Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add?

  DOES ANYONE ELSE HAVE SOMETHING FURTHER TO ADD?

  R. A. Lafferty

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  About a Secret Crocodile

  Mad Man

  Nor Limestone Islands

  The Man Underneath

  Boomer Flats

  This Grand Carcass Yet

  In the Garden

  Groaning Hinges of the World

  Golden Trabant

  How They Gave It Back

  Maybe Jones and the City

  Seven Story Dream

  Adam Had Three Brothers

  Pig in a Pokey

  The Weirdest World

  The Ultimate Creature

  Website

  Also by R. A. Lafferty

  Dedication

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Secret Places

  About a Secret Crocodile

  THERE is a secret society of seven men that controls the finances of the world. This is known to everyone but the details are not known. There are some who believe that it would be better if one of those seven men were a financier.

  There is a secret society of three men and four women that controls all the fashions of the world. The details of this are known to all who are in the fashion. And I am not.

  There is a secret society of nineteen men that is behind all the fascist organizations in the world. The secret name of this society is Glomerule.

  There is a secret society of thirteen persons known as the Elders of Edom that controls all the secret sources of the world. That the sources have become muddy is of concern to them.

  There is a secret society of only four persons that manufactures all the jokes of the world. One of these persons is unfunny and he is responsible for all the unfunny jokes.

  There is a secret society of eleven persons that is behind all Bolshevik and atheist societies of the world. The devil himself is a member of this society, and he works tirelessly to become a principal member. The secret name of this society is Ocean.

  There are related secret societies known as The Path of the Serpent (all its members have the inner eyelid of snakes), The Darkbearers, the Seeing Eye, Imperium, The Golden Mask and the City.

  Above most of these in a queer network there is a society that controls the attitudes and dispositions of the world—and the name of it is Crocodile. The Crocodile is insatiable: it eats persons and nations alive. And the Crocodile is very old, 8,809 years old by one account, 7,349 years old if you use the short chronology.

  There are subsecret societies within the Crocodile: the Cocked Eye, the Cryptic Cootie and others. Powerful among these is a society of three hundred and ninety-nine persons that manufactures all the catchwords and slogans of the world. This subsociety is not completely secret since several of the members are mouthy: the code name of this apparatus is the Crocodile’s Mouth.

  Chesterton said that Mankind itself was a secret society. Whether it would be better or worse if the secret should ever come out he did not say.

  And finally there was—for a short disruptive moment—a secret society of three persons that controlled all.

  All what?

  Bear with us. That is what this account is about.

  JOHN CANDOR had been called into the office of Mr. James Dandi at ABNC. (Whisper, whisper, for your own good, do not call him Jim Dandy; that is a familiarity he will not abide.)

  “This is the problem, John,” Mr. Dandi stated piercingly, “and we may as well put it into words. After all, putting things into words and pictures is our way of working at ABNC. Now then, what do we do at ABNC, John?”

  (ABNC was one of the most powerful salivators of the Crocodile’s Mouth.)

  “We create images and attitudes, Mr. Dandi.”

  “That is correct, John,” Mr. Dandi said. “Let us never forget it. Now something has gone wrong. There is a shadowy attack on us that may well be the most damaging thing since the old transgression of Spirochaete himself. Why has something gone wrong with our operation, John?”

  “Sir, I don’t know.”

  “Well then, what has gone wrong?”

  “What has gone wrong, Mr. Dandi, is that it isn’t working the way it should. We are caught on our own catchwords, we are slaughtered by our own slogans. There are boomerangs whizzing about our ears from every angle. None of it goes over the way it is supposed to. It all twists wrong for us.”

  “Well, what is causing this? Why are our effects being nullified?”

  “Sir, I believe that somebody else is also busy creating images and attitudes. Our catechesis states that this is impossible since we are the only group permitted in the field. Nevertheless, I am sure that someone else is building these things against us. It even seems that they are more powerful than we are—and they are unknown.”

  “They cannot be more powerful than we are—and they must not remain unknown to us.” Mr. Dandi’s words stabbed. “Find out who they are, John.”

  “How?”

  “If I knew how, John, I would be working for you, not you working for me. Your job is to do things. Mine is the much more difficult one of telling you to do them. Find out, John.”

  JOHN CANDOR went to work on the problem. He considered whether it was a linear, a set or a group problem. If it were a linear problem he should have been able to solve it by himself—and he couldn’t. If it were a set problem, then it couldn’t be solved at all. Of necessity he classified it as a group problem and he assembled a group to solve it. This was easy at ABNC which had more group talent than anybody.

