“The Mutational-Advances in the human species have been orderly and well-spaced. And each has been quite clearly announced, though only at the very moment of its happening. The coming of color vision, the coming of speech, the coming of consciousness (the latter two were probably simultaneous comings) have all been announced by rampant pruritus. The ancient trepanning of skulls which so puzzled archeologists and anthropologists was directed at getting into the brain to scratch the announcing pruritus, the Boding Itch.
“Humans as they are now constituted are only about two steps away from perfection. Since the mutational-advances have been orderly and well-spaced, let us consider which advances are next in order. And let us consider when the spacing will be fulfilled. My own figures indicate that the spacing is fulfilled almost exactly now and that it is time for a new appearance (which I believe will be a double appearance).
“All that humans now need for their completion are a handy road map to show them where they're going, and a correlating eye to show them where they are right now. They will get these two benefits quite soon, and there will be a spillover of them to other intelligent species.
“The spillover to other intelligent species is a sort of insurance. If mankind stumbles and falls back at this step, or at any other step, things will not have to begin quite at the beginning again. The other intelligent species will have a good start on things, a better-than-nothing start.
“When the rampant and universal itching appears, know you that the illuminating summer of the intellect is nigh.”
“Well, that's surely plain enough,” Fritz said. He took the book from Vera and put it back on the shelf. The name of the book was The Back Door of History and it was written by that weasel-faced Doctor Arpad Arutinov.
Vera and Fritz went into the kitchen to eat the Happy Ox Hodgepodge, one of the Great Dishes of the Western World.
“Yes, that's surely plain enough,” Vera agreed as she tied the bib under her chin (Happy Ox is sloppy), “but there's many a slip on those muddy syllogistic roads. When will WHEW get into the act? And how can WHEW be balked from spoiling the whole show?”
WHEW was ‘Worldwide Health Enforcement Wardens.’ This multinational agency under its motto ‘Good health and good attitude compulsory for everyone!’ could act on a worldwide scale within short minutes to obliterate any new ailment or unease. Sometimes it acted too rapidly, but it was never guilty of not acting. There was no way that it could neglect something like the new itch.
“What worries me most is WHEW's secondary motto ‘Out by the roots! Leave not a trace,’ ” Fritz said. “I believe that it will be a very delicate and detailed tracery, and I don't want my own version of it to be obliterated without a trace. I believe that the tracery will consist of a ‘world line’ as well as a ‘personal line,’ and that those of us who are the natural leaders must combine the two of them in our leadership. Perhaps some of us could hide?”
“Hide from WHEW? Oh, that's funny. Nobody can hide from WHEW, Fritz.”
“Monkeys and apes worldwide are also exhibiting the ‘Itchy Palm Syndrome,’ ” a commentator's voice on the 6:41 news spot was saying. “And dolphins are showing a strange and unlocalized unease which is somewhat similar to the ‘Itchy Palm Syndrome.’ Let me emphasize though that the dolphins are not actually suffering from an itching of the palms of their hands. They haven't any hands or palms thereof. “But WHEW is on the job. Already they have treated and cured ten million persons and they will be treating about ten million persons a minute until everybody on Earth is cured. WHEW is using the new (well, it's about six minutes old now) Deep-Bite Acid Treatment. There have been early complaints of the treatment leaving holes clear through the palms of the hands, but this has now been adjusted for. The Deep-Bite Treatment was biting a little bit too deep for a short while there. But the mysterious itch will soon be no more than a memory.”
“Maybe we could got good depth photographs of the—ah—road maps of the future before they are obliterated,” Fritz Der Grosse hazarded to Vera.
“I'm afraid not,” she snuffed that one out. “The maps are not clarified yet, on me or on you, and I don't believe that they will be clarified until the itch has run its course.”
“If extremes come to the extreme, we could—” Fritz hesitated.
“What, funny man, what?” Vera asked him.
“Lop them off,” Fritz Der Grosse said in a pale voice.
