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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “No, no, Jane Casual. My whole life is in ashes if I can't have the real thing.”

  Simpson Coldturkey started up the cockeyed stairs to that cockeyed, foreshortened second story where he lived. He dragged himself upward with sad steps. Then suddenly his steps became more animated. A wave of garish orange swept over him. He saw the whole world with garish orange eyes now. “I have it all!” he cried. “I can put it all together in a moment!” He got the Sundog key from one hiding place, the Grunion key from another hiding place, and he keyed the ‘Garish Orange Mood Cubicle’ that Jane Casual had stored there. And the cubicle leapt into action.

  With the ‘Garish Orange Mood Cubicle’ one could go into the wonderful, tigerish, ogreish, bloody mood, and the cubicle would furnish the weapons and arrange all the wonderful encounters. One could go right out and kill real people and have the absolutely life-capping pleasure.

  If one could get out.

  Le Hot Sport

  The Dukkerin Daily was something of a fun newspaper for the four days of its publication. It seemed loaded with whetted axes ready to swing. It was witty and novel and titillating. “For the present, subscriptions will not be accepted,” it announced, but it was everywhere on the newsstands. And every morning it had at least three “Jokes of the Day” that were better than the “Jokes of the Day” of any other morning paper anywhere. But the slippery heart of the paper was to be found in its “Predictions”. That first day there was a whimsical story: “Two-dollar guitar launches local boy on thirty-nine-year stardom in musical world.” But the boy's name, Randy Lautaris, was not known to the reading public. The interview with Randy had been done the day before, and nine-year-old Randy had indeed bought a guitar from a friend for two dollars. But the strings and frets and parts to put it into working condition would cost more than thirty dollars, and then it would still be an inferior guitar. Nevertheless, the Dukkerin Daily gave a lot of information of Randy's thirty-nine-year career which lay entirely in the future: the combos he would put together, the concerts in which he would star, the long list of songs he would write that would pass the ten million mark, the Cine-Melody Movies he would make. Randy Lautaris was a quick-witted and well-spoken nine-year-old boy, and likely he would have a successful career in something. “Why only thirty-nine years stardom?” Randy had asked George Hegedusis who had interviewed him. “I'll be only forty-eight years old at the end of that stardom.”

  “I didn't say that it would end,” Hegedusis told him. “It's simply that I can't see more than thirty-nine years into the future, nor can anybody else. If anybody else says that he can see further than that, he is a shameless confidence man.”

  George Hegedusis, appearing suddenly as a newspaper publisher, was the fairly rare combination of a passionate violinist and a shameless confidence man. He played the violin at baptisms and weddings and funerals, and also at award banquets. (Somebody better keep his eyes on that award every second or Hegedusis will have preempted it for himself.) And for some years before this he had been in show business. He called himself The Romany Houdini and he had some good escapist acts. And he was a fine practitioner of the “Fallen Angel Act”. Now he was a little bit too old to be a show person, but one never gets too old to be a confidence man. But he had never dabbled in the newspaper business before, nor made predictions, nor done interviews. “You are skating on mighty thin water, George the Fiddler,” Karl Staripen of the local police bunko squad told George that first morning when the Dukkerin Daily had been on the newsstands for less than nine minutes. If any new con popped up, Karl Staripen always knew about it within ten minutes.

  “Prove malice on my part, or prove me wrong in any of my predictions or facts,” Hegedusis said, “or else do not interfere with me in my pure-hearted activities.”

  (Karl had often arrested George, and yet they had remained tolerably good friends.) “What am I supposed to do, wait thirty-nine years to see if you're right in your story about Randy Lautaris and his two-dollar busted guitar?”

  “You might as well, Karl. You won't be doing anything else important for the next thirty-nine years, will you? But you can catch me up lots quicker if I'm wrong on the facts of other of my stories. Did you read my piece on Moxie Masterman?” That piece, also in the first morning's run of the Dukkerin Daily, was headed “Moxie Masterman begins one-hundred-and-one game hitting streak” and the text ran: “Moxie Masterman, hot-and-cold first baseman for the Louisville Lions in the new Deep South Major League, got his first hit of the young season yesterday, after twenty-nine times at bat without a hit. It was a pathetic, patsy eight-inning single that nobody could be very proud of. Nevertheless, it was the beginning of a hundred-and-one-game hitting streak, a world's record to be set by Moxie. The streak will not be broken until August the third of this year when Moxie will once more go hitless after hitting in one hundred and one.”

