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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “A report from India says that the elephants are looking into the ends of their trunks and cooing with delight,” the commentator on the 8:16 news spot was saying. “And they are scratching the tops of their heads on the boles of trees with obvious pleasure.”

  “I suppose that the spillover to the other intelligent species is a good thing,” Fritz Der Grosse said, “but it is not enough. We need us too.” A one-handed man named Buford Cracksworthy, in a moment of panic, had lopped off his own head.

  “Here, here, here,” the chief of the WHEW crew cried. “That isn't allowed at all.”

  “Oh boy oh boy oh boy!” the severed head moaned in severe unease. The slumped-over body of Cracksworthy wasn't in control of its head, and the head wasn't in very good control of itself. That wasn't a successful way of saving the third eye.

  One of the leaping leopards came, smashed the head, and then chewed it up and swallowed it. It sounded as if the beast was chewing a head of cabbage.

  “What a race, right down to the wire,” Vera Vanguard chortled. “I'm getting so smart I'm about to bust. Oh, is it my turn now? Have you already blinded the third eyes, that is cured all the others? Hand, just let me see that line once more by my new illumination. Oh, I understand it. There is a delay, and there is a great burgeoning in the group futurity line then, an absolute incandescence. But my personal future line, why is it blurred? “I'll think of something, I'll think of something fast. Ouch! Say, that deep-bite acid does have a bite to it! Oh, its darker in here than it was. And I forget what I was trying to do.”

  Posterior Analytics

  Potters Field was the best place for the inner city people to eat lunch. It was a dual-purpose area. It counted as green-sward or park-land and so helped to keep the downtown up to the ‘Green-Acres Ratio Requirement’. And it still fulfilled its original purpose as a burial place for unclaimed bodies and for the bodies of non-citizens. Burials were still made there regularly. There were from a dozen to sixty burials every night. But ‘Benson's Thirteen Hour Miracle Grass’ would overgrow the disturbed earth and have all traces of the burials obliterated before lunchtime of the next day. And every day there was a fresh scattering of tombstones, bright, white, crisp, to sit on. The lunch-munchers always preferred the newer stones. Besides the new stones, there were also the less bright, less white, less crisp ‘yesterdays stones’ in their diminished states. These would be veined and sundered and crumbling from the gobbling of the miracle grass. The stones would disintegrate completely in about a week and would merge with the soil and leave no trace. They were made to exact formula by McGuire's Disintegrating Tomb-Stone Company. The bodies buried in Potters Field were thought to take three weeks to disintegrate. At least, no new burials were made directly over old burials more often than that.

  The sheep kept the lush miracle grass from growing too tall. And the fat soil, through the medium of Benson's grass, was turned into fat sheep. The sheep got along well with the lunching people, and the lunch-munching people got along very well with the sheep and they held little noontime lotteries to see which hundred of them would have portions of the five fat sheep that were slaughtered and roasted in Potters Field every day.

  Among the lunch-munchers there were a few devotees who believed that the buried people should not so soon be forgotten. The devotees were expert at spying out the grass-disguised outlines of the night-before graves, and they lit and set rush-lights to burn on each new grave for the noon hour. The fat rushes would burn for exactly an hour before they burned up. The devotees pulled the rushes from the little lustral brook or drainage ditch that ran through the Field. The rushes purified the draining water, and the devotees daily pulled enough rushes to keep them from clogging the brook.

  For the last several days though, people or creatures had been breaking up out of their graves, erupting through the dirt and miracle grass. They'd break out around high noon when so many lunchers were there, they would brush the grave dirt off themselves, and then they would walk away as nonchalantly as folks can do under such circumstances. Some of the munchers found this horrifying and some of them found it funny. But the Potters Field must have become a bit crowded or people wouldn't have been breaking out of it.

  So, with a fairly regular supply of bodies guaranteed by the system, the whole Potters Field Complex was in tolerable balance. Some of the bodies were just unidentified corpses found around that part of town, but most of them came from the ‘Alien Analysis Center’, a large and mislabeled building that formed the north border of Potters Field.