Vera Vanguard read scraps from another book, while they assessed a very direful situation. “There are seven major mounts on the palm of the hand: the Mounts of Jupiter, Saturn, Apollo, Mercury, Mars, Venus, and the Moon.
“There are seven major nodes on the palm of the palm: the Nodes of Solomon or Judgment, of Everlastingness or Transcendence, of Virtue, of Eloquence, of Power, of Agape or Enabling Love, and of Futurity.
“There are six minor lines on the palm of the hand: the Life Line, the Saturn Line, the Head Line, the Heart Line, the Mars Line, and the Girdle of Venus.
“Thus it is seen that there are seven mounds and seven nodes, but only six major lines. This does not mean that we have lost one of the lines of the palm of our hand. It means that we haven't arrived at it yet. Indeed there is folk memory of the time when there were only four major lines in our palms.
“The seventh line, when it appears, will be the line of the Future, and it will be the chart of things to come. It will erupt out of the Node of Futurity which is located in the Mount of the Moon, and it will move across the palm to the Ring of Saturn which is at the base of the index finger.
“It is the custom to end books on Palmistry with the question, ‘What does the future hold?’ The answer is that the future for us holds the Vision of the Future Limned out plainly in the palms of our hands, and it holds a new Illumination to see that Future by.”
The book that Vera Vanguard had read this from was Palmistry for Plain People, by Moses Mantes.
About thirty of the people who considered themselves as natural leaders in that town had gathered in the rooms of Fritz Der Grosse. “If we are able to effect telekinesis it all, and I believe that we are, then we should surely be able to control and influence our detached parts,” George Frontrunner said. “We are already on the verge of a breakthrough in this field. We'll let this impasse push us right into this breakthrough.”
Then the commentator on the 7:01 news spot was talking: “For more than eight minutes now WHEW has been developing a new breed of dog that will go direct to severed members and utterly destroy them. Here is a direct quote from the Plenipotentiary of WHEW: ‘Don't hack them off, folks. They aren't that itchy. And if you have any left-handed (hey, that's a pun) ideas about this, well, forget them!’ People out there, WHEW means what it says.”
“Let's cut our losses in half,” Fritz said to that circle of his friends. “Oh, we'll each just lop the left one off and try to conceal it in a good place, though the dogs do complicate that. The left palm is supposed to be much the more informative one, you know.”
2.
The eyes we have, the eyes we have,
And soon we'll have another!
Or else a leopard epitaph.
Oh how they slink and sluther!
C. S. Leeward Lewis
Vera Vanguard was giggling. Her handless left hand was packed in dry ice to stop its bleeding, and she looked dismal and disheveled. None the less, she was giggling.
“I thought it would stop half the itching, at least,” she snickered, “and it did for a moment. But now I have a new itch, right on the top of my head. And I've only one hand to scratch that with, and no other hand at all for scratching my itching hand.”
“Yes, I have an itching right on the top of my head too,” several of them said. “It's the second stage of the rocket, as it were.”
“The ‘Book’ said that the new appearance would probably be a double appearance,” Fritz reminded them. “Well, what is going to develop on the tops of our heads?”
The severed left hands of the thi
rty persons were romping around on the tables and floor, and climbing up the draperies. They were under pretty good telekinetic control by their owners, though several of the hands seemed to have minds and lives of their own. Each of these hands bore an emerging map of the future, and they must be kept safe from the effecting cures of the WHEW.
Four of the hands, working together, raised one of the windows two inches and crawled out under it to the stone ledge outside. Other left hands opened the other two windows of the room, and then all the hands were outside on the ledges. The people closed and locked the windows then and pulled the drapes over them. Would the dogs developed by WHEW be able to find and destroy the hands when the hands were outside on stone ledges that were thirty stories high?
