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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Oh, God help us all!” Gregory Smirnov cried in genuine agony.

  “What a beautiful and pious thought!” Chresmoeidy beamed.

  Gregory Smirnov, the Director of the Institute for Impure Science, wasn't worried about the expense. As the result of the ‘Great Tom Fool Caper’ and other confidence ploys, Epikt and Proaisth and Chresmoeidy had become three of the richest mobile intelligent machines in the world, and they could pay for everything that was not otherwise taken care of. Gregory was worried about the press and the media generally on the surface of the world. The Institute for Impure Science had been getting more than its share of bad press for years. Its reputation was permanently in the state of tatters. And he was worried about the lawsuits in surface-of-the-world courts. Especially was he worried about the laughter. The ‘Giggle Combine’ was a vested interest that supported orthodox science wholly, and it was unremitting in its attacks on the unorthodox.

  Gregory Smirnov, Valery Mok, Aloysius Shiplap, Charles Cogsworth, and Glasser cringed in a five-person cringe when the ‘Hollow Earth Society’ challenged the entire scientific community to debate on whether or not our Earth was indeed a Hollow Earth. The debate would be held in the Gaetano Balbo Memorial Auditorium of the Institute for Impure Science itself. Ah, after that debate was over with, you wouldn't have been able to find the reputation of the Institute with an electronic microscope. Science, whether it was right or wrong, would win such a victory as had not been won since—

  And, worse luck yet, the lawsuits began on that very first day. A hasty edict was handed down that the Hollow Earth People had to put all the water back into the Lake Yahola Reservoir, and they had to fill up all the big holes in Donner's Pasture, and that it had to retrieve all the houses that had slipped down into those holes.

  Let us not overlook the fact that the First Annual World-Wide Out-From-Under-The-Rocks Hollow-Earth Convention-on-The-Surface was a lot of fun. The Hollow Earth Society lifted two dozen Hollow Earth Bison out of the depths (those Hollow Earth Helicopters will amaze you the first time you meet them), and the meat was a hit with all the surface people who'd never tasted it before. The Hollow Earth Bison are stupid animals and they usually meet their deaths by falling off precipices. That local gravity inside the Earth really has a snap to it, and sometimes the Bison will fall a hundred miles before they strike another rock shelf. Talk about tenderized meat! Every bone is burst open and the marrow is added to the flesh. Every fiber is broken down. And the Hollow Earth Mushrooms! Some of them weighed as much as ten tons. Such massive delicacies are seldom to be found elsewhere. But the people from the Interior of the Hollow Earth Committee committed a lot of gaffes, such as this one:

  INTERVIEWER: Are there other exchange points like this exchange point which opened up here yesterday? Places where people from the Interior of the Earth come up onto the surface and where the Surface People can go down into the Interior of the Earth?

  INTERIOR OF THE EARTH PERSON: Yes, there are about five hundred exchange points in the world at any one time, but they are not widely known to the Surface People. When the funny little surface machines made the breakthrough here yesterday, we decided to open this up as an exchange point. Mostly we select places way back in the boondocks of Surface Earth, as this place is. We have less trouble with the locals that way.

  Imagine referring to the brightest spot in Oklahoma as ‘Way back in the Boondocks’! That hurt the cause of the Hollow Earth Society immeasurably. And there was the reiterated order of the circuit judge: “The Hollow Earth People must put all the water back into the Yahola Reservoir at once.”

  So an endless line of earth-colored (loamy-gray) people were coming up out of the interior of the Earth, each person with two clay buckets on the end of a pole. Each person would dump his two buckets into empty Lake Yahola to try to fill it up. One person per second dumped his-her buckets into the dry lake, but it seemed that they would be quite a while filling it up. One could look down into the shaft they were coming out of, down and down till the people seemed smaller than ants, and they were carrying the water from some point still deeper and more distant.

  The water had run out of the lake through probing holes made by the machines that ordinarily belonged to the Surface-of-the-Earth community; but the Inside-Earth-People accepted the responsibility for filling it again. It was just that they were pretty draggy about doing it.

