“They were big, tangle-haired, and naked. The meadow was a half kilometer across and perhaps twice as long. I was torn between a desire to see these things up close and to continue searching for my missing wing nuts. I was distinctly worried by now for the radars metal readings hinted that any natives who settled here would exist in a permanent stone age. Resignedly, I started around the meadow.
“Dodging from tree to tree, I came within fifty meters of them and squatted behind a log. They were big, heavier than a Russian wrestler, and, stretched out, would have been as tall as a Texan s story. But they crouched like apes and this made their arms seem longer than a man’s.
“Sparse reddish hair covered the males’ shoulders and chests. It ran down in a bristling line to a tuft which nearly concealed their masculinity. Both sexes had long yellow hair which streamed in a tangled mass from their skulls. This convinced me, even more than the flints they carried, that they were not apes. Uglier than usual they might be, but these things were men.
“They poked along, moving toward me. The big male grunted mightily as he strained at a rotten log. Two females joined him and they turned it over. Females and cubs made eager clucking sounds as they scrabbled for beetles. The boss male sucked a snail from its shell while half-grown bucks watched from a safe distance and perhaps dreamed of a day when they’d be bigger and the boss older. But his stiff beard betrayed no grey and it would take a long fang to reach that throat.
“Minutes passed while I lay behind the log watching them, wondering what sort of necklace the boss was wearing. It didn’t look like the shell and acorn strings the others had.
“Suddenly there was a ’whuff as he stood, little eyes glaring suspiciously toward me. I could see now what the necklace was. He was wearing my wing nuts!
“He made sounds which might have been language and his subjects scurried away while he bared teeth and made threatening gestures at me. One young female carried a baby which couldn’t be more than a month old but, instead of disappearing like the others, she put the baby down some distance back and returned to join the male. I wondered if she was curious or had decided I’d be an easy kill.
“I faced several possibilities—all unpleasant. Either I got the wing nuts from around his neck or I would have to walk across Europe. Something in his attitude told me now was not the moment to dicker. Even if his mind had been capable of entertaining notions of trade, what had I to offer?
“A neat problem in morality: Had I the right to kill a man merely to save myself a long walk home?”
“There was,” my mad friend suggested, “the moot point of whether you could survive the walk. It might have been as simple as your life or his.”
“That occurred to me,” the Byzantine said soberly, “but I did not consider it valid for, as long as I had my weapon it seemed possible that I might eventually return to New Rome with little more than blistered heels.”
“You considered these problems in a calm, detached manner while this ogre glared at you?” the Mexican girl asked.
The Byzantine smiled. “One can consider an amazing number of things in an instant. However, an instant was all I had, for the ‘ogre’ carried a crude flint blade and was stalking me like the Sicilian Avenger in some third rate melodrama. I made a threatening motion with my pistol. He and the female who advanced with him ignored it. I suspect threats would have been useless, even had he known what a pistol was.
“By now they were too close for the obvious tactic of blowing a house-sized hole between us. Also, if I frightened them I’d never see those wing nuts again. I retreated, walking slowly backward while they continued their inexorable advance. Soon it became obvious that I could not backpedal as fast as they could aggress.
“A moment later I also learned I could not run forward as swiftly as their shambling lope could close between us. They were scarcely four meters behind when I cast moral scruples to the wind and turned.”
“Oh gawd!” my mad friend groaned.
The Byzantine looked knowingly at him. “Quite,” he said. “Those bullets were not meant to detonate that close to their user.
“From the sun I should guess it was well past midday when I came to and picked myself from the meadow’s sawlike sedge. I ached in every joint and my ears rang like a carillon. I had lost considerable blood through the nose.
‘There was nothing of the male, save bits of bone and hair. The female had been blown clear but something—it looked like the males mandible—had gone through her chest.
“Of my wing nuts, there was not a sign. I fumbled through my pockets and found the radar which, thanks to potted circuitry, still worked. Hours passed before I had recovered the nuts. I pried one from the bark of a Norway pine over 100 meters away. Then I came back to complete the more gruesome part of my task. The indicator had shown metal embedded somewhere inside the female.
“By this time my ears had stopped ringing and it appeared that I would someday hear again. I removed the final nut from a corpse now advanced in rigor mortis and was about to go reassemble the copter when I heard a faint wail.
“I had subconsciously supposed the rest of them had taken the baby. They hadn’t. It had lain wailing and starving in the grass all this time and only now was I beginning to hear it.”
My mad friend smiled approvingly. “As Arthur Miller once observed, a play always tells how the birds came home to roost.”
“Exactly,” the Byzantine agreed. “Having murdered his parents, what were my duties to the offspring? For in spite of all extenuating circumstances, I could not help thinking of it as murder.
“My rations contained neither milk nor pablum. I tried making baby food as primitive mothers do, chewing a mouthful thoroughly, then feeding it to the child. But he was too young to swallow semi-solids. I carried him back, listening to his gradually weakening wails while I struggled to reassemble the copter. Several nuts had been damaged and it was only with a great deal of hammering that I got things back together.
“Nevertheless, two hours later I was back at the time machine and a microsecond after that I had returned to an era where bottles and formula were available.”