  The group that John Candor assembled was made up of August Crayfish, Sterling Groshawk, Maurice Cree, Nancy Peters, Tony Rover, Morgan Aye, and Betty McCracken. Tell the truth, would you be able to gather so talented a group in your own organization?

  “My good people,” John Candor said, “as we all know, something has gone very wrong with our effects. It must be righted. Thoughts, please, thoughts!”

&n
bsp; “We inflate a person or subject and he bursts on us,” August gave his thought. “Are we using the wrong gas?”

  “We launch a phrase and it turns into a joke,” Sterling complained. “Yet we have not slighted the check-off: it has always been examined from every angle to be sure that it doesn’t have a joker context. But something goes wrong.”

  “We build an attitude carefully from the ground up,” Maurice stated. “Then our firm ground turns boggy and the thing tilts and begins to sink.”

  “Our ‘Fruitful Misunderstandings,’ the most subtle and effective of our current devices, are beginning to bear sour fruit,” Nancy said.

  “We set ourselves to cut a man down and our daggers turn to rubber,” Tony Rover moaned. (Oh, were there ever sadder words? “Our daggers turn to rubber.”)

  “Things have become so shaky that we’re not sure whether we are talking about free or closed variables,” Morgan gave his thought.

  “How can my own loving mother make such atrocious sandwiches?” Betty McCracken munched distastefully. Betty, who was underpaid, was a brown-sack girl who brought her own lunch. “This is worse than usual.” She chewed on. “The only thing to do with it is feed it to the computer.” She fed it to the computer which ate it with evident pleasure.

  “Seven persons, seven thoughts,” John Candor mused.

  “Seven persons, six thoughts,” Nancy Peters spat bitterly. “Betty, as usual, has contributed nothing.”

  “Only the first stage of the answer,” John Candor said. “She said ‘The only thing to do with it is to feed it to the computer.’ Feed the problem to the computer, folks.”

  They fed the problem to the computer by pieces and by wholes. The machine was familiar with their lingos and procedures. It was acquainted with the Non-Valid Context Problems of Morgan Aye and with the Hollow Shell Person Puzzles of Tony Rover. It knew the Pervading Environment Ploy of Maurice Cree. It knew what trick-work to operate within.

  Again and again the machine asked for various kinds of supplementary exterior data.

  “Leave me with it,” the machine finally issued. “Assemble here again in sixty days, or hours—”

  “No, we want the answers right now,” John Candor insisted, “within sixty seconds.”

  “The second is possibly the interval I was thinking of,” the machine issued. “What’s time to a tin can anyhow?” It ground its data trains for a full minute.

  “Well?” John Candor asked.

  “Somehow I get the number three,” the machine issued.

  “Three what, machine?”

  “Three persons,” the machine issued. “They are unknowingly linked together to manufacture attitudes. They are without program or purpose or organization or remuneration or basis or malice.”

  “Nobody is without malice,” August Crayfish insisted in a startled way. “They must be totally alien forms then. How do they manage their effects?”

  “One with a gesture, one with a grimace, one with an intonation,” the machine issued.

  “Where are they?” John Candor demanded.

  “All comparatively near.” The machine drew three circles on the city map. “Each is to be found in his own circle most of the time.”

  “Their names?” John Candor asked and the machine wrote the name of each in the proper circle.

  “Do you have anything on their appearances?” Sterling Groshawk inquired and the machine manufactured three kymograph pictures of the targets.

  “Have you their addresses or identifying numbers?” Maurice Cree asked.

  “No. I think it’s remarkable of me that I was able to come up with this much,” the machine issued.

  “We can find them,” Betty McCracken said. “We can most likely find them in the phone book.”

  “What worries me is that there’s no malice in them,” John Candor worried. “Without malice, there’s no handle to get hold of a thing. The Disestablishment has been firmly established for these several hundred years and we hold it to be privileged. It must not be upset by these three randoms. We will do what we must do.”

  MIKE ZHESTOVITCH was a mighty man. One does not make the primordial gestures out of weak body and hands. He looked like a steelworker—or anyhow like a worker at one of the powerful trades. His torso was like a barrel but more noble than ordinary barrels. His arms and hands were hardly to be believed. His neck was for the bulls, his head was as big as a thirteen gallon firkin, his eyeballs were the size of ducks’ eggs and the hair on his chest and throat was that heavy black wire-grass that defies steel plowshares. His voice—well he didn’t have much of a voice—it wasn’t as mighty as the rest of him.

  And he didn’t really work at one of the powerful trades. He was a zipper repairman at the Jiffy Nifty Dry Cleaners.

  August Crayfish of ABNC located Mike Zhestovitch in the Blind Robbin Bar which (if you recall the way that block lies) is just across that short jog-alley from the Jiffy Nifty. And August recognized big Mike at once. But how did big Mike get his effects?

