by R. A. Lafferty

“We ought to have a bigger place for the children to play in the summertime,” Lemuel said one day. “How many do we have now?” Lemuel was a bent young man with bright and slightly peering eyes.

“Five, Lem, five,” Griselda said. This Griselda was something of a looker.

If Lemuel Windfall hadn’t always seen so far ahead, he might have been one of the very top inventors of the world. But isn’t foresight a good quality in an inventor or in anyone?

Sure it is, but it’s not good if you rub it into the ground. It is possible to be too foresightly. Lemuel could see ahead both to the immediate and to the ultimate use of whatever gadget he might devise. And he could pretty well weigh it out in green money how much it could be turned for. It would have been wonderful if he’d let it go at that; if he’d gathered each harvest in as it came to season, and had put his bills of expectation on their proper spindle till they had realized themselves. But Lemuel always saw forward, past the use and application of a device. He saw forward to its obsolescence. And what is the use to activate a device or a potential or a condition if it is going to be obsolete in a decade or two?

“For the money, that’s what’s the use,” the wife, Griselda, would say. “We can use the money right now, and I don’t care whether it will be obsoleted next century.”

“But why should we be bothered for money?” Lemuel would always ask. “Surely it’s always an advantage in any circumstance to reduce the number of moving parts, and money in this life is made up entirely of moving parts. And didn’t I invent instant money just a fortnight ago?”

“Indeed you did, Lem,” good Griselda said, “but you didn’t go into production on the stuff. You looked into the future, and you discovered that it would be a short-term (not over fifty years’ duration) affair. You said that ethical backlash and other difficulties would blow the whistle on it by then. Look, Lem, I’m reasonable. I’m not even asking for instant money today. I’ll settle for thirty-minute money. I’ll give you just thirty minutes to raise some household cash, and that’s the limit. Thirty minutes, Lem. Did you hear me?”

“Yes,” he would always say. Then he would put a few working drawings of something under his arm and would go down the street to Conglomerate Enterprises or Wheeler-Heelers and sell them for whatever he could get in thirty minutes.

“I could get more for things if I had the time and fare to take them to Le Conglomerat in Paris,” Lem would say wistfully. “They’ve written me that they’ll pay well for any new thing of mine, and they say that their offer will stand forever, for a reasonable ever. I could always get more if I had fifteen years to deal instead of thirty minutes.”

“Lem, everything that you’ve ever sold, you’ve already had it on the shelf for at least fifteen years,” Griselda would say with weary patience.

“Yes, I guess so,” Lem would admit.

“And remember that you’ve promised me a trip to Paris.”

“Yes, and I’ll give it to you yet, Grissie.”

* * * *

And there was a worse hitch in the Lemuel mental and fabricatory process. He didn’t like to produce anything unless working conditions were just right. And he had the sad conviction that nowhere in the world were conditions ever just right.

“I should have a workshop that’s in a total vacuum,” he would say sometimes. “That’s the least of the conditions.”

“You should have your head a total vacuum,” Griselda would counter.

“Why, such thing would implode my brains,” Lem would state, “and what would be the compensating advantage?”

“You never know, dear. There might be useful side effects.”

“Yes, I should have a workshop in total vacuum,” he’d dream and beam, “and dust-free, and in a place completely without gravity. And it should be without the quality of temperature; neither medium, nor very high, nor very low temperature will serve; it must be without even the idea of temperature. And it should be beyond the power of hard radiation of every sort, beyond the fury of excessive ultraviolet rays or actinic rays or triatomic oxygen. ‘And all baleful beams,’ as the psalmist says. And my place of enterprise should be beyond the temporal cloud, and I do not mean anything so simple as time-standstill, no, nor eternity either. There must not be duration; there must be only moment. No duration is ever long enough to get anything done.

