“We've got about all we can get out of him,” one of ‘them’ said then. “It was a pretty good analysis. We'll understand these freaks yet.” Oh, that subtle whistling! It always played around the corners of the words of the Stoiks.
“I want to snap back to my body,” Henry Sounder said.
“Oh go ahead then. Nobody's stopping you,” one of ‘them’ told him.
Henry snapped back from that place and zoomed through the air close to the hills and trees. It was night. Then he zoomed into the ground itself and was reunited with his body; but he found himself in a bleak and desolate place and under pressure from the earth around him.
“Where am I? Where am I?” he asked, but he knew pretty well.
“Oh, Henry, you're right next to me, hardly a yard away,” Jill Discovery spoke joyfully. “I felt them burying somebody in the night and I hoped it was for you. My Evertock watch tells me that I have been buried here for twenty-four hours. In spite of the ‘airless breathing techniques’ that all Agents of the Center had to learn in their Survival Courses, it hasn't been a very pleasant twenty-four hours. Did you get the dream I sent you? You did come for me. You do care. Did you bring the shovel?”
“Ah, Jill, I begin to understand now,” Henry Sounder spoke in that tight place. “Explanations come clanging into my head one after another. Both of us were picked up and buried as unidentified bodies since Agents of the Center never carry identification of any kind and since ‘anonymous appearance’ is required of us. And now, having been taught the out-of-the-bodies trick by the Stoiks without wanting to be taught it, we are back alive in our bodies. A body is always reanimated if its own spirit returns to it, if the spirit has merely been in detached local travel from it. That explains some of the things reported seen, zombies, rotting bodies walking and talking, frightful things that are mistaken for ghostly manifestations. The Stoiks are able to get through our guard by dying the ‘little death’ under our questioning (but sending their spirits out of their bodies at just the right moments) and being buried by us. But they later come back and reenter and reanimate their bodies. Then the next day, after the sun and the miracle grass have cracked and fissured the covering earth, they erupt out of the ground, brush themselves off, and walk away. But we already have them recorded as dead and buried, and you know how much people hate to reopen closed records. I have that and much more analyzed now.”
“Did you bring the shovel, Henry?” Jill asked. “When I was taking Third Year Analytics one of the questions was ‘What is your definition of Posterior Analytics?’ And I wrote my answer ‘Posterior Analytics is when you get a thing analyzed too late to do you any good.’ I hope that is not our case. You did bring the shovel, didn't you, Henry?”
“Shovel? What shovel? The Stoiks are better at analytics than we are, so they are able to infiltrate our world, and possibly our ‘Center’ itself. In the last several days there have been some strange new faces in unchallenged high places at the ‘Center’. The Stoiks are telepathic and they cause us to enter into telepathic understanding with them. That slight whistling that we hear when they talk is their talk. The other that we believe we hear from them, it is pure telepathy. My own analysis of the present situation is that—”
“Henry, did you bring the shovel? Tell me, or I'll go hysterical!”
“Jill, Jill, Agents for the Center never become hysterical. It's against our code. The Stoiks are strong enough to break out of the ground without tools. It seems that we are not.”
“Henry, with my last breath: Did you bring the shovel?” Jill screamed with a really big sound. “Where is the shovel!!!”
“Quiet down there!” late-hour revelers hooted at them from above, and then passed on.
The End of Outward
1.
“An arrow should hang at its high point for at least a moment before it falls back,” Ike Casad said peevishly. “The one we are talking about has hung at its apex for about thirty thousand years,” his friend Fausto Barra told him. “It looks as if that should be a long while, but of course it's not. In this business, if you even blink, thirty thousand years is one. The observation base is so short, so short! We just can't get a good look at anything.”
The two men, Ike Casad who was long and lean and light, Fausto Barra who was darker and shorter and thicker, were arching, shooting arrows straight up into the air as high as they could possibly shoot them, and then watching them fall back and imbed themselves in the turf within hand-reach of them.