  Some of the aliens who were analyzed at the ‘Alien Analysis Center’ were themselves rather analytical. The Stoicheoi, for instance, were a very analytical people. They said this of themselves. Well, one of them at least, a large and bumptuous specimen named Kerelspook, had told his analyst Henry Sounder that his people the Stoicheoi were very analytical folks. And that was the nearest thing to a clear statement that could be made about the Stoiks. Henry had personally encountered only this creature Kerelspook and two other Stoiks, and yet it seemed that he had met a multitude of them. It was creatures like them who gave aliens the name of being tricky. Henry was surprised to see that the files on the Stoiks at the ‘Alien Analysis Center’ lacked a few hours of going back four full days. It seemed as though the Stoiks had been a puzzle and a problem almost forever.

  It was hardly possible for any alien to be on Earth for more than an hour without his presence being detected by the Alien Analysis Center. It was not possible for an alien to be on Earth for more than two hours without him being taken into hand by an Agent of the Center and being brought to the Center either by force or by astute handling. Henry Sounder was such an Agent at the Center, and Jill Discovery had been one.

  It puzzled and hurt Henry to have to think of Jill in the ‘had been’ category.

  An oddity about the Stoiks was that they, alone among the aliens, weren't discovered on Earth by the Agents of the Alien Analysis Center. Each of the Stoiks discovered and came to the Alien Analysis Center of his own initiative. And each of them on coming there had made a whistling sound, and then had gone into that clipped sort of English that persons in symbiosis with machines often use: “I am interested in Analysis. I am doubly interested in an Analysis Center. And I am triply interested in your people here. Humor me. Tell and show me all that you know.”

  The ‘Alien Analysis Center’ was a large, plain, brown building, and the only sign on it read ‘Third Class Grain Storage Depot for Sector ZZL’. Since there was no sector ZZL in the entire world, few persons came unbidden to the Center. How could genuine aliens (or false ones, for that matter, if there were such) know that this building was an Analysis Center? Surely not one Earth person in a million knew that there was such a place, and none but the authentic Agents of the Center knew where it was. Even the code clerks at the ‘Center’ believed that it was indeed a Third Class Grain Storage Depot, nor did they wonder much why the funny-looking ‘grain dealers’ who were brought there should be questioned so roughly that many of them died of it.

  How then could the alien Stoicheoi have known that this building was the ‘Alien Analysis Center’? What sort of information drew them to it? And how could this spooky dummy of a Kerelspook have known what the place was? How could this infuriating slob—?

  Gently, Henry, gently! Jill Discovery, a very special person (to Henry at least), had disappeared from the face of the Earth late on the day before this. And this spoken dummy, this infuriating slob, this misbegotten alien, this Kerelspook (“I always wondered what my name would sound like in Earth-talk,” this creature had said, “it sounds funny, doesn't it?”) this impossible alien had been with Jill Discovery when she had disappeared. Kerelspook had to know what happened to her. He didn't seem to know much, but he had to know that.

  Jill Discovery had been ‘snapped away’. For several days now a few people had been ‘snapped away’. They would simply fly through the air as though jerked away by a giant invisible hook. They'd skim through t
he air just above the low trees and the low hills, and then they'd be gone beyond the horizon. This phenomenon had first been noticed a little less than four days before.

  The Agents of the Center used various tactics in their analysis of the aliens they had picked up. Some Agents used rough tactics, and some of them used soft. Jill Discovery was an especially soft-tactics person. She had been walking and talking with the goofy Stoicheoi alien named Kerelspook and trying to elicit information and meaning from him. They had been walking in the lush green grass of Potters Field when Jill Discovery was ‘snapped away’ through the air and was seen no more. Several reputable human persons witnessed this happening, and they all stated that the lady had been talking to the slob-alien when she was ‘snapped away’. The lady had left something behind her, they said, but they all had perceived that it was something worthless and they had not investigated what it was. “There was a dazed aspect to the whole happening,” one young woman said. “I think it was that slob alien who put it in a daze.”