“And my workshop should be spared the effect of every magnetic field, of every voltage differential, of every solar wind. And it should not have any topography at all. Perhaps it shouldn’t even have location, or shape, or size. Griselda, if I had a workshop or factory so situated and appointed, all processes would become easy, and there would be scarce a limit to what might be achieved. Hey, I could make coal then! Oh, but there’s plenty of coal. But in this little workshop here, and in the bigger workshop whose name is World, with all their disabilities of gravity and magnetism and electrical field, and baleful rays and temperature and existence in time and space, and subject to indexing as to shape and size and color and aroma, why, it just doesn’t seem worthwhile even to try to do any work here.”

“But, Lem, if you hadn’t gone tilt-brained and thought up all these objections, then you could believe that you had the finest place in the world, and you could do the finest work anywhere. Say, there’s a title to a piece of land in Colorado that came in the mail today. A Mr. Jasher Halfhogan sent it to you. As far as I can tell, the little piece of land is on a small creek named Picketwire, and there isn’t any town near it anywhere.”

“What? What? Oh, how fortuitous can it get!” Lemuel cried with real enthusiasm. “On Picketwire Creek in Colorado, you say? Why, that’s almost the same thing as having no topography at all. Nuggets of gold and orichalcum on my head! I guess that this is just my lucky day.”

“But shouldn’t this man have sent you money instead of a title to a no-good piece of land?”

“Of course he should have, Griselda. What luck he didn’t! He should have sent me a great lot of money, and I suppose that there are persons who would prefer money. Oh, this is lucky! There is bound to be advantage come of it. One of the requirements of the ideal working place is that it should be unlocated and of no value. May the years teach me enough wisdom to find advantage in this thing! And in the meanwhile, it might be a nice place to turn the children loose in the summertime. How many of them do we have now?”

“Six, Lem, six. They are six of the reasons that I’m often after you for money. And remember that you’ve promised me a trip to Paris. That takes money too.”

* * * *

In a different year Griselda said, “Do you know how much taxes we got a bill for on that stupid piece of land in Colorado, Lem? Eighty-five cents. It must be some place.”

“It makes one feel cheap, doesn’t it, Grissie? I’ll see what I can do about getting the taxes raised. Jasher Halfhogan goes out there pretty often. I guess that I should find out a little bit more about that piece of property.”

“I guess that I should find out a little bit more about that man Jasher Halfhogan,” Griselda said. “He has some kind of hook into you. Jasher Halfhogan sounds like a name that you’d invent. And that funny-looking old man looks like someone you’d invent, too. I’m asking you seriously, Lem: did you?”

“No, not consciously I didn’t invent him, Grissie. And yet I did invent him a little bit, I suppose. And he me. We are all formed by feedback and interaction. We see more than there is in other people, and we ourselves are seen for more than we are. And we grow to match our seeming. Don’t you like Jasher?”

“I’ve never met him, Lem. Every time I’ve seen him he was scurrying away like some night ghost that was afraid of being shone on by sunlight. Well, if he’s a Halfhogan, what would a Wholehogan be?”

“You really don’t know, Griselda? Sometimes you astonish me,” Lemuel said. He was a bent man who had recently slipped into middle age without much noise. “But as to the Colorado land, Jasher says that it’s a gateway to a whole new life. It has something to say to me in the future, I know. And meanwhile, it might be a nice place to take the children some summer. How many do we have now?”

“Seven, Lem, seven.” Somehow Griselda had remained one of the really good-lookers.

* * * *

There finally came a year when Lemuel thrived in his erratic discoveries and enterprises in spite of his being forced to work and invent in places and circumstances of matter and atmosphere and gravity and magnetism and electrical manifestation and temperature and baleful rays and time and space and shape. Money seemed approximately sufficient. But always Griselda had something to worry about.

“I won’t say that I don’t like your friend Jasher Halfhogan,” she said once. “I’m sure that he means well. I have met him now, you know, just a few years ago. Once, I believe, I saw him attempt a smile. It didn’t work. But I do believe that he’s a bad omen for you, Lem. A little buzzard recently whispered to me that he’ll be the death of you yet.”

