“I wonder why he made the grass so sharp, though. There is no reason for it to be like that.”
“Why, and what?”
“Snuffles. Why did he make the grass so sharp? My toes are nearly gone and it's killing me.”
“Georgina, hold onto what's left of your mind. Snuffles did not make the grass or anything else. He is only an animal, and we are sick and walking in delirium.”
So they walked on a while, for evening had come. Then the voice of Snuffles came again inside the head of Brian.
“How was I to know that the grass should not be sharp? Are not all pointed things sharp? Who would have guessed that it should be soft? If you had told me gently, and without shaming me, I would have changed it at once. Now I will not. Let it wound you!”
So they walked on a while, for evening had come. Then days and nights.
“Brian, do you think that Snuffles knows the world is round?”
“If he made it, he must know it.”
“Oh, yes, I had forgotten.”
“Dammit, girl, I was being ironic! And you are now quite nutty, and I hardly less so. Of course he didn't make it. And of course he doesn't know that it's round. He's only an animal.”
“Then we have an advantage back again.”
“Yes. I'd have noticed it before if I hadn't been so confused. We are more than halfway around the little planet. He is no longer between us and our weapons center, but he behaves as though he thought he was. We have no more than forty miles to go to it. We will step up our pace, though gradually. Our old camp valley is prominent enough so that we could recognize it within several miles either way, and we can navigate that close. And if he seems to say in your mind that he is onto our trick, do not believe him. The animal does not really talk in our minds.”
But their narcosis still increased. “It isn't a narcotic belt,” said Brian. “It is a narcotic season on all Bellota — a built-in saturnalia. But we have not been able to enjoy the carnival.”
“Snuffles shows up well as a carnival king, though, don't you think? It is easier to believe in time of carnival that he made the cosmos. I went to the big carnival once in Nola when I was a little girl. There was a big bear wearing a crown on one of the floats, and I believe that he was king of the carnival. It wasn't an ordinary bear. I am sure now that it represented Snuffles, though I was only six years old when I saw it. Do you think that Snuffles' explanation of the law of gravity here is better than Phelan's?”
“More easily understandable at least than the corollary, and probably more honest. I always thought that the corollary also embraced a simple mathematical error and that Phelan stuck to it out of perversity.”
“It is one thing to stick to an error. It is another to build a world to conform to it. Brian, do you know what hour it is?”
“It is the three hundred and twelfth since we were set down.”
“And they return for us at the three hundred and thirty-sixth. We will be back at our campsite and in control by then, won't we?”
“If we are ever to make it back and be in control, we should make it by then. Are you tired, Georgina?”
“No. I will never be tired again. I have been walking in a dream too long for that. But I never felt more pleasurable than now. I look down at my feet which are a sorry mess, but they don't seem to be my feet. Only a little while ago I felt sorry for a girl in such a state, and then I came to half realize that the girl was me. But the realization didn't carry a lot of conviction. It doesn't seem like me.”
“I feel disembodied myself. But I don't believe that this comical old body that I observe will carry me much farther.”
“Snuffles is trying to talk to us.”
“Yes, I feel him. No, dammit, Georgina, we will not give in to that nonsense. Snuffles is only a wounded old bear that is trailing us. But our hallucination is coming again. It will take a lot of theory to cover a dual hallucination.”
“Hush, I want to hear what he says.”
Then Snuffles began to talk inside the heads of the two of them.
“If you know and do not tell me, then you are guilty of a peculiar affront. A maker cannot remember everything, and I had forgotten some of the things that I had made before. But we are coming on a new world now that is very like Bellota. Can it be that I have only repeated myself, and that I did not improve each time? These hills here I made once before. If you know, then you must tell me now. It may be that I cannot wait to chew your brains to find out about it. How will I ever make a better world if I make them all alike?”
“He has forgotten that he made it round, Brian.”
“Georgina, he did not make anything. It is our own minds trying to reassure us that he does not know we are ahead of him and going toward our weapons.”
“But how do we both hear the same thing if he isn't talking to us?”
“I don't know. But I prefer it the way it is. I never did like easy answers.”
Then there came the evening they were within sight of their original valley, and, if they moved at full speed through the night, they should reach their campsite very soon after dawn. “But the weariness is beginning to creep up through the narcosis,” said Brian. “Now I'm desiring the effect that we tried to avoid before.”
“But what has happened?”
“I believe that the narcotic period of the planet is over. The carnival is coming to an end.”
“Do you know something, Brian? We did not have to go around the world at all. At any time we could have separated and outmaneuvered him. He could not have intercepted both of us going toward the weapons pile if we went different ways. But we could not bear to part.”
“That is a woman's explanation.”
“Well, let's see you find another one. You didn't want to be parted from me, did you, Brian?”
“No, I didn't.”
It was a rough, short night, but it would be the last. They moved in the agony of a cosmic hangover.
“I've become addicted,” said Brian, “and the fruit has lost its numbing properties. I don't see how it is possible for anyone to be so tired.”
“I'd carry you again if I weren't collapsing myself.”
“Dammit, you couldn't! You're only a girl!”