  Kerelspook was brought back to the ‘Alien Analysis Center’ building and he was questioned by a group of the Agents, some of whom were rough-tactic persons. And that ogrish alien seemed a little bit puzzled about it.

  “You mean that ‘snapping away’ is usual with you?” he asked. “Oh, it's common with us. It happens to each of us at least once.”

  “When you're alive?” a rough-tactic agent asked.

  “When we're alive, yes. And then—snap away—and we're unalive, in what we call the ‘little death’. ‘Snapping away’ is a way that we die. Do you people have a better arrangement for doing it?”

  “What was the last thing that Jill Discovery said to you before she was, ah, ‘snapped away’?” a medium-rough-tactic agent asked.

  “Her last words were ‘Let us just be clear about who is analyzing whom?’ She asked this rather hotly.”

  “Kerelspook, do you ever tell lies?” Henry Sounder asked the alien.

  “Only analytical lies,” Kerelspook said.

  They questioned Kerelspook more stringently then, to try to get more clear information out of him. And it was under the stringency of their questioning that the fellow died. There was a ‘Whoosh’ as though a blast of air went past them. “What was that?” they asked each other. “Oh, it happens every time that one of the Stoiks dies,” said one of them who had been on these cases more than the others.

  So they certified him dead. The body-buriers buried him then, and the group of Agents certified him as buried. He was buried at night in Potters Field, and that should have been the end of Kerelspook.

  So, about mid-morning of the next day, Henry Sounder was startled when Kerelspook fell into step with him as he walked in Potters Field. Well, Henry had been one of those who had questioned this creature Kerelspook the evening before. He had seen the creature die under a questioning less severe than aliens were sometimes subjected to. Henry was one of the three Agents who, examining the body of the alien independently, had pronounced it dead. And he had seen them bury Kerelspook. Dead and buried and verified.

  So Henry, frustrated by the horrifying disappearance of his favorite lady friend, was shocked, startled, and angered when Kerelspook fell into step with him as though nothing had happened. That slob of an alien was hard to like under the best of conditions. And seeing the fellow now, alive, with dirt, probably grave dirt, clinging to him—that was not the best of conditions.

  “I've always had the idea that the dead, or the returned dead, pick up special knowledge on their way,” Henry said. “Have you any new information about the disappearance of Jill Discovery?”

  “I? No,” Kerelspook said. “I did not dream with her last night, either before or after my burial. But you dreamed of her. Why do you look surprised? Why do world people believe that their dreams are invisible to everybody except themselves? Have you any new information about her disappearance?” There was that whistling sound on the edges of the slightly mechanical speech of Kerelspook.

  “Leave me, oaf,” Henry Sounder said. “I'm too sorrowful and desolate to abide a creature like you today. No, no, I'm wrong, don't leave me. I must know what happened to Jill. There's always a chance that you really do know where she's gone. You have to know more about this than you say.”

  “So do you have to know more about this than you say,” Kerelspook told Henry.

  On the night before, just after the attested death and burial of the alien Kerelspook, Henry Sounder had gone to his quarters and gone to bed. And he'd dreamed of Jill Discovery. Perhaps he had dreamed with her, in Kerelspook's phrase. She had come to him like an undersized wraith, and she had knocked on his forehead with her knuckles. “Let me in, Henry!” she had cried. “Oh, let me in!” So he had let her into his head, as it were. Persons who perform dream analyses on aliens will sometimes have alien-form dreams themselves. “Help me, Henry, help me,” Jill begged. “I was dead in one place and buried in another, and now that I have come together I am buried alive. If you care for me at all come to me. And bring a shovel when you come.”

  “Where are you, Jill?” Henry asked in his dream.

  “I don't know,” she said, “except that I'm buried in the ground. When I was ‘snapped away’ I zoomed only a little ways over the horizon (did you know that ‘snapped away’ people see their original horizon as a line and they pass over it as if passing over a line?), and then I was in a room. ‘They’ have a room there, and they questioned and analyzed me in it. But they didn't use words when they questioned me.

