Short Fiction - R. A. Lafferty (i can read book club .txt) 📗

“I wonder,” he said to Vincent (or to the bar at large, though there were no other customers and the bartender was asleep), “I wonder if you have ever read Zurbarin on the Relationship of Extradigitalism to Genius?”

“I have never heard of the work nor of the man,” said Vincent. “I doubt if either exists.”

“I am Zurbarin,” said the man.

Vincent hid his misshapen left thumb. Yet it could not have been noticed in that light, and he must have been crazy to believe there was any connection between it and the man’s remark. It was not truly a double thumb. He was not an extradigital, nor was he a genius.

“I refuse to become interested in you,” said Vincent. “I am on the verge of leaving. I dislike waking the bartender, but I did want another drink.”

“Sooner done than said.”

“What is?”

“Your glass is full.”

“It is? So it is. Is it a trick?”

“Trick is the name for anything either too frivolous or too mystifying for us to comprehend. But on one long early morning of a month ago, you also could have done the trick, and nearly as well.”

“Could I have? How would you know about my long early morning⁠—assuming there to have been such?”

“I watched you for a while. Few others have the equipment to watch you with when you’re in the aspect.”

So they were silent for some time, and Vincent watched the clock and was ready to go.

“I wonder,” said the man in the dark, “if you have read Schimmelpenninck on the Sexagintal and the Duodecimal in the Chaldee Mysteries?”

“I have not and I doubt if anyone else has. I would guess that you are also Schimmelpenninck and that you have just made up the name on the spur of the moment.”

“I am Schimm, it is true, but I made up the name on the spur of a moment many years ago.”

“I am a little bored with you,” said Vincent, “but I would appreciate it if you’d do your glass-filling trick once more.”

“I have just done so. And you are not bored; you are frightened.”

“Of what?” asked Vincent, whose glass was in fact full again.

“Of reentering a dread that you are not sure was a dream. But there are advantages to being both invisible and inaudible.”

“Can you be invisible?”

“Was I not when I went behind the bar just now and fixed you a drink?”

“How?”

“A man in full stride goes at the rate of about five miles an hour. Multiply that by sixty, which is the number of time. When I leave my stool and go behind the bar, I go and return at the rate of three hundred miles an hour. So I am invisible to you, particularly if I move while you blink.”

“One thing does not match. You might have got around there and back, but you could not have poured.”

“Shall I say that mastery over liquids is not given to beginners? But for us there are many ways to outwit the slowness of matter.”

“I believe that you are a hoaxer. Do you know Dr. Mason?”

“I know that you went to see him. I know of his futile attempts to penetrate a certain mystery. But I have not talked to him of you.”

“I still believe that you are a phony. Could you put me back into the state of my dream of a month ago?”

“It was not a dream. But I could put you again into that state.”

“Prove it.”

“Watch the clock. Do you believe that I can point my finger at it and stop it for you? It is already stopped for me.”

“No, I don’t believe it. Yes, I guess I have to, since I see that you have just done it. But it may be another trick. I don’t know where the clock is plugged in.”

“Neither do I. Come to the door. Look at every clock you can see. Are they not all stopped?”

“Yes. Maybe the power has gone off all over town.”

“You know it has not. There are still lighted windows in those buildings, though it is quite late.”

“Why are you playing with me? I am neither on the inside nor the outside. Either tell me the secret or say that you will not tell me.”

“The secret isn’t a simple one. It can only be arrived at after all philosophy and learning have been assimilated.”

“One man cannot arrive at that in one lifetime.”

“Not in an ordinary lifetime. But the secret of the secret (if I may put it that way) is that one must use part of it as a tool in learning. You could not learn all in one lifetime, but by being permitted the first step⁠—to be able to read, say, sixty books in the time it took you to read one, to pause for a minute in thought and use up only one second, to get a day’s work accomplished in eight minutes and so have time for other things⁠—by such ways one may make a beginning. I will warn you, though. Even for the most intelligent, it is a race.”

“A race? What race?”

“It is a race between success, which is life, and failure, which is death.”

“Let’s skip the melodrama. How do I get into the state and out of it?”

“Oh, that is simple, so easy that it seems like a gadget. Here are two diagrams I will draw. Note them carefully. This first, envision it in your mind and you are in the state. Now this second one, envision, and you are out of it.”

“That easy?”

“That deceptively easy. The trick is to learn why it works⁠—if you want to succeed, meaning to live.”

So Charles Vincent left him and went home, walking the mile in a little less than fifteen normal seconds. But he still had not seen the face of the man.

There are advantages intellectual, monetary, and amorous in being able to enter the accelerated state at will. It is a fox game. One must be careful not to be caught at it, nor to break or