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

by R. A. Lafferty

  Austro made several other sales to people who came into the Mokka-Chokka stand. This was extra income that would be needed to carry the Big Star Detective Agency over a slack period. Austro and his partner Roy Mega, a youthful genius of the Milesian race, had just moved their Big Star Detective Agency to Broken Bench Lane that morning. Barnaby Sheen had made the two young geniuses move their agency out of his electronics laboratory; but the new Broken Bench location was only a hundred feet from that hole-in-the-woods where the laboratory stood.

  A hundred feet, but a million miles distant in spirit. For the magic of enterprise and invention was everywhere in the Lane.

  “Where are all the funny-looking people coming from?” Ophelia Izobret asked them all. “Some of them look even funnier than Judy does today.”

  “They get their faces at Funny Faces Incorporated, that little pill-pushing emporium over there,” Austro told the ladies. “It's one of the hottest enterprises thus far this morning.”

  “Oh, do they glue the faces on to them?” Ophelia asked. “They look so natural for not, ah, looking natural at all. They fit so well that they must be glued on.”

  “No, it's a lot more scientific than that,” Austro said. “Everything is very scientific now, especially on the Lane. That's why Roy and I have taken chambers here for contacts with our clients. The funny faces, they grow them on people with fast-acting pills. You pick out the face that you want to wear for a while, and False Face Flaherty who runs the pillory over there will engineer the pills to give you that face quick. He bought up all the assets and secrets of Instant Physiognomists and also those of the Pow Nose-Shrinker people. He has absorbed companies and he has absorbed people. He's put it together now with a line of the fastest-acting psychosomatic pills in the world. You pop them down, and your face begins to change within seconds. You will notice several people running around with faces like mine. They picked mine for a funny face apparently, I don't know why. But I can always tell the difference. I have a mark on me that none of them know about, and they haven't engineered a pill for it yet.”

  “Is all that the truth, Austro?” Edith Thornbush asked.

  “What is truth?” Austro inquired, and he used his owl face when he asked it.

  “But how do they get rid of the funny faces when they're tired of them?” Ophelia Izobret wanted to know. “How do they ungrow them?”

  “False Face Flaherty asks the customer how long he wants to wear a face, an hour, a day, a week,” Austro said. “Then he adjusts the pill (he says) to give that time effect. After that time, your own face will come back (he says), or an improved model if you wish. And there are no after-effects to the changes (he says). He lies though (everybody on the Lane lies till he gets a truth really rolling for him): none of the pills really has a time coefficient or a reversal effect. False Face doesn't know how long a funny face will remain. He never tried this line of pills before this morning, except on his wife accidentally last night, and the results aren't in yet.”

  “Poor wife!” said Judy Kingfixit. “I don't believe that I quite like that False Face Flaherty. And I don't believe that I can quite stay away from him. That is the ambivalence of my life.”

  “I think that I will get myself a false face to cheer me up,” Edith Thornbush said, “and I really don't care how long it sticks to me.” Edith left the Mokka-Chokka stand to go over to Funny Faces Incorporated.

  “The implications of this are tremendous,” said Ophelia Izobret. “Consider only the criminal aspect of the funny face movement.”

  “You are always so good at considering the criminal aspects, Ophelia,” Judy said.

  Really, funny faces were big. Oh the inventiveness of the people on Broken Bench Lane!

  “Good persons, here are business cards of our main business,” Austro said, and he passed the cards out to all the good persons who would accept them. “Big Star Detective Agency,” the cards were printed. “Mega and Austro, scientists and artists in detection and improvisation. Interesting murders solicited. Tedious murders solved grudgingly. Skip tracing done. We locate anybody or anything. Husbands found cheap.”

  “How cheap?” Judy Kingfixit asked Austro. “I wonder if you could find my husband. I wouldn't want him for more than four or five dollars worth, but I'd go that much.”

  “Find mine too,” Ophelia Izobret said. “Complications, Austro? Oh, I'll pay for the complications also.”

