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

by R. A. Lafferty

  Jim Boomer paid him a dollar for it. “How many of them you got?”

  “I can have a hundred thousand ready to load out in ten minutes,” the man said. “Eighty-eight cents each in hundred thousand lots.”

  “Was that a trailer-load of steel tapes you shipped out this morning?” Art asked the man.

  “No, that must have been something else. This is the first steel tape I ever made. Just got the idea when I saw you measuring my shack with that old beat-up one.”

  Art Slick and Jim Boomer went to the rundown building next door. It was smaller, about a six-foot cube, and the sign said Public Stenographer. The clatter of a typewriter was coming from it, but the noise stopped when they opened the door.

  A dark pretty girl was sitting in a chair before a small table. There was nothing else in the room, and no typewriter.

  “I thought I heard a typewriter in here,” Art said.

  “Oh that is me.” The girl smiled. “Sometimes I amuse myself make typewriter noises like a public stenographer is supposed to.”

  “What would you do if someone came in to have some typing done?”

  “What are you think? I do it of course.”

  “Could you type a letter for me?”

  “Sure is can, man friend, two bits a page, good work, carbon copy, envelope and stamp.”

  “Ah, let's see how you do it. I will dictate to you while you type.”

  “You dictate first. Then I write. No sense mix up two things at one time.

  Art dictated a long and involved letter that he had been meaning to write for several days. He felt like a fool droning it to the girl as she filed her nails. “Why is public stenographer always sit filing her nails?” she asked as Art droned. “But I try to do it right, file them down, grow them out again, then file them down some more. Been doing it all morning. It seems silly.”

  “Ah—that is all,” Art said when he had finished dictating.

  “Not P.S. Love and Kisses?” the girl asked.

  “Hardly. It's a business letter to a person I barely know.”

  “I always say P.S. Love and Kisses to persons I barely know,” the girl said. “Your letter will make three pages, six bits. Please you both step outside about ten seconds and I write it. Can't do it when you watch.” She pushed them out and closed the door.

  Then there was silence.

  “What are you doing in there, girl?” Art called.

  “Want I sell you a memory course too? You forget already? I type a letter,” the girl called.

  “But I don't hear a typewriter going.”

  “What is? You want verisimilitude too? I should charge extra.” There was a giggle, and then the sound of very rapid typing for about five seconds.

  The girl opened the door and handed Art the three page letter. It was typed perfectly, of course.

  “There is something a little odd about this,” Art said.

  “Oh? The ungrammar of the letter is your own, sir. Should I have correct?”

  “No. It is something else. Tell me the truth, girl: how does the man next door ship out trailer-loads of material from a building ten times too small to hold the stuff?”

  “He cuts prices.”

  “Well, what are you people? The man next door resembles you.”

  “My brother-uncle. We tell everybody we are Innominee Indians.”

  “There is no such tribe,” Jim Boomer said flatly.

  “Is there not? Then we will have to tell people we are something else. You got to admit it sounds like Indian. What's the best Indian to be?”

  “Shawnee,” said Jim Boomer.

  “Okay then we be Shawnee Indians. See how easy it is.”

  “We're already taken,” Boomer said. “I'm a Shawnee and I know every Shawnee in town.”

  “Hi cousin!” the girl cried, and winked. “That's from a joke I learn, only the begin was different. See how foxy I turn all your questions.”

  “I have two-bits coming out of my dollar,” Art said.

  “I know,” the girl said. “I forgot for a minute what design is on the back of the two-bitser piece, so I stall while I remember it. Yes, the funny bird standing on the bundle of firewood. One moment till I finish it. Here.” She handed the quarter to Art Slick. “And you tell everybody there's a smoothie public stenographer here who types letters good.”

  “Without a typewriter,” said Art Slick. “Let's go, Jim.”

  “P.S. Love and Kisses,” the girl called after them.

  The Cool Man Club was next door, a small and shabby beer bar. The bar girl could have been a sister of the public stenographer.

  “We'd like a couple of Buds, but you don't seem to have a stock of anything,” Art said.

