The Classic Philip Jose Farmer 1952-1964

by Philip José Farmer

  “Oh, no, not that!” gasped Peggy. “I didn’t know Mahrud meant that!*‘

  “Yes,” thundered the Allegory, “he does! He says that Temper will have to find himself or die. Temper himself would want it that way. He’d not be satisfied with being one of the happy-go-lucky, let-the-gods-do-it Brew-bums who loaf beneath this uninhibited sun. He’ll either be first in this new Rome, or else he’ll die.”

  The conversation was interesting, to say the least, but I lost track of the next few sentences because the bottle had not quit gushing. It was spurting a gentle but steady stream against my side. And, I suddenly realized that the bag would fill and the bottles contents would run out the mouth of the bag and reveal my presence.

  Frantically, I stuck my finger in the bottle’s neck and succeeded in checking the flow.

  “So,” said Allegory, “he fled to the cemetery, where he met Weepenwilly. Weepenwilly who mourns eternally yet would resent the dead being brought back. Who refuses to take his cold and numbed posterior from the gravestone of his so-called beloved. That man was the living symbol of himself, Daniel Temper, who grieved himself into baldness at an early age, though he blamed his mysterious sickness and fever for it. Yet who, deep down, didn’t want his mother back, because she’d been nothing but trouble to him.”

  The pressure in the bottle suddenly increased and expelled my finger. The Brew in it burst over me despite my efforts to plug it up again, gushing out at such a rate that the bag would fill faster than its narrow mouth could let it out. I was facing two dangers—being discovered and being drowned.

  As if my troubles weren’t enough, somebody’s heavy foot descended on me and went away. A voice succeeded it. I recognized it, even after all these years. It was that of Doctor Boswell Durham, the god now known as Mahrud. But it had a basso quality and richness it had not possessed in his predeity days.

  “All right, Dan Temper, the masquerade is over!”

  Frozen with terror, I kept silent and motionless.

  “I’ve sloughed off the form of the Allegory and taken my own.” Durham went on. “That was really I talking all the time. I was the Allegory you refused to recognize. Myself—your old teacher. But then you always did refuse to see any of the allegories I pointed out to you.

  “Well, Dan my boy, you’re right back where you started—in your mother’s womb where, I suspect you’ve always wanted to be. How do I know so much? Brace yourself for a real shock. I was Doctor Duerf, the psychologist who conditioned you. Run that name backward and remember how I love a pun or an anagram.”

  I found all this hard to believe. The Professor had always been kindly, gentle, and humorous. I would have thought he was pulling my leg if it hadn’t been for one thing! that was the Brew, which was about to drown me. I really thought he was carrying his joke too far.

  I told him so, as best I could in my muffled voice.

  He yelled back, ‘“Life is real—life is earnest!’ You’ve always said so, Dan. Let’s see now if you meant it. All right, you’re a baby due to be born. Are you going to stay in this sac, and die, or are you going to burst out from the primal waters into life?

  “Let’s put it another way, Dan. I’m the midwife, but my hands are tied. I can’t assist in the accouchment directly. I have to coach you via long distance, symbolically, so to speak. I can tell you what to do to some extent, but you, being an unborn infant, may have to guess at the meaning of some of my words.”

  I wanted to cry out a demand that he quit clowning around and let me out. But I didn’t. 1 had my pride.

  Huskily, weakly, I said, “What do you want me to do?”

  “Answer the questions I, as Allegory and Ass, asked you. Then you’ll be able to free yourself. And rest assured, Dan, that I’m not opening the bag for you.”

  What was it he had said? My mind groped frantically; the rising tide of the Brew made thinking difficult. I wanted to scream and tear at the leather with my naked hands. But if I did that, I’d go under and never come up again.

  I clenched my fists, forced my mind to slow down, to go back over what Allegory and Polivinosel had said.

  What was it? What was it?

  The Allegory had said, “Where do you want to go now?”

  And Polivinosel, while chasing me down Adams Street— Adam’s Street?—had called out, “Little man, what now?”

  The answer to the Sphinx’s question was:

  Man.

  Allegory and Ass had proposed their questions in the true scientific manner so that they contained their own answer.

