The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  R. A. LAFFERTY

  Magazine Section

  R. A. Lafferty started writing in 1960, and throughout the subsequent twenty-six years he has turned out a seemingly endless string of mad and marvelous tall tales, including some of the freshest and funniest short stories ever published. In 1973 he won the Hugo Award for one of them, “Eurema’s Dam”. His books include Past Master, The Devil Is Dead, The Reefs of Earth, Okla Hannali, The Fall of Rome, Arrive at Easterwine, The Flame Is Green, Annals of Klepsis, and the collections Nine Hundred Grandmothers, Strange Doings, Does Anyone Else Have Something Further To Add?, Four Stories, and Golden Gate and Other Stories. His most recent books are the collections Ringing Changes, Heart of Stone, Dear, Snake In His Bosom, The Man Who Made Models, and Slippery, and the novel Half A Sky. His story “Golden Gate” was in our First Annual Collection; his story “Company in the Wings” was in our Second Annual Collection.

  In the wry story that follows, he suggests that perhaps we should believe everything we read in the papers, after all …

  Magazine Section

  R. A. LAFFERTY

  1.

  STRANGE INCIDENT AT HAT-BOX FIELD

  Years ago (oh, from 1958 to 1962) Junior Giant Jet-Hoppers were used on short commercial flights out of small airports in the NE Oklahoma, NW Arkansas, SE Kansas, and SW Missouri areas. These smallest of jets would carry only thirty-two passengers. Well, on the routes they ran there were seldom more than twenty passengers: if there’d been smaller jets made, they’d have been used.

  The Junior Giants had size limitations in several places. They had the narrowest throats of any jets, entirely too narrow; and because of this the Junior Giants were often choked down by the birds they sucked in, especially ducks and geese.

  At dusk of November 2, 1960, a Junior Giant took off a north-oriented runway from Hat-Box Field of Muskogee, Oklahoma, bound for Fayetteville, Arkansas, a flight of ninety-four miles. This was a little early in the year for geese to be flying south, and yet they had been heard the night before this.

  It was for this reason that Flight Attendant Angela Rebhuhn brought her shotgun along with her on that flight. Just after takeoff, seeing a flying V of geese coming right at them, she opened the nose-escape window (quite against regulations) and shot a blast at the V of geese to make it veer off. Then she readied herself for the second blast, but she did not shoot it. She said later that she had the clear impression that the leading goose of the V was not a goose.

  The Junior Giant sucked up the first five flyers of the V, then choked and died, banked over the Cookson Hills, and came back to Hat-Box Field at an easy glide and made an easy landing.

  The night service crew (it consisted of a man and a boy) removed four geese (and one thing that was not a goose) from the gullet of the Junior Giant Jet-Hopper. The damage was declared to be minor, and the Jet-Hopper took off again after a total delay of only seven minutes.

  The four geese that had been sucked into the narrow gullet of the jet and choked it down were now no more than four hot little blocks of charcoal (damn, they stayed hot for a long time!), and the man and boy spread them out on the floor of the machine shed.

  But the leader of the V, the thing that was not a goose, did not seem to be badly burned. It was a curious creature. Its wings were like bat wings, very long fingers with a leather-like webbing between them. The creature was slightly made, but it had a finger-wing span of at least five feet. Its head and face were not at all goose-like. They were a little like those of a coon, or a monkey, or a comically ugly little man. Then the funny face stretched itself, flexed its web-joined fingers, opened its eyes.

  and it said “Hot and fast, there’s just no thrill like it.”

  and it winked at the man and the boy

  and the man and the boy fell all over themselves getting out of that maintenance shed.

  Then they heard the popping of stretched leathery finger-wings as the thing that was not a goose took to the air and vanished.

  * * *

  Nobody except Angela Rebhuhn ever believed the man and the boy. The man got testy and would not answer questions about it unless you found him boozed up down on Callahan Street in Moskogee. The boy started out hitch-hiking the morning after the incident. He said that he was going back home (to Olathe, Kansas) to finish high school. He said that he had seen something that only a liar could believe.

