My friend continued with the list of landowners. “Johnson lies north of you. The town is west and Henriquez lies south.”
“Aha!” I said. “Is that the same Henriquez all those posters and painted rocks call an unpunished murderer?”
The general smiled sadly. “That chapter of politics is finished, I sincerely hope. Anyhow, this Henriquez is American. His real name is Hendryx.”
“So which one was stealing your help?” a wife asked.
The criada came in again bearing a tremendous clay pot of refried beans. The general and his wife took theirs with handfuls of dried chiltepines, tiny holly-like berries only slightly warmer than solar plasma. I nibbled on relatively temperate jalapeños.
“No one was stealing my help,” the general resumed.
“Were they losing theirs too?”
“It took me several days to make sure they were not. Then one night the moon was right and I found myself walking down a delta path with a band of men. At first I didn’t realize where we were going, but suddenly in the firelight, listening to the peculiar sharp tone of war drums, I was twelve years old again.”
“Why were they worried about Earth Shaker?” my friend asked. “I don’t remember any bad quakes recently.”
“I didn’t know who or what Earth Shaker was. Like you, I’d always assumed he was a local Poseidon. But as I listened to the chants and prayers, my ideas were revised.”
“He’s not an earthquake god?” a wife asked.
“I asked as many questions as I dared without arousing suspicion.”
“Suspicion of being you?” my friend asked.
“Of being tocoyori,” the general corrected. “A white man is not responsible for his color, but everyone despises a turncoat.”
“What did you finally learn?”
“Nothing.”
“An Indian has difficulty extracting information from Indians?” My friend was incredulous.
“They weren’t deliberately concealing anything,” the general said. “But their data were so illogical.”
“I have the same trouble with transubstantiation,” I said.
“We must take some things on faith,” my friend said.
“Even something underground that eats people?” the general asked.
“Earthquakes have been known to devour people,” my friend said.
“Bears live in caves,” a wife suggested.
“From what I could learn he was more like a snake.”
“There are no man-eating-snakes this side of Brazil,” I said.
“Not even in legend?” the general asked.
I surrendered. “Every archetypal horror the id can conceive is present somewhere in legend.”
“Serves you right for not going to confession,” my friend said.
“But we go,” the general protested. “Now that we are free and no longer forced to go, my people still conform to the Christian faith—at least as they understand it.”
“Give me the child until he is seven,” my friend quoted.
“Give me Earth Shaker,” I said.
“Coming home that night, I got a hint of what he might be,” the general said. “My companions dropped off one by one, heading for their homes on neighboring ranches. By dawn I was alone. Unfortunately, I was on the wrong side of my ranch and there was no telephone. I resigned myself to more walking. And with my weight . . .”
The general sighed and stopped talking when the criada came back with coffee and habañero. My friend took coffee while the rest of us sipped the sherry and rum concoction.
“I had barely started walking again,” he said, “when I sighted a burro eating my tomatoes. I drew my pistol. Then I realized the trouble I’d have dragging him out of the field. Also, if I could catch him, maybe I could ride home.”
“Without a rope?” a wife asked.
“Indians have ways of catching animals,” the general said. “Walking downwind, I was almost within grabbing distance when some accursed crow saw me and gave the alarm. The burro trotted through a couple of rows, strewing ripe tomatoes behind him. Once again I began my stalk, hoping the crow would have more important business elsewhere. The plants were staked high and I couldn’t see the burro. But I could hear him. Suddenly there was a threshing as he tore more plants loose.”
“Rather an expensive ride,” my friend hazarded.
The general nodded. “I drew my pistol again to shoot the beast before he could do more damage. But when I worked my way through the tomato plants, he had disappeared.”
“The end of a perfect day,” a wife said.
The general soberly agreed. “I was more interested in a bath and breakfast,” he said. “Finally I attracted my caporal’s attention with a couple of shots, and he brought me home in a jeep. I told him to go back and catch or shoot the burro.”
“For this story to make sense, he didn’t find it,” my friend said.
“I was finishing breakfast when the field telephone rang. My caporal was a mestizo. Otherwise, I suppose he’d have disappeared with the rest of my help. ‘My general,’ he said, ‘there is here something which does not explain itself.’ A half hour later I was back looking over the damage that miserable beast had done.”
“What was inexplicable?” a wife prompted.
“Tracks,” the general said. “In soft, freshly cultivated ground even a yori—” He shot my friend an apologetic glance.
“They disappeared?” I asked. “Either the burro grew wings, or an eagle carried him off.”
“Shades of the Wendigo!” I muttered.
“You didn’t think of Earth Shaker?” my friend asked.
“The ground was smooth, tomato plants only slightly disturbed by the burro’s passage.”
“What did your caporal say?”
“Nothing. From the amount of white in his eye, I suspected I was about to lose another employee. Finally we drove stakes around the spot where the tracks disappeared. I spent the rest of the day in town going from one cantina to the next trying to recruit labor. It was not one of my better days. Exhausted, disgusted, resigned to losing my crop, I went to bed at nightfall.”
“Where you slept rather unsoundly,” my friend supplied.
