Stories by R. A. Lafferty Vol 1 Part 17

"I'm Agnes," said Agnes."What did you mean it rained dirty green all the time? Tell me all about it."

"I will not, Mr. Swicegood. I was just telling a dream I had to Agnes. It isn't any of your business."

"Well, I have to hear all of it. Tell me everything you dreamed."

"I will not. It was a dirty dream. It isn't any of your business. If you weren't a friend of my Uncle Ed Kelly, I'd call a policeman for your bothering me."

"Did you have things like live rats in your stomach to digest for you? Did they --"

"Oh! How did you know? Get away from me. I will call a policeman.

Mr. McCarty, this man is annoying me."

"The devil he is, Miss Ananias. Old Bas...o...b..just doesn't have it in him any more. There's no more harm in him than a lamppost."

"Did the lampposts have hair on them, Miss Teresa? Did they pant and swell and smell green-"

"Oh! You couldn't know! You awful man!"

"I'm Agnes," said Agnes; but Teresa dragged Agnes away with her.

"What is the lamppost jag, Bas...o...b.." asked Officer Mossback McCarty.

"Ah -- I know what it is like to be in h.e.l.l, Mossback. I dreamed of it last night."

"And well you should, a man who neglects his Easter duty year after year. But the lamppost jag? If it concerns anything on my beat, I have to know about it."

"It seems that I had the same depressing dream as the young lady, identical in every detail."

Not knowing what dreams are (and we do not know), we should not find it strange that two people might have the same dream. There may not be enough of them to go around, and most dreams are forgotten in the morning.

Bas...o...b..Swicegood had forgotten his dismal dream. He could not account for his state of depression until he heard Teresa Ananias telling pieces of her own dream to Agnes Schoenapfel. Even then it came back to him slowly at first, but afterwards with a rush.

The oddity wasn't that two people should have the same dream, but that they should discover the coincidence, what with the thousands of people running around and most of the dreams forgotten.

Yet, if it were a coincidence, it was a multiplex one. On the night when it was first made manifest it must have been dreamed by quite a number of people in one medium-large city. There was a small piece in an afternoon paper. One doctor had five different worried patients who had had dreams of rats in their stomachs, and hair growing on the insides of their mouths.

This was the first publication of the shared-dream phenomenon.

The squib did not mention the foul-green-rain back-ground, but later investigation uncovered that this and other details were common to the dreams.

But it was a reporter named w.i.l.l.y Wagoner who really put the town on the map Until he did the job, the incidents and notices had been isolated.

Doctor Herome Judas had been putting together some notes on the Green-rain Syndrome. Doctor Florenz Appian had been working up his evidence on the Surex Ventriculus Trauma, and Professor Gideon Greathouse had come to some learned conclusions on the inner meaning of warts. But it was w.i.l.l.y Wagoner who went to the people for it, and then gave his conclusions back to the people.

w.i.l.l.y said that he had interviewed a thousand people at random. (He hadn't really; he had talked to about twenty. It takes longer than you might think to interview a thousand people.) He reported that slightly more than sixty-seven percent had had a dream of the same repulsive world. He reported that more than forty-four percent had had the dream more than once, thirty two percent more than twice, twenty-seven percent more than three times.Many had had it every d.a.m.ned night. And many refused frostily to answer questions on the subject at all.

This was ten days after Bas...o...b..Swicegood had heard Teresa Ananias tell her dream to Agnes.

w.i.l.l.y published the opinions of the three learned gentlemen above, and the theories and comments of many more. He also appended a hatful of answers he had received that were sheer levity.

But the phenomenon was not local. Wagoner's article was the first comprehensive (or at least wordy) treatment of it, but only by hours.

Similar things were in other papers that very afternoon, and the next day.

It was more than a fad. Those who called it a fad fell silent after they themselves experienced the dream. The suicide index rose around the country and the world. The thing was now international. The cacophonous ditty Green Rain was on all the jukes, as was The Wart Hog Song. People began to loath themselves and each other. Women feared that they would give birth to monsters. There were new perversions committed in the name of the thing, and several orgiastic societies were formed with the stomach rat as a symbol. All entertainment was forgotten, and this was the only topic.

