Not To Mention Camels
Page 21
“Long enough for a little last fun, though,” Hector Bogus said. Hector filled in as a sort of Media and Eidetic Lord on that boondocks world. Hector crudely cut a small sliver of Polder’s flickering heart with a pocketknife. Then he pulled several things out of the pockets of his tunic. He gave the heart-sliver a sort of galvanic shock between two little brass balls that were the opposite members of a condenser. “That will keep the flutter going just about long enough,” Bogus said.
Bogus put the fluttering sliver of flesh into a small torture cabinet. He bellowed small flames into the cabinet for a white-hot fire.
“It is fun to arrange that even this last flutter-piece of Polder should have exquisite and intense response to and appreciation of pain, and of time,” Bogus said. “One can study a soul in hell by this device. That’s what I’m doing. In the miniature, so in the fullness. The pain is real to the flutter-piece, and the pain is eternal.”
“Did you stick pins into the heads of fluttering moths when you were a boy?” Og Scath asked in contempt.
“No, I didn’t,” Bogus said. “I didn’t begin to do things like that until much later, after other things had failed me. Ah, I’d love to get amplification of its organless screaming! How would you like that, Og?”
“Og Scath is dead,” Doctor Vonk said, sadly but with no doubt at all about it. “Quite sudden. He believed he had to go with Polder to shield him. He may have gone an instant early. It still flutters a bit, does it not, Bogus?”
“It flutters less and less, but more and more intensely, in greater and greater agony. I salve myself by saying that this sliver is no more than a toy. I swear that Polder himself was never anything more than a toy. But it’s giving a good imitation of a soul screaming in hell, forever. I can’t get the amplification to work properly, and now I’m afraid I’ve lost it.”
The Polder-sliver gave one final flutter. Then it stopped fluttering.
“It fails and falls like a spark on the instruments,” Doctor Vonk said.
“It falls like lightning,” Doctor August said.
“It was his last jump,” Doctor Raphaelson said. “When can we record zero? Now! That was it. That was the end of Polder Dossman, forever.”
That was the end of Polder Dossman.
For about three seconds.
Then he was heard in the very deep distance, far under the queasy feet of all of them. They didn’t need amplification to hear it. And they didn’t doubt that all of them would be hearing it forever.
It couldn’t, of course, be an actual soul screaming forever in hell. It had to be some sort of imitation.
But it was quite a good imitation.
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R. A. Lafferty (1914-2002)
Raphael Aloysius Lafferty was an American science fiction and fantasy writer born in Neola, Iowa. His first publication of genre interest was “Day of the Glacier” with The Science Fiction Stories in January 1960, although he continued to work in the electrical business until retiring to write full-time in 1970. Over the course of his writing career, Lafferty wrote thirty-two novels and more than two hundred short stories and he was known for his original use of language, metaphor and narrative structure.
Also by R. A. Lafferty
The Devil is Dead
Archipelago (1979)
The Devil is Dead (1971)
More than Melchisedech (1992)
Other Novels
Past Master (1968)
The Reefs of Earth (1968)
Space Chantey (1968)
Fourth Mansions (1969)
Arrive at Easterwine: The Autobiography of Ktistec Machine (1971)
Not to Mention Camels (1976)
Aurelia (1982)
Annals of Klepsis (1983)
Serpent’s Egg (1987)
East of Laughter (1988)
How Many Miles to Babylon? (1989)
The Elliptical Grave (1989)
Dotty (1990)
The Flame is Green (1971)
Okla Hannali (1972)
Half a Sky (1984)
Collections
Nine Hundred Grandmothers (1970)
Strange Doings (1972)
Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add? (1974)
Funnyfingers & Cabrito (1976)
Apocalypses (1977)
Golden Gate and Other Stories (1982)
Through Elegant Eyes (1983)
Ringing Changes (1984)
The Early Lafferty (1988)
The Back Door of History (1988)
Strange Skies (1988)
The Early Lafferty II (1990)
Episodes of the Argo (1990)
Lafferty in Orbit (1991)
Mischief Malicious (And Murder Most Strange) (1991)
Iron Tears (1992)
The Man Who Made Models – The Collected Short Fiction Volume 1 (2014)
The Man With the Aura – The Collected Short Fiction Volume 2 (2015)
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © R.A. Lafferty 1976
All rights reserved.
The right of R.A. Lafferty to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK Company
This eBook first published in 2016 by Gollancz.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 473 21356 2
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.orionbooks.co.uk