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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Well, you're mostly telling tall stories, Socrates,” the time-tripper insisted. “And yet you are your genuine self and you could give us deep and sensational information. You work with us and we'll create the greatest archeological-historical coup ever. We have about a hundred key questions here, and if you will just use them for takeoff points—”

  “Go ahead, Rocky,” Art Slick said. “You'll have time. We won't be setting out for Cos for an hour yet.”

  “And you haven't anything better to do,” another of the time-probers put in. “After all, this is a rainy day in Halicarnassus.”

  “It doesn't hurt to be nice to people,” the local girl said, “not when they have made such long time trips to see you. Be nice to them, or we won't take you to Cos for the Goose-Down-Eve Festival. And the Cos goose down is the softest down in the world and justly famed.”

  “It's not softer than thumbs down, surely,” Socrates said. “Thumbs-down is softer than goose-down every time. All right, folks, I open my heart and my head to you. But I wouldn't be opening them to you if it weren't such a dismal rainy day; and I wouldn't be opening them to you if only they had changed the bill at even one of the movie houses.”

  Then the time-trippers fell upon him joyously for the epoch-making interview.

  “We'll gas up at Turkoman's Marina, Rocky,” Art Slick called.

  “We'll see you there, but take your time and give them what they want. You owe it to the world, Rocky.”

  “Why do you call him Rocky when his name is Socky,” the local girl asked as she went out with Art and Jim.

  And the interview was a great success. The old master used the hundred or so questions as takeoff points for truly masterful illuminations. It really was the archeological-historical coup of the century. Of which century?

  Of the twenty-ninth century. That's the one the time-trippers came from. It rejuvenated the twenty-ninth century that had gone stale. It produced one of the most startling reanimations ever. It brought about the rarest of things, the Almost Perfect World.

  Rocky disappeared from the Halicarnassus scene shortly after the interview. Oh, he's still around somewhere, but he had other interests and he keeps out of the public eye, so it's said. And he won't give interviews.

  So we have nine centuries to wait before we can get a piece of that startling reanimation and a share of the Almost Perfect World.

  Make Sure The Eyes Are Big Enough

  It rings like happy thunderclap,

  The nine-tenths world of clown.

  It's ‘Things Returned’ with sap and hap.

  It's circus come to town.

  A discovery was made in the field of phenomenal psychology early this week. It consisted of opening the eyes and seeing the nine-tenths of the world that had previously been invisible. The discovery was simply there for persons of a certain type, and it had not been there before.

  It had been there for certain kids for at least a day. Then it had been there for a tyrannical old lady named Mary Imperial McSlim, and she found it so amazing that she decided to keep it for herself. But the next noontime it was there for her grandson Rusty McSlim, the great phenomenal psychologist, and he was excited enough about it to want to share it with the entire world. And that evening it was experienced by a dozen of McSlim's great colleagues whom he had called together to tell about it. That was when the thing was effectively there.

  But three others of the colleagues who were present didn't experience it at all. They even said that it was another sample of McSlim's droll humor.

  The new experience or discovery was a wider range of seeing and sensing. It was the quick cognition of animations and people and off-people and pantograms and joyous beasts and monsters that had heretofore been invisible. It was seeing the other nine-tenths of the world in its racing brightness, and the realizing that the one-tenth of the world that had always been visible was comparatively a little bit sub-par. It was — well, it was the sensual pleroma, the fulfillment, the actualization, all this laced with the excited “Hey, where have you guys been!” motif.

  Mary Crisis McSlim, a kid and the daughter of Rusty McSlim, had seen the enlarged scene earliest; but the first accountable or adult person to see it had been her great-grandmother Mary Imperial McSlim, the grandmother of Rusty McSlim the great phenomenal psychologist. And old Mary Imperial had seen that enlarged world by a peculiar arrangement.

  Great-grandmother Mary Imperial was an old tyrant, and now fate had punished her for her tyrannies. She was confined to her bed for the rest of her life. She had always wanted to see everything, and now she couldn't. So the great Rusty McSlim fixed it so that his afflicted grandmother could see with the happy and hungry eyes of his lively daughter, Mary Crisis, who ran everywhere and saw everything.

  All that Rusty had to do was drill a small hole through the lachrymal crest of his daughter, between the bridge of her nose and her left eye socket (Mary Crisis was left-eyed), and set a mini-probe into the Jacob's membrane at the back of her eye. And the probe was attached by tight magnetic couple to a little recording retro-camera made to hook over the left ear of Mary Crisis. Mary Crisis didn't like it hanging on her ear though, so she wore it stuck with chewing gum in the corner of her eyebrow. This, of course, gave much greater fidelity to the running pictures.

  The camera was a small cube about two millimeters on a side. If it had used a lens of its own instead of the lens in the left eye of Mary Crisis, it would need to be at least four millimeters on a side, and Mary Crisis might have let it get covered up or she would have forgotten to turn it on. But she turned on her own eyes automatically.