  But their unbelieved story survived.

  Every two or three years after that, people (even newcomers to the neighborhood who could not have heard the story) would report seeing a V of geese going south in the evening sky with a lead flyer that wasn’t a goose.

  I found the boy in an art class in Olathe, Kansas. He drew for me a clear picture of what he had seen. I found Angela Rebhuhn and showed her the picture.

  “That’s him, that’s him exactly,” she said. “I’ve seen him twice since then. But he doesn’t lead geese into the jet throat when I’m on a flight. He and I have come to an understanding, an understanding over about three hundred air yards. When I shoot my warning shotgun blast, he veers off with the V. He understands that my second shot will be more than a warning.”

  By John T. Woolybear in the Sunday Magazine Section of the Muskogee Messenger—of quite a few years ago.

  * * *

  John T. Woolybear was a casual man with pale blue eyes. He was flecked with large tan freckles, and each freckle had a slight blue ring around it as though it had been drawn by a cartoonist. He had three wives: one in Illinois, one in Nebraska, one in Texas. He was on tolerably good terms with all three of them. Well, he sent each of them a card on her birthday every year. But he never entered the three states where they lived because (tolerably good terms or not) they had legal writs out against him.

  John Woolybear was a newspaper hobo. He could run a Linotype machine and all those other machines around a newspaper. He was a fair reporter. He wrote unusual feature articles for the Sunday Magazine Sections of newspapers. He had sold at least one of them a week for about forty years and that was about two thousand of them. He had his own rules for writing these Magazine Section stories: “THEY MUST BE STRANGE, THEY MUST BE OUTRAGEOUS, THEY MUST BE GARISH, and they must be true.” And he insisted on that lower-case truth in every one of them.

  He seldom stayed with one newspaper more than a month.

  When he left a town he usually left about an hour before dawn, dragging a suitcase big enough for three men, picking a highway nexus on the edge of town to hitch a ride from.

  2.

  STRANGE HAPPENINGS AT BLACKBERRY PATCH, KANSAS

  Parallel to the Cross-Timbers there is a ridge known (but not known at all widely) as Big Wind Ridge, which runs from the Texas gulf-shore through Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and into Canada. It is the unofficial place where the Great Plains end and the hilly woodlands begin, and one goes down from the plains to the hills. There is always a strong wind out of the west all along the ridge, and as a result of this there is much kite-flying by men and boys also all along the ridge. Big Wind Ridge is the best kite-flying place in the world, and the best kite-flying place along the whole Ridge is Blackberry Patch, Kansas, an unincorporated place in Doniphan County.

  Blackberry Patch, Kansas, is the only place in the world where boy-carrying kites and man-carrying kites are really common. The west wind at Blackberry Patch will sustain really large kites, some of which are equipped with seats or even dangling gondolas such as passenger balloons have. It is not uncommon for three to five persons to be airborne by a single kite; it isn’t uncommon if they are Blackberry Patch people. But there is something unusual and even secret about the people of Blackberry Patch.

  The Blackberry Patch from which the settlement got its name was originally a hundred miles across, back in the Indian days, and the berry vines were thick. But now (for the last hundred years or so) the patch has been nibbled away by settlers and farmers. But the heart of the patch still remains thick and secret: and it is there that Blackberry
Patch people (they are now an ethnic mixture of Kaw Indians and settler-Germans) live and make blackberry jelly at the Jelly Factory to sell all over the United States, and make kites and Fat Air suits. Since there is no graveyard or burying place around Blackberry Patch itself, one has to believe that the people go to what they humorously call the Elephant Graveyard in the Sky, in kites and their Fat Air suits, when their days are finished.

  Sure, the Kaw Indians flew kites back in the Indian days, beaver-skin kites strung on frames of tough and springy Osage Orange wood. For kite-ropes they used twisted huckleberry vines. They flew the kites more than a mile high, and sometimes the kite-riders put on their Fat Air suits and jumped out of the high kites. Then they might drift as far as fifty miles, across the wide Missouri River and into the treacherous Missouri Territory. And their descendants, the Kaw-Germans, still do it.