  “The Cardinals should take the Colts today,” a serious man there was saying.

  “The Cardinals—” Mike Zhestovitch began in the voice that was less noble than the rest of him, but he didn’t finish the sentence. As a matter of fact, big Mike had never finished a sentence in all his life. Instead he made the gesture with his mighty hands and body. Words cannot describe the gesture but it was something like balling up an idea or opinion in the giant hands and throwing it away, utterly away, over the very edge of contempt.

  The Cardinals, of course, did not take the Colts that day. For a moment it was doubtful whether the Cardinals would survive at all. From the corner of the eye, red feathers could be seen drifting away in the air.

  August Crayfish carefully waited a moment and watched. A man walked out of the Blind Robbin and talked to another man in that little jog-alley. From their seriousness it was certain that they were talking baseball.

  “The Cardinals—” the first man said after a moment, and he also made the gesture. And seconds later a man playing eight-ball in the back of the Blind Robbin did the same thing.

  August was sure then. Mike Zhestovitch not only could shrivel anything with the gesture, but the gesture as he used it was highly epidemic. It would spread, according to Schoeffler’s Law of Dispersal, through the city in short minutes, through the world in short hours. And no opinion could stand against its disfavor. Mike Zhestovitch could wreck images and attitudes—and possibly he could also create them.

  “Do you work alone?” August Crayfish asked.

  “No. The rip-fix and the buttonsew girls work in the same cubbyhole,” Mike said with his curiously small voice.

  “Do you know a Mary Smorfia?” August asked.

  “I don’t, no,” Mike said, a certain comprehension coming into his ducks’-egg-sized eyes. “And you are glad that I don’t? Then I will. I’ll find out who she is. I see it now that you are a wrong guy and she is a right girl.”

  Then August Crayfish spoke the slogan that would be unveiled to the ears of the world that very night, a wonderfully slippery slogan that had cost a hundred thousand dollars to construct. It should have warned Mike Zhestovitch away from his mad resistance.

  Mike Zhestovitch made the gesture, and the slogan was in ruins. And somewhere the Secret Crocodile lashed its tail in displeasure.

  “Do you want to make a lot of money?” August Crayfish whispered after a long reevaluation pause.

  “Money—from such as you—” Big Mike didn’t finish the sentence, he never did. But he made the gesture. The idea of a lot of money shriveled. And August Crayfish shriveled so small that he could not climb over the threshold of the Blind Robbin on the way out and had to be aided over it by the shod toe of a kind man. (This last statement is a literal exaggeration but it is the right direction.)

  NANCY PETERS of ABNC located Mary Smorfia in the King-Pin Bowling Alley, where she was a hamburger waitress and a beer buster. Mary was small, dark, unpretty (except for her high-fre
quency eyes and the beautiful gash across her face that was her mouth), lively, smart, busy, a member of that aberrant variety of the human race that was called Italian.

  “Snorting Summer should take the Academy Award,” one nice guzzling lady at the counter was saying to another, “and Clover Elysée is the shoeless shoo-in for best actress of the year.”

  And Mary Smorfia made the grimace. Ah, it was mostly done with the beautifully large mouth and yet every part of her entered into it, from the blue lights in her hair to her crinkly toes. It was a devastating, all-destroying grimace. It gobbled up, it nullified and it made itself felt to a great distance. The nice guzzling lady had not even been looking toward Mary Smorfia but she felt the grimace like a soul shock, and she herself did the grimace with a wonderful distortion of the features that weren’t made for it.

  And the grimace swept everything like quick contagion or prairie fire. Snorting Summer—gah! Clover Elysée—guggling gah! Those things were finished forever, beyond laughter, below derision. And Nancy Peters of ABNC noted the powerful effect carefully, for the original words of the nice guzzling lady were the very words that ABNC had selected to be echoed a hundred million times whenever the awards were thought of.

  “Do you work alone?” Nancy Peters asked Mary Smorfia.

  “Kid, I am so fast they don’t need anyone else on this shift. I’m like silly lightning.”

  “Did you ever think of becoming an actress, Mary?” Nancy asked in honey-tones.

  “Oh, I made a commercial once,” Mary said out of her curly gash-mouth (she had to be kidding: she couldn’t really have a mouth that looked like that). “I don’t know whether I sold much of my guy’s soap but I bet I got a lot of people off that Brand X. Ashes it was, worse even, after I monkey-faced it. They say I’m a natural—but once is enough.”

  “Do you know a Mike Zhestovitch or a Clivendon Surrey?” Nancy asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Mary said. “What league do they bowl in? I bet I will like them both, though, and I will remember their names and find them.”