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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “I don't know if I can live on that or not,” Matthew Quoin said, “but I've no choice except to try.”

  Matthew Quoin changed his life style a bit. He gave up his lodging room. He slept in a seldom-flooded storm sewer instead. But it was still a hard go.

  A nickel a pound! Do you know how many pennies, pulled out rheumatically one by one, it takes to make a pound? Do you know how many nickels it takes now just to get a cup of coffee and an apple fritter for breakfast? Matthew Quoin had started at three-thirty that morning. It would be ten o'clock before he had enough to take to the Elite Metal Salvage Company to sell for legal tender. It would be ten-thirty before he had his scanty breakfast. And then back to the old penny-fishing again. His fingers were scabbed and bleeding. It would be almost midnight before he had enough (yes, the Elite Metal Salvage Comany did do business at night; that's when they did of lot of their purchasing of stolen metal) to trade in for supper money. And that would represent only one hamburger with everything on it, and one small glass of spitzo. But Matthew would never be clear broke. He was still cock of the walk.

  “Now here is where it gets rough,” Matthew Quoin said. “Suppose that I give up and am not able to live on the bright flow of coins, and I die (for I cannot die until I do give up); suppose that I die, then I will have lost the dubious transaction that I made so long ago. I'll have been outsmarted on the deal, and I cannot have that. That fellow bragged that he'd never lost on a transaction of this sort, and he rubbed it in with a smirk. We'll just see about that. I've not given up yet, though I do need one more small morsel of food if I'm to live through the day. Do you yourself ever get discouraged, robin?”

  Matthew Quoin was talking to a lone robin that was pulling worms out of the browned grass that was beginning to be crusted with the first snow of the season. But the robin didn't answer.

  “You live on the promise of spring, robin, though you do well even now,” Quoin said. “I also have a new promise to live for. I have been given a fresh lease on life today, though it will be about seven years before I can put that lease into effect. But, after you're old, seven years go by just like nothing. A person in the Imperial Coin Nook (it's in a corner of the Empire Cigar and Hash Store) says that in about seven years my coins will have value, and eventually he will be able to pay a nickel or dime or even fifteen cents for each of them. And that is only the beginning, he says: in fifty years they may be worth eighty cents or even a dollar each. I am starting to put one coin out of every three into a little cranny in my sewer to save them. Of course, for those seven years that I wait, I will go hungrier by one third. But this promise is like a second sun coming up in the morning. I will rise and shine with it.”

  “Bully for you,” the robin said.

  “So I have no reason to be discouraged,” Quoin went on. “I have a warm and sheltered sewer to go to. And I have had a little bit, though not enough, to eat today. I hallucinate, and I'm a trifle delirious and silly, I know. I'm lighthearted, but I believe I could make it if I had just one more morsel to eat. This has been the worst of my days foodwise, but they may get a little bit better if I live through this one. It will be a sort of turning of the worm for me now. Hey, robin, that was pretty good, the turning of the worm. Did you get it?”

  “I got it,” said the robin. “It was pretty good.”

  “And how is it going with yourself?” Matthew Quoin asked.

  “There's good days and bad ones,” the robin said. “This is a pretty good one. After the other robins have all gone south, I have pretty good worm-hunting.”

  “Do you ever get discouraged?”

  “I don't let myself,” the robin said. “Fight on, I say. It's all right today. I'm about full now.”

  “Then I'll fight on too,” Matthew swore. “One extra morsel would save my life, I believe. And you, perhaps, robin—”

  “What do you have in mind?” the robin asked.

  “Ah, robin, if you're not going to eat the other half of that worm—”

  “No, I've had plenty. Go ahead,” the robin said.

  I Don't Care Who Keeps The Cows

  Because of the trashiness of its origins, there has grown a sort of amnesia over the account of how we became as amazingly smart as we are now, and of how we were even smarter for a while there. This honest account should cut through the amnesia a little bit.

