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

by R. A. Lafferty

  2

  Captain Robinson was sad. He had become infested with small guests and had had to shave all the hair off his body. The prickling, now in its second day, had become intolerable. And he had one other worry. “Who'm I going to send?” he barked at T/3 Carp who was acting First Sergeant on loan to headquarters. “Lively made the last three. I can't send him all the time. Who'm I going to send?”

  “There's only one left. You'll have to send Buttercup.”

  “Buttercup! He couldn't lead a detail of girl scouts from here to the mess tent.”

  “I doubt if he could, but this will only be a routine patrol. It shouldn't take more than twenty men to do it, and finish it in twenty-four or thirty hours. You could send Rand and Mueller along as sergeant and corporal, and they can take care of anything. We have a pretty rough bunch in our battery, so there's not much to worry about.”

  “The rough bunch is what I'm worrying about. It's like sending a little boy into a wolf den. But I can't be holding an umbrella over him forever. You tell him, and then you brief him. They'd better leave about midnight, and they can lay up close before dawn and operate by daylight.”

  “All right. I wouldn't worry. Lieutenant Lively said that on the last patrol the Hard Heads weren't even there. There was just a bunch of middle-aged ribbon-clerks from Tokyo or somewhere.”

  “That also is what I'm worrying about. The Hard Heads are supposed to be there. We have to know where they are, or some midnight they will be in the middle of us here.”

  The battery was available for general guard duty, dock detail, and perimeter duty. The perimeter ran up and along the crests, about ten miles back from the beach. And what Japanese were behind it were mostly content to stay behind it. But not entirely. They did make sorties, and they had to be kept track of. There was little daily contact between the two forces along the perimeter itself. The only trouble was that the two forces were not in agreement as to where the perimeter was supposed to be. There was constant infiltration, the nuisance of telephone lines being tapped or cut, and the chilly feeling that comes when all phones ring dead and the radio is out. The radio is always out.

  So there were probing patrols, exploratory patrols, anticipatory patrols, just plain nuisance patrols in the middle of the night. The battery had to supply a patrol every third day, to last approximately half that interval.

  They did well to travel at night. The terrible heat went down with the sun, and movement was bearable. They moved through the dark, covering the miles as well as they could through the tangles that were always at three levels.

  “There is a reason for this,” said Lieutenant Littlejohn to Sergeant Rand. “There is a symbiosis of three factors all conspiring to bar our way: the ground grasses which are tendriled rather than twisted, the parasitic vines, and the free-standing boscage. Each offers its obstacle, and combined they make slow going…”

  “That part's all right,” said Rand, “but now we're coming into new country for us. Here we aren't sure of our topography.”

  “Oh, but I have been here often. I know the topography, and especially I know the botany.”

  “This far through the draw? But this was considered as beyond the perimeter till the last forty-eight hours. Well, if you can make it, then all of us can make it.”

  There are men who do not know where it begins. But they would not be too successful here. There is always a definite point of starting. A man should be able to hear the whistle that begins the game, or the bell that starts the round. He should know when he is walking on the sand of an arena and no longer on a street. They were on an arena now, and most of them knew when they had entered it. It was about two-thirty in the morning. It would be hard to define the change, but it was definite, this point where the area of conflict began.

  “There's a glow up front,” said Corporal Mueller. “Shall I scout it?”

  “No need,” said the lieutenant. “It's only fox fire, phosphorescent glow from rotting wood.”

  “It may, and it may not be. I've been in the jungle a lot at night. I say it could be anything.”

  “Too green. Not an artificial light at all. Simply fox fire.”

  “Lieutenant, it could be a smoked-up carbide lantern. They show green. It could be an electric spot with a lurcher's shield on it to make it a dark lantern. It could be a spot hung with netting, or even with one of their green fatigue jackets.”

  Corporal Mueller scouted it. Mueller walked like a bear, plantigrade, and he rolled like a boat. But he could move more quickly than any other man of them, large or small; and he could get to places that none of the rest could reach. A bear can go where even a puma cannot. He will grumble and talk to himself and make a fuss over it, as a puma would disdain to do. But he will go there and back.

