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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “The cockroaches are hearing a lot sharper lately,” Katherine Hearne said. “Watch! I will let just one pinch of super-fine flour-dust fall down to the floor. Watch! They hear it, and they come to it like it was a clanging gong. Kids, that is hearing!”

  “Someone present has been experiencing a real revel of sharpening senses,” Vonk said. “Oh, to enjoy such powers as no one has ever enjoyed them before! There just can't be anything like it.”

  “You just don't know how right you are!” Jack Bang declared.

  “I think I know a way to put a stop to that revel stuff,” George Meropen said darkly, flipping his flip-blade knife.

  5.

  “Everything for a thousand yards or so around here feels that it's being observed,” Doctor Vonk said some time later. “Everything. Every rational animist knows that there is nothing at all that will not feel itself observed, that there is nothing that will not respond. The very plates in this place know that they're being sensed in a new way.” “All the plates here are flawed,” Jack Bang said. “So are all the cups. If crockery things weren't flawed they'd never break: but throw any of these on the floor and they'll break. If they don't break the first time you throw them down, they'll break the second or third time. This plate here, I can tell you just where it would break. I could draw a pattern of its breaks. The main flaw in it is three-quarters of the way through, nearest the bottom: and it veins out in a design like the veins of a maple leaf.”

  “Why were all the poets blind, that's what I want to know,” Katherine Hearne said. “Does anybody know why they are?”

  “You bet I know why,” George Meropen said. “They just ask for it, that's why.”

  “Who says that all poets are blind?” Doctor Vonk asked. “What poets were blind?”

  “Oh, Homer, Milton, Blind Raftery of Galway, and Hollis Townsend who has poems in the quarterly out at the University every month,” Katherine said. “They are all blind. There's others too.”

  “Thamyris and Masonides. And Tiresias and Phineus,” said Jack Bang.

  “I believe that only about a third of the major poets were blind,” Doctor Vonk said. “We have only about five hundred poets listed at the ‘Institute for Creative Mutations’. That doesn't count blind bards, unless their songs were indisputably of their own creations.”

  “Blinding them doesn't work,” Winston Urbanovitch said. “It just doesn't shut them off.”

  “We'll see about that,” George Meropen growled. “I bet it can fix them where they can't see what they're not supposed to see.” And George was playing with that knife of his.

  “It's mostly the living things that are reacting so strongly to their being observed in so unusual a manner,” Vonk said, “but some of the supposedly non-living things too. The observer always becomes part of the observation, and there's some very strong and innovative observing going on around here.” “You just don't know,” Jack Bang said. “You just don't know who's watching who.”

  “Like the guy says, even the potatoes have eyes,” Katherine commented.

  “I don't know about that fellow Vonk who just left,” Winston Urbanovitch said later. “Someone said last night that they could hear wild ducks going over. And someone else said ‘Nay, that's just Doctor Vonk you hear.’ Well, is he a whole quackery by himself?” “I've heard that he uses a monkey flipping pennies as a basis for his statistical analysis,” a lady said. “You know him, young fellow—” (This to Flip O'Grady)— “Is that the truth of it?”

  “I get so damned tired of explaining the difference between a monkey and an ape!” Flip wrote wearily in his notebook. “Other than that, it's true.”

  There was the time when Vonk, who was hopping around like a grasshopper now in trying to observe whatever was dawning, gave this opinion. “This mutation, and all mutations, works too fast for inheritance. It has to be infection, epidemic. It's caught, it's caught! I wonder if it is caught directly from one person to another, or if there is a carrier. So far, the mutation affects mostly persons who come into the International House of Doughnuts. Do the other persons catch it directly from the primary, or is there an intermediary?”

  “I read the other day that cockroaches are three hundred and ninety-two million years old,” Katherine Hearne said conversationally.

  “Significant!” Doctor Vonk rapped. “It was just about that time that mutations as we know them began to appear in our line. People, there is something going on here. All of you, and you the primary in particular, don't drop it!”

  About those different ways of seeing: The colorless or stone-statue-white way, which was also the fine-form-schematic way of seeing things, was only one of the many new forms of creative visionings that were epidemic around there like an outbreak of swine flu. The electrical corona of people and plants and objects was the most dazzling of the new aspects. And it was never a mere random dazzle. Every flame and coruscation of every corona meant something. There were flowing psychic equations of the people there; there were the potentials and compensations and attainments. There were the startling statements and propositions; there were the signatures. These were the fire pictures of the people and things in their completion and sanctification. Coronas have always been very futuristic. Looking into the coronas had something of the nostalgia of looking into old wood fires or bonfires and watching the phantoms and pageants there. But those in the coronas were pageants and narratives that worked. There was fortune-telling and telepathic interpretation blended together. The entire contents of each person are always written plainly on the outside of that person, in flame and in dazzling topographic configurations. Now, by a person in the throes of the new mutation, this flaming expression could be read, totally, and in interpretive depth.