  Every afternoon when Mary Crisis came in from her lively day, she would click that day's picture-capsule (a cube about one millimeter on a side) out of the little camera and give it to her great-grandmother Mary Imperial. And old Mary Imperial would put it in her projector and watch it for several happy hours, seeing everything that the hungry eyes of Mary Crisis had seen that day, and seeing it all with the immediacy and buoyancy that Mary Crisis contributed to it. And the great-grandmother would go, in surrogate fashion, everywhere that Mary Crisis and her three best friends, Eustace Riggles, Bravura Jones, Henry Gusset, had gone that day.

  Well, Mary Imperial couldn't see with the eyes of the three friends of Mary Crisis, but Mary C was clearly the wide-eyed and hungry-eyed one of the group. Eustace was all ears, Henry was all mouth, and Bravura was all motion; and she was almost always in the field of vision of Mary C anyhow. And what the eyes of Mary C did bring was a varied panorama of the pulsing world containing everything from giggling cows to newborn birds and city traffic.

  Giggling cows? Yes, for the last couple of days there had been giggling cows.

  This surrogate seeing had become a big and sustaining thing in the life of old Mary Imperial, and she prayed that nothing would ever go wrong with the arrangement. But it was a ten-fold bonus for her when everything suddenly went exuberantly right with the surrogate living and viewing.

  On the evening of the record, she saw the already lively world as greatly magnified and wonderfully exploded and fantastically added to. She saw ‘our companions and friends’, the aura of other creatures with which we are usually invisibly surrounded. And a great quantum step in perception had been made.

  How thin and tinny and how few in number had been the objects in our old field of view! How mediocre in color and how undistinguished in style it had all been! How un-flamboyant the world had been before this! She viewed for quite a few hours.

  Then she buzzed for her great-granddaughter Mary Crisis just at midnight, and Mary C came almost instantly from her bed. People always came almost instantly when Mary Imperial buzzed for them.

  “You saw so many additional things today, Mary C, such enhanced things, such a mass of wonderful things and people. How?” she asked.

  “I don't know. All my gang saw the new people and things and whirlings today. We say it's the circus come to town, the Big Circus this time. We keep seeing and knowing
more and more guys and their dogs, some of those dogs twenty-five feet long; and they're all so friendly and monstrous looking. We keep getting hit, ‘bop!’, by more and more colors and better ones. Have a stick of Sappy-Happy Chewing Gum, G-G Mother. Open up and live a little.”

  “You know that civilized people don't chew gum, sappy-happy great-granddaughter of mine. There has been a premonition of this for several days. Do those giggling cows in Monaghan's meadow have anything to do with these new things?”

  “Yes, I think so,” Mary Crisis said. “They started before this other business started, maybe two days before. They had already been giggling for quite a while before we began to see the Big Circus. I think that they were already seeing what we saw today.”

  There was an incredible advance and expansion in the seeing adventure, that's what it was. There had never been anything like it for a long, long time. When medium-early man had suddenly acquired color-vision and so moved out of the old black-and-gray dinginess, that must have been something of the same explosive and emerging experience. But the old tyrant Mary Imperial didn't get all of it. She got only the visual part, and she got that second hand. She should have opened up and lived a little, as Mary Crisis told her. But she missed it by declining the symbol that was more than a symbol.

  Rusty McSlim caught the full phenomenon about noon the next day, and he didn't know what triggered it. It wasn't something he had eaten; he hadn't eaten anything that day yet. It came onto him like a big door banging open and letting in endless masses of sunshine and color, all of them inhabited by stimulating creatures that Rusty felt he knew from somewhere.

  Rusty was an acute observer of the phenomenon from the time it first came to him, and he had more than just a ‘seeing’ of the new throngs of creatures, human, quasi-human, way-off-human, and comically and rampantly animal.

  Besides the seeing of these folk he also had the bountiful smells of them. Hey, the odd creatures do smell good when you catch them at full whiff! And he heard them, with other ears, with old pointed ears that he had forgotten about having. He did not hear by conventional sound that is often irritating, but by the most wonderful invention ever, sound without noise! And he understood the ‘talk’ of these nations of creatures, though perhaps it should be called ‘communication’ rather than literal ‘talk’.

  And he also had a great new comprehension by that blending of all the senses (the ‘common sense’ in the old meaning) whose organ of perception is located just below the fontanel of the head.

  Rusty McSlim observed and reveled, and bided his time. This was almost too much to take in at once. These newly-visible folks ran from typhoeans (extreme types, they) to very close cousins of humans. And the new-appeared animals had a much wider range, though there were no strict rules for determining which were mere animals and which were intellectual quasi-humans. Rusty spoke civilly when he was spoken to, but he did not yet take any initiatives.

  But, that evening, Rusty convoked a group of his close associates; and twelve of his fifteen gathered colleagues experienced the whole fulfillment. All of them were phenomenal psychologists, and so they knew the importance of recording their impressions. Most of them spoke their observations into their recorders (which phenomenal psychologists even take to bed with them); and at the same time they set four panoramic cameras to gobbling everything up.

  But the most startling observation that they made was that the observing was a two-way street. The ‘new-appearance persons’ were regarding the human psychologists as themselves being new appearances, and they were quite interested in them. Some of these ‘first-time-ever-seen’ quasi-humans were recording their own observations of the McSlim group.