“Before dawn I was up again. I remembered a trick we used to pull on the federates. I saddled a horse and roped a yearling calf. By the time he had struggled halfway across that field, the calf had learned to choose between leading and choking.”
‘Which choice he possibly later had cause to regret,” my friend said.
“I tried to drive the yearling into the enclosure. When he refused I paid out rope until my horse was on the other side and began to drag him across.”
‘Which wasn’t the smartest thing you’d ever done,” my mad friend concluded.
“It cost me a calf, a horse, and would have cost my life if the horse hadn’t bucked me clear.”
“What did you see?” a wife asked.
“Mostly dust. Vaguely through the dust I thought I saw something else. That evening I went to confession for the first time in thirty years.”
“Good for the soul,” my friend approved.
“Nobody believes an Indian,” the general protested. “Not even a priest.”
“What did he say?” I asked.
“Chewed me out for blasting pot,” the general said indignantly. “And I haven’t touched the stuff since I came up in the world and tasted Scotch.”
“So what did you do then?”
“What does an Indian do?” the general growled. “Have you ever faced the slab-jawed officials of another race who automatically assume you’re drunk, stupid, or lying?”
My friend sighed. “I grew up,” he said, “in a small Catholic country which was dominated by a powerful Protestant neighbor.”
The general studied my friend closely. “You don’t look Mexican,” he said.
“It’s nice of you to notice the parallel,” my friend said. “But I’m Irish.”
“What happened next?” a w
ife insisted.
“Subject races learn subterfuge,” the general said.
“Please don’t throw me in the brier patch!” my friend murmured.
“For one mad moment I thought of going to the government. But they are also mostly yorim.”
I began to see light. “You’re not a pot farmer!” I exclaimed. “You never have been.”
“Did I say I was?” the general asked aggrievedly.
Habañero finished, I accepted a cup of tarry, char-roasted coffee. The general offered cigars. I recognized the distinctly non-Cuban odor of West Coast tobacco. “Compostela?” I asked.
The general nodded.
My friend sniffed approvingly and lit up. “Couldn’t have been a very big snake if burning over a field killed it,” he said.
“I don’t think it was a snake at all,” the general said. “But I didn’t depend on burning.”
“How did you do it?” a wife asked.
“A burro, a packsaddle, a hundred kg of 40 percent blasting-gelatin, and a slow fuse.”
My friend blanched.
“Did you kill it?” I asked.
The general pointed at the cone-shaped rock I’d noticed as we entered. I got up to examine it. It was rough, like volcanic stone from the lava beds south of here. “Lapillus?” I asked.
The general shook his head. “Tooth,” he said.
“Impossible!” my friend exclaimed. “That thing has no roots. Besides, it’s two feet long!”
I was inclined to agree, when some warning bell rang in a frontal lobe. Where had I seen a similar tooth? Slowly, a slide from Biology I came into focus. “This mouth,” I guessed, “was it triangular?”
The generals eyes widened. “Teeth in all three jaws,” he said. I felt a prickle.
“There ain’t no such animal!” my friend protested.
“No blood?” I hazarded.
“Slime.”
“Where’d you ever see such a thing?” my friend sneered.
“In my garden. Slugs and snails have no jawbones, so their teeth need no roots.”
Several wives put down their cups simultaneously.
The general stood. He paced moodily across the immense sala to peer out of a mullioned window. I couldn’t imagine what he was seeing in the dark.
“Why the burning?” my friend said suddenly.
“Window dressing. Exorcism. Call it what you will.”
“But why?”
“To get my help back, of course.”
“Who told the government you were growing pot?”
“My caporal”
“And you still hire him?”
“I sent him. Even gave him a map.”
Suddenly I realized that this Indian knew how to get something out of an uncooperative government. “Too bad you couldn’t make them furnish the dynamite too,” I said.
“They did,” the general said moodily. “I stole it where they were building a highway.” He turned in sudden resolve. “I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve invited you all here tonight.”
I glanced at friend and wives. Suddenly we were all laughing. “I’m sorry,” I finally managed. “You don’t look a bit like Boris Karloff.”
Then abruptly my friend frowned. “I know,” he said.
“Could you go over that slowly?” I asked.
“The burros in the enclosure,” my friend said thoughtfully. “Did you notice the general counting them?”
Sweat sprayed as a I remembered him walking across that enclosure, poking about, pulling weeds. No wonder the general had walked like he was in a mine field. “None missing?” I said hopefully.
“One.”
I sat down.
“What do you want?” my friend asked.
“Nobody believes an Indian,” the general said.
A phone rang. Ladies jumped. Gentlemen tried not to. The criada came into the room and whispered to the general. “For you,” he said, pointing at me.
I went into the other room. “Good thing you told me where you were going to be tonight,” Shapiro said. “That damn bogie’s down to a hundred thousand.”
“Impossible. It’d burn up in a holding orbit at that height.”
“Tell it to the radar. It’s still dropping.”
