the fun. Maybe we can take in the races at Hot Springs while we're there.” “Oh, Arkansas, mother of monsters and myths!” Cris Benedetti intoned piously.
“Austro!” Barnaby Sheen called loudly. “Austro! Where is that blamed kid anyhow?”
“Sure, I'd rather go on a dinosaur hunt in Arkansas than on another rattlesnake hunt to O'Keene,” Cris said. “I'm certain that the dinosaur hunt will be safer. They really do have rattlesnakes at O'Keene.”
“Austro!” Barnaby called again. “Aw dinosaur droppings, that kid can hear a pin drop five miles away, so I know he can hear me. And if there's anything funny happening anywhere he's got something to do with it. Austro!”
“Two hundred people have seen it,” Harry O'Donovan was saying, “so something is there. They've got its footprints everywhere, and they've got a number of clear photographs of it. It's moving fifty miles a day, and it's moving this way. They're going to kill it. It's the tyrant saurus, and it's carnivorous, it could take a cow in a single bite. I'd hate to miss the biggest game hunt of all, but I'm afraid of it. I don't believe an elephant gun would have any effect on it. They'd better figure 90 mm guns at close range. It's a job for the army or the state national guard, not for sportsmen's guns. Ah, but sportsmen wouldn't be sportsmen if they dodged the big ones.”
Barnaby Sheen, Doctor George Drakos, Cris Benedetti, and Harry O'Donovan were my four friends who knew everything.
“Austro! Austro!” Barnaby was still bellowing. “I hate to disturb that boy at his daydreaming, but if there's a hundred foot dinosaur in Arkansas, then Austro's got something to do with it being there.”
“If my dog gets here on time we sure would like to go on that hunt,” Austro said. “We've been communicating about it while the dog's on his way, and he's just about as wild to go on the hunt as I am. That dog of mine isn't afraid of anything no matter how big it is. Carrock, he doesn't like monsters. I bet he'd bite the tail right off of that big whatever-it-is.”
“Austro, how long have you been sitting there?” Barnaby asked crossly, for Austro was in one of the reclining chairs right in that room.
“I've been sitting here an hour, I guess. Carrock.”
“Then why didn't you answer me?”
“Oh, you were bellowing at somebody away off there. It was a directional bellow, and it wasn't sent in my direction. I thought that it was some other Austro that you were calling.”
Austro was an Australopithecus boy from the Guna Slopes of Africa. He worked for Barnaby Sheen.
“Austro, what do you know about the dinosaur over in Arkansas?” Barnaby demanded.
“Just what people say the last two days, and what you say here. Carrock! You say you might go and hunt it. My dog and I, we want to go hunt it too. I hope my dog gets here in time for it.”
“You're sure you don't know anything else about the dinosaur in Arkansas, Austro?”
“I'm sure, Mr. Sheen. I never heard of a dinosaur till the last two days. I just barely heard of Arkansas before that.”
We didn't go on the dinosaur hunt that day. We didn't quite know where to go; the animal was moving almost too fast for the reports to keep up with him. At the ever increasing rate he was moving he'd be on us in a day or two, and our marked map of his movements showed that he was coming straight for us. And the reports that came in weren't at all crackpot reports. They had been straight and sharp reports from the beginning. It was as if all the sightings had been made by persons of sound intelligence and acute observation. There were three sketches and two photographs of it in the morning World. “This one is better than most textbook drawings,” George Drakos said. “In one respect only, the atrichos representation, is it suspiciously like the popular idea of a dino. None of these pictures gives us the live appearance, which we don't know. All of them give us the museum appearance, which we do know. This puzzles me extremely. But there isn't any doubt that he is the tyrannosaurus rex himself. He is almost the biggest of the dinosaurs. He is by a long ways the biggest of the flesh-eating dinos. Look at the teeth on him! He could crunch a big car or a small house with those teeth. He will go a hundred feet, counting the tail; and when he rears up on those big hind legs he can reach most of that hundred feet high.”
“Well, why can he, George?” Barnaby asked reasonably. “Why is he constructed to reach so high? Was there anything that he preyed on anywhere near a hundred feet high?”
“No, I suppose not, Barnaby,” Drakos said. (We had all become instant experts on dinos in the last several days, but Drakos had been an expert since boyhood.) “Maybe it's to pluck living meat out of the tops of trees, but most things that climb a hundred feet high would be too small for him to bother with. And he could shake anything out of any tree without reaching that high. He would have to eat plenty of large, ground-dwelling animals to get enough to fuel himself. No, I just don't know why he was built to reach so high.”
“When I was a boy I used to have a fantasy about the biggest possible animal,” Barnaby said, “and I still have that fancy or yearning. I want something so big that the next biggest animal in the world would have to hunt it in packs like wolves hunted buffalo, a dozen of them leaping on it to pull it down. I want one so big that tyrannosaurus rex would have to hunt it that way; I want an animal so big that he makes
all the others look like pygmies. And I'd give everything I own to be on a hunt for the biggest. Rex will do, and I'm avid to be after him. But really I want an even bigger one. That wouldn't be possible though, would it?”
“No, Barnaby, rex was about the limit,” Drakos said. “Look at the grotesque thickness of his haunches. Even so, if he were half again his weight he wouldn't be able to walk.”
“If my dog gets here tomorrow, can we go on the hunt?” Austro said. “You just don't know how avid my dog and I both are to hunt the big one.”
“We will hunt him, today or tomorrow or the next day, whenever we can locate him certainly,” Barnaby said. “Roy Mega is already finishing the gun that should bring him down. He's the biggest killer ever, and we have to hunt him; if it's him hunting us, then we're dead. Ah, if only we had something to harry him and make him stand to bay!”
“My dog will do that,” Austro said stoutly. “My dog isn't afraid of anything.”
“Austro, do you realize just how big the tyrant rex is?”
“It doesn't matter whether I realize it or not, Mr. Sheen. My dog is too dumb to realize it, and I won't tell him. He'll fight anything; and it's because he doesn't realize how big anything is.”
“Why are you so sure that your dog is coming, Austro?” Barnaby demanded. “I said a few months ago that we'd locate your dog and have him flown over here. You said no. You said the dog could find his own way here just as soon as you let him know you wanted him to come. But he can't find his own way here, Austro — it's halfway around the world.”
“That won't bother a good dog. He's on his way. He's almost here now. We communicate with each other; we can always feel where each other is.”
“How would he cross the ocean, Austro?”
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 224
