They broke it, and they lost part of it when they broke it. The whole apparatus of being so smart crumbled, even though a lot of the smartness would remain. The top of the mountain of it was gone.
We'll never be that smart again.
The Casey Machine
There's a way, my companion, my bacon my bean,
No matter at bottom it isn't too clean:
The way is the way of the Casey Machine.
—Promontory Goats
A top electronics repairman and designer like myself, Newton Prescott, has the opportunity of knowing more of what is going on in the world than any other person. He not only has his finger on the world's pulse: he designs that pulse, and he redesigns it every day. And ninety-eight percent of that pulse is subliminal and deep-flowing.
I am writing this journal as therapy. I have a compulsion to forget some things (neither I nor my doctor understands this compulsion) and at the same time something jogs my memory back to them. I am advised to write them out in this journal and then burn the journal. If that doesn't work, I will have to have brain surgery. Something is bugging me in a small area of my brain.
A while back, every coin parlor on Kasmir Street had at least one of the Casey Machines. That was an electronic device of such scope as you don't see every day. Most of the Tea Rooms on Hubbard Street had them; and the more modish and vital bars on North Durkheim Street. The Casey Machines were Achronological Eaves-Dropping Machines. “They were unspeakably vile,” Mrs. Duckhunter said. “I don't want either of you to have anything more to do with them even if they come back.”
“They were gold mines,” Mr. Duckhunter said, “and you, Prescott,” (he said to me) “were as good a shovel-and-crib man as was ever around a primitive gold mine. There was a million dollars here, or ten million, for the right hook-up. Sure it was vile, at first. But if you can't stop a thing from being vile, you can at least make money out of it. It's an idea whose time was overdue. The need was there. I don't remember it very well now, but we did make money out of it, and we're still doing it, beneath the surface. None of it is as clear as it was, but we're still making millions and millions and millions out of something.”
“I wish we weren't,” Mrs. Duckhunter said. “We aren't bad people. We aren't really vile. Why isn't there some way we can shut off the money and be poor and honest again?”
“We weren't ever poor, Crissie,” her husband George Duckhunter said, “and we weren't ever honest, for that matter. And I don't know any way to shut off the money. We're being paid as high priced guardians, or some such. I just don't remember the circumstances as well as I might. I don't believe that either you or Prescott does either. We can't exactly keep our memories of those wonderful and event-filled days when we were so rich. We have to settle for remaining so rich.”
There had been quite a bit of discussion about that strange device, the Casey Machine, that so many persons (including its purported inventor) insisted did not exist at all. And much of the discussion was on the theological level.
“Will everybody know everything, or will only the people who are ‘saved’ know everything?” a soggy sinner asked his pastor. “After the Judgment, whether the General or the Particular, will all of us know everything that ever happened? Will all of us know all the dirt, all the thoughts and acts of every person who ever lived? Will we be roomy enough for all this knowledge? Will we have the scope to possess it in vivid detail? Will we be able to revel in all the acts of our neighbors forever?” “All persons will know everything, yes,” the pastor said. “Whether it is after the Particular or the General Judgment that we receive full knowledge is uncertain: but that may not matter, and there may not be any great interval between the two. When we die we enter eternity, and there is no time differential there. The ‘Saved’ will have edification and joy from their total knowledge, and the damned will have fiery regret and deepest suffering. But as to the reveling in the shameful thoughts and actions of other persons, no, the ‘Saved’ would never do that.”
“The ‘Saved’ will miss all the fun then,” the soggy sinner said. “But there will be recompenses to being damned. Ah, will there ever be recompenses! And we can have that revel-and-glow show for times without end. There is no way we can lose.”
“You can lose your eternal souls!”
“So to speak, pastor, so to speak. But they will still be eternal, and we can still be doing what we like best to do anyhow. We will have the time beyond time, and all the time there is. And we will have the dirt beyond dirt and all the dirt that has ever been, or is, or will be. Oh, it will be a wallow-and-revel-and-gloat experience forever, and there will be no limit to it. The Casey Machine is a foretaste of the glory that is to come. And the ‘lost’ souls will have a lot more fun out of it than will the ‘found’ or ‘saved’ souls.”
“But you will suffer forever the discomforts of the damned, Lorenzo—” the pastor protested in fear and amazement.
“Discomfort forever will be worth it!” the sinner said resoundingly. “There are priorities in every condition, and I give first priority to prowling all that secret knowledge in a pulsating glow. And until I cross the bar and come to the untrammeled thing, I will use the Casey Machine for all it's worth.”
“The better sort of people are not having much to do with the Casey Machine,” the pastor said.
“So much the worst for the better sort of people!” the soggy sinner gave the decision.
And there was a conversation between a daughter and her mother.
“It is not right that we should seek out and revel in the dirt of each other,” the daughter said. “It is more the case that we should share the total lives of each other, in pathos and in hilarity, in love and in fascination. With everything to select from, we will naturally select the best.”