  But it was only fox fire, half an acre of it, a cup-shaped swamp of early submerged rotting wood glowing in the jungles.

  They lay up about two hours before daylight. There were eighteen of them: Lieutenant Littlejohn, Sergeant Rand, Corporals Mueller and Meadows. PFCs Hebert, Brooks, Pop Parker, Redwolf, Martin, and Gagnon; and privates Bellar, Girones, Muños, Villareal, Cross, Jennings, Crawford, and Crandall. They slept for two hours before daylight, with Meadows, Redwolf, and Bellar as guards. Then they roused, had J rations, and moved along their route. There is little twilight in the tropics. It is dark, and then within fifteen minutes it is broad daylight. And the sun is the enemy.

  They went in three groups of six men each. Lieutenant Littlejohn took one with Corporal Meadows as his assistant. Corporal Mueller took one. And Sergeant Rand took one. Every two or three hours they would rendezvous and rest for half an hour.

  “There is something moving up that ravine,” said Sergeant Rand at one of their rendezvous points, “less than a mile from here. The birds are rising above someone.”

  “It's likely wild pigs,” said Mueller.

  “Birds do not rise for pigs,” said Rand. “They rise for some of the large predatory animals, of which there are none on Guinea. They rise from birds of other factions. And they rise from a man or men. These are rising from men below them. Who can spot one?”

  “Heavens,” said Lieutenant Littlejohn. “Give me the field glasses. I believe I see him.”

  “Heavens,” said Meadows very softly to himself. But he gave the field glasses to Lieutenant Littlejohn.

  “Do you see them?” asked Rand.

  “One, yes. I see him clearly. And he is a beauty.”

  Meadows and Mueller looked at each other in disgust.

  “Well, can you tell what he is?” asked Sergeant Rand. “Let me look. It's important.”

  “Of course it's important,” said the lieutenant. “It will shake ornithology to its roots.”

  “It will what?” asked Rand. The day had become blindingly hot. There is an insanity about very hot days. “Tell us at once whether he is Japanese, Melanesian, or Malay. Or let one of us look. We can tell in an instant.”

  “Japanese or Melanesian? What an odd term of reference! It almost seems that we are not talking about the same thing. But he is a new species entirely. I had heard the ‘caw’ before, and had found one feather. And now I have seen him himself.”

  Sergeant Rand took the field glasses roughly away from the Lieutenant.

  “It's too late,” said Corporal Meadows. “The man has already gone over the crest. And we still don't know what he was. But he has seen us.”

  “Lieutenant,” said Rand, “will you please tell us just what you were looking it?”

  “The crow. A completely new species. Do you realize what this means?”

  “Yes, Lieutenant,” said Rand wearily. “It will shake orninthology to its roots. And when you have shaken it, what will you have? The man! The man, Lieutenant, was he Japanese, Malay, or Melanesian?”

  “Man? Was there a man there? Probably a patrolman of our counterparts, or a straggler of some description. But the crow! A completely new species!”

  “Judas Priest!” said Meadows.
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  Rand, Meadows, and Mueller talked a little apart from the lieutenant and from the men. It was very hot now, and all the heat was not from the sun.

  “What we do with the little joker if we get in a jam?” asked Meadows.

  “I will be responsible,” said Rand. “If it reaches a point of necessity, I will do whatever has to be done. You are with me if that happens?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then the men will be with me also. I have the scent of something. I believe that the Hard Heads are back. It's been too quiet today. There is nowhere so quiet as the mouth of a trap. I feel that there is more than one pair of eyeballs watching us. See if you can spot them.”

  “Lieutenant,” said Sergeant Rand a little later, “we will not split up this time. We will go all eighteen together.” “You are giving the orders now?” asked the Lieutenant with what was supposed to be ice in his voice. But the ice had a certain rattle and tinkle to it.

  “I seem to be,” said Rand. “Someone has to give orders. We are under surveillance. We will travel together for greater security if we are caught in the bag.”