  There were two clans of smart people in those days, the Scar-Tissue Clan and the Necklaces Clan. And then there was a smaller group, the Little Red Wagon People. All of these had somewhat cumbersome arrangements to be as smart as they were, and all of them paid a pretty steep tab for it. It cost a lot of money to be a smart person in those days. The people of the Scar-Tissue Clan — now there was something stark and outstanding about all of them. It may have been their pop-eyes, what used to be called “weight-lifter's eyes.” It may have been the scar tissue itself, about the brows and temporals. It may have been the generalized protuberances, the bull-humps at the base of the old brain, the pherea or satyr-like growths at the throat, the pareia-pouches at one or the other sides of the head, these growths that the more advanced members of the clan usually had. Those things did make persons look peculiar, until the look became common. They were the things that set the people of the Scar-Tissue Clan apart.

  (Jerome Blackfoot was getting a head start on the world during the early morning hours, but he wasn't one of the Scar-Tissue People, nor a Necklacer, nor a Little Red Wagoner either.)

  All of the Scar-Tissue people were deaf in the ear of their selection. One ear had to be used as a vent and a drain and could no longer be used for hearing. This deaf ear was usually on the same side of the head as the pareia-pouch.

  The whole business of the ultra-braininess of the Scar-Tissue Clan (and of the other clans also, but the Scar-Tissues had been the first of the burgeoning brain groups) had been a fallout of a few quacksalvers and confidence persons trying to make a little money and have a little fun. Very many great discoveries and inventions have this quackish origin. There had first been those blatant advertisements:

  “The Brain is a muscle. Develop it as you would any other muscle. Slam the steroids to it and make it grow! Use our special brain-designed steroid implants and injections. One of our crews will be in your neighborhood this month. Sign and mail the coupon today. Our crew will call on you in a plain brown truck and they will perform all necessary micro-surgery and plugging and implementing in our own truck-clinic or in your own home. Your brains will begin to grow and develop immediately. You can notice the difference within thirty minutes. You'll be smarter, a lot smarter! Hear what H. H. Van der Rander of Ocean Bright California writes:”

  And what H. H. Van der Rander wrote might be “I multiplied my brain power seven times in just eleven days. But the most amazing results were noticed right at the beginning. I doubled my brain power in the first hour. It was like opening a door into another and more spacious world. I am now four times as smart as anyone else in my neighborhood, and eleven days ago I would have rated in the bottom one-third.”

  Grotesque as it might sound to a man from Qualquimmerchock, the thing worked from the very first. Well, it had worked for weight-lifters and wrestlers; why shouldn't it work for brains? The people who subscribed to the service did get smarter, amazingly smarter in a very short period of time, and they stayed smart. It was like opening the door on another world, yes. Even those early original steroid crews, coming in their plain brown trucks, did excellent work. There is no way that steroid plugs and injections cannot nourish and develop the brain. (“Be brain-starved no longer. Be among the first people ever to have amply fed brains.”) The brain is a muscle, and all muscles develop rapidly and amazingly, geometrically and exponentially, by steroid injections. The brain so treated will grow in size and strength until it crowds all available space, and then it will look for more space, either interior or exterior, to spill over into.

  And the intelligence also increased exponentially. People with husky and bulky and muscular
brains are simply much smarter and intellectually stronger than are people with skinny and skimpy brains. “It's smart to be smart” was one of the advertising slogans that was very effective. All the injections and plugs did cause a lot of scar tissue, of course. Probably this could have been removed. There were plenty of cosmetic cons to take care of it, but for a while the scar tissue was a status thing. The more scar tissue that one had on his head, the smarter he was. And almost everybody was soon taking the steroids. Almost everybody, that is, except those most conservative people in the world, the confidence people themselves who had started this particular advancement.