“No, he’ll not cause my death, Grissie,” Lemuel said seriously. “Though the neighborhood children of whatever age hoot at him and call him Mr. Deathman and Mr. Soul Broker, yet I believe that they misunderstand his role. He will not cause my death. ‘Twill be a mere synchronicity. He wants me to locate by that entrance in Colorado some year soon, to go to that little property of ours. That’s one of the entrances to the next step in living, he says. And it would be nice to visit it, Grissie, before we die, or soon after that, in any case. And it might be pleasant to take the children there for a little vacation. How many do we have now?”

“Eight, Lem, but they’re all married and moved away. I believe that it’s too late for us to arrange such a trip together. In the next life, maybe.”

“Maybe so, Grissie. It’s good to think about.” Lem was a bent old man now, and he hadn’t intended to let himself get into such a state. And Griselda was still a good-looker, now and forever. “Colorado seems to loom pretty big in the next life,” Lem was saying. “I’m feeling a bit doddery lately. I may ask Jasher Halfhogan what he thinks about it all.”

* * * *

So the next season, when Jasher came through town again, Lemuel asked him about several things. “I’d like someday to visit that little Colorado property that you once deeded to me for services rendered,” Lem said. “I have high expectations for it. And I’m reaching the age where I need something of value to concretize my expectations a little.”

“Oh, the property itself is worthless, Lem,” Jasher said. “Don’t set any expectations on its value.”

“But, Jash, you once said that it was a gateway to a whole new life.”

“So I did, and so it is. But even a broken gate that’s not worth half a dollar may be a gateway to a whole new life. It’s the location that’s important, Lem. There are a few other localities equally important, and they all give ingress to the same place. But it would be impossible to put any of them into right context without the services of a special informant such as myself. The place is analogous to a mail drop, Lem, in that it gives communication to places almost without limit. Rather think of it as a world drop or a life drop. It’s better to take these things under guidance and control than to go at random and in ignorance. Besides, I get a commission on you. I work largely on commission.”

“I never did know what you did, Jasher,” Lemuel said. “I’m not one to wonder about a friend’s occupation, but my wife often speculates out loud about yours. She says that you’ll be the death of me yet.”

“No death is foreordained, Lem. I’ll collect a fee on yours when it does happen, but that’s only because you’re in my territory. Lemuel, do you have any particular later life desires or aspirations? We may be able to do something about them.”

“Oh, yes. And what desires I have left do seem to get a little bit stronger with age. In particular, I’ve always believed that I could accomplish things almost without limit if I had the proper working conditions for discovering and processing and manufacturing. I have found, Jasher, quite a few things that had to have been fabricated in more nearly ideal circumstances than are found on Earth. Or at least they had to be patterned and triggered in more favorable circumstances. These things have been passed off by most persons as natural or quasi-natural phenomena. But they’re not natural. I know manufactured things when I see them, and many of these things are manufactured. Aye, Jasher, but they’re not made under the disabilities that afflict our local planet.

“I want to make such things also. I want to make them in such profusion that they will be mistaken for natural or quasi-natural phenomena. I want to make them so nearly perfect that they will be almost unnoticed in their excellence, and so tremendously large that they will escape scrutiny and stand like invisible and accepted giants. I do not want money or recognition for these services that I am burning to perform. But, Jasher, the sites and circumstances for such doings are simply not to be found on this world.”

“It may be that they are to be found with one foot on this world, Lem,” Jasher Halfhogan said, “or with one tentacle. The world puts out some very long and tricky tentacles, a few of them so tremendous that they do escape scrutiny. So I will bet that we can find good site and circumstances for your workshop or whatever. Just what specifications do you have in mind for it?”

So Lemuel Windfall explained to Jasher Halfhogan just what he would need for the minimum. And Jasher nodded from time to time and mumbled, “I think so. Yes, I think so.” Lem listed the things that he had often poured into the erratic ears of his wife and into the stoppered ears of the world at large. All about the avoidance of atmosphere and magnetism and gravity and baleful rays. “And somehow Griselda must get a trip to Paris out of it,” he said.

