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

by R. A. Lafferty

  IR: “I wouldn't worry about that detail, Mother Maderos. You can already go to jail a dozen times for using what you have admitted using. Anything else?”

  MM: “Yeah, I put a little bit of ‘smart stuff root’ and a little bit of ‘strong stuff root’ in it. I figure that people can't be too smart or too strong. Those two are code names. They won't mean anything to you. They stand the world on its nose but they won't mean anything to you.”

  IR: “Mother Maderos, you are hereby enjoined from manufacturing or selling any more of this powder. The items are all dangerous and illegal, all of them that I understand. Formal charges will be filed against you within twelve hours; and, pending that, you will probably be taken into custody within an hour. If you have any arrangements to make, make them quickly. You will be going away for a long time.”

  MM: “I'll just ship the carload of the stuff that I have on the siding to my main distribution point. Then I'll think about it, whether I want to change the powder or stay with it the way it is. Oh, it's no trouble. All my railway cars are self-propelled.”

  IR: “You will not ship anything anywhere! Almost all the items you have named are carcinogenous to black-foot weasels.”

  MM: “Whatever happened to rats? You'll enjoin me to nothing. You are the nothing person. Let the tongue-tied federal person here do the enjoining if anybody does.” This Conchita Maderos then went to the window, put two fingers in her mouth, and whistled a very piercing and loud whistle.

  IR: “Back me up, Clyde, back me up. Say one of the phrases in your repertoire.”

  FP: “Right on!!!” From outdoors, and about a kilometer away, there came a very loud and piercing whistle in answer to the whistle that Conchita Maderos had given. This was followed by a roar and a rumble, a self-propelled rumble.

  FP: “It's rolling, is it?”

  MM: “Yeah, Clyde, that last carload of stuff is rolling. But I'm not sure about the subsequent ones. That might be the subsequentest one there is.”

  IR: “What, what, what? What is all this mouthy talk? As I said, Mother Maderos, if you have any arrangements to make, make them quickly. You will be going away for a long time.”

  And just what is all this business about the ‘Mother Maderos Dawn Chili’ doing in the middle of this account? Oh, I have just received a registered mailing from the Criminal Enforcement Division of the Government. It is sent to all the Junk Food dealers in the country, it says. It quotes the foregoing little interview as evidence, and it states that this must be displayed in a prominent place as a warning against the Dawn Chili Powder. Failure to display this prominently can result in a prison sentence from any derelict Junk Food dealer.

  I have no prominent place to display it, but maybe this will do. I am not a Junk Food dealer, but the Criminal Enforcement Division of the Government must believe that I am or they would not have sent this missive to me by registered mail. It is safest to insert this here.

  3.

  Terrance Tripuill is the world's smartest geologist and geocosmologist, and he has been so for most of this year. Oh, there is no doubt that he is the smartest. He arrived on the scene like a continental upheaval, with the rocks gushing like water and a brimstone smell upon everything. He brought new theory and facts to isothermics. He unraveled the secret of the trilobite Isotelus. Nobody else had even thought to ask why a new trilobite had been needed in its particular era. And the answer that Terrance gave to that question left the people shaking who really understood the trilobite situation. Nobody knew more about Florissant Lake Beds than did Terrance Tripuill. Nor about the Flaming Gorge, nor about Devonian Orogeny generally. Nor about the Sundance Sea, or the Sinbad Limestone, or Neogeratorus. If it had anything to do with the Earth, Terrance knew all about it.

  Terrance, a lumbering giant, was a sober and sedate man. He wasn't as bizarre as most of the sudden new geniuses of this year, though some of their oddities have rubbed off onto him now. Besides wearing at all hours and seasons and functions a hunting jacket with all the pockets filled with shotgun shells (no, that was only a drollery of his to say that they were shotgun shells; they were really blasting caps), his only eccentricity was carrying around a bowling ball with him always. The bowling ball had a world map contoured upon it, and the three holes at the top of it had interesting counterparts on the surface of the Earth itself. For, just at these three corresponding locations, Terrance had begun three great excavations into the earth, one of them near Alta in Norway (70°N, 23°E); one of them near Kazachye in Siberia (70°N, 142°E), just where the Cherskiy range of mountains had somehow been gobbled up; and the third of them on Cornwallis Island in the Northwest Territories of Canada (99°E, 75°N). This latter was called the thumb-hole by Terrance.

