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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Who are you on today?” the Demogorgon mouthed around a glob of brains.

  “Yourself and Joe Snow,” Evangeline told him. “He's the second half of my daily double.”

  “There's always a delay about Joe,” the Demogorgon said. “His messages are not clear till a contrasting background builds up. And even after they are clear, they still are not very clear. Why doesn't everyone get on me alone? I'm the best of them all. I am pleased to see that you have had troubles today.”

  “Not bad ones. Or not good ones, as it would be from your viewpoint. You really are the devil, aren't you? It's just that the man I work for keeps telling me that I'm fired, and it's just that my husband died this morning from a foolish antic and I have no place to bury him. He has an acid condition, I think, and that's bad for some plants. People won't let you bury an acid man in their gardens.”

  “Aren't there any necrophagists in your town? They are likely breaking down the doors of your place right now to feed on him. They don't mind acidity.”

  “They're too particular lately though. They'd eat a few choice parts of him and then I'd be stuck with the rest. And the dogs are almost as bad. There's so many parts that they like to play with but won't eat up.”

  “Consider lilac bushes,” the really devil said. “Consider blueberry shrubs. I must go now. I have to oppress widows and orphans and defraud laborers. And there's several small children of both sexes that I must rape. It's an old pleasure that's coming back into favor. And take a careful took at my own latest message on the wall. It's rather excellent. Bad-bye, madam.”

  “You are outmoded. You know that,” Evangeline said. “And you're outrotted in so many ways.”

  “It's a case of the false coin driving out the true again,” the Demogorgon said.

  Evangeline went down to view the Great North Wall. She had to wear a man's hat to go down there: that was the rule. They had hats available at a little booth. Oh, there is always so much of the local prophetic-art in Atlanta and places like that. But some of it is good. Persons were at work with cameras and scanners and code breakers and calculators on many of the messages, squeezing the last drop of guidance out of them. The message of Joe Slow was still there on the prime wall. The background of it had darkened somewhat, but it was still too much white-on-white to be read. And Joe Snow himself was there.

  “How good are lilac bushes for an acid husband?” Evangeline asked him. “How good are blueberry shrubs?”

  “Rhubarb is the best,” Joe Snow said thickly. Joe was snowed.

  “Why didn't I think of rhubarb? When will the background of your message darken enough to make it readable?” Evangeline asked. “I've got to catch a fly-by home in an hour.”

  “Perhaps the message won't be readable today at all,” the thick-tongued Joe Snow mumbled. “Amateur artists are careless and they are writing over my message. I try to chase them away, but as the afternoon goes on I get sleepy and then there is no one to chase them off. But imprint my message on your mind and hold it there. The snow-colored message itself will not darken, but your mind will become gray and grimy by evening. The contrast will enable you to read it.”

  “Thank you,” Evangeline said. “Things are much easier when one avails herself of guidance.”

  Evangeline then had a liaison and affair with a gentleman who was also on Joe Snow and Demogorgon for the daily double. The liaison and affair took something more than half an hour. Then Evangeline caught a fly-by to go back home. And when she was back in her home city, she went immediately to Reuben's Rhubarb Patch. “I have an acid husband,” she told Reuben. “And, oh, your rhubarb does look as if it needs acid!”

  “That's my poke-weed patch,” Reuben said. “This is my rhubarb on the other side. Oh, bring him along and bury him, I guess. He can't hurt the soil much.” So the remains of Mudge Gilligan were quickly buried at Reuben's.

  “Oh, how right everything is going today!” Evangeline chortled. “And I thought that things would be bad. I guess that things almost always go right for guided persons. I may as well settle my other problem.” She went by the place where she worked.

  “I have decided to forgive you for your bad manners of today, Selkirk,” she told the man she worked for. “You are an unguided person, so I must make allowances. But you know how much trouble you'd get into firing even an unguided person. There's a dozen agencies who'd battle you to the last drop of your blood. And we guided persons are much more powerful.”

  “You don't work here any more, Evangeline. Get out!”

  “I am on a double these days. I am on the Demogorgon, and I am also on Joe Snow. This will not mean much to an unguided and unscientific person such as yourself, but I assure you that those are the two strongest lobbies of all the wall people. And remember, Selkirk, that this is payday. Shell, man, shell!”

  “Out, Evangeline, out!” Selkirk ordered, but he ordered with much less strength than usual. He was nine parts beat already, and with real pressure put on him he'd cave in.

  “I'll be back within the hour, Selkirk,” Evangeline said. “And I believe that a little bonus added to my pay would be a nice gesture. It's almost imperative that unguided persons make such nice gestures regularly.”

  Evangeline went down to the local Southside Sewage Plant wall, a fine expanse. The Turning Worm had just hit for the first time that day, and his had generated some excitement. The Turning Worm was not a prophet of multiple presence, and this was not a prime wall here, but the reproduction was good. And the reproduction of the Joe Snow message was good, but there was still not enough contrast to make it readable. Evangeline had that snow-message imprinted on her own mind, however, and her mind had now become gray and grimy enough to give contrast. And she read:

  Oh make it proud and make it sly!