  Affected by the technology of the settler-German element, the Fat Air suits are much better than they were in the Indian days. And so are the kites. Tough, rubber-like polyethylene has taken the place of beaver-skins for both the suits and the kites. The suits used to be blown up by mouth, and the air was stoppered inside the suits by big wooden corks. Now the suits have regular air-valves in them; and every suit-traveler carries a bicycle pump along with him when he goes drifting. A person encased in a Fat Air suit can walk along pretty well on the ground, or bounce along; and if he falls down, he can roll along and bounce up again. And in the air he can get along famously. Fat Suitors from Blackberry Patch, Kansas, have floated across the Missouri River and clear across the state of Missouri and come down in Illinois. They carry dried blackberries with them to nibble on. And they wear advertisements on their Fat Air suits, and they always attract attention when they land. Often they are given rides back to Kansas by drivers for the Missouri-Kansas Motor Freight Line, as MK Freight Lines is one of the advertisements they most often wear on the backs of their suits.

  There is another aspect of the Blackberry Patch kites and the Fat Air suitors that some people find hard to believe. It is the main secret thing about them. There being no burial grounds around Blackberry Patch itself, the Blackberry Patchers, when they find that their days have about run out on them, go by kite and suit to the secret place with the secret name: but the joking name for it is the Elephant Graveyard in the Sky. A person gets into his Fat Air suit and goes up about a mile high in a kite. He jumps out then, and he begins to glide. But he does not begin his gentle glide downward as usual. He glides upward across the Missouri River. He comes to the secret place that looks like a big cloud on the outside. But it is a special sort of cloud with its spherical silver lining on the inside. It is bigger on the inside than on the outside, and has running water and green pastures. And there he will be gathered to the bosom of his fathers (mothers too, maybe), and will find all the wonderful Blackberry Patch people who have ever passed over to their glory.

  This last part may be inexact, as nobody has ever entered the miscalled Elephant Graveyard in the Sky and returned to give an accurate report of it.

  And just where is this big secret cloud with the joking name?

  It is exactly over downtown Kansas City, Missouri, and exactly two miles up.

  By John T. Woolybear in the Sunday Magazine Section of the Kansas City Star.

  * * *

  That was the last thing that Woolybear ever had published in the Sunday Magazine Section of the Kansas City Star. The Monday morning after it appeared, Peter J. Oldpeter was fired as editor of the Magazine Section and was replaced by a younger and less genial person.

  And the Magazine Section themselves in many Sunday newspapers were now being replaced by other things such as a second or even third section on TV personalities or Rock-Sockers.

  3.

  THE STRANGE CASE OF THE GOOD GIANT IN STONE COUNTY, MISSOURI

  The only things known for sure about Saint Christopher are that he was a very good person and that he was a giant. Other things about him, such as whether he ever really lived at all, or whether he ever really died at all, are not known for sure.

  Dating from the third century A.D., all around the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, there are at least a hundred giant statues in various states of decay. In many cases the local belief is that they are statues of Saint Christopher. Some of the statues are fallen and broken badly. Some of them have lost heads and arms. But there is one thing missing from even the best-preserved of them, and that is the face. There are no faces on any of them, even those where the rest of the head is preserved. On the best-preserved of these statues, there is clear evidence that the faces were broken off with hammers or axes. So at least as many of the statues are called locally “The Giant without a Face” as are called “The Good Giant Saint Christopher.”

  But what could have been so very wrong, or so very right, with the faces of the stone giants that people believed they had to break them off?

  In Stone County, Missouri, in the United States of America, near the place called Talking Rocks, there lived until two years ago a man named Horace Goodjohn Christopher, a retiring sort of man who seemed to be liked and admired by everybody and everything except the coons and badgers and wolverines. These animals hated him, but dogs loved him, and people liked him.