  In the next second, with that realization acting like a powerful motor within me, I snapped the conditioned reflex as if it were a wishbone. I drank deeply of the Brew, both to quench my thirst and to strip myself of the rest of my predeity inhibitions. I commanded the bottle to stop fountaining. And with an explosion that sent Brew and leather fragments flying over the barge, I rose from the bag.

  Mahrud was standing there, smiling. I recognized him as my old prof, even though he was now six and a half feet tall, had a thatch of long black hair, and had pushed his features a little here and there to make himself handsome. Peggy stood beside him. She looked like her sister, Alice, except that she was red-haired. She was beautiful, but I’ve always preferred brunettes—specifically, Alice.

  “Understand everything now?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “including the fact that much of this symbolism was thought up on the spur of the moment to make it sound impressive. Also, that it wouldn’t have mattered if I had drowned, for you’d have brought me back to life.”

  “Yes, but you’d never have become a god. Nor would you have succeeded me.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked blankly.

  “Peggy and I deliberately led you and Alice toward this denouement so we could have somebody to carry on our work here. We’re a little bored with what we’ve done, but we realize that we can’t just leave. So I’ve picked you as a good successor. You’re conscientious, you’re an idealist, and you’ve discovered your potentialities. You’ll probably do better than I have at this suspension of ‘natural’ laws. You’ll make a better world than I could. After all, Danny, my godling, I’m the Old Bull, you know, the one for having fun.

  “Peggy and I want to go on a sort of Grand Tour to visit the former gods of Earth, who are scattered all over the Galaxy. They’re all young gods, you know, by comparison with the age of the Universe. You might say they’ve just got out of school—this Earth—and are visiting the centers of genuine culture to acquire polish.”

  “What about me?”

  “You’re a god now, Danny. You make your own decisions. Meanwhile, Peggy and I have places to go.”

  He smiled one of those long slow smiles he used to give us students when he was about to quote a favorite line of his.

  “‘… listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door. Let’s go.’”

  Peggy and he did go. Like thistles, swept away on the howling winds of space, they were gone.

  And after they had vanished, I was left staring at the river and the hills and the sky and the city, where the assembled faithful watched, awestruck. It was mine, all mine.

  Including one black-haired figure—and what a figure—that stood on the wharf and waved at me.

  Do you think I stood poised in deep reverie and pondered on my duty to mankind or the shape of teleology now that I was personally turning it out on my metaphysical potters wheel? Not I. I leaped into the air and completed sixteen entrechats of pure joy before I landed. Then I walked across the water—on the water—to Alice.

  I do think it was rather nice of me. After all, I wasn’t in too good a mood. That whole night and morning, my legs and my upper gums had been very sore. They were making me somewhat irritable, despite liberal potions of Brew.

  But there was a good reason.

  I had growing pains, and I was teething.

  The Alley Man

  I HE MAN FROM the puzzle factory was here this morning,“ X
said Gummy. ”While you was out fishin.“ She dropped the piece of wiremesh she was trying to tie with string over a hole in the rusty window screen. Cursing, grunting like a hog in a wallow, she leaned over and picked it up. Straighten-ing, she slapped viciously at her bare shoulder.

  “Figurin skeeters! Must be a million outside, all tryin to get away from the burnin garbage.”

  “Puzzle factory?” said Deena. She turned away from the battered kerosene-burning stove over which she was frying sliced potatoes and perch and bullheads caught in the Illinois River, half a mile away.

  “Yeah!” snarled Gummy. “You heard Old Man say it. Nuthouse. Booby hatch. So… this cat from the puzzle factory was named John Elkins. He gave Old Man all those tests when they had him locked up last year. He’s the skinny little guy with a moustache ”n never lookin you in the eye ‘n grinnin like a skunk eatin a shirt. The cat who took Old Man’s hat away from him ’n woun’t give it back to him until Old Man promised to be good. Remember now?“ Deena, tall, skinny, clad only in a white terrycloth bathrobe, looked like a surprised and severed head stuck on a pike. The great purple birthmark on her cheek and neck stood out hideously against her paling skin.

  “Are they going to send him back to the State hospital?” she asked.