  “A paint manufacturer doesn't necessarily paint his own body with every paint he makes, good quality though it may be,” Jerome Blackfoot said. “I'm not going to have any of this stuff injected into my own brains. Sure it's good. I invented it, didn't I? I designed types Alpha and Delta of the Brain Steroids myself, so of course they're good. But I'm fastidious. When I was little, I wore white gloves when I played in the mud. I'll stay with my natural brains, unbulged and unbursted. But now we will have to develop and devise a few things for all these new muscular brains to occupy themselves with. Give them something to be smart about. There is something unclean about the vision of all those strong brains munching on themselves. We will give them ‘Essence of the Compacted World’ to munch on.”

  Well, Blackfoot and his partner did come out with a line of shape-modules or information modules that could be impressed into the new big brains which they had helped create. These modules contained details (more than details, whole constellations of persons and places and happenings and meanings and sights and smells and axioms), and their patterns and contents went directly into the brains in usable forms. Oh, for instance there would be a shape-module for a certain discipline or specialty of biology. No need to spend five years acquiring it. It was quite easy, after one of the quacksalvers had come upon the method intuitively, to put any and all information into a shape-module form that was ready for impressing. There was very little physical content to this absolutely massive information; it was all coded into impressed shape. Thus a person with a brain sufficiently fortified with steroids might absorb the entire corpus of a hundred thousand novels in one impressing session, and he would possess this information and emotion and experience intimately forever. A person could learn languages or philosophies or mathematics or art-experiences or histories similarly. Anybody could know anything now. Everybody did know everything (and you have no idea how big and finely grained this “everything” is) almost immediately. It looked as if everybody in the land would become stunningly smart and informed. Everybody, except perhaps that small group of persons who had accidentally started it all.

  Jerome Blackfoot the Black-Footed Weasel was one of no more than thirty prime quacksalvers and confidence persons who had first gone into brain steroids. And yet the connection between the “new age of brainery” and the quacksalvers couldn't be allowed to remain so blatant. Blackfoot and persons like him would give brains a bad name. So it was surely a good thing that the brain steroids as well as the information-modules were taken out of the hands of the quacksalvers and given into the control of professionals and scientists and governmentalists. Because this was a big thing. What had come upon the world, what had slipped up on the blind side of the world, by accident and without warning, was “Controlled Explosion Day” itself, the day when the whole world got smart, the day that the world had been created for. Big strong brains now shook off their dubious and accidental origin, created themselves to further massiveness and capacity, and went to work on the mountains of information that was the world itself, interior and exterior, in impressed module form. These brains held the “Essence of the Compacted World” and they spun intelligent judgments on it out of their own mountainous intellectuality. So there was joy and enthusiasm and high thinking in the land.

  (Ferndale Whitehead was getting a head start on the world in the early morning, and he wasn't one of the Scar-Tissue People, or one of the Necklace People, or one of the Little Red Wagon People either.)

  Quite soon, with the intervention of the government with its professionals and scientists, the “Mental Musculature Phenomenon” became a stratified and restricted benison. Everybody would still know everything, but not everybody would know everything to the fullest power. “Big Brain Morning” was not to be enjoyed in its ultimate form by everybody. Or rather, there would be new and more ultimate forms created that would not be open to all. There would have to be stages to it. Bands of professionals and scientists periti made the selections of just who would receive the more ultimate forms of brain development, and who would have to be content with mere doubling or tripling of brain muscle and scope. There would be, for the common good, hierarchies of braininess. And it would be mostly the case of “To those who have, let it be given.” So it would be mostly the case of the professionals and scientists forming the top hierarchy. The common people didn't really have enough brains to deserve ultra-brains. They would be better off than they had ever been before, but special states must be reserved for special persons. The special persons were in. Others were almost in. And lesser breeds would be forever outside by their lack of capacity or by their own sordid choice. And yet there were strange compensations in belonging to a lesser breed. Those of the lesser breeds, and some of those with hardly any breeding at all, just had to be certain that they would receive what was coming to them.