  Be grassed, be snowed, be hemp-ty,

  and hold your head almighty high

  although your head be empty.

  Evangeline Gilligan walked proudly and with high head. She felt an everlasting compassion for all the unguided and unscienced people of the world, all those who were not prestressed, all who were not people of the walls. The guided persons had so much working for them! The wall washers would be around again in a few hours to white the walls for new messages and for another wonderful new day.

  Fall Of Pebble-Stones

  And heal my heart and bless my bones

  With nightly fall of pebble-stones.

  Ellenbogen, Rainy Morning Rimes.

  Bill Sorel stood at his nineteenth-floor window and shied pebbles and stones out over space to land in the sidewalk and street. It had rained the night before, and there were pebbles on that little ledge under his window after every rain. It's always fun to throw stones, even small stones, in the morning and see what they will hit.

  “Hey, that cop's going to come up and get you again, Bill Sorel,” Etta Mae Southern called from her window next door. “Where were you last night? I called every guy I know for a date and couldn't get anybody. You remember the other day the cop came all the way up to your place and told you the people in the street were getting crabby about getting hit on the head with pebbles.”

  “I have been awarded the big red plum, Etta Mae,” Sorel boasted to the early morning air and his neighbor. “I'm not a professor; I'm not a doctor: I'm just a hardworking and dirty-scheming popularizer and feature writer. But I have wrested the big red plum from the big boys in the Q. and A. scientific field.”

  “Well, don't throw the plum-pit down on someone's head when you're finished,” Etta Mae said. “You told that cop, ‘They're not very big pebbles,’ and he said, ‘No, I know they're not.’ You told him, ‘People just like to complain about things,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, I know they do. Now you just cut out hitting people on their heads with pebbles so they'll have one less thing to complain about.’ You said, ‘How did you know it was me?’ and he said, ‘Who else in this building would be a mad pebble-thrower?’ He sure is a nice cop but I bet he won't be so nice if he has to come al
l the way up here after you again.”

  “I've been awarded the big red plum,” Sorel repeated, and he continued to pick the pebbles out of that little ledge below his window and throw them down over the street. “I have been selected to compile, edit, write or whatever The Child's Big What and Why Book. This will pay me well. All I have to do is answer the scientific questions that children of all ages will ask, and do it in the style that the most doltish kid can understand and the smartest kid will not find patronizing. And really most of the work is done before I start.”

  “You hit a man with a pebble, Bill. He's looking around to see where it came from. He's on the edge of being real mad if he finds out someone hit him on purpose.”

  “I didn't,” Sorel said. “I discovered that I can't hit any of them on purpose, so I concentrate on hitting them by accident. I just throw them and let them find their own targets. But it wasn't a very big pebble and it didn't hurt him much. Now all I have to do is find out half an answer to one question and a full answer to another, and I'll be able to put the book together. Where do you think the pebbles come from, Etta Mae?”

  “My idea is that the rain makes them. Pebbles are made out of silicon mostly. And silicon and nitrogen are almost exactly alike. I used to go with a smart follow and he taught me things like that. When it lightens, the rain makes almost as much silicon water as nitrogen water, and it deposits it as pebbles. That's one way. Hey, do you know that rotten people never have pebbles around their houses? The other way is that little pieces of sand come together and the lightning-impregnated water fuses them into pebbles. It has to be one of those ways or there wouldn't always be pebbles after it rains. There's a third way that pebbles could happen, but it's a little bit doubty.”

  “Tell me the third way, Etta Mae. I have to consider lots of fringe things for the Big What and Why Book.”

  “It's that somebody doesn't want you to run out of pebbles because you have so much fun throwing them. So, whoever it is, he keeps making pebbles for you every time it rains. You know Mrs. Justex on the eighteenth floor. She always used to live in a house before she came here, and she had a little ledge outside her kitchen window where her milk would be left every morning. She took the apartment here and saw that there wasn't any ledge. ‘Have you got milk?’ she asked herself. So she nailed up a little ledge like the one you fixed for yourself there. And every morning there would be a quart of milk for her on the ledge. This went on for a week till she happened to think, ‘Who is my route man here? And how does he got up to the eighteenth floor on the outside of this building?’ She heard him then — it was early in the morning — and she went to see. She opened the window suddenly and knocked him off. He fell down and was killed on the sidewalk. But he faded away, and there wasn't anything left of him when she went down to look. After that, she had to start buying her milk in the store.”

  “No, Etta Mae, I know Mrs. Justex. That's just one of the stories she tells when she's wet-braining it in the Wastrels Club.”

  “It did seem kind of doubty. I don't believe she drinks milk at all. What is the half an answer and the whole answer that you have to find out before you can put the book together?”

  “The half one is, ‘Why does a baseball curve?’ I think I have that all whipped. I'm going to see a man today who is supposed to know the answer. And the whole answer I'm looking for is to the question, ‘How do the pebbles get under the eaves?’ ”

  “Oh, well, it's got to be one of the three ways I told you.”

  Bill Sorel stood there at the window and threw every pebble away. That is important. He didn't miss a one. Then he got a little broom and swept that ledge clear of everything.

