More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

Brannagan found the pants for the excited young man, and Duffey made coffee for him. By and by he was more composed.

  “It is a completely new system of Perverse Logic that I have discovered,” the young man said, “or that has discovered me and employed me as a medium. It will drive out all the other systems of logic as a shrew drives out mice. It has come to me in my sleep a dozen times, and I have always forgotten it as I awakened. I have known that if I could get certain key words and symbols down, I would be able to put it all together from them when I was in a clarified wakened state. For a long time I have slept with a candle lit and with writing materials beside me to jot down the key words as I wakened, and for a long time something has gone wrong every morning. This morning, after I had received the great and crooked message once more, I was told in a sad voice, ‘This is the last time that it will be given to you. Get it down this morning or lose it forever.’ Well, I would get it down then, for there was not anything else that could hive gone wrong with my precautions and procedures that had not previously gone and now been allowed for.

  “I was mistaken in this supposition. There was one other thing that could go wrong, and it did. While I slept, mice came in and ate much of the writing paper that I had by my bedside, and they left only small pieces that they had bitten around. But I had to get the great system written down. I filled up even the smallest piece of paper that the mice had left. Oh, you do have them safely, sir, do you not? And you have them in the order that I wrote them?”

  “I have them in the order that you wrote them, yes,” Casey said.

  “And they will be destroyed in the same order that you wrote them, in the same order that he has them,” Melchisedech said. “Destroyed they must be.”

  “No, no, no!” the young man jittered. “I have the system in my mind no longer. I spilled all of the treacherous things down on the little pieces of paper. It is an entirely new thing. It will turn the world awry and set it by the ears.”

  “New and awry things usually do set the world by the ears,” Melchisedech said. “But the world can hardly stand another entirely new and entirely harmful system of logic at this time. Believe me, we are not narrow-minded or arbitrary about this. It's a bad and slippery thing that you have almost introduced. It has come close to being born many times. Again and again and again it has come close. But now we are luckily rid of it this time also.”

  “Give me those little pieces of paper or I will shoot you all,” the young man cried. “Have I a gun to shoot you with? Do I not usually have a gun here?”

  Brannagan found the gun and gave it to the young man. Duffey found the bullets for it and gave them to him. The young man put the gun to the right temple of Casey Gorshok and fired it with a loud explosion. But Duffey and Brannagan and Casey had already retreated from there, out of that time and out of that place. Their exquisite sense of timing was the one thing that never left them.

  The ‘Sudden Withdrawal’ was a device that they often used. They had carried out their mission and prevented a tricky thing from being born. It wasn't an ordinary tricky thing, or it wouldn't have been assigned to the Argo. There was something absolutely new in trickery and devilishness in it.

  But, if their mission in this had been carried out perfectly and completely, the adventure could not even have been told about. The adventure would have been wiped out with the thing itself. And the adventure is told about. It is only the loose end adventures that have enough of them to be remembered and told.

  “I shudder to think what might have happened if it had taken effect,” Duffey speculated. “The last such thing that took effect put mankind into a twist for four hundred years, and this one could have been much twistier. Gorshok, just to add double surety to this matter, I did not hear the sound of the small pieces of paper being destroyed. Let us hear that sound now.”

  “Ah, I just thought that I might read a little bit of them now, Duff,” Kasmir the sorcerer mumbled.

  “No, no, destroy them at once,” Brannagan insisted. “No one of even ourselves would be immune to their effects. You especially would not be immune. Destroy the little pieces of the logic system, Casey, and let there not be division between us.”

  Casey destroyed some little pieces of paper.

  “Is that all of them, Casey?” Duffey insisted.

  “All of them but three,” Casey said. “Shoal water ahead! Watch the steering!”

  “I see no shoal water ahead,” Brannagan said. “Destroy them, Casey, all of them.”

  Casey destroyed three of them, but did he destroy all of them? Did he lie when he said that there were only three of them left?