  The theory of Terrance (get ready for it, it's in the style of the new “loose theory” outpouring of this year) was that three very great holes in the Earth, each about two hundred miles in diameter and nine hundred miles deep, had been filled up artificially, by men, or by the giants who were before men. Terrance Tripuill was a great fundraiser, and he was determined to find out why those three big holes had been filled up. They were filled with such masses of rubble that whole ranges of mountains had been demolished to obtain the filling material. After seven months of digging, the deepest emptying (about sixty-five miles deep, at the Cornwalis Island site) still showed artificial fill of rocks that were the remnants of mountains blasted apart.

  “There is something waking up down at the bottom of that hole,” Terrance declared on one of his fundraising tours. “I have been logging its brain waves (Would you believe brain waves a mile long?) It's been a prisoner down there for between seven and nine million years. I am pretty sure that there is one of these creatures at the bottom of each of the three holes. People, we must solve this at all costs. It is the biggest skeleton ever to be hidden in any three closets. A creature that is seven to nine million years old is old. A creature that is two hundred miles in diameter is big. People, this is no little project that we are engaged on. This is ‘Big Study’ stuff.”

  There were people who believed that the big creature should not be released, that it or they were imprisoned and buried for a reason. But if a thing was that big, the new feeling was to go ahead with it. No new scientist of any other recent year had got hold of such a ‘Big Concept’ project as Terrance Tripuill had got hold of here. Consider him, and get an idea of the really big things that are on the move right now, the big new things that are not always as neat as the new things of other years. Should the present year not be named ‘The Year of the Big Concept’?

  But it has been Rafael (The Big Think) Ricardo who has really brought the present year where it might be called ‘The Amazement of the Ages.’ The other spectacular new scientists have big concepts and big enterprises, but they do not really have the ‘View From a Distant Mountain.’ The ‘Distant Mountain,’ somewhere out in the orbit of Neptune, gave the ‘Big View’ as well as the ‘Big Think’ to Ricardo who was able to locate himself mentally in that place. It gave him peculiar insights and far-out-sights into all the jumping new theories, those of Casey Yantra, August Toombs, Joyful John Tolliver, Ivan Tottlebeam, Jessica Wigtown, John King Stephen, Henry Saxo, Caroline Yap, Efram Rickets, Demetrio Garcia, Sulkey Jane Surrey, Tom Benbolt, Terrance Tripuill, all the great ones. “A year that can't see itself properly on the outside has still a long ways to go on its exterior construction,” Ricardo used to say as he zoomed along on his skateboard. On the project that was popularly called ‘The Three Holes of Terrance Tripuill,’ Ricardo had some penetrating ‘distant mountain’ views. “No, of course there aren't any big creatures buried alive at the bottoms of those three holes,” he said. “That's the silliest thing I ever heard of. Our trouble is that we are all too close to the Earth to see what it is really like. It is an artificial ball set into a natural sequence of planets orbiting a natural sun. Terrance Tripuill is forever carrying a bowling ball around with him, even to bed (his wife tells me that it is from the bowling ball
that she got that broken clavicle, and her insurance didn't cover ‘a bowling accident in bed’), and yet he hasn't tumbled to the fact that he has been living on a bowling ball all his life. His unconscious understands it, yes, but his consciousness does not.

  “Some demiurge once set it, the bowling-ball Earth, into a sequence of orbiting planets for a joke. It did look like a planet orbiting there, and his companions laughed with him at the place he had parked it.

  “But some of the fauna of the bowling ball named Earth developed and came to understand the situation. They filled up the threefinger holes of the bowling ball with rubble from a few mountain ranges that they had to demolish. When that demiurge is ready to go bowling again (though a day with them is as a million years with us, yet it's been more than a cosmic week since he set it here, so he might come for it at any time) he won't be able to pick the bowling ball up out of its orbit. He'll find that the finger holes are filled up. That might give our artificial planet a reprieve for a while (an instant with the demiurge while he had to grasp the ball with both hands might be as ten thousand years with us). The decision to fill up the three holes was a good one, no matter whose decision it was.”

