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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Could I have? How do you know about my long early morning — assuming there to have been such?”

  “I watched you for a while. Few others have the equipment with which to watch you when you're in the aspect.”

  So they were silent for some time, and Vincent watched the clock and was ready to go.

  “I wonder,” said the man in the dark, “if you have read Schimmelpenninck on the sexagintal and the duodecimal in the Chaldee Mysteries.”

  “I have not, and I doubt if anyone else has. I would guess that you are also Schimmelpenninck, and that you have just made up the name on the spur of the moment.”

  “I am Schimm, it is true, but I made up the name on the spur of the moment many years ago.”

  “I am a little bored with you,” said Vincent, “but I would appreciate it if you'd do your glass-filling trick once more.”

  “I have just done so again. And you are not bored; you are frightened.”

  “Of what?” asked Vincent, whose glass had in fact filled again.

  “Of reentering a dream that you are not sure was a dream. But there are often advantages to being both invisible and inaudible.”

  “Can you be invisible?”

  “Was I not so when I went behind the bar just now and fixed you a drink?”

  “How?”

  “A man in full stride goes at the rate of about five miles an hour. Multiply that by sixty, which is the number of time. When I leave my stool and go behind the bar I go at the rate of three hundred miles an hour. So I am invisible to you, particularly if I move while you blink.”

  “One thing does not match. You might have got around there and back. But you could not have poured.”

  “Shall I say that mastery over liquids and other objects is not given to beginners? But for us there are many ways to outwit the slowness of matter.”

  “I believe that you are a hoaxer. Do you know Dr. Mason?”

  “I know of him, and that you went to see him. I know of his futile attempts to penetrate a certain mystery. But I have not talked to him of you.”

  “I still believe that you are a phony. Could you put me back into the state of my dream of a month ago?”

  “It was not a dream. But I could put you again into that state.”

  “Prove it.”

  “Watch the clock. Do you believe that I can point my finger at it and stop it for you? It is already stopped for me.”

  “No, I don't believe it. Yes, I guess I have to, since I see that you have just done it. But it may be another trick. I don't know where the clock is plugged in.”

  “Neither do I. Come to the door. Look at every clock you can see. Are they not all stopped?”

  “Yes. Maybe the power has gone off all over town.”

  “You know it has not. There are still a few lighted windows in those buildings, though it is quite late.”

  “Why are you playing with me? I am neither on the inside nor the outside. Either tell me the secret or say that you will not tell me.”

  “The secret isn't a simple one. It can only be arrived at after all philosophy and learning has been assimilated.”

  “One man cannot arrive at that in one lifetime.”

  “Not in an ordinary lifetime. But the secret of the secret, if I may put it that way, is that one must use part of it as a tool in learning. You could not learn all in one lifetime but, by being permitted the first step, to be able to read, say, sixty books in the time it took you to read one, to pause for a minute in thought and use up only one second, to get the day's work accomplished in eight minutes and so have time for other things — by such ways one may make a beginning. I will warn you, though. Even for the most intelligent it is a race.”

  “A race? What race?”

  “It is a race between success, which is life, and failure, which is death.”

  “Let us skip the melodrama. But how do I get into the state and out of it?”

  “Oh, that is simple, so easy that it seems like a gadget. Here are two diagrams I will draw. Note them carefully. This first — envision it in your mind, and you are in the state. Now the second one — envision, and you are out of it.”

  “That easy?”

  “That deceptively easy. The trick is to learn why it works — if you want to succeed, meaning to live.”

  So Charles Vincent left him and went home, walking the mile in a little less than fifteen seconds. But he still had not seen the face of the man.

  There are advantages intellectual, monetary, and amorous in being able to enter the accelerated state at will. It is a fox game. One must be careful not to be caught at it, nor to break or harm that which is in the normal state. Vincent could always find eight or ten minutes unobserved to accomplish the day's work. And a fifteen-minute coffee break could turn into a fifteen hour romp around the town.

  There was this boyish pleasure in becoming a ghost: to appear and stand motionless in front of an onrushing train and to cause the scream of the whistle, and to be in no danger, being able to move five or ten times as fast as the train; to enter and to sit suddenly in the middle of a select group and see them stare, and then virtually to disappear from the middle of them; to interfere in sports and games, entering the prize ring and tripping, hampering, or slugging the unliked fighter; to blue-shot down the hockey ice, skating at fifteen hundred miles an hour and scoring dozens of goals at either end while the people only know that something odd is happening.

  There was pleasure in being able to shatter windows by chanting little songs, for the voice (when in the state) will be to the world at sixty times its regular pitch, though normal to oneself. And for this reason also he was inaudible to others.

  There was fun in petty thieving and tricks. He could take a wallet from a man's pocket and be two blocks away when the victim turned at the feel. He could come back and stuff it into the man's mouth as he bleated to a policeman.

  He could come into the home of a lady writing a letter, snatch up the paper and write three lines on it and vanish before the scream got out of her throat.