  Gummy, looking at herself in the cracked full-length mirror nailed to the wall, laughed and showed her two teeth. Her frizzy hair was a yellow brown, chopped short. Her little blue eyes were set far back in tunnels beneath two protruding ridges of bone; her nose was very long, enormously wide, and tipped with a broken-veined bulb. Her chin was not there, and her head bent forward in a permanent crook. She was dressed only in a dirty once-white slip that came to her swollen knees. When she laughed, her huge breasts, resting on her distended belly, quivered like bowls of fermented cream. From her expression, it was evident that she was not displeased with what she saw in the broken glass.

  Again she laughed. “Naw, they din’t come to haul him away. Elkins just wanted to interduce this chick he had with him. A cute little brunette with big brown eyes behint real thick glasses. She looked |ust like a collidge girl, ‘n she was. This chick has got a B.M. or somethin in sexology…”

  “Psychology?” “Maybe it was societyology…”

  “Umm. Maybe. Anyway, this foureyed chick is doin a study for a foundation. She wants to ride aroun with Old Man, see how he collects his junk, what alleys he goes up ‘n down, what his, uh, habit patterns is, ’n learn what kinda bringin up he had…”

  “Old Man’d never do it!” burst out Deena. “You know he can’t stand the idea of being watched by a False Folker!”

  “Umm. Maybe. Anyway, I tell em Old Man’s not goin to like their slummin on him, ‘n they say quick they’re not slummin, it’s for science. ’N they’ll pay him for his trouble. They got a grant from the foundation. So I say maybe that’d make Old Man take another look at the color of the beer, ‘n they left the house…”

  “You allowed them in the house? Did you hide the birdcage?”

  “Why hide it? His hat wasn’t in it.”

  Deena turned back to frying her fish, but over her shoulder she said, “I don’t think Old Man’ll agree to the idea, do you? It’s rather degrading.”

  “You kiddin? Who’s lower’n Old Man? A snake’s belly, maybe. Sure, he’ll agree. He’ll have an eye for the foureyed chick, sure.”

  “Don’t be absurd,” said Deena. “He’s a dirty stinking one-armed middle-aged man, the ugliest man in the world.”

  “Yeah, it’s the uglies he’s got, for sure. ‘N he smells like a goat that fell in a outhouse. But it’s the smell that gets em. It got me, it got you, it got a whole stewpotful a others, includin that high society dame he used to collect junk off of…”

  “Shut up!” spat Deena. “This girl must be a highly refined and intelligent girl. She’d regard Old Man as some sort of ape.”

  “You know them apes,” said Gummy, and she went to the ancient refrigerator and took out a cold quart of beer.

  Six quarts of beer later, Old Man had still not come home. The fish had grown cold and greasy, and the big July moon had risen. Deena, like a long lean dirty-white nervous alley cat on top of a backyard fence, patrolled back and forth across the shanty. Gummy sat on the bench made of crates and hunched over her bottle. Finally, she lurched to her feet and turned on the battered set. But, • hearing a rattling and pounding of a loose motor in the distance, she turned it off.

  The banging and popping became a roar just outside the door. Abruptly, there was a mighty wheeze, like an old rusty robot coughing with double pneumonia in its iron lungs. Then, silence.

  But not for long. As the two women stood paralyzed, listening apprehensively, they heard a voice like the rumble of distant thunder.

  “Take it easy, kid.”

  Another voice, soft, drowsy, mumbling. “Where… we?”

  Violent coughing.

  “It’s this smoke from the burnin garbage, kid. Enough to make a maggot puke, ain’t it? Lookit! The smoke’s risin’t‘ward the full moon like the ghosts a men so rotten even their spirits’re carryin the contamination with em. Hey, li’l chick, you din’t know Old Man knew them big words like contamination, didja? That’s what livin on the city dump does for you. I hear that word all a time from the big shots that come down inspectin the stink here so they kin get away from the stink a City Hall. 1 ain’t no illiterate. I got a TV set. Hor, hor, hor!”

  There was a pause, and the two women knew he was bending his knees and tilting his torso backward so he could look up at the sky.

