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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “What are you going to do, Otto, phone Voiles and wake him up?” Penstock asked.

  “More than wake him up, I'll bring him here. Ah yes, I'll bring him here,” Otto said calmly. But Otto was shaking in a nervous sort of passion. That meant — well, it meant that he was being excessively Ottoish. Penstock and Rivet looked at each other.

  Oh, oh! they thought, almost audibly and almost in concert. Here we go again with a stammer! How can Otto outdo Otto tonight?

  Otto Pankration was sometimes an imposing man, and that was his public reputation. But sometimes he was a dubious venture of a fellow. The latter was most often the case when he was with his cronies Penstock and Rivet.

  “So bring the weatherman here then, Otto,” Penstock said.

  “Ah yes, well, you see this high-voltage assembly here —” Otto began.

  “The one by which you call spirits from the vasty deeps, as you said the night before last?” Ed Rivet asked. “It is impressive and expensive-looking, yes, and you should be able to use it as a prop for some good illusions. But it looks like an electric furnace to me, and not a high-voltage assembly at all.”

  “It looks like it, and it isn't,” Otto answered. “Well then, to the business at hand.” He turned on the mechanism that looked like an electric furnace and wasn't. It didn't spark, it didn't flash. It growled and hummed a little bit. That was all.

  And a man was standing there, bare-shanked and angry, and apparently just tumbled out of his sleep. All right, pretend to be unimpressed! Pretend to be blasé about it all. A man had materialized in the room right there! Otto had outdone Otto again tonight. Whether or not the feat should come undone later, it was absolutely top stroke now.

  The bare-shanked and angry and confused man was Hector Voiles, the most noteworthy of the local TV weatherpersons. Well, was Hector really there, or was he a projection? Or was he present and yet unsubstantial in some other way?

  “How have you brought me here, Pankration?” Hector wheezed. “You could at least have let me put on pants.”

  “Think ‘pants,’ Hector, and you will be wearing pants,” Otto blared. “Pants are the slightest of illusions at best. Now tell us what the weather will be for the coming hours.”

  “But I haven't the reports here, or the charts, or even the instruments.”

  “You are yourself the instrument,” Otto said. “Be intuitive! Tell us what the weather will be. Then you can go back to bed.”

  This wasn't in Otto's big home. That was sort of above them and around the corner. It wasn't in Otto's laboratory either. It was a small room, half underground, fitted out for the comfort of Otto and his cronies, and otherwise filled with a jumble of instruments and equipment that seemed to be out of present use. This was Otto's Little Den. Or it was Little Otto's Den.

  “It is overcast and misty now,” Hector Voiles said. The light didn't pick him out very well in that room, and indeed the room was poorly lighted. Or else they were all low-resolution persons tonight. “But it will clear within an hour, and then it will quick-frost. Quick-frost, yes, but only at ground level will it freeze. At instrument level it will not fall below thirty-seven degrees. And for a fortnight hence the weather will be good for eidolons. Oh I wonder why I said that? I wonder what I meant?”

  “Thank you, Voiles,” Otto Pankration said. “Quick-frost you said, and whatever else you said doesn't matter. Leave now.”

  “I don't know how,” said Hector, the bare-shanked weatherman.

  “Go the same way you came,” Otto said with a mean edge to his voice.

  “I can't. I don't know how I came here,” said the suddenly shivering Hector.

  “Be intuitive. Divine a way,” Otto said. “Go from us now and go back to bed.”

  Hector Voiles the weatherman became unsubstantial and unhinged. He unmaterialized, and he was gone. And Otto Pankration, Charles Penstock, and Ed Rivet loaded into Ed's car to go to Oolagah Lake to dynamite for pond pickerel. The dynamiting goes so much more crisply when there comes a quick frost.

  How would Otto outdo Otto on that one? Sluff it off if you can, but it had been a pretty good trick. Otto had materialized a known man against that man's will. He may have used TV data to build the prospectus for a projection, but it was not a TV image that was projected. Hector Voiles did not appear bare-shanked and newly awakened and humbling on TV. Hector had been caught in the actual moment. He had been jerked out of his sleep and brought to Otto's Little Den, or to Little Otto's Den. But it was hard in ordinary circumstances to think of Otto Pankration as a little man, for he was quite large.

