Fourth Mansions by R.A. Lafferty

Author:R.A. Lafferty
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Science Fiction, General, Fiction
ISBN: 9781473213531
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2016-01-29T10:00:00+00:00

“All right, Miguel, all right. I'll proclaim it,” Freddy said. “Yes, I will remember it all. Leave me now. I have my affair with elegant dogs and returned men fine in toadflax.”

VIII: THE LINE OF YOUR THROAT, THE MERCURIAL MOVEMENT

What adders came to shed their coats?

What coiled obscene

Small serpents with soft stretching throats

Caressed Faustine?

Swinburne

IN HIS HOTEL ROOM Fred Foley examined the money-belt and billfold he had taken from Crabtree. Finding nothing of interest in them except money and identification, he made a bundle of them to parcel post to the police. He examined casually the contents of the large manila envelope. This, he decided, he would keep for further study.

It was the detailing of Crabtree's latest invention, the design of a cubicle. The cubicle would be the size to hold a man lying down. It would be airtight and nearly indestructible when sealed. The purpose of it was obscure, though the papers said it was an Enervator. “Who wants to be enervated anyhow?” Foley asked himself.

There was considerable electromagnetic apparatus, minute controls to maintain conditions and large controls apparently to set up conditions. There were many pages of mathematics and schematics which could not be digested casually; by many persons they could not have been digested at all. But Foley, who had been a science feature writer, had a talent of going to the heart of a thing and he soon had the basic idea of it.

“But it's all wrong,” he said.

“Of course it is,” said Hondo Silverio. “It's a substitution, but an ingenious one.”

“It isn't an Enervator, of course,” said Richard Bencher. “It's an Hypnotic Dredge. Even in its wrongness I can see that the original is meant to bring up the strengths and varieties unused, the vitality untapped, to awaken the interior nourishing weirdness and so demolish the exterior mock-root poisons. Stay there, Foley; I'll get you over the wall.”

“No machine will do it — not this, not the original,” said Hondo Silverio. “But they're afraid of it and have intercepted it. They're terrified of our interior strengths.”

“I didn't know you two were tuned in,” Freddy said. There was a note by Crabtree to the effect that the thing had never actually been tried out. There was writing that Freddy called the “A” or Crabtree hand; there were some that he called the “B” substitution or other hand, but this was so near to the Crabtree hand that Foley did not know how he distinguished them.

There was a feeling about all this that Foley had from the first, a feeling which he knew would persist no matter how deeply he delved into it: that was the feeling that the whole thing was a hoax.

At the same time there was the even stronger feeling that Carlyle S. Crabtree had been in no respect a hoaxer. But can a straight man perpetuate a hoax unwittingly? No, not that man. He might perpetuate some nonsense, or a failure or an ineptitude, but never a hoax.

But this smelled of hoax all through it. “Well, I'll leave it here a while,” Freddy told himself.

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