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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Not so,” Flip wrote. “They went to that for just a little while. Then they came back. And they shortened and shortened and shortened. Might come to a flat hundred to one against yet.”

  (It was almost as if their primary had to go through some sort of seed-scattering and dying phase before the mutation could be finally transmitted as a valid thing.)

  “It's no great matter,” Jack Bang was saying. “Sure, I'm dizzy, but maybe not from the loss of blood. I always was pretty dizzy. No, it doesn't bother me. I can see about as well without them. I wasn't using them very much at the end anyhow, not for the big-seeing stuff.”

  “I did it for the greater good,” George Meropen was saying to his questioners. “Hell, I don't know what I mean. The lawyer told me to keep saying that. He must have had some idea of how to get me off the hook. I did it for the greater good. I did it for the greater good.”

  A lot of people had suddenly gone deeper into the explosive vision, Katherine Hearne, Flip O'Grady the hot-handed chimp, Winston Urbanovitch, Doctor Vonk himself.

  “We are back from odds of ten billion to one against,” Vonk sang. “We are back from the shorter odds of only a hundred million to one against. We are coming up to incredibly short odds, no more than a hundred to one against. Victory, Victory! For battlers like us, those are not bad odds at all.”

  People, the chances are high, (they have risen now to about one chance in a hundred), that you will hear more about this matter.

  Lord Torpedo, Lord Gyroscope

  Karl Riproar was the unusual son of two torpedo-makers, Epstein Riproar and Nastasia Hectic-Smith. Karl was extremely hyperactive in both mind and body. He was a genetic and chromosomic freak, as are all extraordinarily hyperactive persons. And he was descended from a short line of such freaks. By heredity and induced mutation and massive chemical and magnetic intrusion, he became one of the very active and hectic ones. Epstein Riproar who was Karl's father had been a hyperactive and violent man, an intelligent but erratic doctor and designer who found himself outside the law because of his manufacture of torpedoes. These torpedoes were not the physically explosive directional underwater bombs. They were people who were hyped up to carry out such violent assignments as were given to them. They were powerful and swift, and perhaps they were intelligent. Anyhow, they were of surpassing speed in mind and body, and of relentless strength and power and impetus. There was some argument as to whether the ‘torpedoes’ were chemically stuffed and stimulated, or whether they were actually mutants. Well, Epstein Riproar made every kind of torpedo that there was any market for, and he sold them to eager buyers for top prices. These torpedoes could be used for hit men or for assassins of every type. They could get in and out of any jam. Because of their speed of attack there was scarce any protection against them. Such mentality as they had was of the high speed variety. They could conceive and carry out a murder or mutilation in a tenth of a second.

  Karl's mother was Nastasia Hectic-Smith, a hyperactivist and incendiary and maker of torpedoes herself. She herself had gone through genetic tampering that was deliberately designed to double her activity and relentlessness. It also, by one of those slip-ups that sometimes happen, doubled her intelligence, which was already high. This was not necessarily a disaster. Torpedoes should have high-speed mentality, but not enduring intelligence. Many of the torpedoes were set to destruct after one hit, so real intelligence would be wasted on them. But it might not be wasted on a manufacturer of torpedoes.

  As to where Epstein and Nastasia got their furious energy, well there was a solution to that in their family traditions. It had to come from somewhere. Yes, it sure did.

  Epstein and Nastasia had met as fellow members of that underground and international organization known as “The Restless Lions”. Both of them had been manufacturing torpedoes for various individuals and organizations, and sometimes they had bid against each other and been down-priced. Now they combined their talents and techniques. They became the top manufacturers and purveyors of human torpedoes.

  They decided to have a son and turn him into the hottest torpedo of them all, one not intended to self-destruct but to be used again and again with growing expertise. This son was Karl Riproar, one of the most active and turbulent babies ever birthed. The surgical implantations were made in him when he was one day old, to double his inherited activity and restlessness.

  “I hope it doesn't double his intelligence too,” Nastasia said. “He'll have enough trouble with it, being so damned smart, without another doubling. It hasn't been easy for me being always so smart that I'm like to pop. But try to get all that stuff you've got in your mind out of your mind, and it isn't easy.”

  “It won't matter too much, Nastasia,” Epstein said. “The way things are going, it may be an actual advantage for a torpedo not to carry excess baggage, but super-intelligence may no longer be in excess. I hope that his intelligence does double or even quadruple, so long as it doesn't put a damper on his energy. And I want to watch it work.”

  “Hopping hippos, Epsie, this isn't ‘Murderex-X’ to make him mean that you've salted his glands with!” Nastasia howled. “This is ‘Melerex-X’ the nice-guy drug. The chemist made a mistake on our order.”

  “He sure did,” Epstein agreed. “Wouldn't it be funny if our child did turn out to be a nice guy? But the switch may not go too hard. With everything else working in him, and with his inheritance from us, he should be mean enough.”

  Actually, the surgical implantation had increased young Karl's intelligence eight times, but his father didn't get to watch his development very long. Epstein and Nastasia were killed in a shootout a week later. And Karl Riproar, when he was eight days old, was placed in one of those progressive institutions.