  “Do you not still have one of them, Casey?” Duffey asked. “Even one piece of paper will have evoking words or parts of words on it. From them, an evil person might be able to reconstruct the whole system. Destroy that last one!”

  “I destroyed all three of them. Reefs ahead!” Casey bawled. “Shorten sail. Beat to the wind. Do various nautical things. All hands aloft. Awk, one last little piece of paper fluttered over the side undestroyed. I must have miscounted them. Oh well, no harm done.”

  “What if a devil-fish find it and save it?” Duffey asked. “Our mission is not perfect until that one piece is destroyed with the others. Do you not have a particular devil-fish who is mascot to you, Gorshok? You used to have one. Have I not noticed him following us in these very waters? What if he should...”

  “I cannot hear you, Duffey, with this violent wind blowing,” Casey said.

  “There is no wind,” Melchisedech spoke. “But here it is that we enter new waters. Destroy that paper when the devil-fish brings it to thee, Casey. I will not remember to remind you of this again. Sometimes the amnesia works for us and sometimes against us. Now the forgetting message works its forgetting on me also.”

  At Weinsburg on the Nechar River, the Argo Masters cured a young man of stuttering. This was a brilliant young man with a mind like a burning sphere and a will to move worlds. And there was a red fury about everything that he did, and this caused him to be a great overturner. He had all excellent qualities and talents, and the stuttering had been the only defeating and frustrating ailing that he had.

  The Argo Masters broke in on this brilliant man suddenly.

  “How how how how d-d-did y-y-you g — ” the young man began to question their intrusion.

  “Ephphatha,” said Melchisedech Duffey. “Be thou opened.” The young man's lips and tongue were loosened, and he stuttered no more. The young man looked at them in that burnished way that all very brilliant people have, and he seemed a little bit disturbed.

  “Had I asked to be cured?” he challenged them then.

  “In a way you did ask to be cured of your stuttering,” Melchisedech said. “You have complained angrily of your affliction to High Heaven. You have said that no man was ever so unfortunate as yourself. You have sworn that the clear river of your thoughts was roiled by the stuttering obstruction of your lips and tongue. You have sworn that you could move worlds, if only you were free of this misfortune.”

  “You did not pay attention to my question,” the brilliant man said. “Of course I complained. This complaint was a part of my stock in trade. It was a means I used to work myself into a wrath. Of course I was furious against my affliction. It was a stepping stone to my being furious against other things. And how else could I have been furious so constantly and so easily? No, I did not ask to be cured. Afflict me again and restore me as I was.”

  “This I will not do,” Melchisedech said. “I have said ‘Be Thou Opened’, and you are opened. One would have to be perverse to object to being cured.”

  “Of course I'm perverse,” the man said. “That's the whole idea. I can move worlds whether I am bound or loosened, but I can move them in a crooked way only when I am bound. I want to be furious and frustrated! That is part of my mission. If I have not this goad of fury, I will be a cheerful man. And if I am a cheerful man, the destruction that I have sworn to do will not seem important.�
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  “Be cheerful. Be opened. Stutter no more,” Melchisedech said. “And destroy no more. This turns you from an evil genius into a good genius, or at least a complacent genius. Out of here, companions, out of here.”

  Duffey and Brannagan were out of there, out of that time and out of that town. They were already reading the work order for their next mission. And Casey Gorshok Szymansky, where was he? Oh, he would be along in a minute. Sometimes he loitered a bit as he dawdles over the curiosities of the world. Sometimes he seemed completely unable to keep his hands off of this thing or some other. But he would be along in a minute.

  It was a good thing they had removed the stuttering impediment from the young man and unfrustrated him. Frustrated persons sometimes do very great harm, and the future must be cleansed of frustrations as much as possible. Likely enough, if some Argo Master gave him his stuttering back, he would be frustrated all over again, and his powerful mind would be slanted to evil and awry things.

  But why should anyone give him his stuttering back again?