“And now the real problem,” I suggested.
“Did you baptize him or give him to a zoo?” my mad friend asked.
“After a week it became obvious to both of us that I was not a fit mother. He seemed perfectly normal but he most assuredly would not be when he grew up. Could I wish him onto some childless couple and break two innocent hearts?”
“Wouldn’t he die anyhow when he got a whiff of modern, antibiotic-hardened germs?” I asked.
“That too occurred to me but I could not take the easy way out. And then, I was curious. Wolf children, you know. What could this creature be in normal surroundings?
“But I did not expect to live more than six months. Nor would the baby, even if he survived after losing his postnatal immunity.”
“I wish you wouldn’t make those disconcerting statements about when the world’s going to end,” my mad friend said.
“So I went back thirty five years,” the Byzantine continued, “and doctored a birth record. I placed little Caliban with a middle-aged couple and told them he was my wild oat on a brilliant but unstable actress. I set up a trust fund.”
The Byzantine’s account abruptly ended. His eyes crossed and he laid his head on the table.
“Interesting,” I said to my mad friend. “But what’s with the extradition? I’ve heard some weird ideas to get a tax-free Paris vacation but what do the property owners have to say?”
“In addition to being police chief of Speedtrap, I am also mayor,” my mad friend said.
“But don’t you have to answer to the city council?”
“Not after she’s absconded,” a wife said.
“I should think the citizens would protest these high-handed tactics.”
“Since the mine closed down I am the sole property owner of Speedtrap,” my mad friend said.
“And one half of the
total electorate,” a wife added.
I began to see it but I still couldn’t quite believe it. “How do you live?” I asked, then I remembered.
“As long as I can ticket two tourists a day we won’t starve,” my mad friend said. “But, just assuming God would permit such things, what do you think of the FBI story?”
I frowned. “He’d be 35 now, almost 36. With all the eightballs in existence I suppose he could find a place somewhere.”
“A nice comfortable hole in civil service?” my friend needled.
“Well,” I said thoughtfully, “it’s of, by, and for the people and I’ve heard that the only difference between us and the Neanderthaler is accumulated experience.”
“Assuming he had a soul,” my mad friend injected.
“Cavemen were as smart as you?” a wife asked.
“Not exactly,” I said, thinking it over. “Civilization protects the oddballs and freaks who, little by little, breed us back up into the trees. Primitive man, on the other hand, may not have believed in survival of the fittest, but he practiced it.”
My mad friend made a rude noise.
“He had neither fang, claw, horns nor hooves. Nor was he crutched with 70 centuries of accumulated gadgetry. Your adult Neanderthaler was either very smart or very dead.”
The errant Catalán—he of the shabby overcoat—returned with an immense, pouter-pigeon-breasted woman. He caught his partner’s eye and they converged on our table. “Yankees go home!” the virago shrilled. With the ease of long practice, she lifted the Byzantine to his feet, reoriented his boina, and slapped him awake.
My mad friend produced a pistol with a suddenness which amazed me. “Hold it!” he growled, “I’ve seen that kind of commie snatch before.”
“You want to see my papers?” the second Catalán asked in Brooklynese. The Tugboat Annie type suddenly lapsed into English and offered her credentials too. My mad friend hid his pistol.
I took a closer look. “Take it out again,” I told my friend. “These amateur snatch artists have gotten the FBI and the Secret Service confused.”
The Catalán smiled wickedly. “Kindly remind yourself of the Secret Service’s principal function. And by the way,” he added, “the director of the Saucer Works will take a dim view of your future if this gets out.”
The Byzantine was awake now and stared blearily, mumbling. I bent closer and listened. “Fine boy,” he was saying. “Proud of my son.” His eyes came momentarily into focus and he remembered us. “By the way,” he asked, “Did any of you vote for him?”
A beer and a half later I was still worrying about the Byzantine’s attitude toward reality. “Do you think our boy Ug is going to take that Ultimatum in stride?” I asked.
“To be a man,” my friend was muttering, “one must have an immortal soul.”
“But is possession of one’s soul a requisite for political office?”
“Probably not,” my mad friend admitted.
1963
The World Must Never Know
Before settling (if that is quite the word for someone now engaged in converting a former municipal bus to his own peripatetic and familial usage) in San Diego, Garry Cotton Mario Edmondson—he of the beautiful chestnut beard, beautiful wife, and four beautiful children-sojourned in Mexico both widely and lengthily; the curious reluctance of the inhabitants, however, to master his native Manx, obliged him to acquire more than a smattering of the Pre-Conquest tongues. Concerning the names of the tribes and towns mentioned in this, the latest of Mr. Edmondson’s Mad Friend stories, we ourself know as near to nothing as makes no matter. About the identity of the Friend, we know as much as we care to. And as for the hint at The Troth about another recluse-writer (pseudonym not unlike . . . “S. Murphy”) hidden away beyond the Mexique Bay, we feel that this is a story for which we, like the world, are not yet prepared . . . James Clarke, editor of Adventure during that magazine’s great days, says that this story deals with “a world in which reality is dislocated and strange events become natural. It makes sense of a kind not realizable by conventional, logical means. The fictional effect is, to me, analogous to those achieved by Dylan Thomas and other poets who break through logic and still remain intelligible.”
