Stories 5, page 1
MORE STORIES BY R.A. LAFFERTY
*153. Bright Coins In Never-Ending Stream
*154. Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen-Seventies 155. Splinters
165. Lord Torpedo, Lord Gyroscope
170. The Only Tune That He Could Play
*175. You Can't Go Back
179. Square and Above Board
180. Ifrit
185. Golden Gate
*186. This Boding Itch
187. Tongues of the Madagora
*188. Make Sure the Eyes Are Big Enough
189. Marsilia V.
*190. One-Eyed Mocking-Bird
214. And Some In Velvet Gowns
215. The Doggone Highly Scientific Door
*216. Oh, Whatta You Do When the Well Runs Dry?
227. Magazine Section
240. Grey Ghost: A Reminiscence
245. Le Hot Sport
BRIGHT COINS IN NEVER-ENDING STREAM
People sometimes became exasperated with Matthew Quoin, that tedious old shuffler. Sometimes? Well, they were exasperated with him almost all the time.
It isn't that people aren't patient and kind-hearted. All of them in our town are invariably so. But Matthew could sure ruffle a kind-hearted surface.
"Oh, he is so slow about it!" people said of him. That wasn't true, Matthew's fingers flew lightninglike when he was involved in a transaction. It was just that so very many movements were required of him to get anything at all transacted.
And then the stories that he told about his past, a very far-distant past according to him, were worn out by repetition.
"Oh, was I ever the cock of the walk!" he would say. "I left a trail of twenty-dollar gold pieces around the world three times, and that was when twenty dollars was still worth something. I always paid everything with twenty-dollar gold pieces, and there was no way that I could ever run out of them. Ten of them, a hundred of them, a thousand of them, I could lay them out whenever they were needed. I had a cruse of oil that would never be empty, as the Bible says. I had a pocketbook that would never be without coin. I was the cock of the walk. Plague take it all, I still am! Has anybody ever seen me without money?"
No, nobody had. It was just that, of late years, it took Matthew's money so long to add up. And often people had to wait behind him for a long time while he counted it out, and they became Sulky and even furious.
When people became weary of listening to Matthew's stories (and of late years he could feel their weariness for him like a hot blast) he went and talked to the pigeons. They, at least, had manners.
"The bloom is off the plum now," he would tell those red-footed peckers,
"and the roses of life have become a little ratty for me. But I will not run out of coin. I have the promise that I will not. I got that promise as part of a dubious transaction, but the promise has held up now for more years and decades than you would believe. And I will not die till I am death-weary of taking coin out of my pocketbook: I have that promise also. How would I ever be weary of drawing coins out of my pocketbook?
"This began a long time ago, you see, when the pigeons were no bigger than the jenny-wrens are now. They had just started to mint the American twenty-dollar gold piece, and I had them in full and never-ending flow. I tell you that a man can make an impression if he has enough gold pieces. Ah, the ladies who were my friends! Lola Montez, Squirrel Alice, Marie Laveau, Sarah Bernhardt, Empress Elizabeth of Austria. And the high ladies were attracted to me for myself as well as for my money. I was the golden cock of the golden walk.
"You ask what happened to those golden days?" Matthew said to the pigeons, who hadn't asked anything except maybe, "How about springing for another box of Cracker Jacks?"
"Oh, the golden days are still with me, though technically they are the copper days now. I was promised eight bright eons of ever-flowing money, and the eight of the eons could last (along with my life) as long as I wished it to last.
"And, when the first eon of flowing money slipped into the second, it didn't diminish my fortune much. It was still an unending stream of gold. Now they were five-dollar gold pieces instead of twenty-dollar gold pieces, but when there is no limit to the number of them, what difference does that make?
I would take one out of my pocketbook, and immediately there would be another one in it waiting to be taken."
"I suppose I really had the most fun when I was known as the Silver Dollar Kid," Matthew Quoin told them. He was talking to squirrels rather than pigeons now, and it was a different day. But one day was very much like another.