  And why did Casey Gorshok the sorcerer lag so far behind the other two that day?

  At Wien, on the Donau River, they had an encounter with an old problem of either ethics or philosophy. Whether it was better to do the right thing for the wrong reason, or to do the wrong thing for the right reason.

  “There is a mixed group in this very city having a go at this very problem right now,” Melchisedech said, “and it behooves us to interfere. These people are in grave danger of following wrong reason in a particular action. What shall we do about this?”

  “Trick them,” said Brannagan, “or anyhow trick somebody. There is no thing like Holy Trickery for jobs of a certain sort. Great Thomas writes that this is the one case in which trickery is licit: that one may trick a tricker, or he may trick a tricker's tricker's tricker. You tick the odds and the evens off on your fingers when you are involved in such high speculation as this, and it is not difficult to keep things straight. We cannot have wrong committed for any reason.”

  “But we can,” said Melchisedech. “We can have it committed for a right reason.”

  “But that would be wrong,” Brannagan insisted. “I mean, it would not be right.”

  “Ah, but it would be,” Melchisedech said. “It would be right for the wrong reasons, which would make it right.”

  “No, it'd be wrong,” Brannagan still argued, “and rightly so. Why are we having trouble with a little schoolboy argument like this? Right and wrong are as differentiated as are beacons in the opposite ends of the sky. Who could possibly mistake them?”

  “It's cloudy today,” Casey said, “and the beacons don't shine as well as they might. There are some things that can better be solved by two heads than by three. If the first head is wrong, then the second head will contradict it and make it right. But the third head contradicts them; then it will make it all wrong again. Therefore, I will remove this my third head from the company for a little while.”

  Casey Gorshok strode off among the fountains and government buildings and pastry shops and left the other two to settle it. And Brannagan and Duffey joined the company of a philosophical activist group that was then in discussion. It was for the pleasure and the influencing of this group that they had come to Wien.

  When Argonauts interfere in three or more futuristic affairs within a couple of hours, they may very well go a little wrong. Not very wrong, of course, for their being Argonauts will not allow them to go too far astray. There was the further case that, in mixed company and in Wien, it was sometimes difficult to distinguish right from wrong, a difficulty that does not occur anywhere else in the world. Besides, it was a pleasant company, and a pleasant time of the afternoon.

  This mixed group of people (you may not believe this about them) was of great influence on the world. What they thought here today would be thought tomorrow in the provincial capitals of Paris and Moscow and New York. And even Argonauts enjoy sharpening their wits on strange hone stones. But such arguments must come to an end when there are other adventures to have before sundown. And the mixed people were discussing more than one hundred variations of their original right-wrong argument.

  Melchisedech Duffey slipped off and bought the café where the arguments were going on. Then he hired four fast-action carpenters with swift saws and unobtrusive ways. Each time a new variation of the argument was introduced, the four carpenters came swiftly and each of them cut one inch off the bottom of one of the table legs where the arguments were being held. They always did this so quickly and neatly that nobody noticed what was going on. “Now we are really getting to the gist of things,” some of the arguers said. “Oh, this is the low-down of it. This is the low-down.”

  But, as the table got lower inch by inch, the arguers began to have third thoughts about the whole business. And when the table top was flat on the floor, Duffey and Brannagan, in their roles as magicians and certified Argonauts, moved in deftly and demolished the disputes.

  “Your arguments haven't a leg to stand on,” Duffey told one party of them.

  “Your whole thesis lacks depth,” Brannagan told the opposite party of them. “Your arguments have been reduced to the lowest common denominators. Leave them, and have peace in these things. Besides, your chairs are standing above you and calling you back to true reason.”

  So Duffey and Brannagan finally set the company right. Or they set it wrong. But they forced them to quit their silly quibbling, and they went away from there with the feeling of a job well done.

