Universe 2 - [Anthology] Read online

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  * * * *

  * * * *

  Here is an R. A. Lafferty story that proves everybody in the world is telepathic, and always has been. Then why don’t we use the ability, you ask? What makes you think we don’t? How did you ask me that question, anyway?

  A SPECIAL CONDITION IN SUMMIT CITY

  by R. A. Lafferty

  “How do we communicate anyhow, Sumner?” Fenwick asked. “Those two seem almost to have something new to say about communication.”

  “Except that they’re unable to communicate it,” Sumner jeered. “That’s the trouble with permitting scientists and such amateurs to have opinions about thought processes. We communicate by words, Fenwick, and not by any sort of waves dreamed up by these wave-brains. They are saying that even conventional signs owe their meaning to telepathy.”

  “But Hegeman and Bott-Grabman are men of considerable reputation—I forget in just what field. They say that words are only a conversation or index that we employ, and that we could not communicate more than fifty percent if we were restricted to words.”

  “Let them stick to their own fields,” said Sumner. “They know nothing of language communication.”

  “It isn’t only language that they downgrade,” said Fenwick. “Signs, conventions, assumptions, all sorts of things—they say that these convey little by themselves. They say that we would have no way of knowing our own face in the mirror—even though we looked at it a dozen times every day of our lives—if it were not for these personal waves which are popularly known as telepathy. They even say that the parallelism of concepts —which is what we know as consciousness—would not be possible without the reception of the echo of our own waves.”

  “I tell you, those men know nothing, Fenwick.”

  “But Bott-Grabman has one striking case: an Italian-speaking woman married to an Armenian-speaking man for thirty years. Neither has learned the spouse’s language, but they always understood each other.”

  That is when it happened, but silently and with no tip-off.The change came over everyone in the city. Fenwick’s own personal waves were scrambled as he continued, and it made a difference:

  “The woman—now I am not sure which was the woman —I think one of them was a woman and one was an Armenian—the pro-names of both were ambivalent, or rather unknown to me— What gender is Morvan? How Armenian is Renentlas? It would not be incompatible that it was the other one who talked Haik.”

  “Haik, Yike! It’s a good thing they didn’t understand each other or they’d have been divorced in a year. You are exorbinately involved, Fenwick.”

  “It is you, you convoluted colt,” Fenwick flared back, “and I don’t speak temporally, old Sumner-mumner.”

  That made Sumner mad, and they had a fist fight.

  “We should be able to understand each other a modicum,” Sumner said as he marinated Fenwick’s ear (but they couldn’t, they couldn’t understand each other at all).

  “You mean we should be able to understand each other a bit,” said Fenwick as he fractured Sumner’s kidney. “Sure I mean a bit—one of the pairs of stands that a hawser goes around—it is not something that goes into a horse’s mouth, Sumner. Which one of us is Sumner? I’d like to see you put one into a horse’s mouth.”

  “Horse’s mouth straight from the is different,” said Sumner, or perhaps it was Fenwick. Actually it was the speaker who spoke. “I’m telling you straight from the horse’s mouth you are the wrong end of a horse. That is my inconsequential opinion.”

  They fought, and they had been friends.

  * * * *

  The same evening, a few miles across town, an elderly Armenian man cut the throat of his Italian wife of thirty years.

  “All at once it seemed she was just jabber,” he said.

  * * * *

  At about the same time, a fat man rushed back angrily and punched a news-boy in the face.

  “You have sold me a foreman paper,” he accused the boy.

  “It’s the same paper you get every evening,” bubbled the boy bloodily. “You punch people in the face, you wait till my brother comes, he’ll punch your dod bobbed knob. It’s the same letters. It’s the same words.”

  “I know it’s the same words. Why can’t I read it then? It must be in a foreman language.”

  He punched the boy in the face again, and left. What you expect him to do when a boy sells him a paper he can’t read?

  * * * *

  Two men were on a scaffold thirty stories up. This isn’t the story of the two Irishmen on a scaffold. One of these was Irish and one was a Dane.

  “Drop the line a little,” said the Dane. “Hah! Did I say drop it? Belay that last. I mean rai—”

  “You mean railly drop it?” asked the Irishman. “I take it that is the meaning of belay, though I wish you’d forego Danish words.”

  He railly dropped the line. He fell thirty stories. It killed him.

  “The fellow misunderstood me,” said the Dane. “He never did that before. I was trying to tell him—” But the fall killed the Dane too.

  * * * *

  Traffic was getting snarled.

  “Can’t you tell green from red, bub?” a policeman asked an honest citizen motorist.

  “I sure can, and your nose ain’t green,” said the honest citizen, and his wife laughed at the joke.