  “Ah, you lovely lovely moon, bride a The Old Guy In The Sky! Some day to come, rum-a-dum-a-dum, one day I swear it, Old Woman a The Old Guy In The Sky, if you help me find the longlost headpiece a King Paley that I and my fathers been lookin for for fifty thousand years, so help me, Old Man Paley’ll spread the freshly spilled blood a a virgin a the False Folkers out acrosst the ground for you, so you kin lay down in it like a red carpet or a new red dress and wrap it aroun you. And then you won’t have to crinkle up your lovely shinin nose at me and spit your silver spit on me. Old Man promises that, just as sure as his good arm is holdin a daughter a one a the Falsers, a virgin, I think, and bringin her to his home, however humble it be, so we shall see…”

  “Stoned out a his head,” whispered Gummy.

  “My God, he’s bringing a girl in here!” said Deena. “The girl!”

  “Not the collidge kid?”

  “Does the idiot want to get lynched?”

  The man outside bellowed, “Hey, you wimmen, get off your fat asses and open the door ‘fore I kick it in! Old Man’s home with a fistful a dollars, a armful a sleepin lamb, and a gutful a beer! Home like a conquerin hero and wants service like one, too!”

  Suddenly unfreezing, Deena opened the door.

  Out of the darkness and into the light shuffled something so squat and blocky it seemed more a tree trunk come to life than a man. It stopped, and the eyes under the huge black homburg hat blinked glazedly. Even the big hat could not hide the peculiar lengthened-out bread-loaf shape of the skull. The forehead was abnormally low; over the eyes were bulging arches of bone. These were tufted with eyebrows like Spanish moss that made even more cavelike the hollows in which the little blue eyes lurked. Its nose was very long and very wide and flaring-nostriled. The lips were thin but pushed out by the shoving jaws beneath them. Its chin was absent, and head and shoulders joined almost without intervention from a neck, or so it seemed. A corkscrew forest of rusty-red hairs sprouted from its open shirt front.

  Over his shoulder, held by a hand wide and knobbly as a coral branch, hung the slight figure of a young woman.

  He shuffled into the room in an odd bent-kneed gait, walking on the sides of his thick-soled engineer’s boots. Suddenly, he stopped again, sniffed deeply, and smiled, exposing teeth thick and yellow, dedicated to biting. “Jeez, that smells good. It takes the old garbage stink right off. Gummy! You been sprinklin yourself with that perfume I found in a a
sh heap up on the bluffs?”

  Deena said, sharply, “Don’t be a fool, Gummy. He’s trying to butter you up so you’ll forget he’s bringing this girl home.”

  Old Man Paley laughed hoarsely and lowered the snoring girl upon an Army cot. There she sprawled out with her skirt around her hips. Gummy cackled, but Deena hurried to pull the skirt down and also to remove the girl’s thick shell-rimmed glasses.

  “Lord,” she said, “how did this happen? What’d you do to her?”

  “Nothin,” he growled, suddenly sullen.

  He took a quart of beer from the refrigerator, bit down on the cap with teeth thick and chipped as ancient gravestones, and tore it off. Up went the bottle, forward went his knees, back went his torso and he leaned away from the bottle, and down went the amber liquid, gurgle, gurgle, glub. He belched, then roared. “There I was, Old Man Paley, mindin my own figurin business, packin a bunch a papers and magazines I found, and here comes a blue fifty-one

  Ford sedan with Elkins, the doctor jerk from the puzzle factory. And this little foureyed chick here, Dorothy Singer. And…“

  “Yes,” said Deena. “We know who they are, but we didn’t know they went after you.”

  “Who asked you? Who’s tellin this story? Anyway, they tole me what they wanted. And I was gonna say no, but this little collidge broad says if I’ll sign a paper that’ll agree to let her travel aroun with me and even stay in our house a couple a evenins, with us actin natural, she’ll pay me fifty dollars. I says yes! Old Guy In The Sky! That’s a hundred and fifty quarts a beer! I got principles, but they’re washed away in a roarin foamin flood of beer.

  “I says yes, and the cute little runt give me the paper to sign, then advances me ten bucks and says I’ll get the rest seven days from now. Ten dollars in my pocket! So she climbs up into the seat a my truck. And then this figurin Elkins parks his Ford and says he thinks he ought a go with us to check on if everythin’s gonna be OK.”