  “This is the smartest kid ever tested,” said one of the wranglers at the institution to one of the medical monitors. “You could drive a truck down some of the grooves in his brain. I bet we wouldn't get another kid this smart in a thousand years. Or another kid this active.” Actually, they got another one that smart and that active the very next day, but that was an extraordinary happening. And they really weren't likely to get another such for two thousand years.

  Karl Riproar grew into a physical and mental wonder, and he was a boy who was always busy. (Maybe you missed the weight of that statement. He was always busy.) He was not just busy twenty-four hours out of the day: it was much more than that. Karl was busy in many depths and directions, and he never let up. He was like a roaring river in his relentless activity and in his constant consuming. He wasn't mean. He was a nice guy. In this, it did matter that the ‘Murderex-X’ had not been implanted in him. And the ‘Melerex-X’ had made him personable and amiable, odd qualities for a natural-born torpedo. But Karl had the relentlessness that is often found in mean people. And he had a spacious gluttony that was almost without equal.

  He was a glutton for body food and for mental nourishment, and oh for another sort of food also. By the time he was six years old he had things pretty well arranged in his own way at the old progressive institution. A recollection of him when he was about six years old has him sitting at table and shoveling it in at a startling rate, but he was doing many other things at the same time. He had an earplug in each ear, and they were receiving two different instructional programs. There were three TV sets before him, two of the programs being educational and the other one being that whanging presentation of violence and adventure and relentless activity ‘The Restless Ones’.

  Karl had a dictaphone turned onto himself, and he was talking and singing around his food, putting out an amazing spate of entertainment from his ‘consciousness three’ level. He was also reading one book and one newspaper by eye, and reading another book by Braille.

  And this was the general format that he would follow for much of his life during the routine of the six forty-five minute periods every day that he was at his meals stuffing in the food and drink. About his only later refinement was his sitting on the john while he did all these o
ther things, for saving time; but this combination was not allowed in that early part of his life that he spent in the progressive institution.

  “The attainment levels of the little inmates of this institution aren't as high as they should be,” a wrangler at the school said to a rhetor (being a progressive institution they had wranglers and rhetors and monitors, but not teachers). “It's only in comparison to that Karl Riproar and that Emily Vortex that the attainments of the others seem low,” the rhetor said. “Actually their levels are rising all the time. They are above what we might logically expect them to be.”

  “Dammit, this is a progressive institution,” the wrangler said with some wrath. “The attainment levels of the little inmates aren't as far above what we might logically expect as we might logically expect them to be. Something is hindering them a little, all except Karl and Emily.”

  Karl Riproar wasn't mean. He wasn't mean at all. Just irresistibly active. The fact was that Karl was an absolutely normal boy through all his boyhood years. He liked everything that all normal and healthy boys like. He just liked those things to be faster and still faster, to be accelerated to their limit; and he liked a lot of them at the same time. Karl was a physical as well as a mental marvel. He was a superb wrestler and boxer, and he excelled at every kind of ball, at every event of track and field, at horsemanship and shooting and fishing, at sailboating and swimming and tightrope walking, at snake-catching and calf-riding and cartooning, at tumbling and gymnastics and trapeze work, at woodcraft and fieldcraft, at cliff-climbing and building-climbing, at magic tricks and hypnotism, at microscopy and radio-building, at taxidermy (well, where did he get that twenty-two foot long alligator skin?), at playing the cornet and the harmonica and the musical saw, at ventriloquism and imitations, at building midget cars that would run, at the manufacture of stink-bombs and disappearing ink and itching powder and turnip whisky and dynamite from materials found around the kitchen and storeroom of any progressive institution, at sword-swallowing and juggling, at training fleas, at making fire balloons, at duding it up with the girls (it was his outstanding duding it up that won him the companionship of Emily Vortex, the fairest and most intelligent and most hyperactive and fastest in the metric mile of all the girls in that particular progressive institution), at making counterfeit money in the printing and engraving section of the ‘useful arts’ department, at making real money in the money market.

  “There's an astonishing amount of angular momentum being consumed around here,” Wrangler Hoxie remarked one day at the institution. “All that angular momentum that is consumed has to come from somewhere. Well, where is it coming from? You are a smart boy, Riproar. Why don't you solve this problem?”

  “As to myself, I have kept the problem solved,” Karl Riproar said with that certainty that young boys sometimes have. “That is to say that I have anticipated it and have not let it become a problem.”

  “At nine years old you have it solved? Then you're the boy who's found the golden fleece, Karl.”

  “It wasn't lost. It was there all the time, Wrangler Hoxie,” Karl said.

  “And just when did you begin to solve this problem of energy and angular momentum, Karl?”

  “When I had myself sent to this progressive institution. The fleece was here and waiting to be shorn.”

  “But Karl, you were only eight days old when—”

  “Yes. It doesn't pay to let a problem get too big a start on you.”