  “Who needs stock?” the girl asked. “Here is beers.” Art would have believed that she brought them out of her sleeves, but she had no sleeves. The beers were cold and good.

  “Girl, do you know how the fellow on the corner can ship a whole trailer-load of material out of a space that wouldn't hold a tenth of it?” Art asked the girl.

  “Sure. He makes it and loads it out at the same time. That way it doesn't take up space, like if he made it before time.”

  “But he has to make it out of something,” Jim Boomer cut in.

  “No, no,” the girl said. “I study your language. I know words. Out of something is to assemble, not to make. He makes.”

  “This is funny.” Slick gaped. “Budweiser is misspelled on this bottle, the i before the e.”

  “Oh, I goof,” the bar girl said. “I couldn't remember which way it goes so I make it one way on one bottle and the other way on the other. Yesterday a man ordered a bottle of Progress beer, and I spelled it Progers on the bottle. Sometimes I get things wrong. Here, I fix yours.”

  She ran her hand over the label, and then it was spelled correctly.

  “But that thing is engraved and then reproduced,” Slick protested.

  “Oh, sure, all fancy stuff like that,” the girl said. “I got to be more careful. One time I forget and make Jax-taste beer in a Schlitz bottle and the man didn't like it. I had to swish swish change the taste while I pretended to give him a different bottle. One time I forgot and produced a green-bottle beer in a brown bottle, ‘It is the light in here, it just makes it look brown,’ I told the man. Hell, we don't even have a light in here. I go swish fast and make the bottle green. It's hard to keep from making mistake when you're stupid.”

  “No, you don't have a light or a window in here, and it's light,” Slick said. “You don't have refrigeration. There are no power lines to any of the shanties in this block. How do you keep the beer cold?”

  “Yes, is the beer not nice and cold? Notice how tricky I evade your question. Will you good men have two more beers?”

  “Yes, we will. And I'm interested in seeing where you get them,” Slick said.

  “Oh look, is snakes behind you!” the girl cried.

  “Oh how you startle and jump!” she laughed. “It's all joke. Do you think I will have snakes in my nice bar?”

  But she had produced two more beers, and the place was as bare as before.

  “How long have you tumble-bugs been in this block?” Boomer asked.

  “Who keep track?” the girl said. “People come and go.”

  “You're not from around here,” Slick said. “You're not from anywhere I know. Where do you come from? Jupiter?”

  “Who wants Jupiter?” the girl seemed indignant. “Do business with a bunch of insects there, is all! Freeze your tail too.”

  “You wouldn't be a kidder, would you, girl?” Slick asked.

  “I sure do try hard. I learn a lot of jokes but I tell them all wrong yet. I get better, though. I try to be the witty bar girl so people will come back.”

  “What's in the shanty next door toward the tracks?”

  “My cousin-sister,” said the girl. “She set up shop just today. She grow any color hair on bald-headed men. I tell her she's crazy. No business. If they wanted hair they wouldn't
be bald-headed in the first place.”

  “Well, can she grow hair on bald-headed men?” Slick asked.

  “Oh sure. Can't you?”

  There were three or four more shanty shops in the block. It didn't seem that there had been that many when the men went into the Cool Man club.

  “I don't remember seeing this shack a few minutes ago,” Boomer said to the man standing in front of the last shanty on the line.

  “Oh, I just made it,” the man said.

  Weathered boards, rusty nails… and he had just made it.

  “Why didn't you—ah—make a decent building while you were at it?” Slick asked.

  “This is more inconspicuous,” the man said. “Who notices when an old building appears suddenly? We're new here and want to feel our way in before we attract attention. Now I'm trying to figure out what to make. Do you think there is a market for a luxury automobile to sell for a hundred dollars? I suspect I would have to respect the local religious feeling when I make them though.”

  “What is that?” Slick asked.

  “Ancestor worship. The old gas tank and fuel system still carried as vestiges after natural power is available. Oh well, I'll put them in. I'll have one done in about three minutes if you want to wait.”