Nervous disorders took a fearful rise as people tried to stay awake to avoid the abomination, and as they slept in spite of themselves and suffered the degradation.

It is no joke to experience the same loathsome dream all night every night. It had actually come to that. All the people were dreaming it all night every night. It had pa.s.sed from being a joke to being a universal menace. Even the sudden new millionaires who rushed their cures to the market were not happy. They also suffered whenever they slept, and they knew that their cures were not cures.

There were large amounts posted for anyone who could cure the populace of the wart-hog-people dreams. There was presidential edict and dictator decree, and military teams attacked the thing as a military problem, but they were not able to subdue it.

Then one night a nervous lady heard a voice in her noisome dream. It was one of the repulsive cracked wart-hog voices. "You are not dreaming,"

said the voice. "This is the real world. But when you wake you will be dreaming. That barefaced world is not a world at all. It is only a dream.

This is the real world." The lady awoke howling. And she had not howled before, for she was a demure lady.

Nor was she the only one who awoke howling. There were hundreds, then thousands, then millions. The voice spoke to all and engendered a doubt. Which was the real world? Almost equal time was now spent in each, for the people had come to need more sleep and most of them had arrived at spending a full twelve hours or more in the nightmarish world.

"It Could Be" was the t.i.tle of a headlined article on the subject by the same Professor Greathouse mentioned above. It could be, he said, that the world on which the green rain fell incessantly was the real world. It could be that the wart-hogs were real and the people a dream. It could be that rats in the stomach were normal, and other methods of digestion were chimerical.

And then a very great man went on the air in worldwide broadcast with a speech that was a ringing call for collective sanity. It was the hour of decision, he said. The decision would be made. Things were at an exact balance, and the balance would be tipped.

"But we can decide. One way or the other, we will decide. I implore you all in the name of sanity that you decide right. One world or the other will be the world of tomorrow. One of them is real and one of them is a dream. Both are with us now, and the favor can go to either. But listen to me here: whichever one wins, the other will have always been a dream, a momentary madness soon forgotten. I urge you to the sanity which m a measure I have lost myself. Yet in our darkened dilemma I feel that we yet have achoice. Choose!"

And perhaps that was the turning point.

The mad dream disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared. The world came back to normal with an embarra.s.sed laugh. It was all over. It had lasted from its inception six weeks.

Bas...o...b..Swicegood, a morning type, felt excellent this morning. He breakfasted at Cahill's, and he ordered heavily as always. And he listened with half an ear to the conversation of two girls at the table next to his.

"But I should know you," he said.

"Of course. I'm Teresa."

"I'm Agnes," said Agnes.

"Mr. Swicegood, how could you forget? It was when the dreams first came, and you overheard me telling mine to Agnes. Then you ran after us in the street because you had had the same dream, and I wanted to have you arrested. Weren't they horrible dreams? And have they ever found out what caused them?"

"They were horrible, and they have not found out. They ascribe it to group mania, which is meaningless. And now there are those who say that the dreams never came at all, and soon they will be nearly forgotten. But the horror of them! The loneliness!"

"Yes, we hadn't even pediculi to curry our body hair. We almost hadn't any body hair."

Teresa was an attractive girl. She had a cute trick of popping the smallest rat out of her mouth so it could see what was coming into her stomach. She was bulbous and beautiful. "Like a sackful of skunk cabbage,"

Bas...o...b..murmured admiringly in his head, and then flushed green at his forwardness of phrase.

Teresa had protuberances upon protuberances and warts on warts, and hair all over her where she wasn't warts and b.u.mps. "Like a latrine mop!"

sighed Bas...o...b..with true admiration. The cracked clang of Teresa's voice was music in the early morning.

All was right with the earth again. Gone the hideous nightmare world when people had stood barefaced and lonely, without bodily friends or dependents. Gone that ghastly world of the sick blue sky and the near absence of entrancing odor.

Bas...o...b..attacked manfully his plate of prime carrion. And outside the pungent green rain fell incessantly.

SODOM AND GOMORRAH, TEXAS.

Manuel shouldn't have been employed as a census taker. He wasn't qualified. He couldn't read a map. He didn't know what a map was. And he only grinned when they told him that North was at the top. He knew better.