IT WAS VERY LATE OF A DARK and moonless night. My mad friend was near exhaustion and I had arrived. Crouching in a thicket of some thorny desert flora, we listened for sounds of pursuit. After a moment my friend stopped panting. “You suppose it really worked—like he said it would?”
I shrugged and a thorn raked my shoulder. “Want to go back and see?”
He climbed to his feet and helped me up. “Better get to the car before daylight,” he said. We began trotting. A half hour later we collapsed in a dry arroyo and he was pecking at it again. “God would never permit such a thing,” he complained.
“He permits this,” I panted. “As for the rest, The World Must Never Know.”
“About the icebox or about the writer?”
A horse neighed somewhere so we began running again.
The trip had been one undiluted disaster. First, the transmission had exploded. Then my agent had phoned at the last minute and stuck me with this fool’s errand. About that time the only wives on friendly terms with us had decided they’d had enough Mexican desert to last the rest of their Jives. In another month this town would be uninhabitable. Already, the mirages were carrying parasols.
We sat on a backless bench under the scant shade of the military society’s ramada and surveyed the dancers who tramped and spun monotonously. My mad friend sipped asphaltum-like coffee and looked surreptitiously for a place to spit. Finding none, he swallowed. “It is my considered opinion,” he pontificated, “That we pursue the wild goose.”
I tasted tizwín and agreed. With neither ice, head, nor maturity, the tizwín offered little, apart from bits of fermenting maize and possibly less danger than the local water. “I only knew him by reputation,” I said.
“So what makes your literary skill think he’d end up in a place like this?”
I shrugged. “Last known address.”
My friend waited in silence. “Apparently he was living in one of those Truman Crackerbox developments, skinning mules or missiles up in California when he first started dumping his frustrations into the typewriter.”
My mad friend gave me a sharp glance. “Sounds familiar.”
“He had one of those weird, gingerbread styles,” I continued, “Unreadable until somebody performed an adjectivotomy.”
A strident chirping issued from the church as cantor as antiphoned their distaff portion of the mass back at the chanting maestro. A pascola—one of the dancing clowns—gave us each a hand-rolled cigarette and began a long, rambling story. The language was quicker than I, but the punch line, which convulsed our neighbors, seemed to involve a coyote urinating on someone.
“You suppose he spoke it?” my friend asked.
“Must’ve. His Spanish was as ungrammatical as Hemingway’s.”
“Why do you suppose he left Utopia-on-the-Freeway?”
I shrugged. “He had a job, a wife, two daughters—none of which, apparently, he cared much for.”
“Gauguin syndrome,” my mad friend observed. “What caused him to bolt?”
A small brown man with a large canvas musette bag appeared on the opposite side of the plaza. Standing between the cross and the whipping post, he peered uncertainly through the dancers’ dust. Spotting the only foreigners, he advanced, unconsciously parodying the sacred steps as he wheeled to avoid a gyrating platoon whose skirts fooled no one, save possibly the BoyStealing-Devil for whom they were intended.
Having safely skirted the skirts, the small brown man stopped at our bench beneath the military society’s ramada. He removed an immense hat and fanned himself before rummaging in the bag and extracting a much handled post card. “Meester EeYAHree?”
This was vaguely reminiscent of my mad friend’s patrilineal handle so he took the plunge. “Ehui.”
The small brown man brightened. “You speak the language!”
My friend lapsed into Spanish. “Not well,” he admitted. “I can never remember when the double vowels should have a glottal stop in between.” He turned the post card over.
“May we buy you a drink?” I asked.
The mail carrier rearranged the one or two letters in his bag, searching for a graceful way to apprise me of my gaffe. “I am pweplum,” he said, which meant he belonged to the club whose shade we used, and was a citizen of this city-state where we barbarians gaped. “You are yorim?” The word referred to races less favored by God—people of degenerate religious practice who are not quite human—and presumably excused me from knowing that Drink came from the Great Mother and was neither bought nor sold.
My mad friend said something in Arabic. It sounded like an old window shade being ripped down the middle.
“Qué hubo?” I asked.
“They twist the dagger in a still bleeding wound!”
The post card had squares for “x”s after Was your car ready on time? Were our employees courteous? Were you satisfied with the work performed? Was the steering wheel clean?
I sympathized, for my mad friend was acutely unhappy with the re-transmissioned and re-radiatored behemoth which languished at Road’s End some 100 km below us.
“Just wait,” he muttered, “Until one of those courteous, cheerful, clean-steering-wheeled pirates tools into my speed trap!” He remembered the mail man. “Will you honor us by sitting?”
The small brown man gave a furtive Indian smile and sat. A boy brought him a glass of tizwín. Still shrilling, the purple crowned cantor as emerged from the church, surrounding Virgin & Child. Age and an unsophisticated wood-carver had given these statues a color and ethnic cast more probable than that of the Aryan travesties one encounters among Nordic Faithful.
Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 17