  “No. I've already got a car,” Slick said. “Let's go, Jim.”

  That was the last shanty in the block, so they turned back.

  “I was just wondering what was down in this block where nobody ever goes,” Slick said. “There's a lot of odd corners in our town if you look them out.”

  “There are some queer guys in the shanties that were here before this bunch,” Boomer said. “Some of them used to come up to the Red Rooster to drink. One of them could gobble like a turkey. One of them could roll one eye in one direction and the other eye the other way. They shoveled hulls at the cottonseed oil float before it burned down.”

  They went by the public stenographer shack again.

  “No kidding, honey, how do you type without a typewriter?” Slick asked.

  “Typewriter is too slow,” the girl said.

  “I asked how, not why,” Slick said.

  “I know. Is it not nifty the way I turn away a phrase? I think I will have a big oak tree growing in front of my shop tomorrow for shade. Either of you nice men have an acorn in your pocket?”

  “Ah—no. How do you really do the typing, girl?”

  “You promise you won't tell anybody.”

  “I promise.”

  “I make the marks with my tongue,” the girl said.

  They started slowly on up the block.

  “Hey, how do you make the carbon copies?” Jim Boomer called back.

  “With my other tongue,” the girl said.

  There was another forty-foot trailer loading out of the first shanty in the block. It was bundles of half-inch plumbers pipe coming out of the chute — in twenty-foot lengths. Twenty-foot rigid pipe out of a seven-foot shed.

  “I wonder how he can sell trailer-loads of such stuff out of a little shack like that,” Slick puzzled, still not satisfied.

  “Like the girl says, he cuts prices,” Boomer said. “Let's go over to the Red Rooster and see if there's anything going on. There always were a lot of funny people in that block.”

  Golden Trabant

  The man who entered, though quiet and soft-stepping, was none of your tame animals. He'd kill for the one thing he wanted and couldn't get enough of; but he hardly knew what to do with the packet of it he had under his arm. The man had a slight green tinge to him, and Patrick T. K. guessed that what he carried would have it also. In an earlier era the man would have been tagged immediately as a seaman. Plainly he was still that, but of a more ethereal sea. Under his arm he had a package wrapped in newspaper, and more sturdily wrapped beneath. It was not a large package, but it was quite heavy.

  The faring man was slim but amazingly wiry. Patrick T. K. was fat but with a lean and hungry eye that couldn't be fooled. Patrick set the weight of the package carried by the man at a hundred and twenty pounds.

  If it were iron of such bulk it would weigh hardly a third that. If it were lead it would not be that heavy. Patrick studied the tendons on the side of the man's neck and the bulging veins on the back of his hand. He studied the set of his feet as he stood there, and he calculated the man's center of gravity, package included. Mercury would not be that heavy. Platinum would be heavier by a tenth. Patrick T. K. sometimes made mistakes in his judgment, but he never made mistakes by as much as ten percent.

  So the seaman had a lump of gold to sell him.

  Nothing unusual about that. Patrick T. K. bought more sly gold than anyone in town.

  “I've been told,” said the seaman, “and it doesn't matter by whom, that you might be able to give me good cash for what I have here. But I won't be beaten down. I know my price.”

  “And I know mine,” said Paddy T. K. “Twenty thousand. How do you want it? Well, come, come, how? Twenties, fifties, hundreds, thousands or a king's mixture?”

  “I had priced it a little higher,” said the man.

  “What? For that undersized loaf of bread under your arm? Two hundred dollars a pound for a hundred pounds is as close as I can figure.”

  “It weighs more.”

  “I know what it weighs. But I like to use round figures.”

  “Shall I unwrap it here? Have you a place to test it?”

  “Leave it wrapped. Here is the sum. And if you find it short a bill or two, be assured it is a dishonest mistake.”

  “There is more where this comes from.”

  “I can take this much every two weeks. Now be off.”

  “You're not going to look at it? How can you be sure what it is?”

  “I have X-ray eyes.”

  “Oh.”