But he did write a nice round hand -- like a boy's hand. He did know Spanish, and enough English. For the sector that was a.s.signed to him, he would not need a map. He knew it better than anyone else, certainly better than any mapmaker.

Besides, he was poor and needed the work.

They instructed him and sent him out. Or they thought that they had instructed him. They couldn't be sure.

"Count everyone? All right. Fill them all in? I need more papers.

"We will give you more papers if you need more, Manuel, but there aren't so many in your sector."

"Lots of them, lobos, tejones, zorros, even people."

"People only, Manuel. Do not take the animals. How would you write them up? They have no names."

"Oh, yes. All have names. Might as well take them all."

"Only people, Manuel."

"Mulos?""No."

"Conejos?"

"No, Manuel, no."

"No trouble. Might as well take them all."

"Only people -- G.o.d give me strength! -- only people, Manuel."

"How about little people?"

"Children, yes, that has been explained to you."

"Little people. Not children. Little people."

"If they are people, take them."

"How big they have to be?"

"It doesn't make any difference how big they are. If they are people, take them."

Manuel took Mula and went. His sector was the Santa Magdalena -- a scarp of baldheaded and desolate mountains, steep hut not high, and so torrid in the afternoons that it was said that the old lava sometimes began to writhe arid flow again from the sun's heat alone.

In the Center Valley, there were five thousand acres of slag and gla.s.sified rock from some forgotten old blast that had melted the hills and destroyed their mantle, reducing all to a terrible flatness. This was Sodom-strewn with low-lying ghosts as of people and objects, formed when the granite bubbled like water.

Away from the dead center, the ravines were body-deep in chapparal, and the mountains stood gray-green in old cactus. The stunted trees were lower than the giant bushes and yuccas.

Manuel went with Mula -- a round easy man and a spare gaunt mule.

Mula was a mule, but there were other inhabitants of the Santa Magdalena whose genus was less certain.

Yet even about Mula there was an ancestral oddity. 11cr paternal grandfather had been a goat. Manuel once told Mr. Marshal about this, but Marshal had not accepted it.

"She is a mule," he said. "Therefore, her father was a jack.

Therefore his father was also a jack, a donkey. It could not be any other way, Manuel."

Manuel often wondered about this, for he had raised the whole strain of animals and he remembered who had been with whom.

"A donkey! A jack! Two feet tall, and with a beard and horns! I always thought he was a goat."

Manuel and Mula stopped at noon on Lost Soul Creek. There would be no travel in the hot afternoon. But Manuel had a job to do and he did it. He took the forms from one of the packs that he had unslung from Mula and counted out nine of them. He wrote down all the data on nine people. He knew all there was to know about them -- their nativities and their antecedents.

He knew that there were only nine regular people in the nine hundred square miles of the Santa Magdalena.

But he was systematic, so he checked the list over again and again.

There seemed to be somebody missing. Oh yes, himself. He got another form and filled out all the data on himself.

Now -- in one way of looking at it -- his part in the census was finished. If only he had looked at it that way, he would have saved worry and trouble for everyone, and also ten thousand lives. But the instructions they had given him were ambiguous, for all that they had tried to make them clear.

So very early the next morning, Manuel rose and cooked bean and said, "Might as well take them all."

He called Mula from the thorn patch where she was grazing and gave her salt and loaded her again. Then they went to take the rest of the census -- but in fear. There was a clear duty to get the job done, but there was also a dread of it that the superiors did not understand. There was reason also why Mula was loaded with packs of census forms till she could hardlywalk.

Manuel prayed out loud as they climbed the purgatorial scarp above Lost Soul Creek "-- ruega por nosotros pecodores ahora" -- the very gulches stood angry and stark in the hot early morning -- "y en la hora de nuestra muerte."

Three days later an incredible dwarf staggered into the outskirts of High Plains, Texas. He was followed by a dying wolf-sized animal that did not look like a wolf.

A lady called the police to save the pair from rock-throwing kids who would have killed them; and the two as yet uncla.s.sified things were taken to the station house.

The dwarf was three feet high-a skeleton stretched over with brown-burnt leather. The other was an uncanine looking dog-sized beast so full of burs and thorns that it might have been a porcupine. But it was more a nightmare replica of a shrunken mule.