“Nah, no such thing,” the mother answered. “That's not for me. It's not for hardly any one. For most of us, we will want the outright filth and the outrageous dirt. There will be some humor in it, yes, very dirty humor. And there will also be cannibalism and sadism and satanism. But the main jolt will always be the dirt, and the scandal, and the sedition and slander and blackmailing knowledge. Not money blackmail: personal ruination blackmail. And the dirt, the dirt, the dirt.”
I am about the only one left who can go back and pick up such private conversations from the recent past.
Why do we, in swift moments, remember when we could fly or do other wonderful things? Because, in swift moments, at some time or other, we really could fly and do other wonderful things. And because it is not good that we should be above our heads for too long, those swift moments were brief ones and were quickly forgotten.
“Oh salving hatred, Oh revivifying derision, Oh nourishing slander!” Josephine McSorely crowed in the Underground Eagle. It is significant that my own copy of it seems to be the only copy still left in existence, even though the Underground Eagle always had a large press run. “The secret is out,” Josephine wrote, “and it can never be penned in again. It was at a small and informal meeting tonight that the make-ups and premises of the world were changed. We held a Particular Judgment, and the Casey Machine was born from that judgment. It is here, right now, and forever. We all know everything now. The power and the knowledge came over the small group of us, and we can perhaps pass it on to other groups for a fee.
“In times before this, several other organizations of illuminated persons have known everything. They knew everything, before their own deaths, by making a Particular Judgment in their own lives. But we become masters of our own judgment in a way the earlier ones could not, because we live in an age of electronic amplification and switching and data control. We are able to project it all, and to repeat it. Yes, and we are able to sell it.
“Casey, with his peculiar mind-set, was the activator of this. He himself denies that the Casey Machine has been invented. Well, it was invented, by the ideologues and experts among us. And it is known as the Casey Machine. And the world is not the same as it see
med to be before we invented it. (Casey himself never was the same as he seemed to be.) This is the big night. This is the night that slimy and rotten enjoyment came into the world as a maneuverable thing.
“Casey had a passion for knowing everything about everyone, even and especially the most sordid things. He had this passion so strongly that he was able to modify and change the way of the world with it.
“ ‘This is all nonsense,’ ” Casey said. ‘What is the matter with the bunch of you anyhow?’ ‘Supposing that it is nonsense,’ that electronics man Newton Prescott said. ‘Nonsense is more often amplified than is sense. It is stronger in its accumulation, and it is less subject to blocking out and monitoring out. You have provided the impetus, Casey, one strong enough to affect the world and turn death into a trifle. It can ride on any carrier, and I believe the carrier of the world magnetism will be the best. It will not be the strangest thing riding that power. Yes, Casey, the Casey Machine has been invented, by you and by me and by others of us here.’
“ ‘Where is it then?’ Casey asked. ‘I can't see it. Can you?’ ‘Yes,’ Newton Prescott said, ‘in my mind I see it, and it will operate mostly inside minds. It is a wireless machine as of now. And it has no physical components yet. But we will give it components and materiality.’ ‘If I gave impetus to such a thing, then I withdraw that impetus,’ Casey said. ‘You can't,’ Prescott told him. ‘This wind has blown from you, and there is no way you can make it not to have blown. By the way, I have an interesting idea for one component of the Casey Machine. There is an electrical discharge from dead persons that is generally overlooked for the reason that it occurs about thirty minutes after clinical death. But we have trapped more than two hundred instances of this discharge into condensors, and we have studied the data. It is very intricate. (We have lately discovered that electricity, like magnetism, is made up of a variety of unaccountable foreign material; there is no such thing as pure electricity: it has to be made out of something.) This post-death discharge data is of a two-way effect: part of it comes from the other side of death and was never in the living person. I am certain that this is a real kick-back from what used to be called the ‘other shore’. I intend to use one such ‘dead-man’ charge in every Casey Machine that is made.’
“Then Newton Prescott said several other things too weird to print even in the Underground Eagle. And Casey washed his hands and conscience of the whole affair, again and again. ‘Casey, you are a hypocrite,’ said Januarius O'Higgins, who was present. ‘I predict that you yourself will buy a Casey Machine, probably through a middle-man, as soon as they are available.’ ‘May I go to Hell if I do,” Casey swore. ‘Oh, all of us will go to Hell,’ said Evelyn Apostolo. ‘We'll ultimately get more out of the machine, and out of the phenomenon of which it is the forerunner, by going to Hell. We have made that choice: it was the choice embodied in the Particular Judgment that we gave and received this evening, the Judgment that created the Casey Machine as a side effect.’
—Josephine McSorely, with her Underground News in the Underground Eagle
Is it not most peculiar that I own the only known copy of this issue of the Underground Eagle? Isn't it funny that nobody else remembers the piece at all, not even Josephine McSorely who wrote it? And my copy is falling apart. In fact, the date of the issue has flaked off of every single sheet of this issue.