I thought a moment. Something had to be wrong with the goddamn radar, but I’d been trying to find it for two weeks. “Better use the red phone,” I finally said. “If it keeps coming down, somebody can fly by for a visual sighting.”
“Right,” Shapiro said.
I went back into the sola. “I’ll do it,” my friend was saying. He went the way I had come and I heard him struggling with, the telephone. Finally he began talking in Spanish. The conversation warmed. “To me it imports phallus what you opine,” he finally shouted. “Put me through to the colonel.”
A moment’s silence and then my friend said things in several languages. “All right,” he finally shouted, “have it your own way: The general denied everything. By deep guile and sheer force of personality I tricked a confession out of him. Now will you drop a little napalm on that free-loving field?” A moment later my friend came into the sola still muttering in Arabic. It sounded like Nasser accepting an invitation to a B’nai B’rith dinner.
The general gave him a sad smile.
“Tomorrow morning,” my friend said.
Suddenly there was a feeling. I didn’t realize what it was until the solas windows tinkled inward. An instant later the BOOM sent me skidding across the parquetry.
A wife who had not been in line with one of the windows helped me up. The yard-thick adobe walls had stood up admirably, but the roof was going to need a few hundred tiles.
While my mad friend had been wrangling over the telephone, the moon had risen. I saw a mushroom cloud rising from the glow that had been that field. “Isn’t this carrying Operation Intercept a little far?” I asked.
“Are you out of your skull?” my mad friend asked. “I haven’t authority to order this!”
“So who?” Then suddenly I knew. Was the telephone still working? It rang. The bruised and incredulous general answered and an instant later silently beckoned.
“Shapiro?” I asked.
“Yeah. I got on the red phone and somebody got on the hot line. Then somebody got on the chow mein line and a minute later somebody was on the blintz line.”
“So who the hell authorized tactical A-weapons?”
“Nobody. Air Force sent a photo plane. By then the damn bogie was on the ground. Were you watching?”
“No. What happened?”
“I don’t know for sure. There was only one TV pickup on the plane. Somewhere out of focus in one corner, it started glowing red, as if the whole goddamn airplane was melting. Then a second after that the plane started diving. It was just about zero range from that thing in the weed patch when the screen went blank.”
“He kamikazed into foreign soil with A-weapons?”
“Of course not. He might’ve had a couple of Sidewinders. What d’you suppose he hit?”
Wives, general, mad friend were looking a me. “I’ve got an idea,” I said. “Let’s see if anybody believes an Indian.”
Later, poking morosely through fallen tiles, my friend asked, “What’s to believe? Man-eating slugs don’t build spaceships.”
I didn’t think so either. “Maybe these ships drop in to harvest their cattle just as the general harvests his tomatoes.”
My friend muttered something in Latin. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “A just God does not permit such things.”
“Look what he permits on this planet.”
My mad friend sighed. “You may have a point.”
1972
The Tempolluters
. . . in which an absolutely mad scientist comes up with a logical explanation for certain supernatural manifestations . . .
“I’ve never seen one,” my mad friend protested.
“You’ll be one if you don’t watch it!” I yelled.
He swerved p
ast a lorry into a clockwise roundabout. Circling past our off-ramp, my friend said something. From its vehemence I suspected the Arabic abhorrence for things lefthanded was being extended to countries that drive that way.
Finally I saw an opening. We shot blindly and made it at no cost, save to the disposition of a bowler-hatted gentleman in a mini auto. “Are we going the wrong way?” I asked.
My mad friend gritted his teeth and ignored me. “What was that address again?” he asked.
“The Grove, near Harpenden, Fitch Lane, New Maiden—” I stopped for breath.
“Yet they can get mail delivered three times a day!” he groused.
In the back wives continued their discussion of whether the new wraith look could be worn with hip boots. Abruptly my mad friend stopped. We got out and entered a tiny office. Behind the desk a small dark man smiled.
“I don’t believe it!” I said. But I really did. This little man with the dazzling smile of an Algerian rug peddler had been slipping in and out of our lives in different guises, different languages, different countries since my mad friend and I were much smaller cogs in the respective machines that hire us. His improbable stories all hinged around an improbable future whence he had visited us with his roommate’s time machine. He was not marooned here, since he still had the machine. But if the little man were given credence, he had destroyed his own past: A 2500 A.D. golden age where Constantinople never fell and Mohammed was Bishop of Medina. It all sounded too good ever to be true.
“I believe it.” My mad friend referred to the Byzantine’s smiling presence in a realtor’s office and not to the little man’s improbable past future perfect.
“You seek isolation,” the Byzantine said. “A large estate with accommodation for a hundred patients—persons!” he hastily corrected.
“Wait till I get my hands on that security officer!” I said. My mad friend added something in Arabic. It sounded like fingers bending the wrong way.
Then I remembered how easy it could to be invade files if one could go to the proper spot and wait for a burglarproof building to be erected around one’s invisible time machine.
“I am prepared to accept ninety thousand pounds,” the Byzantine said. He hesitated a moment then smiled and added, “Or one hundred eighty thousand of which sixty will be equally divided and deposited in two numbered Swiss accounts.”
Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 22