  “Then why don’t you obey the light?” asked the policeman.

  “Why? They started to give orders now?”

  “Red means stop.”

  “Red don’t mean stop to me,” said the honest citizen. “Even stop don’t mean stop to me. You start taking orders from lights and pretty soon you’re taking orders from bugs. Why don’t they fix some way all the cars don’t try to cross the intersection at the same time? This way makes a jam-up.”

  “Why don’t you blow your horn, John?” the honest citizen’s wife asked him. “Everyone else is blowing his horn.”

  The honest citizen blew his horn.

  * * * *

  Things started to get rough as the evening came on. The police couldn’t do anything. There was now no way of telling a policeman from anyone else. The magistrate couldn’t make out warrants. What kind of words do you put on warrants anyhow? What do they mean if you put them there? And how will they mean the same thing to someone else?

  The power went off in large sections. There was confusion in the power houses and the switching stations. Who remembered the difference between cut it in and cut it out and cut it off?

  * * * *

  “Let’s get out of this riot and go home to supper,” a man said to his wife. She slapped him silly.

  “Why’d you do that?” he asked, peering up from the sidewalk.

  “No man can talk to me like that,” she said.

  “But I just meant—”

  “How am I to know what you meant? You ought to be shot. You can’t talk to me like that.”

  “But I’m your husband.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know what that means.”

  “I don’t know either. It seems like I’ve always been saying it.”

  They walked off in opposite directions.

  Then it broke clear down. The fires began and smallpox broke out. Whenever anything basic is disrupted for a bit, solid brick walls will burn, and triply-inoculated persons will begin to die of smallpox before you can count to a thousand.

  How are you going to put out fires when you can’t tell the firemen from anyone else or the fire-wagons from other vehicles? How is a fireman going to go about it if he can’t understand orders? Why doesn’t everyone shut up if nobody can understand what they’re saying?

  * * * *

  “I’m the mayor of the city,” said a man at a shambles. “Let’s attack the problem in a front-headed manner.”

  “What’s that mean?” asked a commissioner.

  “I don’t know,” said the mayor. “I’ve been saying it for a long time. Look the words
up in a book. It might tell.”

  “The time for words is past,” said the police chief. “This is the time for action. It seems that I’ve always said that too.”

  “What do you mean by action?” asked the Commissioner of Parks and Sewers.

  “I mean this,” said the police chief, and he began to punch the Commissioner of Parks and Sewers around.

  “Let us attack the problem in a forceful manner,” said the mayor.

  “How forceful you want him to get?” asked the Commissioner of Parks and Sewers.

  The meeting broke up without adjourning. They hadn’t been getting anyplace.

  * * * *

  “What paper did you say you worked for, young man?” Professor Hegeman asked the reporter.

  “The Summit City Sun. I write science features, as I keep telling you. But my time isn’t wasted here. You two throw away enough in conversation to keep me in material for months.”

  “Hegeman, that’s the paper whose edition was rather odd tonight,” said Professor Bott-Grabman. “We both commented on it.”

  “I haven’t seen it,” said the reporter. “Is that it?”

  “Very little to see,” said Hegeman. “Thirty-nine blank pages, and only the name of the paper and some words in large type on the front page. ‘IF YOU THINK YOU CAN DO BETTER YOU COME AND TRY—THE EDITOR,’ is what it says.”

  “Something is wrong!” yowled the reporter. “I’d better get back.”

  “I thought you’d come for a story,” said Bott-Grabman.

  “I have. It’s the biggest thing I’ve come on for a long time, but there must be something wrong back at the paper.”

  “Likely there wasn’t much news today, and the editor just didn’t feel like putting out much of a paper,” said Hegeman. “Some days I am listless and don’t feel like doing much either.”

  “My radio!” cried the reporter. “Let me hear if there’s something wrong in town.”

  “You can’t get a thing here,” said Bott-Grabman. “You’ve no idea how well we are shielded. That’s necessary for our evening’s experiment. Now, forget about everything else! We are not inclined to chew our words twice here. We’ll try to give you a story, but you have a distorted idea of what we are working on.”

  “Everyone says you’re working on telepathy,” said the reporter.

  “Well, for our present step, we’re working off it, not on it. Please get hold of one thing. We have always been telepathic.”

  “Both you and Professor Hegeman?”

  “Why of course both of us! Do you think one or the other of us is a freak? Of late I’ve been so disgusted with people that I hesitate to do any more lecturing. ‘Will we ever be telepathic?” they ask us—those wool-headed sheep. ‘You already are,’ I tell them patiently. ‘Then why don’t we know It?* they bumble out. ‘I wonder you even know which end of you to put your hats on,’ I tell them, and sometimes this way of talking alienates them. ‘Telepathy is thinking to a distance, but you can’t think to a distance if you can’t think at all. Most of you can’t think from one end of your brain to the other,’ I explain it to them, ‘you can’t project what you haven’t got, you bleating pecori,’ I say, ‘but, for all that, some of it comes through with you.’ I tell them all this, but I am unable to make them understand it. I haven’t a good platform manner.”