  Then there was the natural and uncluttered level.

  Clothes are sometimes wonderful and attractive and warm, but so is the ability to focus them out. It is nice to see people and things vivid and bare and vital. But it was the case of Jack Bang looking at persons on this vivid and bare level that angered George Meropen so excessively. And yet Bang didn't show too burning an interest in this flesh-surface level, no more than any other unhealthy-minded young man would have shown. After all, when one has seen the corona, the bare flesh is a bit bland—and bare.

  But it wasn't being seen on the bare-flesh level that bothered Katherine Hearne the most. It was being seen on a level a bit more inner than that, as flayed and visceral and revealed in depth, as being scanned in the inner workings of lungs and spleen and kidneys and bowels, as appearing like something out of an animated technicolor anatomy textbook, it was such as that that made Katherine say “I wish you wouldn't look at me like that, Jack Bang. It gives me the creeps.” There was the uneasy feeling that there was hard radiation in being looked at by X-ray eyes. Yes, a person or a thing always knows when it is being looked at, and how.

  This way of seeing would be handy for doctors. They could directly examine persons at this visceral level, in this interior analytical aspect. It would be handy for biologists and bacteriologists and clinical technicians and many other sort of people to be able to see these interior things clearly, always lighted and presented for best vision, always just at the focused death desired. And it would be handy for them to see both interior and exterior things at greater magnification when there was need for it. Now, with the new talent, one could see things down to cell level, down to chromosome level, down to gene level, down to virus and sub-virus level, down to molecular level.

  Doctor Vonk, for the last two days, when he had occasion to use a microscope, well he didn't use a microscope now—he got along just as well without it. To a thousand power he could see well enough, and he knew that he had just stepped over the threshold. He knew or guessed also, that someone could still jerk out the rug from under that over-the-threshold step and send all of them sprawling. All of the secondaries were still dependent on their primary. It was almost as if their primary (their primary was Jack Bang, no use of making a mystery out of it) had
still to go through some sort of seed-scattering and token-dying phase before the mutation could be finally transmitted as a valid thing.

  In the open world that is exterior to bodies, the eyes seemed to have discovered new telescopic as well as microscopic magnifications and penetrations. A good pair of mutated eyes could pick up fine detail, down to the cell level at least, on things animate or otherwise at least a mile away. And that, as must be said again and again when considering this marvel, was only the beginning.

  The reason that Jack Bang was now able to spend so much time drinking coffee in the International House of Doughnuts was that he no longer worked for a living. He could now make all that he needed by playing cards with other gentlemen. Sure, he could see the spots on the cards, open or hidden; for now he had ‘multiple-viewpoint-vision’. He cleaned out a lot of card-men, and one of them was George Meropen who fancied himself as a poker player.

  Jack Bang grinned a lot now, for he no longer seemed afraid of George Meropen or of anybody. And George Meropen would sit and flip his flip-blade knife and practice his sinister look.

  But things were almost too easy and too profitable for Jack.

  “What's the fun of playing poker if I win all the time?” he asked once. “When I can see their hearts sink—yes, sink—when I break them, then I feel a little bit sorry for them. When I can see the saliva in their mouths turn sour (sure I can see ‘sour’ as well as I can see anything) then I always ease up a little bit. What will happen to my old killer instinct now that I can win all the time and when I can see how sad they feel when they lose?”

  Gaming had been one of the enjoyments of his life, and now the edge was off it as the green came in. And it was the same with the horses. The ‘multiple-viewpoint-vision’ had futuristic aspects and Jack did well here also. But it reached the pleasure limit, and the profits became cumbersome.

  “What's the fun of watching the horses run and betting on them if I know who's going to win every time?” he asked. Well, maybe the fun did wear a little bit thin on some things, but Jack was having a lot of new fun these days. He had pretty well taken Katherine Hearne away from the sinister George Meropen. And the implications of his new talent were like a traffic jam of three thousand cars backed up and all honking to get going. There were backed-up advantages to all this that a person might not even get around to thinking about for years.

  “It is strange that the primary should be a commoner,” said Doctor Vonk who had noble blood and was entitled to the title of Graf-Doktor in the old country (Hoch Oldenburg).

  “It very nearly compromises the whole affair.”

  “Watch it there!” Flip O'Grady scribbled in a testy hand.

  “Watch it!” Katherine Hearne said snappishly.

  “Watch it, Doctor,” Jack Bang said with an asymmetric grin.

  “Watch it!” George Meropen growled dangerously, and he flipped his flip-blade knife.

  How odd that the commoners don't like to be called commoners!

  Jack Bang was a poet, albeit an informal one. And his new circumstance, sitting in the catbird seat with every thing going his way, was sheer poetry. “You are the only major mutation-in-action that has ever been competently observed,” Doctor Vonk told Bang one day. “You are grotesque, but we have no way of telling that all of them were not grotesque. The whole idea of mutations is damned eccentric. We have just barely missed several of the mutations, missed observing them by as narrow a time as thirty million years or even three million years. But we are right on it with you. It would be a shame if your advantageous mutation were not captured and harnessed. You represent something new in humanity. Don't let it get away! Don't drop it! Don't bust the thing, Bang, unless indeed it is necessary that the thing bust before it can succeed.”