“You’re making it easy for us, Lem,” Jasher said. “You’re going right down the line with all our specialities. Lem, I know just the place for it. When will you be ready to go?”

“I’d go quickly enough if I knew where I was going and what I’d find,” Lemuel stated with the confidence of one who doesn’t expect his hand to be called.

“You’ll find just the conditions that you have been speaking of, Lem. But can you handle it, or will you go right past the place? I’ve never been certain that you have enough of the cantankerous metal in you, and without it you’ll have too easy a passage to discover these conditions. Have you the need to be compensating enough that you must create things in such profusion and perfection? For it does go by need, and I simply don’t believe that you have a strong enough need in you. Lem, I don’t believe that you have been a bad enough man to be called to the extraordinary ransom and prodigy.”

“Have I not been bad enough?” Lemuel crooked his voice at Jasher. “Let me tell you about it, low and into your ear here.” And Lemuel talked into Jasher’s ear in a serious and hushed voice until all the blood was drained out of Jasher’s face.

“Stop, stop! Yes, you’ve been bad enough, Lem,” Jasher croaked with distaste. “I was wrong to doubt you. How soon will you be ready to go? It’s to your little land in Colorado. It’s a better entrance than most places to the whole new circumstance and life.”

“I’ll be ready to go by nightfall, Jasher,” Lemuel said.

And that was almost the last that anyone saw of Lemuel Windfall around the old place. He cashed in his chips, as they say. He lowered his flag, so the colloquialism has it. He had his ticket punched, as the phrase goes. He went West, as the older fellows say. He shipped off to Colorado, as the proverb has it.

His wife, Griselda, put on widow’s weeds when he was gone.

She had always been an impatient woman.

* * * *

More energy has been spent in explaining the presence of coal deposits on our Earth, and more especially in explaining petroleum deposits, than in almost any other thing. Probably more energy has been spent in explaining them than in forming them. But it comes to nothing.

One authority insisted that the carboniferous gluts of our world came from the tails of comets that sideswiped the Earth. And this is one of the most nearly intelligent of all the explanations that have been put forward!

There is one geologist who says that petroleum is formed only between layers of bituminous shale, and that it is formed in such case by great pressure and heat. That is a little like using cheese for the jaws of a vise intended to exert tremendous pressure. Bituminous shale just isn’t the rock for the job. And trying to explain the presence of petroleum is child’s play compared with trying to explain the presence of bituminous shale.

There is another authority who maintains that petroleum and natural gas are largely due to the resinous spores of rhizocarps. Savor that opinion for a moment, reader, and you must conclude that there is at least one authority running loose who should be confined.

In every case, the temperatures sufficient to form coal or petroleum are somewhat higher than the temperature sufficient to vaporize the entire Earth. One exasperated authority stated that all such deposits must have been made by kobalds or gnomes laboring under the roots of mountains. He was righter than he knew. But the question remains: how could any circumstances on Earth serve to trigger such deposits and results? And the answer is an easy one: they couldn’t.

—Arpad Arutinov, The Back Door of History

But there is a condition, neither on Earth nor off it, not in any place, really, where circumstances could trigger such results. This is a condition lacking the quality of location (Jews, close your ears! Greeks, harden your hearing! Covenanters, avert your senses lest you be affronted by it!), a realm of ransom and recompense and incredible self-assigned labor, a scene where such accumulations of carbonaceous matter are indeed patterned and planned and instigated.

—Arpad Arutinov, The Back Door of History,

Second Revised Edition

There were new cargoes and traffics appearing, new potentials and circumstances; but it was only Conglomerate Enterprises and Wheeler-Heelers and Le Conglomerat and such like firms that guessed that the new things weren’t really natural or even quasi-natural. The new things were manufactured—these canny companies recognized this quickly enough—and they weren’t exactly manufactured on this world.

The conditions here just weren’t right for them. And, as it seemed to the men of the several discerning firms and conglomerates, the new cargoes and traffics and products had the signature of one man all over them.