  “How do you like that story, Staripen?” Hegedusis asked the bunko cop. “Hang me on that one if Moxie misses today, or any day for a while now. But he won't.”

  “I remember Moxie when he was in the Texas League,” Karl said. “George, why is Moira in this room of yours? Does that mean my death, or yours?”

  “Probably mine. I'll be predicting my own death, tomorrow likely.” Moira was a strange and beautiful lady. Sometimes people could see her and sometimes they couldn't. But she was always a bad omen.

  “Four of the twelve stories in this first edition of your paper will give me a chance to nail you cold today or tomorrow or the next day, George,” Karl Staripen said, “and I'm waiting to pounce on you. What's your object in all this?”

  “Unrequited genius demanding a voice, Karl. When you're better than anybody else at a thing, then there comes a time when you just have to go public.” But George Hegedusis didn't slip that day, nor the next day, nor the next day after that. It wasn't till the fourth day that his newspaper publishing was brought to an end. And then he didn't slip, didn't make a false prediction. It was his totally hair-raising true prediction that caused the very stones to cry out “Enough!” against him.

  2

  This was the outrageous prediction: “Eleven-year-old Caspar Lampiste didn't seem very much worried when I told him that he had only one day to live, that he would be killed by an automobile then. ‘What kind of automobile?’ he laughed. ‘Shouldn't I get to pick what kind of automobile I want to be killed with?’ ‘It will be a foreign car named Le Hot Sport,’ your faithful reporter, I, George Hegedusis, told him. ‘Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow!’ young Caspar sang out. ‘That's the rarest car there is. There are only four Les Hots Sports in the United States.’ ‘There will be five of them,’ I said, ‘and you will be killed by that fifth one.’ It is rather sad, really, that a young boy should be killed like that, but I only see and report the pending happenings. I don't cause them to happen. Caspar Lampiste, an eleven-year-old boy of this city will be killed by a Le Hot Sport automobile about one o'clock this afternoon.” That couldn't be disregarded. Karl Staripen, a captain on the police bunko squad, took George Hegedusis, the new newspaper publisher, into custody quite early that morning. And he also called in Rich Frank Lampiste, an executive of great scope and power who was the father of young Caspar Lampiste. Then the three of them went out to the Lampiste mansion and headquarters and they were quickly surrounded by a swarm of young executives who were in the employ of Rich Frank Lampiste. After a while, young Caspar Lampiste was brought in and set in the midst of them where he could be watched every second. “This is my office and headquarters and also one of my fortresses,” Executive Rich Frank Lampiste said, “and it occupies the entire sixth and top floor of my mansion here. It is in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circuit of wonderfully clear see-out glass which is also bullet-proof and shatter-proof. We are high on a hilltop here, and no automobiles are ever allowed within a thousand yards of the mansion. I don't like automobile fumes. I have a man in TV communications with us at each of the four Les Hots Sports in the United States; and with each of them is the ow
ner of that particular automobile who swears that it will not be moved today. My young executives, of course, were already at work on this problem before Karl Staripen called me, but thanks anyhow, Karl. All the Les Hots Sports in the United States are at least thirteen hundred miles from here. I intend to prevent my son from being killed by any of those four automobiles at about one o'clock this afternoon. Where do you get your nonsensical predictions, Hegedusis? And where, if ever, did we meet before?”

  “We've met. I played the violin at your wedding twelve years ago.”

  “Did you ever play at any hangings, Hegedusis? I'm angry enough to have you hanged out of hand. And I've always liked that tune ‘The Gypsy Hangman’ when done by a lively violinist.”

  “I did play ‘The Gypsy Hangman’ at your wedding, Rich Frank. And I've always been a lively violinist. And, oddly enough, I did play the violin at a hanging once, at the special request of the man being hanged. But my own death will be otherwise, not by hanging. You all are so entranced by the little story on page one of my paper this morning that you may have missed my prediction of my own death on page eight.”