“I am not only a girl! Nobody is only an anything. Our trouble here may have started with your thinking that Snuffles was only an animal; and he read your thoughts and was insulted.”
“He did not read my thoughts. He is only an animal. And I will shoot his fuzzy hide full of holes when we get to our campsite. Let's keep on with it and not take any chances of his catching or passing us in the dark.”
“How could Phelan's corollary apply to this planet and no other when he had never been here then?”
“Because, as I often suspected, Phelan had a touch of the joker in him and he composed it sardonically.”
“Then he made it for fun. And do you still think that Bellota was made for fun?”
“The fun has developed a grotesque side to it. I am afraid I will have to put an end to a part of that fun. The dark is coming, and there is our campsite, and we are in the clear. I'll make it before I drop if I have to bust a lung. There's an elephant gun with a blaster attachment that I'll take to that fur-coated phony. We're going to have bear steak for breakfast.”
He achieved the campsite. He had reached the wobbly state, but he still ran. He was inside the circle and at the gun stack, when a roar like double thunder froze his ears and his entrails.
He leaped back, fell, rolled, crawled, snaked his way out of reach; and the sudden shock of it bewildered him.
And there was Snuffles sitting in the middle of the supply dump and smoking the pipe of Billy Cross.
And when the words rattled inside Brian's head again, how could he be sure that it was hallucination and not the bear talking to him?
“You thought that I had forgotten that Bellota was round? If you knew how much trouble I had making it as round as it is, you would know that I could never forget it.”
/>
Georgina came up, but fell to her knees in despair when she saw that Snuffles was there ahead of them.
“I can't run any more, Brian, and I know that you can't. I am down and I can never get up again. How soon will they get here?”
“The Marines?”
“Yes, the ship.”
“Too late to help us. I used to wish they would be late just once. I am getting that wish, but it isn't as amusing as I anticipated.”
Snuffles knocked out his pipe then, as a man would; and laid it carefully on a rock. Then he came out and killed them: Georgina, the friendly iceberg, and Brian, who did hate a pat ending.
And Snuffles was still king of Bellota.
The report of the ship read in part:
“No explanation of the fact that no attempt seems to have been made to use the weapons, though two of the party were killed nearly a week later than the others. All were mangled by the huge pseudo-ursine which seems to have run amok from eating the local fruit, seasonally narcotic. Impossible to capture animal without unwarranted delay of takeoff time. Gravitational incongruity must await fuller classification of data.”
The next world that Snuffles made embodied certain improvements, and he did correct the gravity error, but it still contained many elements of the grotesque. Perfection is a very long, very hard road.
Rainbird
Were scientific firsts truly tabulated, the name of the Yankee inventor, Higgston Rainbird, would surely be without peer. Yet today he is known (and only to a few specialists, at that) for an improved blacksmith's bellows in the year 1785, for a certain modification (not fundamental) in the moldboard plow about 1805, for a better (but not good) method of reefing the lateen sail, for a chestnut roaster, for the Devil's Claw Wedge for splitting logs, and for a nutmeg grater embodying a new safety feature; this last was either in the year 1816 or 1817. He is known for such, and for no more. Were this all that he achieved his name would still be secure. And it is secure, in a limited way, to those who hobby in technological history.
But the glory of which history has cheated him, or of which he cheated himself, is otherwise. In a different sense it is without parallel, absolutely unique.
For he pioneered the dynamo, the steam automobile, the steel industry, ferro-concrete construction, the internal combustion engine, electric illumination and power, the wireless, the televox, the petroleum and petrochemical industries, monorail transportation, air travel, worldwide monitoring, fissionable power, space travel, group telepathy, political and economic balance; he built a retrogressor; and he made great advances towards corporal immortality and the apotheosis of mankind. It would seem unfair that all this is unknown of him.
Even the once solid facts — that he wired Philadelphia for light and power in 1799, Boston the following year, and New York two years later — are no longer solid. In a sense they are no longer facts.
For all this there must be an explanation; and if not that, then an account at least; and if not that, well — something anyhow.
Higgston Rainbird made a certain decision on a June afternoon in 1779 when he was quite a young man, and by this decision he confirmed his inventive bent.
He was hawking from the top of Devil's Head Mountain. He flew his falcon (actually a tercel hawk) down through the white clouds, and to him it was the highest sport in the world. The bird came back, climbing the blue air, and brought a passenger pigeon from below the clouds. And Higgston was almost perfectly happy as he hooded the hawk.
He could stay there all day and hawk from above the clouds. Or he could go down the mountain and work on his sparker in his shed. He sighed as he made the decision, for no man can have everything. There was a fascination about hawking. But there was also a fascination about the copper-strip sparker. And he went down the mountain to work on it.
Thereafter he hawked less. After several years he was forced to give it up altogether. He had chosen his life, the dedicated career of an inventor, and he stayed with it for sixty-five years.
His sparker was not a success. It would be expensive, its spark was uncertain and it had almost no advantage over flint. People could always start a fire. If not, they could borrow a brand from a neighbor. There was no market for the sparker. But it was a nice machine, hammered copper strips wrapped around iron teased with lodestone, and the thing turned with a hand crank. He never gave it up entirely. He based other things upon it; and the retrogressor of his last years could not have been built without it.