So several gentlemen from Conglomerate Enterprises came to visit Griselda Windfall. They had been in the habit of taking advantage of Griselda’s husband, Lemuel, and they didn’t intend to get out of the habit just because he had left town.

“It is absolutely necessary that we locate your husband, Lemuel Windfall,” they said in unison (there were three gentlemen).

“It isn’t necessary to me, it isn’t necessary to Lem, and I’m not sure that it’s necessary at all,” Griselda said. “If Lem had wanted to be located, he could have stayed here.”

“He could have what?” the three Conglomerate gentlemen croaked in disbelief in their single voice. “Mrs. Windfall, your husband is making all the new things available free. There are millions of dollars in this if you can help us locate him, or simply tell us where he is, if you know. Then we can work out the double modification, and we will have everything on a paying basis.”

“Millions in it for me, and tens of millions in it for you,” Griselda said thoughtfully. “And what is in it for my husband, Lemuel, who apparently doesn’t want to be found? Please explain to me about the double modification.”

“We will take one example out of dozens,” the three men spoke in their single voice. “Smithstone Clay has become edible, and we believe that Lemuel Windfall has made it so. In nine billion years, Smithstone Clay has never been edible before; and now it is. There were previous hints of it, of course. There were clay eaters in assorted boondocks. But real Smithstone Clay has never been found in abundance before. Now it is. And who can say when or how it happened? Who kept a running census of so worthless a thing as Smithstone Clay? But now it is no longer scarce and no longer worthless. That is good.

“But it comes free to everybody. That is bad.

“It would be simple to put a modification into it at the other end, at your husband Lemuel’s end, so that it wouldn’t become edible until we put the countering modification into it at this end. This is the double modification. By this we can control the products or traffics or cargoes or potentials or circumstances. And then we will be able to sell it, for a fair price, to the whole world, instead of having it go free. And people always appreciate a thing more when they have to pay for it.”

“Oh, sure,” Griselda said. “I will think about this, gentlemen. And I will ask Lemuel what to do about it, if I can find him with his ears standing open.”

“And, Mrs. Windfall, there are dozens of other new and advantaged things besides Smithstone Clay,” the three men tried to explain to Griselda in their unity talk.

“I know pretty much what the other new things would be,” she said. “I watch the ripples, and I can guess what innovative rocks are being dropped into the pond. Particularly can I guess them when I’ve heard Lemuel talk about them for fifty years. I will let you know, gentlemen.”

* * * *

Griselda had a little talk with herself after the gentlemen of the Conglomerate had taken their leave.

“My Lem has succumbed to the devil’s most transparent temptation,” she said. “I wish that he wouldn’t do things like that. He should never wander off from me and do things on his own. He hadn’t left his first childhood, and now he’s fallen into his second. ‘Command that these stones be bread,’ the devil must have told him. Why is it that nobody sees the heresy of the ‘Feed-the-world-by-easy-device’ proposal any longer? The devil got Lem in a weak place there. He always had a soft spot in his heart for the devil, and he always had a soft spot for the ‘Feed-the-world-by-easy-device’ ploy. I’ve told him that the devil will be the ruin of him yet.”

* * * *

Griselda went to visit a sibyl in a cave out on the Sand Springs road. It was one of those caves that run back into the bluffs just before you come to Union Street Hill. Once there was a restaurant and nightclub named the Cave in that block. Now the block was known as Sibyls’ Row. There were half a dozen sibyl studios and one brake-lining shop in that block, and one empty cave with a For Rent sign.

“I would like your help in locating my husband,” Griselda told the sibyl. “Here is his address.”

“If you have his address, why do you need my help in locating him?” the sibyl asked. “Does he live at the address?”

“Yes, I suppose he does,” Griselda said, “but I don’t. I’m not sure that the address is real. I hardly know how to say this, but there is something very spooky about the place. I believe I could go there— and I intend to—and that my husband would be there. And yet I might not be able to see him or talk to him. And I might not be able to come back. There are things accumulating there. Things were accumulating long before my husband went there to work and live. And other things have been similarly accumulating in other places, or in other entrances to the same place, for long ages. I have this information but I don’t know where I have it from.”