  “What is Moira doing here?” Rich Frank Lampiste suddenly demanded. “Chief of Security O'Brien, couldn't you keep her out?”

  “She is a ghost, Mr. Lampiste,” O'Brien said. “I can't keep ghosts out.”

  “I can,” Frank Lampiste said. “Fade out, Moira. Be you gone! You are a mistaken omen this time. My son will not die today.”

  “I read your account of your own death, Hegedusis,” the bunko cop Karl Staripen said. “But it's phony. No Romany, whatever else he can predict, can predict his own death. It's his blind spot. There is something very ulterior about that item of yours.”

  “It's interesting though,” said Rich Frank Lampiste. “It goes, as I recall it, ‘George Hegedusis' death will take place about ten minutes after one o'clock this afternoon. He will be flung to his death from a sixth-floor window of Frank Lampiste's executive suite on the top of his mansion. If they claim it was a suicide, do not believe them. It is murder. If my body is not found, it only means that they have hidden my body. It will be murder, and it will cry to Heaven for vengeance. And if there should be a grotesque or incredulous aspect to it, then the Lightning that is the father of me, George Hegedusis, will come and take away all that is grotesque and incredulous, and I will have died clean.’ George, George, is nothing but some of your bleak fun?”

  “No, the fun has all gone out of my life since I have come under the compulsion of predicting true.”

  “Moira is still in the room,” the security chief O'Brien said.

  “Not to me she isn't, O'Brien,” Frank Lampiste stated.

  Suddenly the bunko cop Karl Staripen was all over George Hegedusis. He shackled his arms behind him, and he shackled his legs to the modernistic steel framework of the executive suite. “However you go out of here, it will not be by a window, George,” Staripen said.

  “Every Romany man comes sometimes in his life to his ‘Days of Power’,” Rich Frank Lampiste spoke as though he were lecturing. “Usually, for the good of the world, these days are as short as they are grotesque. Now you come to the end of your short and grotesque and ridiculous ‘Days of Power’, George Hegedusis.”

  “They must not be remembered as grotesque or ridiculous,” Hegedusis protested in a thick voice. “My father the Thunder will save me from that.”

  “You told my son, Hegedusis, that there would be five and not four Les Hots Sports in the country. Where is the fifth one? Is the fifth one in the country yet?” Frank Lampiste demanded of the shackled George Hegedusis.

  “I don't know. It's probably crossing the border just about now.”

  “How?”

  “Oh, by air, in a powerful but unregistered craft. It's the Le Hot Sport that was stolen in Morocco last week.”

  “Yes, that's the one that has me worried. You really are onto something. The odds are towering against us being in any flightway of that powerful but unregistered craft. The odds are prohibitive against the automobile somehow falling out of that craft. And it's very long odds against that automobile falling through the very strong steel roof here and killing my son.”

  “Yes, the latter odds are prohibitive, Rich Frank Lampiste,” Hegedusis agreed. “There is no way that the automobile could fall through this roof here and kill your son in this place. Because your son is not here. Do you believe that fate is an imbecile? This is not your son, not the boy I talked to yesterday. This is a look-alike. Are you trying to trick God, Lampiste?”

  “No, I'm trying to trick a lesser and meaner demiurge who plays such bloody tricks on poor humans. Maybe you've spoiled it now. Maybe he's heard you. No, my son couldn't have remained silent all this while. But this nephew of mine here usually says something when he talks, and my son doesn't.”

  “How far is your son removed from here, Lampiste?” Hegedusis asked.

  “I'll not tell you that. Certainly I'll not tell it out loud. But he is in a fortress of mine that is stronger and more secret than this one, an underground bunker, not so very distant from here. Oh, God, help me now! I myself am having a 'far-seeing'! My son has left the fortress where I had him placed. He has started back this way, furtively and through the swamp-jungle. Why did he not stay where I had him placed? Henry, Henry, can you hear me? How did it happen?”

  “He said he wanted to check the override lock on this underground bunker himself, Mr. Lampiste. And then he was out of that door and into the swamp-jungle which you yourself had constructed to be impassable. He was like a fox with his tail on fire. We cannot spot him yet, but we can hear his voice. He keeps crying, ‘I have to meet something. I have an encounter I must keep.’ But surely we'll be able to seize him again shortly.”