  Was there ever as intellectual a year as this one? Well, do you yourself not sleep better at night knowing that the ‘Big Think’ is present among us?

  4.

  Six Investigative Reporters were sitting very late one night over the walnuts and the wine. They were talking about the one thing that they had all been basically investigating all year. The six of them (Interrogative Reporters, though they are gadflies upon the Earth, are not bad people when they get together by themselves) were Tim Dall, Eileen Keeghan, Harold Fame, Maximilian Lombardy, Janus Funk, and Roxie Campollion. The one thing they were always thinking and talking about (while they pursued lesser stories to make a living) was the appearance of the exceptional ‘new people’ this year, so much more talented than the new people of other recent years, so much more loutish and slobbish than the leading new people of other years. And they had about worn out the night with anecdotes of the incongruities of these ‘new people.’ One of these Investigative Reporters, Tim Dall, had always been the least esteemed of the group. But now, suddenly and in a way not understood, he had himself become one of the new people. That made a difference.

  And, this was connected with his having become a ‘new person,’ he could crack walnuts between his thumb and forefinger now. Of course these were Black Walnuts. This group wasn't, at least, the sort of people who used English Walnuts.

  “Yes, you have become one of the ‘New People’ geniuses, Tim,” Roxie Campollion said. “We realize that you have suddenly become preternaturally strong and spacious and intelligent. And yet you're as common as you ever were. You are, in fact, the only common one of us. Why oh why should the bird lay the golden egg on the top of your noggin and not on the noggin of any other of us? It's damned unfair. Special blessings should not come to persons who can't handle them elegantly.” Roxie was a little bit sour when she thought about this.

  “The ‘new people’ geniuses, of this year most especially, are pretty crass. They're the sort of folks who wear turtleneck sweaters and eat liver-and-onions,” Janus Funk said in disgust. “You qualify for that, Tim. Ah, I'm under a vow never to retire for the night until the first hint of the dawn appears in the sky. I hope it doesn't keep me waiting too long this morning.”

  “The aliens have landed,” Eileen Keeghan moaned. “One or two of them have been landing spectacularly every day this year. And they are all so common and so cruddy that they make the rest of us seem, by contrast, to be exciting and more than a little bit alienish ourselves. These new arrivals do not really have the ‘touch of strange’, for that is always accompanied by a ‘touch of elegance.’ Oh yes, they all arrive with the door-splitting power of both mind and body. We will not accept them. Well, what will we do with them then? They're the sort of people who drive orange automobiles and wear apple-blossom scent in July.” Eileen wrote a daily newspaper column titled ‘Kit Fox Droppings.’ It was very elegant, as was she. “Doesn't the time drag between four and four-thirty in the morning though!”

  “The aliens have not landed,” Harold Fame said. “Examine any one of the brilliant ‘new people’ and he will have been around for as long as you want to check back on him, been around as a tedious and unbrilliant fixture, with his pockets empty and his welcome everlastingly worn out. But what carrion have they now eaten that they have become so great? I believe that they've struck the ‘mother lode’ this year, though without realizing it. For a dozen years, intelligence-enhancing substances have been placer-mined out of the flow and pharmacopoeia of our world; but always they have been greatly diluted and their real sources have remained unknown. But they've tapped the ‘mother lode’ this year. Oh, why can't we all find it out and tap it? This year's ‘new people,’ they're the sort who would casually toss their jacket over their right shoulder when strolling on a chill-sunny day, the sort of people who use Syrian almonds and New Jersey holland onions.”

  “I never did understand about the ‘new people’,” Tim Dall said, “but yesterday morning, quite early, I discovered that I had become one of the ‘new people.’ It would seem that, having become one of them, I would be able to understand and explain them better, but such is not the case. I still do not at all understand these powerful new people, not even the powerful new person that I have become. But this ‘mother lode,’ you call it, Harold, I should be able to identify it. And there is a glimmer of it at the back door of my mind right now.”