“I will give the address to my python,” the sibyl said. “He will get to the effective level of it.” The sibyl went down into a lower room to give the assignment to the python. And, after a while, she came back.

“Rats, rats!” she said in an odd voice.

“Is that an expletive?” Griselda asked her.

“Not this time. It’s just that I’m almost out of rats. You know, there isn’t a single rat catcher listed in the phone book this year. Rats and rabbits are what the python eats. You were talking about accumulations, Mrs. Windfall. Yes, there have been these most spooky accumulations for ages. For long ages before men appeared, these accumulations are to be found, so the peculiarity of the addresses must go back before mankind. I wonder just who was living at those dubious addresses then. Whatever the species, they had affinity for mining and for well-digging: mythology tells us that much about them. They manufactured things by processes that seem impossible. There was always one element missing. I believe that there was bilocation involved. I believe that there still is. Ah, the python has the address analyzed.”

The python’s voice came through a sort of ventilator shaft in man-serpent accents: “The address is at one of the primary interchanges, though physically it is on a small creek in Colorado. The full name of this creek is El Rio de las Animas Arrepentidas en Limbo, or the River of the Compensating Souls in the Borderland or Limes. But the early Spanish people did not name the creek so. With rare intuition, they recognized the site for what it was, and their name was the perfect translation of the primordial name, which is very old. The creek is also called Lost Souls Creek and Picketwire Creek. Sophia, ask the lady whether she happens to have a rat with her.”

“Oh, no I don’t have,” Griselda said. “I never carry them.”

“Nobody carries them anymore,” the man-serpent complained. “Well, the creek rises at, nay, it falls down from Trinchera Peak in Las Animas County, and it ends in the John Martin Reservoir on the Arkansas River in Bent County. The lower hundred and fifty miles of the creek, from Hoene to the town of Las Animas, does not touch on inhabited region at all.

“The same creek, bearing the name of Las Animas, is also found hundreds of miles distant, in Sierra County, New Mexico. There is some mystery about this bilocation of the creek on Earth, but the fact of the bilocation hasn’t been doubted. It is really a case of multilocation, as it is with every primary interchange place.

“Ah, there’s lots of words and names welling up out of my depths, and all of them refer to this location. Some of them call it a dislocation; some of them say that it is one of the limbos or halfway places; or a half-mansion, or a half-house.”

“How about a half-hogan?” Griselda asked the educated snake in the room below.

“I don’t know,” the python said. “But what seems to be the trouble? Why don’t you go ahead and visit the place, lady?”

“Yes, I will, I’ll do that,” Griselda said. “Thank you, python. Thank you, sibyl.”

* * * *

. . . mineral as well as metal, and that which is now only a name, and was then something more than a name—orichalcum—was dug out of the earth. . . . The red light of orichalcum.

-Plato

As Griselda came near the place, she was surprised to find what name the local people called the stream. It was startling; it was a name unbelieved by many; it was ironic.

“Jews, close your ears!” a prairie dog barked.

“Greeks, harden your hearing!” a rattlesnake voiced.

“Covenanters, avert your senses lest you be affronted by it!” a bull-bat spoke in a series of little booms.

“What I say is that Lem is lucky to have done even as well as this,” Griselda said.

* * * *

This was the evening of the following day after the conversation with the Conglomerate gentlemen and with the sibyl and the python. It was a few hundred miles distant from the previous scene, and Griselda Windfall, having found her way somehow to an interior place, was dining with a funny little creature in a funny little restaurant. They were set down to a fine compendium of the new edible clays and stones. It was a queer, refractory sort of place, but Griselda had adjusted to it in everything except her eyes and her mind. Her dinner date had been getting smaller, and the cafe-restaurant had been getting stranger and more intimate.