  “Surely you'd better.”

  “I believe that I'll begin my own ‘Days of Power’ today,” said eleven-year-old Ronald Lampiste, the look-alike of his cousin Caspar Lampiste, “for I am a Romany man already. Oh, my Days of Power and Speed! If I work up early momentum, my days should go on almost forever. But I will need a spacious place to operate in. Where will I find it, where will I find it? Most Romany men do not come into their ‘Days of Power’ early enough.” “I've always believed that three million dollars is too much money for a two-passenger sports car that doesn't hold the road very well at over two hundred miles an hour,” said the bunko cop Karl Staripen. “And, to me, it hasn't much style. There's a lot of ballyhoo has gone into that price. And yet the maker has sold twelve of the little buggers at three million each. He has to employ a lot of legend to do that, of course, and your item will help the legend, Hegedusis. It is said that eleven of the twelve Les Hot Sports have killed a person, and that twelfth one (the one that was stolen in Morocco last week, the one that may presently be airborne over our own country) is jealous of the others and is trying for a spectacular kill. It will bring as much as nine million dollars on the American market if it does attain a showy and spectacular kill.”

  “And it's said that each of the twelve is indwelt by an evil spirit,” Rich Frank Lampiste mumbled. “That rumor has helped to get the base price up to three million dollars. Oh, the whole thing is shot through with such obvious fraud, and yet I tremble for the safety of my son. If my son's life is spared, I will give him any gift he wishes in the whole world.”

  “Would you give him a Le Hot Sport automobile, Uncle Frank?” the nephew in the room asked. “Then I bet he'd take me for a ride in it lots of times.”

  “Yes, Roland, I would give him, I will give him Le Hot Sport. And if he does not survive to receive the gift, then life is empty for me forever. Ah, we've made positive identification. The powerful but unregistered craft that left Morocco last night and left a jungle clearing in Yucatan two hours ago is indeed over our country now. And, unfortunately, we seem to be approximately on its flightway. Yes, yes, Henry, keep me posted, and see if you can't get it a little bit clearer on the screen. Oh, why doesn't it veer off a little bit? Karl, do you think t
hat crazy George Hegedusis here really has something to do with this? And is there any way we could trade him in to fate to get a better bargain? How odd! All three of us here are Romanies.”

  “All four of us here are Romanies, Uncle Frank,” said the nephew Roland Lampiste.

  “It takes one to catch one,” said the bunko cop Karl Staripen. “I always get the Gypsy cases, but I never was much good at solving them. Yes, I wish there were some way to trade in Fiddler George here for a better bargain. That's what your name, George Hegedusis, means: George Fiddler.”

  “I know it,” said the fiddler man and fate-predictor. “And your name, Karl Staripen, means Karl Jailhouse.”

  “But my own name is somewhat more rare,” said Rich Frank Lampiste. “I doubt whether either of you know what my name Lampiste means?”

  “Its common meaning is a sad-sack or a hard-luck Charley,” said George Hegedusis. “But its original meaning is ‘scapegoat’. Aye, you are one who must take on you the sins of a whole people.”

  “Mine is a spooky name in the present context,” Rich Frank Lampiste said, “but my mansion here is built of steel. It is impervious. If I see that there will be a direct hit on us here, we can drop down to the floor below us, or to five floors below us, in one second. Your estimate of the time is about right, Fiddling George. It will be just about one o'clock when the plane arrives, and we are approximately in its path.”

  “Is your son also approximately in its path?” George asked.

  “Oh, my God, yes. I can see him in my scanner now. He's climbed up out of the jungle-swamp and onto the road, and he's running this way with his arms flung wide. I can even read his mouth. He keeps crying, ‘I have a joyous encounter that I must keep,’ and that encounter may be only minutes or seconds away. Oh, either shorten or lengthen the time, God. Oh, God, make time go away completely!” They had several clear views of the powerful but unregistered plane on their scopes. In particular they had a good view of the belly of it. And the belly was badly torn. The craft had made a rough belly landing in the jungle clearing in Yucatan (what illicit cargo had it delivered there?) and now it flew with landing gear permanently down and with an awful wobble. That plane was not in good health.