  “No, you haven’t, Professor Bott-Grabman,” said the reporter. “That is why I am so interested in being able to interpret you. As I understand it, certain gifted persons already have the sense of telepathy—to an extent. What you must do is give the public a real demonstration of it.”

  “We have tried, young man,” said Professor Hegeman. “The existence of telepathy should be as easy to demonstrate as the existence of a tree. But how to prove the existence of anything to those who close their eyes and stuff their hands in their ears? We have tried to demonstrate this simple thing till we are blue in the face— or (more accurately) I turn blue and Bott-Grabman takes on rather an ashen hue. In our desperation, we are putting on a little demonstration this evening and tonight. It should amuse. And perhaps it will convince some. When the existence of the sense is proved to the public, then we will be .better able to work towards the development of it.”

  “Then you are sending out waves—” began the reporter.

  “No. We are inhibiting waves,” said Professor Hegeman firmly. “We are scrambling all personal waves everywhere in the city.”

  “And that will somehow bring out the latent telepathy of the people?” asked the reporter.

  “Quite the contrary, young man,” said Bott-Grabman. “It will completely block every manifestation of telepathy in the city. We work backwards.”

  * * * *

  The first units of the National Guard arrived in Summit City about ten o’clock that night. The reports from the place had alarmed the governor and everyone else. With riots and murders breaking out everywhere and the police strangely helpless, the executive took quick action.

  The guardsmen began to set the place in order, but only for a little while. They never got into the heart of the city. They began to come apart. The first reports back had been clear. Then they were muddy. Then they were completely incoherent.

  “—cannot make headway. Which way is headway? How will we know the guardsmen from the people? What is wrong is that we keep shooting each other. Is this a departure from our original orders? Instruct how we are to tell us apart—” came the last report from the colonel for the night.

  “The man is mad,” said the governor to his aide. “Were not the guards uniformed?”

  “They were when they left here,” said the aide. The governor gave up on his guards and appealed to the army. Within an hour, the Central Area Commandos were wheeling towards Summit City.

  * * * *

  “Then it is not a demonstration of telepathy that you are to give tonight?” asked the reporter. “What is it then? I don’t understand you.”

  “We are trying to demonstrate the absence of telepathy,” said Hegeman. “Suppose that a tribe lived for generations in the sound of thunder that rolled always in one tone with no break at all. Would they hear it?”

  “I don’t know,” said the reporter. “They would hear it in a way, I believe.”

  “Would they notice it?”

  “They might not.”

  “But if the all-pervading sound were suddenly turned off, would they notice it then?”

  “They would surely notice a difference.”

  “Young man, words do not half convey. They are only indicators—hints, small helps, refinements. But we cannot communicate by words alone. Try it! I believe that the people in Summit City are trying just that now—if they have not given up the attempt. Uniforms, signs, conventions have become meaningless to them. They are cut off from direct understanding. All they have left is words, and they can’t communicate with them.”

  “Then what do people communicate with, Professor Hegeman?”

  “What do you smell with? With the nose on the front of your face. What do you see with? With the two marbles that roll around on the forepart of your head. What do you talk with? With the amorphous tongue in your mouth and the mouth box. But what do you actuallycommunicate with? With your brain, you little oaf without one! Words and gestures are only thrown in for good measure.”

  * * * *

  General Gestalt came down by copter as his commandos began to enter the city. He was a bitter man who depended mostly on himself. He had little truck with other people.

  That is what made the difference.

  He watched his commandos disintegrate, as the guardsmen had disintegrated. He discovered that they could not understand his orders, and their replies made no sense to him.

  “Insanity gas?” he puzzled. “Subliminal confusion broadcasts? Brain-softening bacteria? No, it’s too sudden for that. It’s coming from somewhere. I’ve got to get a bearing on it. If you can’t get a triangulation, the next best thing is a bloodhound. There’s one of the
best.”

  General Gestalt caught Corporal Cram by the scruff of the neck and lifted him off his feet.

  “Boy, you got the best nose for trouble in the outfit,” the general said. “I see that you don’t understand my words, but it won’t matter. You can find the middle of a trouble quicker than any half-cooked man I have. All right, lead me to it—

  “No, not there, boy. All they’re doing is breaking out windows and shooting each other. Lead me to the source of the trouble. We don’t want our trouble second hand, do we? Get in the copter with me.”