“I knew, of course, that Smithstone Clay had become edible,” she said, “but I had no idea that one could now eat Dogtooth Rock or Ganister or Mealing Stone. I sure did not have any idea that they were so excellent.”

“Ah, yes, we are about to rehabilitate very many of the rocks and ores and metals. We will adapt them to Earth,” Griselda’s dinner companion said. He was a bent sort of little gnome with bright and peering eyes. “We can find a dozen uses for every one of them. The folks here were needing some new ideas when I came along. Oh, coal and oil and gas are good enough, and they couldn’t be had by regular people without the aid of folks who had fallen into my case. But people appreciate new benisons. Yes, and it is an act of charity and compensation to supply these new things, I believe. Stilbite, Amazon-stone, Aztec Money—ah, they are wonderful stones, and we are finding wonderful uses for them.”

“Toad’s Eye Tin, Asparagus Stone, Dry-Bone Ore,” Griselda murmured fondly. “My husband, Lemuel, thought he could do great things with them if ever he could find appropriate working place and conditions. Listen, bright eyes, what’s good is that there can be money in these things. Somebody goofed at first and let Smithstone Clay become edible free of charge. Now that they have it in such exotic restaurants as this, though, there will be a profit in it somewhere.”

“Do you not understand that all food was originally free food?” that little gnome said with his bent smile. “Do you not know that all shelter was originally free shelter, and that all property was originally free property?”

“Didn’t work, did it? And all those free things will not add up to a free trip to Paris for me. There has to be money generated somewhere. How did you become so bent, little bright eyes? You remind me very much of someone. How did I get here, anyhow, since the map had gone all haywire?”

“Or picketwire,” the gnome said.

“Yes, but I got here. And then both you and the place got funnier and funnier. However did you become so bent?”

“The first and second lumbar vertebrae are reversed. This emphasizes the crook in the back. It bends the head forward and down, to the ideal working and cogitational position. Really, the way that humans have their heads tilted, I don’t understand how they can do any thinking or working at all. This reversing of the vertebrae makes a change in the facial expression: one must always look up and peer at another person. There are even cases where persons aren’t recognized by their familiars after the change. The reversing of these spinal segments also brings a change in the thought pattern, right down where it matters. Folks have spoken mistakenly of visceral thought, but that basic thing is really spinal thought. Spinal thought is very big here. So is medical practice. The changes are all made without surgery. They are made, in fact, without the ... ah . . . patient being touched in any way. All topographical inversions are easy in a nontopographical ambience like this.”

“And you’ve been topographically inverted, bright eyes?” Griselda asked. “You weren’t always a gnome?”

“Oh, God help us all, Grissie! Being a gnome is all in the mind and in the shape.”

“What is that moaning and groaning?” she asked. “It seems to be in the background of everything in this dismal place. And why aren’t there any colors here?”

“Oh, one of the requirements for a good workshop is that it be without distracting colors at all. And some folks moan and groan a lot when they’re at labor. They’re carrying on now like a bunch of ham actors because we’ve set them to work triggering easy-to-find deposits of orichalcum on Earth. We tell them that it’s easier to make than coal or oil, but they whimper about having to learn something new.”

“Orichalcum? You’re arranging for it to be found on Earth? Not for free, I hope?”

“You want it to be somehow otherwise, Grissie?”

“Certainly, Lem. Oh, I called you Lem—you remind me of him. I want the trick that they call the double modification set into it. I want it set in to my own gain. I’d like a few little fortunes to accrue to me, for a few little years.”

“Oh, I suppose so, Grissie. I’ll have them make out a Conveyance of Patent that you can take back to Earth with you. Yes, they are moaning and groaning quite a lot. They are the uncreative folks, so they must be set to simple tasks. And simple tasks do become groaningly tedious.”

“What are the simple tasks, bright eyes?”