  What would Otto do for an encore now? How would he top the materialization of Hector Voiles?

  Well, he didn't really top it. It was already tops. What he did next was materialize two slightly more interesting people. One of these he materialized publicly, the public being those two cronies Charles Penstock and Ed Rivet. But the other one he materialized privately, for himself alone. He dipped the dipper for TV persons again.

  “I am not restricted to them,” Otto explained, “but they are handy objects to sight on and to orient my equipment on. And, of course, I am still experimenting. I will grab and project TV persons, but I will not take them in their TV attitudes.”

  He next took Barry McNary, that local TV pundit and all-points expert who was so filled with urbanity and scope and interest. He took Barry as he was in the early-morning hours (this was the following early morning), but he didn't take him bare-shanked or bewildered.

  Barry was there suddenly, in Little Otto's Den, in a rich crimson dressing gown, and smoking an in-style pipe whose genuine aroma filled the cluttered room. You cannot fake an aroma like that. And Barry McNary brought his own setting with him when he came. He was in his own easy chair, reading a book of his own, with his own side table beside him and his own midnight Tokay at hand. And he glanced at the three town-and-country men with absolute boredom. Then he continued his reading, not for effect, but because it was his pleasure. Little Otto might materialize Barry there, but there was no way that he could compel the interest of this pundit.

  “Barry McNary, pundit and punko, you will answer questions for us now,” Otto said ponderously. “Aye, and you will do tricks, as I order you to do them. Do you know any reason that I am not able to order you to do tricks?”

  “The reason is that I am not here,” Barry said, “and I have no knowledge of this romp, nor interest in it. Hound dogs, in some manner you have got hold of the equivalent of an old and discarded undershirt of mine to worry and toss. So worry it then, dogs! But it is long discarded, and I am not in it.”

  Otto tried again and again to dominate Barry McNary, and he got nowhere. Barry would not answer at all, or he would answer demolishingly. Barry McNary was whipping Little Otto at every turn. A projection should not be able to whip its projector and constructor like that. Barry had a dangerous validity about him even though he said that he wasn't there. It was bad enough to be whipped by a commanded and controlled thing who didn't act as if he were controlled. It was even worse to be whipped by a mere shadow, or by a mere discarded undershirt. Then Barry McNary left him without being dismissed, and he refused to return.

  Still and all, Otto had materialized a second known man, one of more moment than the first one, Hector Voiles. Who else in town was doing any authentic materializing at all? And, as Otto said, he was still experimenting with these new techniques.

  Then Otto materialized still another TV person, Evangeline Aster, a real sparkler. He materialized Evangeline privately, telling no one about it, not even his two close cronies. Of course, he was proud to be able to materialize and summon and command such a sparkler as Evangeline, but the pleasure he wanted with her was private. Otto brought Evangeline to him every night for a week. But it started a little slowly.

  “The rule is that a person brought here by me must obey my every command,” Otto said at an early summons. “I made that rule, just as I made you to come here.”

  “Oh let's just forget th
e whole thing,” Evangeline said. This was the second night of their encounter and Evangeline was in woolies, though she had been in scanties the first night, not expecting to be transported. “I really don't like it here at all and I want to go back. Let me go.”

  “You and I are going to have one of the great affairs of the century, Evangeline,” Otto said. “Now, to make up for lost time, I will force you to be in rapport with me.”

  “Forced rapport is no rapport at all,” Evangeline said, like one reciting an axiom. “This isn't like you, Mr. Pankration, and it surely isn't like me.

  “No. It isn't like us. It is us,” Little Otto said. Wait a minute! Dr. Otto Pankration had the name of being a witty and interesting man. How do you square that with the Otto of these encounters?