  “I enjoy it,” Jack Bang said, “and I wish everyone had it to enjoy. If you believe that it is in the air generally, then I will do everything you suggest to help other people catch it also.”

  “This business of compelling eventualities is a chancy one,” Vonk said. “There is something in the process that revolts against compulsion. But we will keep up all the tricks we know. Flip O'Grady will influence the odds with his flipping (he really can do that), and maybe you can do something new yourself.”

  “I am a poet just come ripe,” Jack Bang said. “I will make a poem to eyes, to my own gloriously exploding eyes. Oh, get out of the way, Meropen!”

  “You took my girl. You took my money,” George Meropen said glumly as he flipped his flip-blade knife. “Maybe I will take something from you.”

  The poem that Jack Bang built to his own exploding and mutating eyes was a thing of power and beauty. Was there ever anything so beautiful as eyes! Eyes are the lights of the world coming down from the Father of Lights. They are the doors of perception and the lanterns of the soul. They are the crystal balls in which futures and presents are read. They are the incandescent orbs that create what they are observing. They are— It broke then, and gushed away in two scarlet streams.

  6.

  That was the end of the poem or rhapsody about eyes. George Meropen did move in and take something from Jack Bang. He took his eyes. And then everything deflated. The scales fell from the eyes of everybody around there, and then it was seen that the scales were the eyes. The whole achievement was thrown away in one horrifying moment.

  Jack Bang was in the emergency room at the hospital.

  George Meropen was in jail.

  Flip O'Grady, flipping pennies, found the odds to lengthen greatly and suddenly against good coming out of this new stuff.

  It was all busted now; but that included one exaggeration that needed busting.

  That was the exaggeration about eyes. Eyes hadn't ever been very good. There had been a lot of serious criticism of the human eye. A German of the last century stated that the generally bad design of eyes offered irrefutable evidence that God was a bungler. And almost all of those who have criticized the eye have also voiced their wonder that we could see even as well as we do with it. It's nothing but a bundle of rods tied together, like a totem, not like something functioning.

  And the answer is that we don't really see with it. We see with something other than our apparent ‘outer eyes’.

  The analogy with the ear is close. We hear with our inner ear and not with our grotesque outer ear. Those things on the outside of our heads are for gathering and focusing the sound, it is said; and then the inner ear ‘hears’ that focused sound.

  That is ridiculous. How could those things on the outsides of our heads gather or focus anything? God put them there for His own reasons and for His own humor, but they haven't much to do with our hearing. And he also put apparent ‘outer eyes’ in our heads, for His own reasons and for His own humor; and they have only a very little bit to do with our seeing. They have a bit more to do with our seeing than have our outer ears to do with our hearing, but only a bit more.

  It is possible that those ‘outer eyes’ are not such outrageously inept instruments at all, but only instruments whose purpose we do not understand. It is possible that God is not a complete bungler, but One whose purposes are veiled.

  A term of horror will not last very long. It slides then into mere glumness. Doctor Velikov Vonk had experienced his moment of horror when George Meropen walked into his laboratory carrying bloody things in a napkin. “You like crazy eyes, Doctor?” he asked. “Yeah, here are Jack Bang's crazy eyes. Yeah, I cut them out of him. Now let us see if he gets to be one of those big-name poets.”

  Katherine Hearne had experienced her moment of horror when she saw Meropen deftly knife the eyes out of Jack Bang's head. Jack had experienced his own moment of horror when he saw that George Meropen wasn't kidding, and when he felt his own eyes robbed from him and himself sickening from the gush of his own blood that he could not see. Flip O'Grady had experienced a moment of something like horror when the unfavorable odds rose like a wave against the success of their project, and that flipping damn penny scorched and burned his fin
gers with a brimstone smell.

  And, everywhere around there, there was the sympathetic bloody blindness experienced by all the penumbral persons and creatures who had been on the edge of the great mutation. And there was the horror of opportunity lost. Scientific observation of other major mutations had been missed by as narrow a time as thirty million years or even three million years. This one was missed, possibly, by only one horrifying moment.

  Then the second of horror had slipped into the half hour of glumness. Jack Bang's life was not in danger, it was said. And then Flip O'Grady came to Doctor Vonk after finishing his flipping session.

  “Market's rallied,” Flip wrote on his scratch pad. “Odds sure did rise steep against it for a while. Then they came back where they were. Then they came a lot better than they were.”

  “But that's impossible!” Doctor Vonk howled. “The odds could not rally. You must have lost your hot hand and thrown all results random. The whole opportunity has blown up with the destruction of the primary. The odds now must be ten billion to one against.”