But the main thing was steam, iron, and tools. He made the finest lathes. He revolutionized smelting and mining. He brought new things to power, and started the smoke to rolling. He made mistakes, he ran into dead ends, he wasted whole decades. But one man can only do so much.
He married a shrew, Audrey, knowing that a man cannot achieve without a goad as well as a goal. But he was without issue or disciple, and this worried him.
He built a steamboat and a steamtrain. His was the first steam thresher. He cleared the forests with wood-burning giants, and designed towns. He destroyed southern slavery with a steam-powered cotton picker, and power and wealth followed him.
For better or worse he brought the country up a long road, so there was hardly a custom of his boyhood that still continued. Probably no one man had ever changed a country so much in his lifetime.
He fathered a true machine-tool industry, and brought rubber from the tropics and plastic from the laboratory. He pumped petroleum, and used natural gas for illumination and steam power. He was honored and enriched; and, looking back, he had no reason to regard his life as wasted.
“Yes, I've missed so much. I wasted a lot of time. If only I could have avoided the blind alleys, I could have done many times as much. I brought machine tooling to its apex. But I neglected the finest tool of all, the mind. I used it as it is, but I had not time to study it, much less modify it. Others after me will do it all. But I rather wanted to do it all myself. Now it is too late.”
He went back and worked on his old sparker and its descendents, now that he was old. He built toys along the line of it that need not always have remained toys. He made a televox, but the only practical application was that now Audrey could rail at him over a greater distance. He fired up a little steam dynamo in his house, ran wires and made it burn lights in his barn.
And he built a retrogressor.
“I would do much more along this line had I the time. But I'm pepper-bellied pretty near the end of the road. It is like finally coming to a gate and seeing a whole greater world beyond it, and being too old and feeble to enter.”
He kicked a chair and broke it.
“I never even made a better chair. Never got around to it. There are so clod-hopping many things I meant to do. I have maybe pushed the country ahead a couple of decades faster than it would otherwise have gone. But what couldn't I have done if it weren't for the blind alleys! Ten years lost in one of them, twelve in another. If only there had been a way to tell the true from the false, and to leave to others what they could do, and to do myself only what nobody else could do. To see a link (however unlikely) and to go out and get it and set it in its place. Oh, the waste, the wilderness that a talent can wander in! If I had only had a mentor! If I had had a map, a clue, a hatful of clues. I was born shrewd, and I shrewdly cut a path and went a grand ways. But always there was a clearer path and a faster way that I did not see till later. As my name is Rainbird, if I had it to do over, I'd do it infinitely better.”
He began to write a list of the things that he'd have done better. Then he stopped and threw away his pen in disgust.
“Never did even invent a decent ink pen. Never got around to it. Dog-eared damnation, there's so much I didn't do!”
He poured himself a jolt, but he made a face as he drank it.
“Never got around to distilling a really better whiskey. Had some good ideas along that line, too. So many things I never did do. Well, I can't improve things by talking to myself here about it.”
Then he sat
and thought.
“But I burr-tailed can improve things by talking to myself there about it.”
He turned on his retrogressor, and went back sixty-five years and up two thousand feet.
Higgston Rainbird was hawking from the top of Devil's Head Mountain one June afternoon in 1779. He flew his bird down through the white fleece clouds, and to him it was sport indeed. Then it came back, climbing the shimmering air, and brought a pigeon to him. “It's fun,” said the old man, “but the bird is tough, and you have a lot to do. Sit down and listen, Higgston.”
“How do you know the bird is tough? Who are you, and how did an old man like you climb up here without my seeing you? And how in hellpepper did you know that my name was Higgston?”
“I ate the bird and I remember that it was tough. I am just an old man who would tell you a few things to avoid in your life, and I came up here by means of an invention of my own. And I know your name is Higgston, as it is also my name; you being named after me, or I after you, I forget which. Which one of us is the older, anyhow?”
“I had thought that you were, old man. I am a little interested in inventions myself. How does the one that carried you up here work?”
“It begins, well it begins with something like your sparker, Higgston. And as the years go by you adapt and add. But it is all tinkering with a force field till you are able to warp it a little. Now then, you are an ewer-eared galoot and not as handsome as I remembered you; but I happen to know that you have the makings of a fine man. Listen now as hard as ever you listened in your life. I doubt that I will be able to repeat. I will save you years and decades; I will tell you the best road to take over a journey which it was once said that a man could travel but once. Man, I'll pave a path for you over the hard places and strew palms before your feet.”
“Talk, you addlepated old gaff. No man ever listened so hard before.”
The old man talked to the young one for five hours. Not a word was wasted; they were neither of them given to wasting words. He told him that steam wasn't everything, this before he knew that it was anything. It was a giant power, but it was limited. Other powers, perhaps, were not. He instructed him to explore the possibilities of amplification and feedback, and to use always the lightest medium of transmission of power: wire rather than mule-drawn coal cart, air rather than wire, ether rather than air. He warned against time wasted in shoring up the obsolete, and of the bottomless quicksand of cliché, both of word and of thought.
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 33