  “Find mine also,” said a funny-faced woman who just arrived there and who sounded like Edith Thornbush. “Oh, that was fast! How do I look? Yes, find mine, Austro.”

  “Yes, I guess so. Me too,” said Cornelia Falselove.

  “Remember also,” said Austro, “that the Big Star Detective Agency is not concerned entirely with crime detection. We also detect patterns and tendencies and unborn facts in the ethical and sociological and scientific fields. Folks, we're good.”

  “But is your information and discoveries correct?” Judy asked.

  “What is correct?” Austro asked, looking like an owl.

  Three other Broken Bench widows, Hedwiga Pompey, Seraph Wideditch, and Lavinia Firstlight, gave Austro earnest money of one dollar each to find their husbands. The additional sums of three dollars and ninety-five cents each would be given on the actual uncovering or delivery of the husbands. This low price was extended to all of them except Ophelia Izobret. Ophelia had to pay one thousand dollars earnest money and gosh knows how much on final delivery (because of some complications in her case), but she paid the first payment cheerfully.

  “Seven cases, carrock!” cried Austro with boyish satisfaction. “That's good. But they are all little husband-missing cases. Not an interesting murder among them. Not even a tedious murder so far. That's bad.”

  “That's bad, yes, Austro,” said a half-familiar voice encased in a new funny face (apparently a man voice and a man funny face), “but you are wrong about there being no murder in the package. There will be a murder or several, and perhaps there has already been one. Whether it is an interesting murder or a tedious one will depend a little bit on the detective of record.”

  “There will be a murder,” said Austro sombrely. “I will have to watch for that, and at the same time I will have to figure out where we went wrong with our ailerons this morning.” (The Big Star Weed Rider, that most esoteric of aircraft, had crashed that morning with Austro and Roy, due to faulty ailerons. Fortunately for them, the elevation was only six inches when they crashed.)

  “Are you my husband?” Ophelia Izobret asked the mysterious funny-faced man who had spoken of murders.

  “Madam, that is confidential information,” said the person, and he moved away and merged with other funny faces in the hustle of Broken Bench Lane.

  “He looks a little bit like my husband with that not-quite-right face of his,” Ophelia said. “It's going to be hard to tell now. My husband always had a not-quite-right face too. What do you think of the ethics of wearing such a face, Austro?”

  “What is right?” asked Austro looking like an owl. “What is not-quite-right? What, on the face of it, is a face?”

  But this isn't getting us into the early-morning wonders of Broken Bench Lane. Listen, travelers and natives alike, no other street anywhere has such sheer inventiveness as Broken Bench. Clay-Eaters Enterprises! Could there be a company of such a name on your own street? This business had opened just this morning, and it had never been known before.

  “Clay-Eating raised to an Art and a Science,” a banner on ClayEaters Building proclaimed. “Gourmets' clay from Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, and our own Oklahoma,” a sign announced. You know what? Some of the clay smells from that place were authoritative and they were nosy. Judy Kingfixit went and bought a hundred dollars worth of stock in Clay-Eaters.

  “Get in on the ground floor of this, on the clay-dirt ground floor of it,” another sign said. Judy got a hank (a long handful) of good, yellow, country clay. It didn't taste very good but it had possibilities. There must be a lot of clay in the wor
ld, millions of tons of it. This looked like a famine-proof industry. How could one go wrong for only a hundred dollars on one of the most basic foods of them all? Clay is even mentioned in Scripture, earlier than any other food that you can think of. It is the real staff of life. “Clay makes the Man,” another sign there said. And it was easy to believe that this superior clay contained any number of rare earths.

  Judy Kingfixit left them and went over to Funny Faces Incorporated. And False Face Flaherty who was the proprietor over there made more passes at her than a Vegas diceman. “I love your face,” False Face said, and he kissed her. “Is it your own?”

  “I'm not sure,” Judy said. “I thought you might know. I hadn't even known that I was wearing a funny face till my friends started to make remarks about it. I think now that my husband spiked my headache tonic last night before he skipped out. Are you my husband? He's an ambivalent man. Is your name as well as your face false?”