  But when Paddy T. K. was alone he put other things away and locked the door. He took the package to a back room, puffing heavily, for it was just as heavy as he knew it must be. He unwrapped it. There was little that Patrick did not know about gold. He knew the greenishness of African gold, whether of the Gold Coast or the South; the greasiness of Kolyma gold and also its extreme unavailability; the cupric tinge of Sierra Madre gold whether from the Guatemala or Mexico district. He was familiar with the sudden brightness of Milne Bay gold, with the granularity of the Canadian, the muscle-like texture of that of Witwatersrand, the lightness of color of the gold of California and nearby Sonora, and the white gold (almost electrum) of New Guinea above Milne Bay.

  This was none of them. It was raw but fine, and very, very slightly cupric. The green tint in it was about the same as that in the complexion of the man. Patrick set down the weight in a notebook. And at the column for the origin he did not hesitate. He wrote down “Extraterrestrial.”

  That was the first written note of the thing.

  Later, this gold would be known as St. Simeon gold (from a station on its route, not from its origin), but Patrick T. K., the old jewelry factor and sly gold dealer, was not fooled.

  Within a month, the Wall Street Journal had also referred to the new gold as extraterrestrial. The boys on that sheet also knew about gold, wherever they got their knowledge. But the Journal was derided for its correct guess. Gold cargo had never been authorized. No such gold had been mined except for pilot digs in conjunction with other operations. The cost would have been prohibitive, considering the cargo of necessary production machinery and the rudimentary state of exploration and the rarity of any solid finds. Off-Earth gold was still a generation away.

  It was a four-man corporation made up of: Robert Fountain, an unobstructed genius; George Grinder, a ruthless ruffian; Carlos Trevino, the last of the Conquistadores and perhaps the first of a new kind of man; and Arpad Szild, a murderous Irishman who used a dead man's papers and a dead man's name. Three of them had been dining in quiet luxury one evening at Trevino's when Szild appeared in the midst of them, “the doors and windows being closed,” as Fountain related it with his biting humor, but that part of
it may not be true.

  “I've been there. I can take you to it,” Szild said suddenly. He sat down and began to eat with his hands from the bowls.

  “I grind up better stuff than you for feed supplement for my cattle,” Trevino said. “Who are you? What can you take us to?”

  “To the Trabant. You were talking about the legend.”

  “All right. You talk about the legend, real fast,” Robert Fountain said. “You haven't much time.” He laid a hog-nosed gun in front of him on the table.

  “It's shaped like a balk or a beam,” Szild said. “Its greater diameter is twenty-five hundred meters, and its lesser is fifteen hundred — a little less than two cubic miles. It's a misshapen tapered beam or egg with a cleft at its minor end. Its rotation is a tumble, and the period of the tumble is just short of thirty minutes. It's as bad-natured a rock as can be found. Cuts you to pieces. Shouldn't have an atmosphere, but there's something that tears up your lungs no matter how you're suited. It's an angry place, I tell you. But it's gold.”

  That was the Golden Trabant, one of the smaller of the eighteen hundred significant asteroids orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. When finally charted several years after this, it would be given the noxious name Venenatus — but that was after it had been treated and its nature changed.

  “We have a nice sketchy catalog of every asteroid down to about that size,” said Grinder. “Nobody knows much about their details, but they are numbered and given their relative positions and speeds in the asteroid stream. Can you tell us which it is?”

  “Can. Won't,” said Szild. “But I'll take you there.”

  Szild had known that he would have to play his ace on the first round. After he had taken them to it, they would have no reason to keep him alive: but he had gambled his life before.

  He said he had been there and knew where it was. The odds were high enough for them to take a chance on believing him. They acquired a ship and mounted a flight.

  The ship was old and had been deactivated. Carlos Trevino bought it at surplus and had it towed down by tug and beached at a remote spot on the holdings of the Trevino family. It was activated by the genius of Fountain and the driving energy of Grinder. They took twelve young Hispanic technicians, none of whom are alive to give their versions. They hadn't known what they would run into nor what the labor would be at breaking up and loading the cargo.