  He could take shoe and sock off a man's foot while he was in full stride. No human face since the beginning of time ever showed such a look of pure astonishment as that of the man to whom this first happened. Discovering oneself half barefoot of a sudden in a crowded street has no parallel in all experience.

  Vincent could paint the eyeglasses of a man dark green, and this would somehow alter the man's whole personality. He'd gulp and wave his arms and develop new mannerisms. Or as a victim took the first puff of a cigarette Vincent would take it from his mouth, smoke it quickly down to the hot nub, and replace it.

  He would take food off forks on the way to mouths, put baby turtles and live fish into bowls of soup between spoonfuls of the eater. And, as a cook cracked an egg over the griddle, he would scoop up the soft contents in mid-air and set down a full-grown quacking duck to the discomfort of both cook and bird.

  He would lash the hands of hand-shakers tightly together with stout cord, and tie together the shoelaces of dancing partners. Or he would remove the strings of guitars while they were being played, or steal the mouthpiece of a horn while the operator paused for breath. He unzippered persons of both sexes when they were at their most pompous, and it was on his account (probably) that Feldman was not elected mayor. This was something that happened on the public platform, and Feldman was completely undone.

  This thing can remain a pleasant novelty for some time. There was, of course, the difficulty of moving large objects. Vincent always wanted to intrude a horse into the midst of a certain assembly. But a horse is too large to be moved in an accelerated time. Vincent drew out the diagram that the faceless man had given him, and presented it to the only horse he knew. But the horse did not get the idea. It would not go into the accelerated state.

  “I will either have to find a smarter horse or a new method of moving heavy objects,” said Charles Vincent.

  Vincent would sometimes handcuff two strangers together as th
ey stood waiting for a traffic light to change. He would lash leaners to lamp posts, and steal the teeth from the mouths of those afflicted with dentures.

  He would write cryptic and frightening messages in grease pencil on a plate just as a diner began to fill it. He changed cards from one player's hands to another's while play was in progress, and he interfered perversely with billiard balls.

  He removed golf balls from tees during the back swing, and left notes written large “YOU MISSED ME” pinned to the ground with the tee.

  He stole baseballs from catchers' mitts at the instant of impact, and left instead small unfledged live sparrows. It was found that there is nothing in the rule book to cover this.

  Or he shaved moustaches and heads. Returning repeatedly to one woman he disliked, he clipped her bald and gilded her pate.

  With tellers counting their money he interfered outrageously and enriched himself. He snipped cigarettes in two with a scissors and blew out matches and lighters, so that one frustrated man actually broke down and cried at his inability to get a light.

  He removed the weapons from the holsters of policemen and put cap pistols and water guns in their places. And he liked to rip off one sleeve only from the coat of a walking gentleman. There is something funnier about one sleeve missing than two.

  He unclipped the leashes of dogs and substituted little toy dogs rolling on wheels. He put frogs in water glasses and left lighted firecrackers on bridge tables. He reset wristwatches on wrists; and played cruel tricks in men's rooms, causing honest gentleman to wet themselves.

  “I was always a boy at heart,” said Charles Vincent.

  Also during those first few days of the controlled new state, he established himself materially, acquiring wealth by devious ways, and opening bank accounts in various cities under various names, against a time of possible need. Nor did he ever feel any shame for the tricks that he played on unaccelerated humanity. For the people, when he was in the state, were as statues to him, hardly living, barely moving, unseeing, unhearing. And it is no shame to show disrespect to such comical statues.

  And also, and again because he was a boy at heart, he had fun with the girls.

  “I am one mass of black and blue marks,” said Jenny one day. “My lips are sore and my front teeth are loosened. I don't know what in the world is the matter with me.”

  Yet he had not meant to bruise or harm her. He was rather fond of her and he resolved to be much more careful. Yet it was fun, when he was in the state and so invisible to her because of his speed, to kiss her here and there in out-of-the-way places and show her other hallmarks of affection. She made a nice statue and it was good sport. And there were others.

  “You look suddenly older,” said one of his co-workers one day. “Are you taking care of yourself? Are you worried?” “I am not,” said Vincent. “I was never happier in my life.”

  But now there was time for so many things, in fact, everything. There was no reason why he could not master anything in the world, when he could take off for fifteen minutes and gain fifteen hours. Vincent was a rapid but careful reader. He could now read from a hundred and twenty to two hundred books in an evening and night; and he slept in an accelerated state and could get a full night's sleep in eight minutes.

  He first acquired a knowledge of the languages. A quite extensive reading knowledge of a language can be acquired in three hundred hours of world time, or three hundred minutes (five hours) of accelerated time. And if one takes the tongues in order, from the most familiar to the most remote, there is no real difficulty. He acquired fifty for a starter, and could always add another any evening that he found he had a need for it.

  And at the same time he began to assemble and consolidate knowledge. Of literature, properly speaking, there are no more than ten thousand books that are really worth reading and falling in love with. These were gone through with high pleasure, and two or three thousand of them were important enough to be reserved for future rereading.