“Oh, mostly the old faithfuls. Consider all the coal and oil deposits that have been fabricated for Earth. Kobalds and goblins and gnomes, so long as they are in this place of tribulation and tribute, are forced to serve the people with these products. Yes, the legends of them working in mines and wells under the roots of mountains are true ones. The making of these things is the hard part. Transferring them from nontopographical ambience like this to Earth is easy. It’s a law that all objects tend to locate themselves in the nearest topography. The great accumulations or deposits or gluts on Earth have been passed off as natural or quasi-natural occurrences. They aren’t, Grissie. They are manufactured things, and they were manufactured here.”

“I’m promised fortunes on the orichalcum intrusions,” Griselda said. “Oh, what are some of the other things that you are making in new profusion and for new uses?”

“Oh, Mealing Stone, French Chalk, Cottonball Borax.”

“Oh, yes, yes. Lemuel was projecting work on all of those. How about Horseflesh Ore and Iron Rose?”

“We’ll be ready with them quite soon, Grissie. And Mispickel and Noselite.”

“Two of Lemuel’s favorites. Oh, how startling! I’ve been sitting here with you and not realizing that you were Lemuel. I thought you were some gnome. But at least we buried you for Lemuel, though somehow you didn’t seem quite dead. If you had, I wouldn’t have come here on this wild-goose ride. No wonder I got lost. The deed said Picketwire Creek, but the people in the area call it Purgatory Creek.”

“No, I don’t seem quite dead, Grissie. This dying makes quite a change in some persons, but it hardly touched me at all. It upset Jasher Halfhogan seriously, very early in his life; that’s why he always seemed a little strange to you. But dozens of things have happened to me that seem more decisive than dying. Ah, here’s the Conveyance of Patent. They do fine engraving here, do they not? And this agrees to the double modification and assigns you the benefits. You can take this to Conglomerate Enterprises, or to Wheeler-Heelers, or to Le Conglomerat in Paris, or to any of them; and you’ll be paid handsomely.”

“To Paris? Oh, if I could only get there, Lem! And with a fortune yet!”

“Oh, you can walk out of here and into any of a thousand different primary interchanges on Earth. Think Paris, and you will come out in Paris.”

“Oh, Lem, Lem! Is there anything that you need here?”

“Why don’t you send me my old red sweater? There’s always been so much moaning and groaning about the heat here that they have overcompensated against it. It will be nice to have my old sweater here when I work late.”

“I’ll send it, Lem, I’ll send it!” Griselda cried. She kissed him, or perhaps she missed him. She thought Paris. She rushed out of there. And she came out in Paris in the middle of . . .

... the Rue de Purgatoire. And right around the corner was Le Conglomerat, where she traded the Conveyance of Patent for a few of those fortunes. And all around every corner was Paris.

“Oh, the red light of orichalcum,” she sang, “and Paris!” For Griselda was a good-looker, now and forever. And with the kind of fortunes that she had, a good-looker like Griselda could have her heart’s desire in that place.

* * * *

R. A. Lafferty writes:

Many fantasy worlds are so similar as to require a common origin. This common origin is now discovered to be a world of fact and not of fantasy. It is prosaic, it is common, it is earthy, and especially it is underearthy. The dislocated Picketwire world is fact, and the fantasies were only misunderstandings of it.

The world of the Picketwire syndrome is on the inside of mountains in an ambience that is null-everything, which is only to say that it is a world that has suffered topographic inversion. And the common workmen there, gnomes, kobalds, poor souls, trolls, are only humans who have suffered topographic inversion.

The handiwork done on Picketwire is superior to anything done on Earth, and it is done at a fraction of the cost (because of the null-everything ambience). Considering the potential for efficient production there, and the difficulties here, it seemed that a scientific study of the possibilities and advantages should be undertaken. “For All Poor Folks at Picketwire?’ is that scientific study.

Take one feasibility estimate: If the book Epoch were printed and produced at Picketwire instead of on surface Earth, it could be done, on glossy paper and with orichalcum cover, for less than three cents a copy. It’s true that the transportation from Picketwire to surface Earth would be around seventeen thousand dollars a copy, but this might be halved or even quartered for very large tonnage shipments.

Lemuel Windfall will arrange for such production if everybody is willing.