“Does the turn-around flop of the arrow count in the cosmic time, I wonder?” Casad asked.
“Yes, and there's an analog to the turn-over flop,” Barra said. “I believe that we're in such a flop-over time now.”
“Watch this, I'm going to hang an arrow in the sky for quite a long interval,” Casad said boastfully.
“Do so,” Barra told him, “but no trickery.”
“Oh, of course I'll use trickery. Don't you realize that we are re-entering the Age of Trickery?” Ike Casad fitted the arrow to the bowstring, drew, and shot it straight up. The arrow rose for fifty meters, slowed, stopped, and hung there.
“What corn!” Fausto hooted in a sort of laughing disgust.
“Dark lad, that corn will become a bit more colorful, a bit more like old squaw corn,” Ike said, “with purple and red and sharp yellow and flame-orange kernels again. Oh, of course it will become less productive, less uniform, less symmetrical. And people will return to becoming more ruddy, rosy and red, yellow-flame, blonde, and shouting orange. Your type, the almost uniform neutral dark, will pass. People will lighten up again. I'll hate to see you guys go, Fausto, but not much. Yes, I believe that we will pull back out of this stalled age and return to diversity and singularity even if they don't pay as well.”
“How long have you known that Dorner was right?”
“I don't know it now, not for sure. But I suspect that he might be. I was suspecting this new development before ever I met Dorner. Ah, the arrow does hang up in the sky beautifully, does it not? The illusion of stopping time is as good as actually stopping it, since time itself is a mathematical illusion. Oh watch it, you oaf! You've broke it!”
Well yes, Fausto Barra, shuffling around on the green turf while they talked, did break the arrow-shaft of Ike Casad as it stood with its head deeply imbedded in the grassy sod. But they looked up and could see that same arrow still hanging in the sky. That duality was only for a moment though. The image of the arrow faded out and was one. And there was no doubt that the broken arrow on the grass was the real arrow.
“Illusion is fun, Ike,” Fausto said, “and you're pretty good at it. We regress from the age of smooth illusion and return to the time of coarse trickery. I'm looking for a way to stay here, and I believe I've found it.”
“There is a way, but you won't find it,” Ike Casad told him. “The mathematics of it will grind you up into country sausage. Come back, come back, it will be good back there.”
“If there's a way, I will find it, and I believe that I have. I know more about tight-rope mathematics than you do, Ike. And I believe that I, with a small group of others, have calculated the quantum interval exquisitely. We will remain as unfalling arrows in the sky, slim lad. We will not go down that grubby hill with most of you.”
Ike Casad was very good at projecting illusions. He could cause one or a hundred (and, once, more than a thousand) persons to see his illusions. Could anyone prove that Casad's things were illusions? Yes, the unreality of his things could be proved by rather complex mathematics, and he was delighted when somebody did prove one of his projections false. Ike carried things a little further though. In a series of three papers he gave disturbing evidence that someone was projecting illusions to delude the entire world. But he was not yet able to disprove that gigantic illusion.
Ike Casad had a large and ornate gazebo in his parkland or English garden there. Well in truth it was a combination of band-stand, summer-house, gazebo and belvedere, and it would hold one hundred p
ersons easily. It looked clumsy and dated and overdone when he had finished it only one year ago; but now it had mode and style. It was now only slightly in advance of the popular taste. A group of fringe scientists was to hold their quarterly meeting here this afternoon, and Ike and Fausto walked down the lush sloping terrace from the archery crest to the gazebo as most of those pop-brains had arrived. Most of them had arrived on single-seaters, but others came in Ford Phaetons, Toyota Curricles, Nobility Surreys (beautiful, beautiful!), Chevrolet Cabriolets, Porsche World Class Sportsmen, Stanhope Imperials, Dodge Celestial Cruisers, Rolls Tycoon Travelers, Grunches Royal Ghosts, and one Paige Post-Age Plutocrat.