"I never cared overly for money. I just don't want to run out of it. And I have the promise that my pocketbook will always have one more coin in it. I liked that sound of silver dollars on a counter, and I'd ring them down as fast as one a second when I wished to make all impression. And they rang like bells. I was in my pleasant maturity then, and life was good to me. I was the guy they all noticed. They called me 'Show Boat' and 'the Silver Dollar Sport.' I always tipped a dollar for everything. That was when money was worth ten times what it is now and a dollar was really something. What, squirrels, another sack of peanuts, you say? Sure I can afford it! The girl at the kiosk will be a little impatient with me because it takes the so long to get enough coins out, but we don't care about that, do we?"
The fact was that Mitiliew Quoin, though he still commanded a shining and unending stream of money, had a poor and shabby look about him in these days of the eighth coin. As part of an old and dubious transaction, he had the promise that he could live as long as he wished, but that didn't prevent him from becoming quite old. He had a grubby little room. Je would get up at three o'clock every Friday morning and begin to pull coins one at a time (there was no possible way except one at a time) out of his pocketbook. It was one of those small, three-section, snap-jaw pocketbooks such as men used to carry to keep their coins and bills in. It was old, but it was never-failing. Matthew would draw the coins out one at a time. He would count them into piles. He would roll them into rolls. And at eight o'clock in the morning, when his weekly rent was due, he would pay it proudly, twenty-seven dollars and fifty cents. So he would be fixed for another week. It took him from three until eight o'clock every Friday morning to do this; but he cat-napped quite a bit during that time. All oldsters cat-nap a lot.
And it didn't really take him very long (no more than five or six minutes) to draw out enough coins for one of his simple lunch-counter meals.
But some people are a little bit testy at having to wait even five or six minutes behind an old man at the cashier's stand.
"I was known as the Four-Bit Man for a few years, and that was all right," Matthew Quoin said. "Then I was known as the Two-Bit Man for a few other years, and that was all right too." This was a different day, and Matthew was talking to a flock of grackle-birds who were committing slaughter on worms, slugs, and other crawlers in the grass of City Park. "It didn't begin to hurt till I was known as the Dime-a-Time Man," Matthew said, "and that stuck in the throat of my pride a little bit, although it shouldn't have.
I was still the cock of the grassy walk even though I didn't have as many hens as I had once. I had good lodgings, and I had plenty to eat and drink. I could buy such clothes as I needed, though it flustered me a bit to make a major purchase. We had come into the era of the hundred-dollar overcoat then, and to draw out one thousand coins, one by one, with people perhaps waiting, can be a nervous thing.
"I began to see that there was an element of humor in that dubious transaction that I had made so many years ago, and that part of the joke was on me. 0h, I had won every point of argument when we had made that deal. The pocketbook was calfskin, triple-stitched, and with German silver snap-latch.
It was absolutely guaranteed never to be clear empty of coin, and it should last forever. Each coin appeared in the very bottom of the pocketbook, that's true, and the contrivance was rather deep and with a narrow mouth, so it did take several seconds to fish each dime out. But it was a good bargain that I made, and all parties still abide by it. The Dime-a-Time years weren't bad.
"Nor were the nickel years really. There is nothing wrong with nickels.
Dammit, the nickel is the backbone of commerce! It was in the nickel years that I began to get rheumatism in my fingers, and that slowed me down. But it had nothing to do with the bargain, which was still a good one."
When the penney years rolled around, Matthew Quoin was quite old. Likely he was not as old as he claimed to be, but he was the oldest and stringiest cock around.
"But it's all as bright as one of my new pennies," he said to a multitude of army caterpillars that was destroying the fine grass in City Park. "And this is the eighth and final eon of the overflowing money, and it will go on forever for me unless I tell it to stop. Why should I tell it to stop? The flow of money from my pocketbook is is vital to me as the flow of blood through my veins. And the denomination cannot be diminished further.
There is no smaller coin than the copper penney.
"It didn't go all that bright and shining with Mattlicw Quoin in the penney years, though. The rheumatism had bitten deeper into his hands and fingers, and now his lightning fingers were slow lightning indeed. The "time is money" saying applied to Matthew more explicitly than it had ever applied to anyone else, and there were quite a few slownesses conspiring to eat up his valuable time.
And every time that prices went up, by the same degree was he driven down. After five years in the peniiy eon he was driven down plenty.