  But farther than that, Dr. Otto Pankration had the reputation of being absolutely courteous, of being just as absolutely uninvolved, of being a man with no crudity in him at all. Moreover, he was completely faithful to the memory of his dead wife. But Otto-in-the-flesh here was the hot-breathing opposite of that.

  And Evangeline Aster, that beautiful sparkler of a woman (she herself had coined the name “The TV Sparkler” for herself), she had always been a consummate comic. She was even that still more rare thing on the current scene, a clean comic, a comic with class (she also had coined that phrase for herself). Evangeline had style, she had probity, she had a husband on an important foreign mission at the moment.

  (A comic with class? This baggage here?)

  She had known Dr. Otto Pankration for five years. But she hadn't at all known this Little Otto who had summoned her to these cluttered quarters here.

  “I have a fine old name, one of the most respected of the ancient Dames of Europe — Pankration,” Little Otto said. “But it is really the name of a wrestle named ‘Rough and Tumble.’ Let us tumble now, Evangeline.”

  “Oh let's just forget the whole thing,” Evangeline said dully. How could this living sparkler seem so dull?

  “You and I, Evangeline, we are to have one of the great affairs of the century,” Otto said again, “and I believe that we are falling a little bit behind schedule. Let's pick up the pace and make up for lost time and passion.”

  So they did. They carried it through. And, for a week there, they had one of the great affairs of the century. Well, maybe it was a bad century. And maybe the great affairs are pretty ordinary when they are stripped down.

  After the fifth night, Evangeline stopped watching it.

  She stopped watching it? But she was in it, wasn't she?

  Evangeline Aster went to see Dr. Sigmund Izzersted. She was about to enter the great marble portals of his famous Coucherie when she heard the doctor call to her in a curious small voice. “Oh Miss Aster, were you coming to see me?” The voice came from that little side street (it was more a shady lane) that ran along the north boundary of the Izzersted complex. “Just come through this little door in the wall and into my special consulting room and we will have a consultation,” the doctor said.

  “I never saw that door in the wall before,” Evangeline told him. “I don't even believe that I can go through a door that little. Well, I came down sort of to see you, but you're so expensive that I just don't know whether I can afford another session.”

  “Oh I pay no attention to money,” the little doctor said (Little? No one had ever thought of him as little before), “since money impinges nowhere into the psychology of persons and is of no major interest to them. What have I been charging you?”

  “A hundred dollars an hour or part of an hour. It's always at least two hundred dollars a session even if it lasts no more than eight minutes — you know, four minutes in one hour and four minutes in another.”

  “Oh that's way too much, Miss Aster,” Dr. Izzersted said. “I couldn't afford to go to myself at that rate. I don't make enough. How about two dollars for as long as the session takes?”

  “Are you kidding, doctor?”

  “Miss Aster, no! When a psychologist starts kidding, well, that blows him for a psychologist. He might as well break up and be done with it.”

  They went through the little door in that wall along the shady lane. The consulting room that they came into was quite small, and Evangeline said that the couch looked like a doll couch.

  “It will fit you,” the doctor said. “Lie down.”

  Evangeline lay down on the couch and it fit her.

  “Your problem, your problem, ah yes,” Dr. Izzersted said. “You have been sleeping in woolies for the past few nights, and you never slept in woolies before in your life. You don't understand it, and neither do I.”

  “How did you know I had been sleeping in woolies?” Evangeline asked.

  “Ah yes,” Dr. Izzersted began again. “It is a series of very realistic dreams you have been having, and you are thoroughly ashamed of the role you are playing in them. But you justify yourself by saying that it is not you in the dreams. It is somebody else. You are merely watching while somebody else in your body cavorts through the episodes. And then you have ceased even to watch them. Is that what you are trying to tell me?”

  “I haven't told you anything yet; but yes, that's the case. Why is this consultation room so little, and why does it seem to be in a different place? Yes, I watch myself, or somebody else who is got up to look like me, doing these things, as I might watch them in a drama. But I watch them from the outside. On the other hand, it is myself who does them, for I am bruised and worn from them every morning. Did you know that great affairs of the century are very bruisy? But, on still another hand, there is something secondhand about my bruises, as though they were transferred to my body from another one.”