  Bill Sorel should have had an easy job of putting that book together. He already knew all the answers except for that half answer and that full answer. He had once handled a lot of the questions in a little daily feature before it was canceled out on him. He could use that material again. And most of the other answers he had already filed in his head for ready use. Besides, there were already many such books that he could draw upon, besides the real reference books, and besides the palaver of his own keen-witted friends. He had had it down to three unanswered questions when he applied for a shot at the Big What and Why. And now he had it down to one and one-half.

  When Bill Sorel had come on the scene there had been three questions going around wearing blatantly false answers. These were: “What Makes it Thunder?” “What Makes a Baseball Curve?” “How Do the Pebbles Get Under the Eaves?” It is hard to believe the answers that had been given to these questions by scientists, some of them grown men.

  Listen to this one:

  “Thunder is produced when lightning heats the surrounding air and causes it to expand and send out waves. The expanding air is heard as thunder.”

  Well, what can you do when you come on something like that? Possibly it was better than answer that earlier generations gave, that the lighting burned up the air and the thunder was caused by new air rushing in to fill up the place.

  Well, Bill Sorel had found out what causes thunder. It was really a wonder that somebody else hadn't stumbled onto the right answer before he had. Read it. Read the amazingly evident answer in The Child's Big What and Why Book.

  Listen to this about a baseball. And it's been repeated again and again for more than a century.

  “The curving of a baseball is caused by denser air in the bottom of the baseball than on the top. Therefore the bottom spin will be more effective than the top spin, will have more traction on the air, and will cause the ball to curve. The ball will curve to the right if the pitcher throws it with a clockwise spin, and to the left if the spin is counterclockwise. Artillery shells behave according to the same rule.”

  Oh, great bloated bulls! What? A three-and-a-half inch difference in elevation would cause enough pressure difference between the top and the bottom of a baseball to make the thing curve up to eighteen inches in sixty-six feet? Where is your sense of proportion? Suppose the difference in elevation-pressure should be a hundred thousand times as much, the difference between low ground and the height of thirty thousand feet or so. Would the thrown ball then curve a hundred thousand times as much? Would it curve thirty miles off course in sixty-feet of travel? As Etta Mae would say, “It's kind of doubty.”

  But now Bill Sorel halfway knew what made a baseball curve. He had heard the explanation at second hand. Today he hoped to hear it first hand.

  And listen to this one about pebbles in the little rain worn ditches under the eaves of buildings:

  “It is sometimes asked why there are usually small white pebble-stones under the eaves-drops of buildings when there do not seem to be any other pebbles around anywhere. But the answer is that there are always pebbles around everywhere. They are mixed with the great bulk of the earth and are not noticed. But rain washes the finer and lighter earth particles away and leaves the pebbles behind. That is the reason that there seem to be so many pebbles under the eaves of buildings, particularly after a rain.”

  Aw, heel-flies! Bill Sorel didn't know the answer to that one, but he knew that such drivel wasn't the answer.

  Yeah, he had a big red plum. He wasn't going to let it get away. He was going to make sure of it. He got in his Red Ranger (a type of motor car) and drove off to find the man who could complete his half answer to the second question. And as he drove, he reviewed in his mind that momentous third question.

  Some pebbles are limestone, but most of them are quartz. And there are not always pebbles around. In much earth there are no pebbles at all. In most earth, the true pebbles will make up less than one part in fifty thousand. Ah, but you put up a building or house and move into it, and after the very first rain there is a thick accumulation of pebbles in its eaves-drops. Has fifty thousand times their amount of earth been washed away to reveal them?

  Bill Sorel had made a nuisance of himself around building projects in checking out the pebble situation. In one place he had taken a cubic yard of dirt, haul
ed it aside, and gone over it all with a toothbrush and sieve. And he had not found any pebbles at all. The only things too big to go through the sieve were organic things, roots, hickory nut hulls, twigs, pieces of bark and pieces of worms. There were not any natural pebbles at all. He kept track of all artificial pebbles (pieces of mortar, cinder block fragments, bits of limestone gravel and of flint chat). He would always know them from genuine pebbles, and he already know that they would not accumulate under eaves.

  He continued his surveillance as the seven houses on this particular tract were raised, were finished, were first rained upon. He examined them. The rain had made little under-the-eaves ditches around all the houses, but there were no pebbles in those ditches. Something was missing from the formula. The premonition of what it might be excited Bill Sorel and almost scared him.

  People moved into one of the houses, and Sorel waited impatiently for it to rain. But it didn't rain for a whole week. People moved into a second of the houses, and that night it rained. Sorel was around with a flashlight at dismal, drenching dawn (it was partly for such devoted labor as this that Sorel had won the big red plum), and he discovered that the two inhabited houses now had pebbles in their eaves-drop runners, and that the five uninhabited houses had none.

  He followed it up. As soon as people moved into another house and there was rain thereafter, so soon was there a full complement of pebbles around that house.

  You do not believe this? Pick out a housing development in your own region, and make a nuisance of yourself by observing it closely. You will be convinced, unless you are of such mindset as defies conviction.