“The dolphins, worldwide, are spending a lot of time contemplating their navels,” the commentator on the 7:31 news spot was speaking. “They are contemplating their navels and grinning those wide dolphin grins. And the dolphins are, especially within the last four minutes, becoming arrogant and uncooperative in certain experiments that people have been conducting on them. What does it all mean?” “It means that now the dolphins can read the future and the humans can't,” said a one-handed young lady named Clair O'Hare. “It's been suspected that dolphins had the equivalent of our palmistry all along, but we never knew how it was recorded. So that's where they have it, in the navel. Never mind, in three or four minutes we'll be able to read the future too.”
“WHEW has nearly completed its worldwide work,” the commentator was saying. “The Deep-Bite Acid Treatment has already been applied to more than ninety-nine percent of the people in the world and the damnable itching has been eaten out to its roots. After being healed, all persons will have slick and unlined palms. The WHEW crews are now mopping up the remaining one-third of one percent of the people in the world, those who are marked for special handling, those identified by the sensors as being somehow uncooperative. “There's an interesting side-light to this. Most people, as soon as the itching in their palms is cured, complain of an itching in the top of their heard. ‘I think my head has been itching for quite a while,’ some of them say, ‘but I didn't notice it so much because the itching in my hands was worse.’ We may, perhaps, have a follow-up on the ‘Itchy Pate Syndrome’ on the 7:46 news spot.”
A bunch of WHEW crewmen burst in on the group in the rooms of Fritz Der Grosse. “You people are ticketed for special handling,” the leader said, “but I don't know why. Oh, maybe that's it! Eustace, bring the specially trained dogs. Thirty of you folks here, and each of you has his left hand freshly lopped off. How are we going to treat hands that aren't here? How did this happen?”
“Thirty separate grotesque accidents,” Fritz said. “I know it's an outrageous coincidence, but it's no more than that.” The WHEW crewmen gave the right hands of each of the group the Deep-Bite Acid Treatment and burned out their Lines of the Future just when they were in the final stages of being born. Never mind, the lines of the left palm are always clearer than those of the right.
Then the crewman, Eustace, came in with nine fierce, newly-trained dogs. The dogs threw themselves against the windows of the room, broke them out, and tumbled through.
“After them!” the chief of the WHEW crew cried; and all of those crewmen followed the dogs through the windows and into a thirty-story fall to shattering death. The crewmen on ‘special handling’ jobs are indeed specialist, but their specializations have crowded out their common sense.
The phone rang. Fritz answered it. And a tapping noise came from it.
“That's mini-Morse Code,” said a one-handed man named Horace Rand. “I'm pretty sure that I can understand it. I'm pretty sure that I'm sending it, in a way, through my own detached and observing left hand. I've sent a lot of mini-Morse by that hand. Yes, here is the message: ‘All clear here. We're on the window ledges three floors above you. We sure did snooker those dogs and fellows, didn't we? Did you ever see dogs trying to follow a trail straight up into the air when they're falling straight down? They can't get any traction. Is it all clear down there? Can we come back down?’”
“Wandering hands, come back to us,” Horace tapped in mini-Morse. And within three minutes all the severed hands had returned to their owners and were frolicking over them like so many pet squirrels.
“Our hands really could be handier for us now than they were before,” Claire said. “This is neat. And the Line of the Future in my separated hand here has become quite clear and wonderfully detailed. I can't quite interpret it yet, but I feel that the ability and illumination for that is on the way to me.”
They all knew what was happening, of course, and how that ability and illumination was coming to them. They knew that at the fontanel of the head there was a ‘third-eye’ that saw by a sense other than regular sight, the third eye that had been asleep in all of us for the last few short thousands of years, the third eye that should open to new unifying and illuminating vision any time now.
“Zoo monkeys and apes have become very arch and knowing in the last few moments,” the commentator on the 8:01 news spot was saying. “They look at the palms of their left hands and they laugh. They scratch their heads (they seem to have the new pate itch the same as humans do), but they scratch their heads with a sort of delight. They seem to know something that we don't.” The thirty persons in Fritz Der Grosse's rooms (natural leaders, every one of them) looked at the palms of their left hands (“Oh, roll over, now flatten out a bit, perfect, perfect!”) and laughed with new joy. They scratched the tops of their heads (with their right hands only), and they scratched with a sort of delight. They were beginning to know things that nobody had ever known before.