Ah, we did make a lot of money out of the Casey Machines! It was as easy as stealing immortal souls from little kids. We were making a million dollars every — well, there is just no time interval to express how often we were making a million dollars. The Casey Machine was an achronological (non-time-bound) device, and the harvest from it was in one huge continuing minute. We were continually making a million, and millions. A dozen of us became Instant Big Rich. We did not really make all that many of the actual and material Casey Machines. But people came to us with wads of money and said they had been receiving vivid life broadcasts from our machines, and they wanted at all costs to continue to receive them. Well, maybe our machines were broadcasting, if people said that they were; but they weren't designed to broadcast. And people were paying us large sums for franchises. “We don't want to be cut off,” they would say. And others would approach us with “We don't want the machine, but we want the name and the power of the machine. We want to call ours the Casey Machine also, though they will be raunchier than your originals.” And Casey Machine Clubs paid us area fees. The money came in variously. Well, it was part of the mechanism that it should make a lot of money for us; and it did, even before we went federal.
The machines weren't designed to broadcast. They weren't designed at all. They grew out of the immaterial components of Casey's passionate and invading curiosity of the thoughts and acts of other people. They grew out of my own discovery of the double-world kick-back electrical discharge mechanism which did indeed serve as a door and valve between worlds. And it grew out of the verve and opportunism of Josephine McSorely, Januarius O'Higgins, Evelyn Apostolo, George and Crissie Duckhunter, and others who promoted the idea which convinces people that they did indeed want something that they already knew that they wanted furiously. It isn't difficult to lead thirst-maddened horses to water. And all of these colleagues had good ideas.
“Give us a classy chassis like a next-year's Ford Alexandrine.” “Invent new colors for it, new reds and flesh colors and blacks, lurid colors. Luridity is the thing.” “Shoot it full of intensity and ur-lust. Make it primordial.” I received such advice from them, and it was all good. “Use grabby motifs, grabby!”
Yeah, one grabby motif I used was the eyes. I was already using a dead-man delayed electrical discharge quantum in every machine. It wasn't necessary. I could have used a dozen other methods; but this was effective, available, quite easy to employ; and it gave an aura of authenticity to the whole thing. Now I also put a set of dead-man's eyes on every machine. It's even easier to procure eyes than delayed electrical discharges, and there was a good-for-business spookiness in having the customers hooked up so that they could look through authentic dead-man's eyes into the revelations.
And the mania took over.
It would seem that persons could simply suicide and have the same effect all at once without the expense. But there was something too final about that for many persons. They would do that the last thing, and it didn't matter that they paid out all their substance on the Casey Machines first. “This is to have the best of all three worlds,” one enthusiast said. The matter of the Casey Machines was raunchy, and some of those of our licensed competitors were stronger than those we made ourselves. This was the primordial lust of mind and body and soul, and of all the under-minds and over-minds. This was the ‘enjoyable degradation’, the ‘polite rottenness’, the ‘healthy prurience’. There was almost endless variety in it. Persons rose to high performance on it when they knew that they were on show, even persons dead for thousands of years. There were probably a million of these very conspicuous ‘show boats’ of the past and the present who were zeroed in on. Their names and identifications spread by word of mind, for they were really top performers. People under the Casey Influence had an other world power and scope of keeping millions of individual persons in their mind and of enjoying billions and billions and billions of details.
I myself was not so entirely fascinated by all the things that the people did as I was fascinated by the electronic manner of their doing. I had recently discovered that there were three categories of being and action, the rational, the irrational, and the electronic; and that the electronic was the most powerful and the most varied. The material world was almost entirely electronic, and it was made up of alien particles and forces and fields. The most familiar and accepted thing, when broken down, was found to be an electronic weave of strands that were neither familiar nor accepted, but were foreign and strange.
Because of group feedback I was thinking better than I ever had in my life. Merely as fall-out from the titanic loutishness and lust and sedition and glutt
ony and slander of the people, this had become breakthrough day in the idea area. There was a new and steeper mentality paralleling the new incredible coarseness. All of us top electronics experts could now read each others' minds. There was some anger and jealousy about this, but really it was to the advantage of all of us. In fact, every person in the world could now read the mind of every other person in the world, or they would be able to do so as soon as they realized what new-power field they were in. This was not exactly as a result of the Casey Machine. It was part of the misnamed ‘Casey Condition’ which had now imposed itself on the world.
Many of us reveled in knowledge, as many more were reveling in the pornea of lust and soul-nakedness and everted bodies and minds. The Casey Condition was very big. Every person could read the mind and body, and the deepest unconsciousness and memory and subliminal areas, of all persons living and dead: aye, and also of all persons still unborn and unconceived and un-thought of; for all time was now simultaneous to us in our new condition. And we were all the same animal. This power of total reading had been available all along. It was just that for several of the recent millennia we had forgotten to use it.
The earth magnetism is not self contained, I discovered. That is, we of the higher electronic community of minds discovered it. It represents a bond between the Earth and something else not yet identified, something more than our solar system and something more than generalized space. But the strands of this braided force are helices of buried memories and buried mysteries. They are the remnants of what must have been really stupendous moments and historical movements subsumed into the Earth's magnetism: and into its thermodynamic balance, and into its isostasis, and into its gravity which is itself a large collection of forces.
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 262