  At first it seemed that the people of the ‘Hollow Earth Society’ might possibly be winning their debate with such minor members of the Scientific Community as decided to come. Tours were organized, and Scientists were taken down into the interior of the Hollow Earth, a thousand, two thousand, three thousand miles down. The shell of the Earth averaged twenty-five hundred miles thick, and it was all like a sponge, with passages everywhere. The rocks and ‘shores’ of those internal spaces were luminescent, and it was not at all hard to see. Those who speak of the ‘Dark Interior of the Earth’ haven't been there.

  Amazing exhibitions were given. Two mountain goats would be positioned on crags a mile apart, and one of them would be upside down with respect to the other one. At a signal, people of the Interior would push each mountain goat off its crag, and each would plummet down, down. But, local gravity being what it is in the interior shell of the Earth, the ‘down, down’ of one goat was in the opposite direction to the ‘down, down’ of the other goat. The two animals would collide violently in the Hollow-Earth air, and their colorful splatter should have convinced all except the most obdurate that it was indeed a Hollow Earth.

  “This is outrageous, Epikt,” said Gregory Smirnov who was on one of the Hollow Earth trips with Epikt. “It's too outrageous to believe.”

  “It comes on pretty heavy to me also,” Epikt muttered. “This is my first trip down here. But you gotta believe your eyes. Men and machines have nothing to believe except their eyes.”

  “Epikt, we have our intelligence to believe. Our intelligence is what we must believe in. We see and we fail to see ninety-nine things, while we are truly seeing only one or two things. We edit out all the unreasonable things that impinge upon our vision, so we do not consciously see them at all. But in unfamiliar settings, we are sometimes befuddled a bit (as we are now), and we neglect to edit out the unreasonable sights. We are two thousand miles deep in such unreasonable sights now, and our reason has stumbled for a while. Of course we see these things in the middle of a contingent hollow Earth, and of course we must not allow ourselves to see them. Reason and intelligence will finally prevail.”

  There was one place where the local gravity was such that a great river, rushing down its valley and coming to the end of the land, separated into two waterfalls which fell in exactly opposite directions. The exactly opposite directions could not both be ‘down’, could they? Yes, they could, according to the local conditions, and here was the mathematics to prove it.

  But, strangely enough, the Scientists from the surface of the Earth did not accept the mathematics.

  “The mathematics is completely childish,” they said.

  “But it explains the phenomena,” the Interior-of-the-Earth people reasoned.

  “Then the phenomena are childish also,” the surface Scients maintained.

  “But you see the phenomena with your own eyes.”

  “Then our eyes are also childish for a while. We will have to keep a tighter rein on our eyes. They almost convinced us that we had taken a journey into the middle of the Hollow Earth.”

  It had already begun to slip away from them, but the people of the Hollow Earth Society didn't realize it yet. The tides are different inside the Hollow Earth, which may have been the reason the People of the Hollow Earth Society didn't realize that the tide had turned against them.

  “Oh, there is an Australopithecus,” cried a bunch of the Interior-of-the-Earth people when they were back on the surface. “We must pay him the highest honor. He is a boy of the race. They were the first ones to come up onto the surface of the Earth, long before the ‘peopl
e’ came up here. You must be Austro, the celebrated artist.” “Yes, I am Austro,” the entity said. But he didn't sound like the Austro we know.

  “Just let me make out an immense check to you,” said one of the leaders of the Inside-the-Earth People. “We syndicate your Rocky McCrocky comic strip down inside, and we've had a team trying to calculate the royalties we owe you. Suppose I give you a check for a million dollars now just for token payment.”

  “That will be fine,” said the dubious entity, and he took the check.

  “We've beat these guys hollow,” Epikt chortled on the fifth day of the convention. “We've beat those surface-of-the-world scientists all hollow. Get it, guys. I said that we beat them all hollow.” “We get it, Epikt,” Valery Mok of the Institute intoned sadly. She still had an unreasonable sympathy for the Hollow Earth thing. And Epikt was having a high time, changing from one mobile extension to another. He would be in his favorite alligator extension, or he would be a hippopotamus, or a young lion, or a seal, and sometimes he would be in his Austro extension again.