All of these were custom built, and the Paige was an absolutely extemporaneous model. They were the finest vehicles that style could conceive or money could build. Scientists were being paid somewhere near what they were worth in those days. What high styling, effortless art, and consummate technology!
And the scientists themselves ran to high style, elite exuberance, and magnetic personalities. They were cult figures. All of them except Dorner.
Jorden Dorner did not run to high style. He wasn't a magnetic or incandescent person. He wasn't a cult figure. He didn't have class. He hadn't any ideas, and what notions he had were hard to accept. He had exuberance though.
“All together now!” this Dorner cried out (he was the last of them to arrive, and most of them had hoped that he wouldn't), “Let's have it: ‘Aw dinosaur droppings, is he here!’ Loud and clear, folks!”
“Aw dinosaur droppings, is he here?” they all sang out loud and clear and with a few chuckles. Well, of course they liked poor Dorner, but not as a scientist. He was a sham, a spinner of false cobwebs. He always came prepared to deliver his long and bottomless speech, and they always tried to crowd him out from it. Well, this time, Charles Cogsworth of the Institute for Impure Science flung himself heroically into the gap and began to speak:
“The Manned Mars Landing becomes more of a possibility every day,” he said with feeling. “Every problem is solved, every doubt is allayed. We have designed perfection in every detail of the ship. We have the crew trained like finely honed instruments. Funds are in escrow. Our timetable is drawn up. We know what we want to do when we get to Mars, and we have the means of doing it. We are almost ready for the final activation of the Program. Our thumb, so to speak, is on the ‘go ahead’ button. This will be the greatest scientific step of this century, of any century.”
“This is the same statement that you have been giving for fourteen years,” Dorner said loudly, “but the ‘go ahead’ button will never be pushed, or if it is pushed it will be found unconnected. There is no ship built for the journey; there is only designed perfection on paper and in computer for such a ship. There are no liquid funds for the project; only funds in escrow. The crew trained like finely honed instruments is fourteen years older than when it was first so trained. We can't send a manned shot to Mars. Forget it!”
“We will never forget it,” Charles Cogsworth said with great dignity. “The ship can be constructed in one hundred and thirteen hours of computerized construction time after we push the ‘go ahead’ button. The funds can be got out of escrow by a simple act of Congress. What can possibly be lacking?”
“The will,” Jorden Dorner said, “and the right time for it. The time for it was not quite reached, and now it will become one year more distant every year. Let's shelve it and forget it.”
“We will never shelve it,” Drexel Bannock spoke solidly. “There have been delays, yes. But there certainly is not any failure of will. Our own chapter, and the fifty other chapters of the ‘Future Today’ movement, all hold this for our first priority. Three months hence, at our next consistory, we may indeed stand at ‘Go Ahead Eve’ which is to be celebrated exactly one week before launching. No, Dorner, you may not read your paper yet. There are many others before you. Diogenes Pontifex, you may deliver your lecture now.”
Diogenes Pontifex, a leader in the ‘Create the Spark Today’ group, was a big man in all the parabiologies, and the creation of life was his main project.
“We have been on our own verge for so long that we have become a little bit dizzy there,” he said. “We were all but certain that we would make our great announcement three months ago. And I was even closer to that certainty last night. Now I find that it still must be a slightly qualified announcement. We have created life, yes. In our particular group there is no doubt of this. We can demonstrate it, yes, again and again. But so far there has been an impurity or incongruity creep into each of our more than one hundred demonstrations: and it has been a different incongruity each time. It is exasperating to be so close to the untainted demonstration for month after month now—”
“For fourteen years now, Diogenes,” Jorden Dorner interrupted. “Fourteen years ago you had me convinced, but my conviction slipped a little bit when you reported in fifty-six consecutive three-month sessions that there is still one more notch to be traversed to absolute certainty. You will never do it, Diogenes. It recedes from you. The time for it has pulled away and left the project stranded, as it has left so many others. Shelve it, shelve it!”