  History, however, is very uneven. It is necessary to read texts and sources that for form are not worth reading. And the same with philosophy. Mathematics and science, pure or physical, could not, of course, be covered with the same speed. Yet, with time available, all could be mastered. There is no concept ever expressed by any human mind that cannot be comprehended by any other normal human mind, if time is available, and if it is taken in the proper order and context and with the proper preparatory work.

  And often, and now more often, Vincent felt that he was touching the fingers of the secret. And always, when he came near it, it had a little bit of the smell of the Pit.

  For he had pegged out all the main points of the history of man, or rather most of the tenable, or at least possible theories of the history of man. It was hard to hold the main line of it: that double road of rationality and revelation that should lead always to a fuller and fuller development, to an unfolding and growth and perfectibility. Sometimes he felt that he was trespassing on the history of something other than man.

  For the main line of the account was often obscure and all but obliterated, and traced through fog and miasma. Vincent had accepted the Fall of Man and the Redemption as the cardinal points of history. But he began to feel now that neither had happened only once, that both were of constant recurrence; that there was a hand reaching up from that old Pit with its shadow over man. And he came to picture that hand in his dreams — for his dreams were especially vivid when in the state — as a six-digited monster reaching out. He began to realize that the thing he was caught in was dangerous and deadly.

  Very dangerous.

  Very deadly.

  One of the weird books that he often returned to and which continually puzzled him was The Relationship of Extradigitalism to Genius, written by the man whose face he had never seen, in one of his manifestations.

  It promised more than it delivered, and it intimated more than it said. Its theory was tedious and tenuous, holstered with undigested mountains of doubtful data. It left Vincent unconvinced that persons of genius — even if it could be agreed who or what they were — had often the oddity of extra fingers or toes, or the vestiges of them. And it puzzled him what possible difference it could make.

  Yet there were hints here of a Corsican who commonly kept a hand hidden; of an earlier and more bizarre commander who always wore a mailed glove; of another man with a glove between the two; hints that the multiplex adept, Leonardo himself, who sometimes drew the hands of men and more often those of monsters with six fingers, had had the touch. There was a comment on Caesar, not conclusive, to the same effect.

  It is known that Alexander had a minor deformity. It is not known what it was. This man made it seem that this was it. And it was averred of Gregory and Augustine, of Benedict and Albert and Aquinas. Yet a man with a deformity could not enter the priesthood; if they had it, it must have been in vestigial form.

  There were cases for Charles Magnus and Mahmud, for Saladin the horseman and for Akhnaton the king; for Homer — a Seleucid-Greek statuette shows him with six fingers strumming an unidentified instrument while reciting; cases for Pythagoras, for Buonottoti, Santi, Theotokopolous, van Rijn, Robusti. And going farther back in time, and less subject to proof, they became much more numerous.

  Zurbarin cataloged eight thousand of them. He maintained that they were geniuses. And that they were extra digitals.

  Charles Vincent grinned and looked down at his misshapen or double thumb.

  “At least I am in good though monotonous company. But what in the name of triple time is he driving at?”

  And it was not long afterward that Vincent was examining cuneiform tablets in State Museum. These were a broken and not continuous series on the theory of numbers, tolerably legible to the now encyclopedic Charles Vincent. And the series read in part: On the divergence of the basis itself and the confusion caused by — for it is Five, or it is Six, or Ten or Twelve, or Sixty or One Hundred, or Three hundred and Sixty or the Double Hundred, the Thousand. The
reason, not clearly understood by the People, is that Six and the Dozen are First, and Sixty is a compromise in condescending to the people.

  For the Five, the Ten are late, and are no older than the People themselves. It is said, and credited, that the People began to count by Fives and Tens from the number of fingers on their hands. But before the People the—, for the reason that they had—, counted by Sixes and Twelves. But Sixty is the number of time, divisible by both, for both must live together in Time, though not on the same plane of time—

  Much of the rest was scattered. It was while trying to set the hundreds of unordered clay tablets in proper sequence that Charles Vincent created the legend of the ghost in the museum.

  For he spent his multi-hundred-hour nights there studying and classifying. Naturally he could not work without light, and naturally he could be seen when he sat still at his studies. But as the slow-moving guards attempted to close in on him, he would move to avoid them, and his speed made him invisible to them. They were a nuisance and had to be discouraged. He belabored them soundly and they became less eager to try to capture him.

  His only fear was that they would sometime try to shoot him to see if he were ghost or human. He could avoid a seen shot which would come at no more than two and a half times his own greatest speed. But an unperceived shot could penetrate dangerously, even fatally, before he twisted away from it.

  Vincent had fathered legends of other ghosts, that of the Central Library, that of the University Library, that of the John Charles Underwood Jr. Technical Library. This plurality of ghosts tended to cancel out each other and bring believers into ridicule. Even those who had seen him as a ghost did not admit that they believed in ghosts.

  Charles Vincent had gone back to Dr. Mason for his monthly checkup. “You look terrible,” said the doctor. “Whatever it is, you have changed. If you have the means you should, take a long rest.”

  “I have the means,” said Vincent, “and that is just what I will do. I'll take a rest for a year or two.”