  But he was in his familiar alligator extension when there was a horrible screaming as only an alligator extension can scream.

  “Back on the Guna Slopes of Africa we ate a lot of alligator tail steaks,” said a fuzz-faced entity that was probably the real Austro, and he took another bite out of the ersatz alligator tail. “But this isn't much. Ah, how could alligator tail ever be so tasteless?”

  Epikt managed to escape into a peacock extension, but it was a peacock without tail feathers. It would be some time before he could wear much tail in any of his extensions. And he had given the million dollar check to the real Austro as part of the deal for escaping out of his jaws.

  There was a lot of laughter at this and other things at the convention. But there was also the wrong sort of laughter turned in the wrong direction. And it was the wrong laughter and the things related to it that defeated the Hollow Earth People, the laughter and the telegrams.

  Was there ever anything that sounded goofier than the claims of the Hollow Earth Society? And the big mistake that the Hollow Earth People made was taking the Scientists down to show them the Hollow Earth. It was funny enough to hear such grotesque claims made. But to see the place itself in all its details, that was a hundred times as funny. The whole surface populace of the world was set to laughing at it. Laughing, guffawing, giggling, sneering, smirking, gabbling like turkey buzzards.

  “It is the inhuman laughter of the walking dead,” one of the Interior-of-the-Earth people protested angrily. Well, of course it was. And it was also the most deadly weapon in any arsenal.

  And the telegrams! The Scientist-Debaters, for a clincher, called for a consensus response from the elite of the world. And the consensus clattered in its answer. Stylized, solidarity telegrams came in by the millions stating that the Hollow Earth was totally impossible. And these were not telegrams from just ordinary people. They were trump-card telegrams from the most eminent people in New York City, Irving Cal, Studio City Cal, Lawrence Kans, San Antonio Tex, Tarzana Cal, Oxford England, Orinda Cal, Houston Tex, Medford Or, South Petherton England, Ithaca NY, Sherman Oaks Cal, Sri Lanka, Potts Point NSW, Villanova PA, Chapel Hill NC, Ferntree Gully Australia, Dalkey Ireland, Santa Cruz, Eugene Or, Bromma Sweden, Halderman Ky, Red Bank NJ, McLean VA, Bethesda MD, Portales NM, Portland OR, Albany CA.

  That was it. The invisible plebiscite had voted. The Secret Masters of the World had spoken. It was not even necessary to open the telegrams. The Interior-of-the-World People knew they were beaten.

  But the People of the Hollow Earth parted in bitterness. “The real hollow people are on the surface of the Earth, not in the Hollow Earth,” one of them said.

  Hooters by the tens of thousands gathered to hoot them on their way down.

  “Yah, go back where you came from! Yah, there's no such place!”

  The Hollow Earth People left in their lowering pride that has always been a characteristic of the people from Down Inside. They did fill up the holes in Donner's Big Pasture, but Gregory Smirnov told them not to fill up the big hole in the rose garden of the Institute for Impure Science.

  “We will keep it open as a sign and a portent,” he said. “We will keep it open as an acknowledgement that we might possibly be wrong, but I sure don't believe that we are. Fare you well, Wraiths. Go back to your wraith-land. I have found you pleasant enough, for all that you lack reality. If I believed in you, I would be other than I am.”

  The empty Lake Yahola, being under court order, was another matter. There was a double line moving there now, but the People from the Hollow Earth were complying with the court order most grudgingly.

  The vengeful judge had ordered the inflow diverted from the reservoir so as not to make the filling easier.

  And he ordered the local ‘Rain Controllers’ to let no rain at all fall into the reservoir.

  Two endless lines of earth-colored (loamy-gray) people were coming up out of the interior of the Earth, each person with two clay buckets on the ends of a pole. Each person would dump his two buckets into empty Lake Yahola. Two persons a second dump their buckets into the dry lake, but it seems that they will be quite a while filling it up. They gain a little bit on it at night, but perhaps they lose a little bit from the evaporation of the lake on a warm day like this. One can look down into the shaft they are coming out of, down and down till the people seem smaller than ants, and they are carrying their buckets from some point still deeper and more distant.