  But someone else came and joined the company as soon as they left, someone else with an interest in continuing the confusion. And this someone else induced all that intelligent company to come to one of the other tables that was still intact, and to continue the nonsense there.

  Who could that person have been?

  At the Ship Argo, as usual, Duffey and Brannagan had to wait for Casey who had been taking his pleasure in the town. When Casey did join them, he had a new, sly look about him. Take that not to heart. Casey always had a new, sly look about him. But one Argonaut surely will not slip back and undo the work of two fellow Argonauts. He would not set things right if they had set them wrong, and he would not set them wrong if they had set them right. For, if an Argonaut did do wrong, he would always do it for the right reasons.

  Unless, of course, he was Casey Gorshok Szymansky. And in his case —

  At Milano, on the Po (or nearly so), they took Mr. X on board the Argo. This X was not a true Master of the Argo, however much he wished that he were. He was not one of the long-lived persons, and his present manifestation was likely to be the only one he would have. He was not a sorcerer, but he swore that he could reproduce any trick of any sorcerer if he saw it twice. He was acquainted with all three masters who were presently on the Argo. He was good and amusing company. There was no reason why he should not have ridden on the Ship. But easily tendered accommodations are not appreciated as much is those that are more hardly given.

  “I do not know you, man,” Kasmir Szymansky said when X came to them there.

  “I do not know you, man,” Melchisedech Duffey said. There was always fun to be had with X.

  “I do not know you, man,” Biloxi Brannagan said, “and our sublime destination can hardly be yours. Nor are you able to riddle our riddles.”

  “The Ship will know me,” said X. “We have sailed together before. I am even a sort of half member of this corporation. Ask the talking oak that has a piece of itself in the Ship's wheel.”

  “I do not know you, man,” said the piece of talking oak. “I believe that it is the nature of X to be unknown. Are you in Scripture, or are you in Inscription? Nobody comes onto the Argo who is not to be found in one place or the other.”

  “I am surely in Inscription,” X maintained. “In the Attic ephebic inscriptions, X equals ‘Xenoi’. No, I am not other wise in Scripture or in Inscription, but I ask you to take me into your company. All of you do know me.

  “ ‘Xeno
i’ means ‘Strangers’,” the piece of talking oak said. And then it fell silent, for that was much more than it usually talked.

  “Oh, I suppose that we halfway know you, X,” Brannagan said, for he had a kind heart under his ruddy hide, “and you have always been good on the conversation and news. Set your golden medallion there on the steersman's sideboard and we will accept it as your identity.”

  X rubbed his hands together in the professional manner. He had seen real sorcerers do this trick more than twice, so he could do it also. And he did produce a big gold coin, according to first appearance. It had his coat of arms on it. It had half of all the fancy things that he wished to put on it.

  “There it is,” he said. “Was there ever such a medallion coin as that?”

  “But, X, it is only a one-sided coin,” Casey chided him. “That makes it a very one-sided identification. Are we not to be allowed to hear the contra against you, the reverse of your own coin?”

  X turned the coin over, and it disappeared. He had made the coin to be two-sided, but something had happened to it. He tried it again and again. He turned it and it was there, a good coin. He turned it over and it disappeared. There wasn't any reverse to it. X had crossed magic with real magicians. In particular he had crossed magic with Casey Gorshok the necromance and Gorshok had won. The coin is still there, on the steersman's sideboard in the cabin of the Argo. It's a curiosity the way it will appear and disappear when it's turned.

  “Yes, X, you may sail with us,” Melchisedech said. “But you sail as a servitor only and not as a Master Argonaut. You are talented, sure. And you are all over the place. But, with you, it is a question of not being able to see the water for the fish. You are to receive half shares of whatever booty we win. Many servitors receive only quarter shares.”

  “That is all right,” X said, “and you do need me. Some of your latest exploits have been worse than just bad show. Gentlemen, they have been bush. Was there not something said about ‘Reducing a problem to its lowest level’? Was there not a business of four quick carpenters and four quick saws?”