  Ferndale Whitehead the Man in the White Hat, a sort of partner of Jerome Blackfoot the Black-Footed Weasel, believed that there would always be a place for a firm with fleets of plain brown trucks and with trained installers and technicians in those trucks. And so it was the case. Blackfoot and Whitehead had held bothersome patents on certain brain steroids. (And those steroids had had invisibly fine tendrils on them, of purpose not generally apparent.) And the partners had developed the techniques of impressionable information-modules, and later of gateway-couples. Though the government voided all such patents and rights-to-techniques, yet they did form a sort of trading basis. And those quacksalver gentlemen were good traders even after they had nothing left to trade with. They could even trade successfully out of an empty banana cart, so long as it still had the smell of bananas about it.

  The quacksalvers became licensed applicators and installers, and their hundred thousand plain brown trucks seemed to be everywhere in the land. Their trucks would roll as long as grass grows and water flows.

  After a while, only token numbers of their trucks still rolled, for steroids and modules and couples were soon made of instantly transmissible and mostly immaterial substance. But the Quacksalver Row people still collected for the full complement of services. That, somehow, had been built into the system without anyone noticing.

  When the Necklace Clan, the other main group of smart people, had come along, Blackfoot and Whitehead and others of their small tribe were able to take advantage of this new development also. They were able to take advantage of it because they had, accidentally, originated it.

  That was the day when Ferndale Whitehead had called up Kathrynne Klunque (she had been born plain Kate Klunk) who had more surplus electronic components than anyone else on Quacksalver Row.

  “Say, Kate, didn't you have a few million junk miniature thermocouples with a two-way couple feature? I'll try a million of them at a cent each. I don't know what I'll do with them, but this is one of those oh-what-the-hell days. Besides, I'd like to help you out of a hole.”

  “I'm not in a hole, Whitie,” Kathrynne said. “I'm sitting on top of a mountain, and ‘Queen of the Mountain’ is the name of the game I'm playing. You are referring to those ‘gateways of the future,’ those ‘gateways to the other realms,’ those ultimate thermocouples or category-couples, are you not? Whitey, I couldn't let you have them for a cent each. I will let you have them two for a cent though. There, I left you breathless with that one, didn't I?”

  “Predictably breathless, Kate. And you also want the pre
dictable—”

  “Fair piece of everything.”

  “All right, Kate.”

  “You've found a way to make at-a-distance couples of information depots to brains?”

  “We think so, Kate. We'll try it with a million or so of your couplers. How much will it cost to make more of the couplers when the stock is used up?”

  “Oh, a cent each. Or a thousand dollars each. Or somewhere in between. It depends on whom we are talking to.”

  They had tried it then, and it had worked. And so the Necklace Clan came into being. People could hang the small gateway-couples around their necks like necklaces, and fifty or so of the gadgets could give them all possible instant information on every subject imaginable. By using the necklaces or strings of gateway-couplings, they would need brains only about half as muscled and massive as those of the prime Scar-Tissue People. They could get by with less brain bulk because the information depots they drew on were not inside their brains. Those information supplies might be in tabulated buildings as far as two thousand kilometers away. Because of this, the Necklace People were able to keep their brains mostly in their own heads, with very little exterior over-spill. This made it neat. But others preferred things more gaudy: the Scar-Tissue Clan reveled in their lurid scar tissue. That was the entry-mark of brains.

  The Necklace thing worked as the previous things had worked. There were now two major clans of very smart people. A choice was offered. People could be about as smart as they wished, in either of two ways.

  The third way, that of the Little Red Wagon People, offered only a minor variation, and there was no basic discovery involved. These people pulled carts or coaster wagons behind them which were filled with their own overflow brains. It was better than having those protuberances growing all over the outside of the head. It was easier on the neck. But there was some danger of being separated by accident from important centers of their own minds. With the Necklace Clan, there was also the danger of power failure cutting them off from their information depots.