  “Yes. But what did your husband spike your headache potion with? Is it possible that someone else knows my secret of physiognomenical freebooting?” False Face Flaherty asked. “No matter. He cannot be my equal. He surely does not have my unique talents. Oh my dear, I must have your funny face. It is a masterpiece. Is it a masterpiece that I did in a dream and then forgot about, or is it the work of a different master? It is primordial, it is prodigious! I will make copies of it for the rest of my life.”

  “Your voice reminds me of someone I know, but I can't remember who,” Judy said. “And your hands remind me of someone I know. Oh yes, I'll buy a hundred dollars worth of your stock. Make it two hundred. Oh, False Face, you do something to me! But I have ramblings to ramble and people to find on the Lane.”

  “My stock boy can handle things here at Funny Faces Incorporated for a while,” Flaherty said. “He's already wearing a Flaherty Special False Face, so he looks like me anyhow. We will ramble together, my dear.”

  Hand in hand, Judy Kingfixit and False Face Flaherty rambled the Lane together. They were both buffs of these hasty businesses which required so much daring to launch and which, when once launched, were so much more likely to sink than to survive. They visited the Hot Sauerkraut Sandwich Drive-In. Hot sauerkraut sandwiches were something whose time had just arrived, and where should such a timely thing more likely show its head than on Broken Bench Lane?

  They visited the Dog Dirt Gasoline Company with its compelling motto: “Our product alone contains volatile matter from high octane Great Danes.” Dog Dirt Gasoline would fill a need and remove a nuisance.

  They visited the Old Original Flea Market, a hold-over from the day before when it had been named the New Original Flea Market. Judy Kingfixit bought one male flea and eight female fleas. She got the papers on them too.

  “Hereafter they will have to give me the flea-breeders' discount on everything I buy there,” Judy told False Face, “regardless of whether it is related to flea-breeding. That is part of the Flea Marketers' Franchise Agreements, but they won't give it to you unless you insist on it.”

  They went to Madame Gussaud's Wax Museum, still going hand-in-hand; but each of them seemed to be carrying something in the free hand now. The Wax Museum was a very contemporary place. Funny faces, appearing on human persons by the pillatory magic of False Face Flaherty no more than fifteen minutes before were now displayed on wax figures at Gussaud's, by the magic of scientific reproduction and copying and the use of the new telestencils.

  Gussaud's was rather a fun place. Everyone who came in there received free a Dirky Dave Rubber Dagger. It was a souvenir of the museum, for Dirky Dave was one of the most popular of the wax pieces. All the pieces were very lifelike.

  One of them moaned horribly now as if it were death stricken. The figure that moaned was wearing one of the new Hamlet Izobret funny faces, the face that was a little wrong for the real Hamlet face. How did they make the figure moan so lifelike (or so deathlike) as that?

  Edith Thornbush was in Gussaud's. So was Ophelia Izobret and many other persons.

  On display were the wax figures of all the T Town notables, past, present, and future, in living wax; but one had to look at their name plaques to be sure who they were. False faces were popping out on more and more of them, by the magic and science of Madame Gussaud perhaps, or by the magic and science of False Face Flaherty who had great influence on his surroundings this morning.

  “Who is False Face Flaherty?” a wax raven croaked.

  Oh, the same or another wax figure moaned horribly again, a death-struck moan!

  There were the waxen images of all the great Evangelists of T Town, all the great Western Swing Kings, all the great Inventors. There were absolutely authentic reproductions of—

  —but here there was a disturbance and interruption. There was another moan like a death râle from one of the wax figures, one of them with the not-quite-right Hamlet Izobret funny face. Then, moaning unnervingly once more, the figure fell heavily with that peculiar squashing thud that is given off only by a column of wax, or by a column of human flesh, when it falls.

  “He is stabbed to death!” Judy Kingfixit cried in a sharp liquid voice. “There is a Dirky Dave dagger in him.”