And they ate more Happy Ox Hodgepodge. It's great brain-food, it's great disposition-and-attitude food, and it's the best ‘third-eye’ food in the world.
“The dolphins still contemplate their navels,” the commentator was saying, “and now they seem to ripple the skin of their heads and whistle and giggle a lot.”
“The dolphins already have the blowholes at the proper place,” a one-handed man named Cyril H. Digby said. “They are natural ‘third-eye’ creatures. The third eye as shown in old alchemical drawings has always looked at least as much like a dolphin's eye as a human's eye to me.”
“But WHEW is on the job,” the spot commentator was continuing. “The Deep-Bite Acid Treatment developed earlier in the evening for the obliteration of the ‘Itchy Palm Syndrome’ has been adapted and deepened for the obliteration of the ‘Itchy Pate Syndrome.’ The secondary motto of WHEW the Worldwide Health Enforcement Wardens is still ‘Out by the Roots. Leave not a Trace.’ WHEW is now making twenty million cures per minute worldwide of the ‘Itchy Pate Syndrome.’ ” “Nipped in the bud,” Vera Vanguard said, “or rather ‘nipped in the bloom,’ for we have already begun to bloom with our glorious new mutational-advance. We have the handy road maps to show us where we're going, to show us the future; and we begin to have the correlating inner-outer eye to show us where we really are now. It sees by a sense other than regular sight, but it sees totally. But WHEW is on the strike again. What will we do?”
“When a process has worked well once—” Fritz Der Grosse began.
“Then take a long cool look at it before you try it again,” Horace Rand offered.
“We may not have time enough to take a long cool look,” Vera said apprehensively.
“I say ‘Lop them off!’,” Fritz cried.
“Is it our heads you are talking about, man?” Cyril H. Digby asked.
“Yes, our heads,” Fritz maintained it, “our wonderful heads with so much new illumination churning around in them. Oh, I feel myself getting smarter by the minute.”
“I'm not sure that your latest proposal reflects that, man,” Cyril said.
And now the 8:11 spot news commentator was talking: “Within the last eight minutes WHEW has developed a new breed of hunting leopards that will savagely and instinctively zero in on severed human heads and find them and
devour them. Don't look for easy outs, folks. WHEW will cure your pate itch in WHEW's own way.”
“That just about does us in,” Claire O'Hare railed. “The ledges outside the windows are too narrow for our heads. They'd roll off. And even if they didn't roll off, they wouldn't be able to climb up the walls to the higher stories. The leopard would have them right where they were.” “It's going to be a race, folks, and I always loved a race,” Vera crowed with avid pleasure. “I feel myself getting smarter by the second, and I'm sure the rest of you are lighting up too. If only a WHEW crew doesn't get here for three or four minutes we'll be so smart that we can outwit them a dozen different ways.”
But a WHEW crew burst into the rooms in that very instant.
“Delay them just half a minute, group,” Vera Vanguard begged her associates in a husky voice. “Oh, I'm getting so smart so fast that I know I'll think of something in half a minute.”
But the WHEW crewmen were already inflicting the Deep-Bite Acid Treatment cures on the heads of group people, eating those third eyes down to their roots before they were fully awake.
“No, no, our heads don't itch at all,” Horace Rand protested.
“The Pruritus-meters are running and they say that your heads do itch,” the chief of the WHEW crew said.
“Great leaping leopards, that's what the joyful leaping marks on my Line of the Future are,” Fritz cried. “Oh great leaping leopards!”
And the leaping leopards were in the room.
“Won't you WHEW gentlemen all have some Happy Ox Hodgepodge?” Vera asked.
“I will,” the chief said, and he began to fill a big platter with it. “And my men will have some of it just as soon as they finish treating you people, just as soon as they are certain that they have you cured and no mistake about it.”
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 283