  Horace G. Christopher, a giant of a man, was generous. And he always seemed to have money to be generous with. Nobody knew where he got his money, for he never worked for pay and he said that he didn’t know where it came from either. “I just reach into one of my pockets and I find whatever I need,” he said. The good giant had gaint pants, and the giant pockets in them were so deep that they never ran empty.

  The Good Giant never worked for pay, but he worked almost all the hours of almost all the days without pay, doing all sorts of things for people, especially for widows and orphans. He was a talented workman in every art and craft you could think of.

  Besides his great height, there were two things a little bit unusual about this Giant John. He was seventeen hundred and fifty years old. And he was dog-faced. That’s right, dog-faced. In hair and hide and snout and eyes and ears and smell he was dog-faced. And it seemed a little bit weird to hear a man’s voice (a clear, strong, friendly voice) coming out of his dog-face.

  The Friendly Giant had a mill and he ground grain for everybody who brought it. Like all millers, he took one-tenth of the grain in fee for the grinding. And yet the nine-tenths of the grain that he returned ground and stacked to the customer was always of greater quantity and greater weight than had been the ten-tenths that the customer had originally brought to him. And he gave to the poor the one-tenth amount of every grinding that he had kept from the customer.

  The Giant had a hotel or roadside inn at the place called Talking Rocks in Stone County, Missouri. He was the patron of travelers, so he welcomed travelers of every sort at his hotel and offered the best bed-and-board anywhere. When travelers left him, they paid whatever they could afford. And they always found twice the amount of their payment back in their pockets after they were a mile or so down the road.

  Everybody liked him except those animals, the coons, badgers, and wolverines, those animals that traditionally hate and fear dogs. Then there appeared a wolverine of genius in the neighborhood. In every species, whether wolverine or human or other, about one individual in five million will be an individual of genius. The gifted wolverine got about a hundred other wolverines to assemble. He had to be a genuis because the slashing solitary wolverines are lone hunters who hate other wolverines only slightly less than they hate creatures of other species. But he assembled them.

  The mob of savage wolverines ambushed the good giant Horace Goodjohn Christopher one night. They killed him, and they tore his hot flesh off his bones and ate it completely.

  Well, was the giant Horace Goodjohn Christopher the same person as the giant Saint Christopher of Canaan? His age of seventeen hundred and fifty years would fit just about right. And the mystery of the old faceless statues of Saint Christopher might have been that
they were dog-faced statues, and persons might have felt that it was not fitting that a saint should be represented as dog-faced even if it was accurate.

  And two days after the death of Horace Goodjohn Christopher, there came further corroboration that he was indeed the same person as ancient Saint Christopher of Canaan. A man came in a truck to the Talking Rocks site in Stone County.

  “I travel for the Zolliger Church Goods Company,” he said. “If nobody objects, I will take the holy bones of Saint Christopher with me. It isn’t seemly that they should lie here on the dark ground and be gnawed on by every animal that comes along. How many thousands of holy relics will they make! A thousand sizeable pieces could be made from just one of those giant tibia bones.”

  “How do you know that they are really the bones of Saint Christopher?” someone asked him.

  “Genuine relics authenticate themselves,” the church goods man said. “And two nights ago, when I was in a hotel in Jefferson City, I dreamed that the holy bones of the good giant Saint Christopher could be found in this exact spot. I came here and found it to be so.”

  I myself visited this church goods man, saw the bones and the relics that he was making from them, and was convinced of their authenticity. He even offered me a job selling them. “You are a charming man,” he said, “and I believe that you could sell anything.” There would be an incredible number of relics made from those bones, and one man could not sell them all. But so far I have not taken the job.

  By John T. Woolybear in the Sunday Magazine Section of the Saint Louis Globe, not too many years ago.

  * * *

  “This is the last thing I can ever buy from you, John,” the Magazine Section editor of the Globe told John Woolybear. “Were I not retiring at the end of this month I would not dare to buy and publish this. It’s outrageous, of course; it’s silly; it’s garish.”

  “But a Magazine Section piece cannot be too garish!” John Woolybear protested. “Everybody knows that.”