  “Suppose that I countermand your order?”

  “Would you give an opposite order, knowing it to be foolish, just to assert your authority?”

  “No. No. The order is correct. It is just that I should have given it. But I will not give the order to scatter again.”

  The lieutenant didn't know what was wrong, but he knew that he had lost the argument. He should have been giving the orders and giving the right orders. And instead, he had been daydreaming and giving no orders at all.

  But his resolve, and he made one, didn't last long. At the next check he turned up missing, and Corporal Meadows had to go back for him. Meadows found Littlejohn sitting on a rock and sketching plants like a small boy. He caught him by a handful of jacket and jerked him to his feet.

  “That's enough,” said Lieutenant Littlejohn. “I am a commissioned officer. Lower your hand or you will be sorry for it.”

  Corporal Meadows was breathing hard. It was a hot day and this perversity wore him thin. With the heat he couldn't strive, and this thing here was almost as intangible.

  “If you were only a man, I could hit you. But I don't know what you are. I can't hit you.”

  “Whether I am or not we may find out today,” said the lieutenant. “I half wish you had tried it. It may be that I would have surprised you.”

  “Nothing you could do would surprise me now. But you couldn't surprise me in that way. I have fifty pounds on you, and I have the name of being rough.”

  “Several of you have the name for it,” said the Lieutenant.

  “And several of us are,” said Meadows. They caught up with the others.”

  “Lieutenant,” said Sergeant Rand in a low but savage voice. “You will start to grow up right now. You are a drag on us. I cannot have you acting like a four year old.”

  “You are right,” said Littlejohn, “and it's an ugly habit of yours. But it may be that some others here could stand a little growing up.”

  “You could even help a little,” said Corporal Mueller. “We believe that we are in the middle of a trap and that any move may release the trigger. But we have to spot them, the outline of them, before we cut loose. We haven't really come on a thing, only the smell of a trap.”

  “Oh,” said the lieutenant. He remembered something but he didn't remember it clearly enough. “I did see a foreign movement several times, but I saw it with only a part of my mind. I was otherwise preoccupied.”

  “Then for God's sake, see it again! Spot them!”

  “Did you ever know anyone to act like that?” Meadows asked Rand a little later. “Yes, many. You on your first patrol, for one, Meadows. You were pretty scatterbrained. I may have been so on mine.”

  3

  They sank down in a clump on the edge of a clearing and remained very quiet for a while. But there was a nightmare aspect about the site as though the brush and thickets were alive and watching them. Ahead was a flat green-purple meadow.

  “I'd like to forget it all,” said Rand. “I'd lie down there in the meadow and just sleep. But it's probably full of thorns.”

  “No. No,” said the Lieutenant. “How could there be thorns? Whoever heard of Marsilia with thorns? That is the largest area of Marsilia Vogelkopiensis that I have ever seen. The inconvenience of lying down there would not be thorns.”

  “Lieutenant,” said Corporal Meadows, “I warned you to forget this science and nature jazz till we're off patrol. Don't make us do anything that we'll regret.”

  “But don't you realize what it is? A fair sized field of quite rare Marsilia. And the feature of this Marsilia is that its Sporophyte is not truly aquatic.”

  “Do tell,” said Meadows.

  “Instead, the spore apparently moves by slow drift through a morasmal aggregate.”

  “Heavens,” said Meadows.

  There comes a time in these afternoons when no one is at his best. The breeze dies entirely, and the temperature here in these dead draws will go past a hundred and twenty. There are blind pockets in the air, and a bird will fly in and will not fly out. The atmosphere piles up in shimmering layers that confuse the vision and falsify distance, and the hills seem to roll and rise like green waves. The eyes burn and blur, and there is an angry threat in every tree.

  “I have the sudden feeling,” said the Lieutenant, “of a groundbird who has not been paying attention, who looks up and sees the bullsnake poised for the swallow.”

  “Am I the snake?” asked Meadows.