  “They drew me out like thousands of fine glass threads, and they reeled and rereeled each of those threads through their scanners till they had read everything on them. That was the way they questioned me. I hadn't any defense against them. I felt naked before them, and then I noticed that my nakedness consisted in me not having my body with me. It's an embarrassing garment to be caught without. But where had I left it? All that I had with me was my spirit and a spirit is really nothing but a great number of glass threads that are so fine that they are individually invisible, but when they are hanked together they add up to a sort of shadow. ‘We've got about all we can get out of her,’ one of ‘them’ said. ‘It was a pretty good analysis.’ I knew that I had been analyzed in my threads for many, many hours. ‘I want to go back,’ I said to them. ‘I want to go away from this place and snap back to my body.’ ‘Oh, go ahead then if that's what you want to do,’ one of them told me. I snapped away from that place then and zoomed close above the trees and hills. But it was full night then. I zoomed into the ground and entered my body; and now I am alive in it, but I'm buried. Please come and help me, Henry, and bring a shovel when you come.”

  That had been the end of Henry's rather odd dream of the night before. But was he himself in another rather odd dream now? Was he only dreaming that he was walking and talking with an alien person who he had certified as dead and had seen buried the night before?

  “That's the one,” said a semi-official man who came up to Henry Sounder and the alien Kerelspook and pointed his finger at Kerelspook. “You are the one who erupted up out of the ground just a little while ago, and you still have grave dirt on your shoulders.” “Wipe it off of me, will you,” Kerelspook said. “I thought that I'd got it all.”

  “Several of you have been coming out of the ground every day for two or three days now,” the semi-official man said. “You came right up through the dirt and through the new grass.”

  “We are a problem,” Kerelspook said. “I wonder what will be done about us?”

  “I heard a salesman from Benson's Miracle Grass talking to the Alderman just now,” the semi-official man confided. “The salesman said ‘We're working on it, we're working on it, and we'll have a tougher grass by tomorrow. Then I'd just like to see anybody come up through it’.”

  Henry Sounder walked further through Potters Field with Kerelspook. “I have to have answers, you oaf,” he told that alien. “Where is Jill Discovery who was in charge of your case before I was put on i
t? You were with her when she disappeared. Tell me one thing at least if you know it: is she alive or dead?” “She is alive, yes,” Kerelspook said. “She is alive again, but possibly not for long. She is in bad circumstance. Tonight and tomorrow you may be in the same circumstance. Will you then have the bodily power to break up through the ground? The girl doesn't have it. And remember that the grass will be tougher tomorrow. You people have your out-of-the-body experiences very badly, and I suppose that some of you will really die of it.”

  Henry and Kerelspook sat down on two of the still-crisp tombstones of that day.

  “You are not good at out-of-the-body experiences because you have not tried them before,” Kerelspook said. “You are like certain primitive peoples who are not able to ride horses, or handle fire, or swim, because they have never resolved to try these things.”

  “I begin subtly to teach Earth people to have quick and snappy out-of-the-body experiences. Subtly I taught the girl, and she had one. Subtly I will now teach you also. My analysis of you shows that—”

  “Let us just be clear about who is analyzing whom!” Henry Sounder cried hotly. And then he remembered with fear that those were the reported last words of Jill Discovery.

  Henry Sounder snapped away then. He zoomed through the air, going low above the trees and hills. He disappeared over the horizon, and he saw that horizon line on the ground as he passed over it.

  But when Henry snapped away from Potters Field he left something behind him still sitting on that tombstone. It was a thing of little value however, except possibly to Henry Sounder himself in a better circumstance.

  Henry was in a room ('they’ had a room there) just beyond the horizon. ‘They’ questioned him and analyzed him, but they didn't use words when they did it. They drew Henry out in the form of thousands of very fine glass threads. It was a wordless questioning and analysis that went on for many hours. Henry realized that he had left his body behind him, probably still sitting on that tombstone in Potters Field. The analysis was getting on his nerves, and this was likely because some of those very fine threads they were reeling out to study were his nerves. They were reeling out the threads that were his spirit and putting them to scrutiny.