  Though Karl excelled at all things and did them with real passion, yet there were many who thought that he did them too rapidly, or that he did too many of them (eight to twelve of them, perhaps more) at the same time. At field hockey he was the best goal tender in the progressive institution. Nay, he was the best in the whole history of that institution. Except when—

  —when he was also on call as kicking specialist and punt return man in the football game in the cornering field, or as center fielder in the baseball game in the bordering field (well, deep center field in the one game was very near to the goal in the other, and Karl was very fast and he never missed a fly ball, nor the blocking of a goal-attempt either; but when he was at bat or on base there were complications), or as volleyball player on the adjacent court. (How Karl could jump to spike the ball down over the net! How he had to be on the fantastic rush even to be there to make those wonderful jumps!)

  Ah, the memory of him running so swiftly from field to field, catching a fly that looked impossible to catch and pegging it home to nail the runner at the plate, thwarting a hockey goal with an incredible last minute arrival, making a simultaneous save and kill in the coffin corner of the volleyball court, swooping under a tumbling punt and returning it all the way back through the whole opposing team to score, all the while holding (and speed-reading) an open book in one hand and having that green (educational) and red (drama) earplug blaring into his head, and under his chin the microphone into which he was broadcasting continuously to some juvenile radio show! Ah, the memory of that!

  And on the fly (always on the fly) making the moves on the scattered boards of the four simultaneous chess games he was playing. Karl Riproar was really something to watch! He was a completely natural and unspoiled boy, but he was so very accelerated about it all.

  It was suggested that Karl might have done some of these things better if he did not do so many of them at the same time. This is false. Nobody could have done any of these things better than Karl did them (except, just possibly, running the metric mile). Learning always on the fly, he learned much more than any other inmate in the progressive institution did (except possibly Emily Vortex). There just could not be any better athlete or better student or gamesman or entertainer than Karl.

  “You are the torpedo, that's what you are,” one of the other boys at the progressive institution said in admiration. “We name you Lord Torpedo,” said another of those boys. “You comprehend it all.”

  “Why should you call me Lord Torpedo?” Karl Riproar asked. “A torpedo is anything that is torpid, and I am not that. Or it is the torpedo fish which is so torpid that it hardly ever flicks a fin or does anything at all to break its smooth lines. Or it is a destructive weapon in the same smooth lines of that lazy fish, and there is nothing I want less than to be a destructive weapon.”

  “We name you Lord Torpedo,” the kid repeated, “because you are so fast and so powerful, and because you never miss. And because you comprehend it all except your new name, which is too close to you for that.”

  Karl could do everything better than any other inmate of the institution, could he? How about the metric mile foot race? There was a little bit of mystery about that. The title-holder in the metric mile was a girl, Emily Vortex. Oh, she was fast, she was very fast, but she was also tricky. But Karl Riproar finally challenged her for the title and they staged the gala race. Emily (they called her Lady Atalanta) broke in front. She was very fast off the starting blocks. And she maintained a killing pace. But Karl gained on her and came almost up to her. Then she tossed the first of the apples, and how could Karl not swerve aside from anything that looked so good to eat? But Karl had foreseen this. He had made himself an apple-grapple, and he picked it up without breaking speed, and he ate it with a musical munching as he read the book he was carrying in his left hand and changed the station coming in on his left earplug.

  Emily threw the second apple, and Karl grabbed it neatly with his apple-grapple, and now he was three strides ahead of her. She threw the third apple, and he swooped it in as neatly as he had the others, and now he was six strides ahead of her and going away. But as he bit into that third apple he came onto something more than juicy fruit. The thing exploded in his mouth, and it threw out a homing directional device. This was a bolo, leaded balls on the ends of rawhide ropes, and the bolo wrapped around Karl's ankles and threw him. And Emily went on to win the race and retain her title.

  The bolo, in its second stage, hog-tied Karl with his hands behind him and his hands and feet together and him writhing help
less. Then Emily came back with a fourth apple and jammed it in Karl's mouth. Yeah, he was the trussed pig with the apple in his mouth, and Emily's triumph was complete.

  But this did not put Karl's spirits down at all. Rather it elevated them, and now he acquired a special affection for this Emily Vortex.

  Karl made fortunes in the stock market and on the various money exchanges. “There are a lot of empty places in the money shuffle and they're just crying out to be filled up,” Karl said. Then he explained how he did it all:

  “Inerrant prediction is the key,” he said. “But faulty prediction is worse than none at all. You must know where you are, have a stable axis, for accurate prediction. The gyroscope is the best of all prediction instruments since it is the only one with a stable axis. But if a person is himself a gyroscope, then he has all the predictions by their gyrating tails.”

  This is the explanation of how he made fortunes in the money markets? Well, Karl did have what can only be called a high rate of rotation in all his activities, and in that sense he was a gyroscope. He was even called Lord Gyroscope by some of his fellow inmates in the progressive institution. This was from a take-off done on him in one of the gridiron entertainments at the institution.

  “Are we going to have a crisis in energy sources around here?” Emily Vortex asked Karl Riproar one day. “I come from an older family than you do in this hyperactivity business and I know where to draw energy from. But is there enough for both of us? Are you hogging it? If there will only be enough for one of us, then I know which one it will be. Myself.” “I hog it a little bit, Emily,” Karl said, “but there will be enough for us both until it is time for us to leave here. And for the time after then, I have plans. See my plans.” And he showed her his prospectus of things to come in this area.