  It is going to take a long time to fill that reservoir up again.

  Ifrit

  I am Henry Inkling, newspaper reporter and feature story writer. I am the best around here, but I never seemed to have anything to show for it until quite recently, within the last several days. It was always the expenses of keeping up my lifestyle that swallowed up everything I could make. But now I've whipped that. Now I have a beautiful home on a beautiful lake. I have stunning mountains rising right out of my own back yard. I have food and drink beyond anything I ever imagined before. And my friends and visitors are absolutely astonished by my setup. I have élan, I have style, I have class. I have become the hottest host in the newsy fraternity in town, and I never knew that adulation could be heaped so high. My evenings-at-home are probably the most cultural in town and likely the most boozy, and they are certainly the most In-Groupy. And the whole business doesn't cost me anything at all. Everything I earn goes straight into the bank now. I don't need it, but it seems like a good idea to put it somewhere. Not only do I have no new expenses at my new and luxurious setup, but I have no expenses at all. All is free. I have it made. This change of life and change of circumstance began about two weeks ago when editor Sandow X. McGoshla gave me a story to do.

  “Wrestling,” he said. “I'm sorry, Henry, but the wrestling shows advertise pretty big in the papers, and we try to do a wrestling special once a year. Do this, and I'll give you a really good assignment the day after tomorrow. Ugh, wrestling, ugh!”

  “Ugh,” I said. “Well, at least there can't be anything new in wrestling. We've had the Wild Man of Borneo who was wheeled up to the ring in a cage. We've had Number 131313 arriving with his handcuffs and his ball-and-chain and his prison-striped trunks. We've had Le Canonnier with his brass cannon that he was always wheeling around and pointing at his opponent while he almost got it torched off with a burning fuse. We've had Hayfield Hooligan with the giant bale of hay in his corner which he always cut open and scattered around the ring. He was the only one who could keep his footing when the ring was knee-deep in hay. We've had the Hangman with that little gallows on wheels, and the rope with its noose that he was always trying to put around his opponent's neck to hang him right there in the ring. Is there anything new this year?”

  “There's the Weeping Genii, Henry. He arrives as the Genii in the bottle. His manager carries him into the ring in a half-gallon bottle. Then he takes the cork out of it, and the Genii pours out. He's about as big as a squirrel at first, but
then he expands till he's six-foot-nine and three hundred and eighty pounds. He can't wrestle much, but he's good show. I'm sorry, Henry, but he's about the only new thing in wrestling this year.”

  “How could he do that?” I asked. It hit me a little odd. “How could his manager carry him into the ring in a half-gallon bottle and then have him expand to such a size as that?”

  “Oh, it's all a fake, Henry. You know that everything in professional wrestling is a fake.”

  So that night I went out to the Junior Pavilion at the Fairgrounds to see the wrestling matches. Sure they were all fakes, but they were good show and they drew the crowd along with them.

  Lord Stamford Heather-Rose had his valet spray the ring out of a a commercial-sized crop sprayer that had the words “Attar of Roses” lettered on it. Then his opponent Josh Pole-Cat had his valet spray the ring with an even larger sprayer that had the words “Essence of Skunk” stenciled on it. Josh Pole-Cat was the good guy for that evening, however, and Lord Stamford Heather-Rose was the villain. And Josh won it all in a bout that degenerated into something very near to straight wrestling.

  Horseshoe Jones was matched with Rexford “The Lawyer” Pettifogger in the next bout. Horseshoe always seemed to have a horseshoe in his hand, and he brandished it as a weapon. As many horseshoes as the referee took away from him, Horseshoe always seemed to come up with one more. Rexford “The Lawyer” Pettifogger had an equally never-failing supply of large writs with the words “Legal Writ. Cease and desist!” written on them so big that everyone in the Pavilion could read them easily. The Lawyer would hand one of these big writs to his opponent, Horseshoe Jones. Horseshoe was a slow reader. He read letter by letter rather than word by word, and about the time that his finger finally came to the last letter, “The Lawyer” would knock him down with a whanging blow right on the button. But Horseshoe would always come up off the mat with another horseshoe in his hand, and they would go at it again.