  “You? No. How could you be the snake? This snake is a hundred yards long and we're right in the middle of his coils. It is a centicephalon, a hundred-headed snake. It prickles my hair a little.”

  The brush and the thickets were in fact alive and watching them. An ambush has a hundred eyes, and to be found in the middle of one calls up a world of anger and frustration and sudden fear. Watch out for the man who says he doesn't scare. He will scare when he sees the eyes of an ambush.

  “This chills me too,” said Corporal Mueller. “Were we all blind at once? There is one of them. Redwolf, see that form behind the largest kapok tree in that group. He is yours when we start blazing. And there is another. They're all along the far edge of the clearing and are filling in. And they're edging around. But whatever we do, don't let's panic. How about it, Rand? Shall we slip out before it's sprung?”

  “Yes. Slip out. Crawl out. Just plain break out. Get out somehow. But the worst advice that a man in danger can ever follow is not to panic. It is even thought of as somehow noble not to panic. But an old captain used to tell me that there was a proper time for everything, including panic. A rabbit knows that. A deer knows it, and he's not even very smart. Why does a man try to forget it? This is the time for a little judicious panic. Go as quietly as we can, at first, fellows, right back the way we came, and then down the first draw to the right. Crawl like snakes, men, and then run like horses. We will rendezvous at Blind Creek Point four miles down. Most of us should make it. And we have found out what we came to find out. The Hard Heads are back, and in number. Now move, men.”

  “Just a minute,” said an unfamiliar voice. “I will give the orders here.” Or was it a familiar voice with an unfamiliar ring to it?

  “Who said that?”

  “I said that. And I will be obeyed. Are you not accustomed to taking orders from an officer?” asked Lieutenant Littlejohn.

  “The Lieutenant will be obeyed,” said Sergeant Rand. “And what are the Lieutenant's orders on this?”

  “First we will trigger off the action with an apparently casual shot. And then we will retreat, but not back the way we came. We will run very low down this gully here on the edge of the Marsilia complex. And we will gather in a pocket on the other end. There appears to be very good cover there. And three men, Mueller, Redwolf, and Cross, will hold this end till we are all down. It's narrow and crested here, and three men can hold
it for a while. And, once we are in the pocket, they will have to come to us, and singly, or a few at a time. The gully is narrow. And it is bound to have a back door.”

  “But, Lieutenant, that's two hundred yards. And it's only crawl cover. They'll shoot us like turkeys as we go down. And what's the use of holding one end of the gully when the entire length of it would be open to them?”

  “But how would it be open to them? How would they get at it?”

  “Are you crazy, Lieutenant? They'd cross that clearing in fifteen seconds and have us head on.”

  “The clearing? But that's the Marsilia. They surely wouldn't venture to cross that.”

  “Lieutenant, you're in a child's world. I'm sure the Hard Heads will not respect the Marsilia, as you call it.”

  “Then this is better than I hoped,” said the Lieutenant. “If you don't understand, then maybe they won't either. I read a warning once about over-estimating an enemy. It makes for timidity. Now, if you are ready, men, I will give the order.”

  “How about it, Rand?” asked Meadows. “We are looking to you.”

  “Do you know what you're doing, Lieutenant Littlejohn?” Rand asked.

  “Yes, I know what I'm doing.”

  “The Lieutenant will be obeyed,” said Sergeant Rand.

  “I have just looked into my coffin,” said Pop Parker. “I hadn't particularly wanted a dirt one, but it looks as though I will get it.” “The beauty of the dirt ones is that they will fit anyone,” said Pvt. Crawford. “And there are always enough to go around. But we will soon fill up eighteen.”

  “I only knew one man who seriously claimed to be afraid of nothing,” said Sergeant Rand. “But the peculiar thing is that he was afraid to die when the time came. He's the only one I ever remember who was afraid to die when it came down to it. A man usually isn't afraid of death when it comes really near. But he's embarrassed over it. It's an awkward and unaccountable thing. And it cannot meet your eye when it comes. It's a shuffling skulker. But it's no great thing to die. Anyone can do it. The defeating thing is to have to do it needlessly.”