“We will never shelve it,” Doctor Elton Karns spoke sternly. He had had a lot of practice with these stern admonitions at recent sessions. “There have been delays, but certainly no failure of will. Our chapter will continue to give full support to the ‘Create the Spark Today’ people. We will go onward with it, onward, onward!”
“We cannot go onward,” Dorner maintained. “We cannot even stay where we are. We go backwards. Does it make any of you queasy to ride backwards in a vehicle? That's what we are doing.”
“Fausto and Jorden,” Doctor Elton Karns said as if changing subject, “are the two of you sick? You both seem quite lively, and yet, and yet— Well, I am a medical doctor, and I can sense things. There is something peculiar here.”
“Oh, what is peculiar about myself?” Fausto Barra asked. “I know lots of things peculiar about Jorden Dorner, of course.”
“Both of you have become slightly transparent,” Doctor Karns said, “though that may not be too extraordinary in present company. I suggest that you leave the illusions to Ike Casad though. His illusions are well done, and so far they are harmless.”
“Mine is not an illusion, not intentionally,” Fausto averred. “If there is a regression, I'm not going to go with it. I'm going to stay in the here-and-now. If we calculate the quantum interval well enough we should be able to remain here. I believe that a quantum has just elapsed, so that most of you are now displaced from several of us by a quantum interval. And you, Doctor Karns, have become slightly transparent to me. Are you sick? Physician, heal yourself.”
Bruno Starlight gave a speech. Dennis Burke gave a speech. Alice Oast gave a speech: “There are some who view with alarm the fact that breeds of domestic animals (those so artificial arrangements!) are disintegrating and becoming unbred. Goldfish are becoming uncolored and speckled all around the world, and those that are still of full gold marking are worth their weight in that metal. Dogs are becoming un-dogged or are slipping back into some of those earlier planned forms of dogdom. White-faced Hereford cattle are losing their square beefiness and becoming tall and lean and wild-looking like their ancestors. But let us not regret the turbulence of animal breeds as a disaster, but rather as an opportunity. The autocracy of species may well be broken now. While this looseness prevails, we may be able to broach the barriers of species and create absolutely new animals. Anything that we can put on the drawing board we can do.”
“So you have been saying for more than a dozen years, Alice,” Jorden Dorner interposed. “It won't work. The time for it has gone by. That door you heard slamming was not opportunity knocking. Besides, it is a tightening and not a loosening of the bonds of species that has happened.”
Adrian Mansion gave a speech. Donatus O'Rourke gave a speech. Shalimar McGuire gave a speech: “We should, just about now, be entering the post-verbal age. How
laughable it is that we should have communicated by talking and by writing for so long! And not all humans understand the same talk, and few of the non-human species understand any human talk at all. What we are really on the verge of is ‘over-think’ and ‘all-species-think’, for thinking and communication are identical. Talking and writing are now on the verge of being obsolete.”
“So many things are on the verge,” Dorner said. “Who is the verger who with his verge-staff allows some things to pass and denies others? It is a cosmic verger nowadays, and he moves us back from the verge.”
Shalimar finished her excellent presentation in spite of the interruptions of Dorner. It was a wonderful piece full of hope and reasoned invention and intuitive leaps: but it was not quite as wonderful as it had been in the earlier years of its presentation. In scientific advance they all had really hit ‘The Great Doldrum Reef’, though of course only for short weeks, or years.
Arsine Braveheart gave a speech. Maurine Burns gave a speech. Then Drexel Bannock gave his great ‘Say to these Stones that they become Bread’ speech: “We can feed the multitudes right now. We can turn the rocks and boulders of the Earth into edible carbohydrates (or is it into hydrocarbons?), and we have been doing it for a long while. Why does this not solve all the hunger problems of the world?”
“Oh, it tastes so funny,” Maurine Burns said. “If it is all the same with you, I'd rather eat the rocks the way they are before you work your great change on them. And the problems of world hunger are already solved. There are just powerful people and groups who have a vested interest in making us believe that there are still hunger problems in the world.”
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 285