  There was one large near-human person who was really a jolly green giant, but done with quite a bit more style than the giant of the old advertisements.

  “Out of mythology!” the green giant gasped and grinned. “I never expected anything this exciting. You are creatures right out of mythology!” And he had his own recorder switches on to catch his own jolly green comments. “Amazing,” he said, “You really are amazing!”

  That was a recorder the big green person was using?

  “Let me see that, let me see that!” cried Doctor Darrel Dogstar whose real field was electronic psychology. “We don't have anything as smooth and sophisticated as that, not at any price.”

  “Oh, it's just a little knock-about model. It is good to see you folks, really good to see you! Every new acquaintance we make enlarges all of us,” the jolly green person was speaking to Darrel Dogstar who was examining the smooth and sophisticated recorder. “We always suspected that you were there. You had to be there to explain certain eccentricities in the animate continuum, but we could never see you or sense you before. We considered filling you with luciferic fluid to make you visible in outline, but that is a little bit like putting salt on the tail of a pterosaur: you have to catch it first. And now you are apparently lit up by some chemical accident, and we can see and sense you almost as easily as we can see ourselves and persons of the other participating groups. Well, we have caught a group of you here now, and we have filled you with luciferic fluid, unbeknownst to yourselves; so we will still be able to see you even if the effect of your chemical accident wears off. And it won't matter whether you continue to see us or not. We know what we look like and we don't need you to confirm it. And yet we welcome you as a participating species, if you are such.”

  “To us, this is a total surprise,” Rusty McSlim spoke in honest humility. “We hadn't even an inkling of your existence.”

  “Not so, not so!” half of McSlim's colleagues leaped to lie about the situation. “Of course we knew that you existed, most of you. Your existence was mandatory for the operation of some of our psychological equations.”

  The sense of touch was the only one not in full scope here. The entities of some of the different orders couldn't touch each other, though to a limited extent (the limit was the strength of the electrical or coronal discharge experienced in touching alien tools) they could handle each others' artifacts.

  “It may be a peculiar question,” hazarded Doctor Jorkus Halliburton whose forte was astral psychology, “but what year is this where you are? Is it with you as it is with us?” He asked this of one of the beautiful fish-faced people.

  “Oh, we don't use years,” said that beautiful person, “and ‘here’ is where we are. Years are so temporal. You will notice that only the wavering and changeable species use them, only about half of the species who are members of the ‘great visibility’. You should know that yourselves still haven't become visible to all the species here present. Try harder.”

  “We don't know what to call all of you. If we call you ‘people’ there may be some confusion,” said Doctor Lollie Lindwurm who was about as phenomenal a psychologist as you'll find. “We just aren't the same. We are impressed by you, but you make up a very odd cousinship for ourselves. The green giant says that we are creatures out of mythology, but I believe that some of you entities are angelic messengers ascending and descending on Jacob's Ladder.”

  “Not many of us are angelic messengers,” said a lizard-faced person of one of the cousinly species. “Hardly one in a thousand. It's probably at least as frequent among you as among most of us. Generally we are in horizontal or ‘big circle’ relationship with each other, and there isn't much ascending or descending to it. Up with the lateral movement! That's what I always say. Oh, are you old enough to have known Jacob, female cousin?”

  “There seem to be fewer outright animals and more quasi-people among you now than there were when I was out and about today,” Rusty McSlim said.

  “We're indoors now,” answered a lordly type, probably a thunder-man, “and the larger beasts are left outdoors.”

  “You said that we are apparently lit up by a chemical accident,” Daniel Dogstar essayed. “But why do you think that our breakthrough is an especially chemical one?”

  “Oh, you're a chemical species,” a fine-
looking, rubbery, frog-faced person said, “just as I myself belong to an Urstuff species, non-molecular and non-all-that-detail. You are not so much creatures right out of mythology as you are creatures right out of a chemistry book. You remind me of some of the cartoon characters in Elementary Basic Chemistry Number One. You yourself, entity Dogstar, are an almost perfect depictment of the protean spirit of Protein as drawn in our elementary texts. You are hinged and articulated just as a protein molecule is. We ourselves, I'm afraid, do not offer such graphic insights into any of the disciplines. I can see that it's going to be a real bash, exploring you people who have always been invisible to us. I love alien encounter.

  “But you must understand that your being made manifest isn't really an unusual thing. It is only that some of us have not personally encountered an instance of it before. A new species is added to the community of the ‘great visibility’ every aeon or so, and now it is your turn to be added. And you will be added, though there may be a little bit of that ‘watch those bumps!’ experience for two or three days as you cross the threshold.”

  2

  What happy incremental eyes!

  What newly opened door!

  The ‘rest of world’ in weirdly-wise

  Reunions us, and more.

  More about that evening meeting cannot be given right here and now. Doctor Darrel Dogstar got his book First-Ever Meeting with the Simultaneous Aliens into print and on sale within eleven hours, and he has writs out to prevent anyone else describing the full conversations and congresses that went on that night. The writs will run out, of course, after the book has enjoyed its three full days on sale: but this is ‘now’ and not three days from now.