  “But it's only a rubber dagger, Judy,” False Face Flaherty laughed. “See the words on the handle of it as on all the rest of them: ‘Dirky Dave Rubber Dagger, Souvenir of Madame Gussaud's Wax Works.’ It must be some sort of joke about him being dead, if they use a rubber dagger.”

  “The rubber is steel-hard now,” Judy said, “and steel-sharp,” (and various persons were beginning to cry out “Murder, Murder!”) “as a result, probably, of the all-pervading science of Broken Bench Lane. Who could have transmuted it so?”

  “Oh, it was no great trick,” Flaherty said. “There's a hundred different inventors of us on the Lane who could have done that at a minute's notice, without props yet.”

  “And the blood! Look at all the blood, Flaherty! Did you ever see so much blood come out of a wax man? Do you think that's wax blood or rubber blood, F. F.?”

  (“Help! Help! Murder! Murder!” other people were calling.) “No, it's real,” Flaherty said. “Get the police, get an ambulance, get a doctor!”

  “Get Austro. He's a detective now,” Judy said.

  2

  All those people were there quickly, the police, the ambulance people, the doctors, different laboratory crews, the detectives Roy Mega and Austro, a police detective named Otis Hardtack, honest citizens, and funny-faced rogues. They all milled around there, and they never did solve that murder. “It's the funny faces that cloud the water,” said that police detective Otis Hardtack when he finally got his brains stretched around the fact that most of the people there were wearing false faces and that they were living and flesh faces that wouldn't come off easily. “This dead man looks like Hamlet Izobret the con-man and inventor whom we have up often. He looks a lot like him, but not quite enough like. Hamlet is a pest that we all know down at headquarters, for the crime-solving inventions that he brings in as well as the quasi-crimes and frauds that he commits. Being an almost-Hamlet, this dead person is not Hamlet Izobret. Hamlet already had the original Hamlet funny face, and it was as good and authentic as any original could be. The one this dead man is wearing is not very accurate. It just isn't good enough to be the original, so the dead man can be anyone except Hamlet. What's behind this funny false face caper anyhow?”

  “What is ‘funny’?” asked Austro in his owlish way. “What is ‘false’?”

  “What we do on Broken Bench Lane is look at the world and at reality out of new faces,” False Face Flaherty was saying with the air of one who had often said it before. “And looking out of new faces is another name for the science of invention. And we who invent, we see the world as wearing a new face every morning.”

  “This man here, the dead man, told me that there would be a murder or murders,” Austro said. “I wondered then how he knew about it.”

  “Are you sure it is the same man?” Otis Hardtack ask
ed.

  “What is ‘sure’?” Austro asked. “It was either this man, or one of those wax figures that were on each side of him when he fell. They have the same faces as he has, and they look as if they were ready to fall also. Why couldn't the man have told me who would do the killing and that it would be done to himself? He was thoughtless.”

  “The one who did it took a little thought,” Otis said. “This rubber-turned-into-steel of the dagger won't take prints. I always hate trouble anywhere in this Lane. There are always freakish elements to it.”

  There was a horrible wail as of a demented siren.

  “The murderer is identified,” Austro said. “That is a new machine that my partner Roy Mega has perfected within the last five minutes. It will sniff out a recent murderer by the aura that he exudes, and it will not be silenced till he is apprehended.”

  There was a second and a third siren wail that joined the first. And then a twelfth and thirteenth wail.

  “The new machine is multi-voiced,” Austro said. “That is for just such contingencies as this. The murderer did not work alone. He was part of a conspiracy. I hope that your men are apprehending the murderers as the machine directs them, Detective Hardtack.”

  “More likely they're trying to shut off that damned noise machine,” Hardtack growled “Oh, how could anyone ever come up with noises like that?”

  And now there were about twenty separate wails coming from the machine as it identified target after target.

  “My partner, Roy Mega, set out to discover the most irritating noise in the world,” Austro said, “the noise that nobody could possibly ignore. We call it the murder-will-out noise, and that's it.”