  “Ah, the night does drag,” Maximillian Lombardy complained. “Until this year I could gather with other Investigative Reporters and believe that I was just possibly in the most elite and most intellectual company in the world. This year, I can no longer maintain that fiction. The ‘new people’ louts are more intellectual than we are, and that makes them more elite than we are. Oh, why should it come to them and not to ourselves! They are the sort of people who—Oh, words fail me!—they are the sort of people who would eat chili for breakfast.”

  “That's it!” Tim Dall cried. “Let's all go have chili for breakfast. I believe that it's important.”

  “It's too early even for a chili breakfast, isn't it?” Roxie asked, not quite warming to the idea.

  “Not for ‘Mother Maderos Dawn Chili’ available at your nearest Crum Bums Junk Food Emporium. Let's go!”

  5.

  “Six Dawn Chilis!” Tim Dall ordered as he and his friends took one of those sociable six-sided tables in Crum Bums North-Side Junk Food Emporium. “We have other chilis,” the waitress said. “Mother Maderos Dawn Chili isn't for everyone.”

  “But it is for us,” Roxie declared. “How is it different?”

  “It makes you smart and it makes you strong,” the waitress said. “I say about those who can't stand the taste of Dawn Chili, ‘Well and good, it keeps things from getting too crowded.’ But there are disadvantages.” Yes, she had already served the six Dawn Chilis to them quickly. “Since it's changed me, I keep breaking all my husband's ribs whenever we rough-house wrestle the way we like to. I have to be careful not to break him, and not to break other things too. And my mind is so active now that it keeps me on the go all the time. And besides, I've made so much money just by latching onto those obvious opportunities that I'm almost buried under it.”

  “Ow!” Roxie cried, “and then Ow on the other side. It's as if long and pointed ears just came out of me. Getting smart fast isn't painless. Oh yes, I'm enhanced, and I only had three spoonfuls of the stuff. Why do you still work here, dear, if you are covered up with money now?”

  “For the people. I couldn't get along without them. Even before I was changed, the first time I walked into Crum Bums (this one opened last May), I said, ‘This is for me.’ These are the kind of people that—”

  “—that drive orange-colored automobiles and wear apple-blossom scent in July,” Eileen Keeghan chirped with her sour bird song, “the sort
of people who wear turtleneck sweaters and eat liver-and-onions (when they're not eating Dawn Chili), the kind of people who casually toss their jackets over their right shoulders. Ugh, and ugh cubed.”

  “You're onto us, sis,” the waitress said. “Aren't slobs wonderful! I'm glad that the change hasn't changed me.”

  “But it hasn't run clear wild,” Janus Funk questioned it, “though I myself have just become one of the New People. What will limit the effect?”

  “Oh, this is the last week that we'll have Mother Maderos Dawn Chili,” the girl said. “There's a writ out against it, so she's not making any more of her chili powder for a while. It's technically a government writ, but it's really Compensating Fate intervening before things get clear out of hand. Oh, the ‘smart stuff root’ and the ‘strong stuff root’ (they're code names only) will still be used in something or other, but by fewer people and in lesser strength. This year almost got out of hand.”

  “I don't feel any pointed ears coming out on me exactly,” Maximillian Lombardy laughed, “but I sure am crowded to bursting with long and pointed thoughts. Ah, I'm going to like this.”

  “I give it up!” Eileen spat in disgust. “I was always smart enough, and I refuse to become gross. I'll blow the lid off this thing!” And she rattled out of Crum Bums North-Side place angrily (she always wore a lot of wooden bracelets and anklets; they accounted for the rattling).

  “She wouldn't even know where to find the lid,” the waitress laughed, “but she'll probably create a few hot pellets. I read her column ‘Kit Fox Droppings’ in the paper. Ah, we have a sort of organization to keep things in hand. We call it the ‘Committee of One Million to Keep it Quiet,’ though it has about five million members now. You all may as well join. The idea is—”