  “Bubbly, mighty bubbly, Miss Aster,” Dr. Izzersted said. “Do you know that some days are very good for blowing soap bubbles (I blow a lot of soap bubbles in my business), and some days are terrible for it? Yes, on a bad day you can add all the glycerin and gloop that you wish to the mixture and you will still not be able to blow decent bubbles. And some fortnights are good for flying eidolons; but most times are very poor for it. This is an excellent fortnight for flying them. I don't know why this should be.”

  “What is an eidolon?” Evangeline asked.

  “It was an eidolon of yours, Miss Aser, and not yourself, that carried on one of the great affairs of the century with the eidolon of a prominent man. What we are really having this fortnight is an eidolonic epidemic. But I wasn't sure that the primaries were aware of their own eidolons. You seem to be, to some extent, aware of your own.”

  “Then I'm not responsible for what my eidolon does?”

  “Of course you're responsible for it, Miss Aster. There is something wrong going on in you, and that's the way it comes out.”

  “But I haven't done anything wrong.”

  “But you are going to do something wrong, murder or arson or some such. And eidolons sometimes blow before the wind and arrive at a crux before their primaries.”

  “And these eidolons have separate bodies?”

  “Very infrequently do they have substantial bodies, Miss Aster. Shadow bodies mostly. But this fortnight, as I say, is very bubbly, very good for flying eidolons. I believe that there are at least half a dozen solid ones flying in this city of a half million. That is an unusually large component. But it isn't so unusual over a long haul. Every undertaker, after a fortnight such as this, gets bodies that he knows are simply not authentic. Oh they have meat and they have weight, but they are incompletely and sketchily done.

  “And there are numerous cases where a body is definitely identified as a person. And then the living person will appear and assert his living identity, and where does that leave the dead and sketchy body? But the first identification will not necessarily have been mistaken. The bodies will (save for the sketchiness of one of them) be bodies of the same person. Even the fingerprints will be identical except that, ah—”

  “Except that what?”

  “Ah change of subject. The way out of your dilemma
, Miss Aster, is to junk your eidolon, which is only a splinter of you anyhow. Ah I see a gleam in your eye. Yes, it would be vivid publicity, I suppose. Throw it screaming off a great and prominent height (and you have always had such a terror of heights!), and then you can reappear—”

  “Oh yes! I think I recognize it now. It's been done before. And it works.”

  “You first came into prominence, Miss Aster, as junior hog-calling champion of Sebastian County, Arkansas, I believe.”

  “Can we not forget that, doctor?”

  “But you are proud of your powerful and blood-curdling scream, with which you won that championship. You believe that, in a more dramatic situation, it might be—”

  “Yes, yes, and do I ever have a more dramatic situation in mind for it! It will work, I know that it will.”

  Evangeline had her genuine sparkle on her now when she saw a shining opportunity. And Dr. Izzersted, who was smaller today than he usually was, had a queer gleam on him like, well, like glycerin in a soap-bubble solution. Yes, he was just a little bit iridescent. He was incompletely and sketchily done. He was not quite as authentic as he might have been. You couldn't exactly see through him, but he did fracture the light a bit.

  “Does the real Dr. Izzersted know about you?” Evangeline asked.

  “Yes he does,” said Little Sigmund, “though he came to the knowledge of me with extreme difficulty. He uses me a lot in his studies. I become the analogue for the splinters of many people. What the real Dr. Izzersted doesn't know is that I also use him a lot in my studies. And yet I am the real Dr. Izzersted. All the splinters are of the same authentic wood. If I'm not he, then who am I? Will you time your event for the ten-o'clock news?”

  “Oh yes, I think so. I believe that it would be the best timing, to do it just a few minutes before the news. Then maybe I will be identified by a bulletin while the program is going on. And then, while they are still staggering from that, I'll appear. I'll electrify everybody, that's what I'll do. Oh thank you, thank you!”

  “That will be two dollars, Miss Aster.”