"If it takes me five hours just to draw out and count the money for
"Something is going to have to give." Something gave.
The government decreed that, due to the general inflation of the economy and the near-worthlessness of the one-cent piece, or penny, that coin would no longer be minted. And, after a cutoff date in the near future, it would no longer be legal tender either.
"What will I do now?" Matthew Quoin asked himself.
He went to talk to the people at the Elite Metal Salvage Company, Scavenger Department.
"How much a pound will you give me for copper pennies?" he asked.
"Two cents a pound," the man said. "There hasn't been very much copper in copper pennies for years and years."
"There is in these," Matthew said. "They follow the specifications of the earliest minting." He showed several of them to the man.
"Amazing, amazing!" the man said. "They're almost pure copper. Five cents a pound."
"I don't know if I can live on that or not," Matthew Quoin said, "but I've no choice except to try."
Matthew Quoin changed his life style a bit. He gave up his lodging room.
He slept in a seldom-flooded storm sewer instead. But it was still a hard go.
A nickel a pound! Do you know how many pennies, pulled out rheumatically one by one, it takes to make a pound? Do you know how many nickels it takes now just to get a cup of coffee and an apple fritter for breakfast? Matthew Quoin had started at three-thirty that morning. It would be ten o'clock before he had enough to take to the Elite Metal Salvage Company to sell for legal tender. It would be ten-thirty before he had his scanty breakfast. And then back to the old penny-fishing again. His fingers were scabbed and bleeding. It would be almost midnight before he had enough (yes, the Elite Metal Salvage Comany did do business at night; that's when they did of lot of their purchasing of stolen metal) to trade in for supper money. And that would represent only one hamburger with everything on it, and one small glass of spitzo. But Matthew would never be clear broke. He was still cock of the walk.
"Now here is where it gets rough," Matthew Quoin said. "Suppose that I give up and am not able to live on the bright flow of coins, and I die (for I cannot die until I do give up); suppose that I die, then I will have lost the dubious transaction that I made so long ago. I'll have been outsmarted on the deal, and I cannot have that. That fellow bragged that he'd never lost on a transaction of this sort, and he rubbed it in with a smirk. We'll just see about that. I've not given up yet, though I do need one more small morsel of food if I'm to live through the day. Do you yourself ever get discouraged, robin?"
Matthew Quoin was talking to a lone robin that was pulling worms out of the browned grass that was beginning to be crusted with the first snow of the season. But the robin didn't answer.
"You live on the promise of spring, robin, though you do well even now,"
Quoin said. "I also have a new promise to live for. I have been given a fresh lease on life today, though it will be about seven years before I call put that lease into effect. But, after you're old, seven years go by just like nothing. A person in the Imperial Coin Nook (it's in a corncr of the Empire Cigar and Hash Store) says that in about seven years my coins will have value, and eventually he will be able to pay a nickel or dime or even fifteen cents for each of them. And that is only the beginning, he says: in fifty years they may be worth eighty cents or even a dollar each. I am starting to put one coin out of every three into a little cranny in my sewer to save them. Of course, for those seven years that I wait, I will go hungrier by one third. But this promise is like a second sun coming up in the morning. I will rise and shine with it."
"Bully for you, " the robin said.
"So I have no reason to be discouraged," Quoin went on. "I have a warm and sheltered sewer to go to. And I have had a little bit, though not enough, to eat today. I hallucinate, and I'm a trifle delirious and silly, I know. I'm lighthearted, but I believe I could make it if I had just one more morsel to eat. This has been the worst of my days foodwise, but they may get a little bit better if I live through this one. It will be a sort of turning of the worm for me now. Hey, robin, that was pretty good, the turning of the worm.
Did you get it?"
"I got it," said the robin. "It was pretty good."
"And how is it going with yourself?" Matthew Quoin asked.
"There's good days and bad ones," the robin said. "This is a pretty good one. After the other robins have all gone south, I have pretty good worm-hunting."
"Do you ever get discouraged?"
"I don't let myself," the robin said. "Fight on, I say. It's all right today. I'm about full now."
"Then I'll fight on too," Matthew swore. "One extra morsel would save my life, I believe. And you, perhaps, robin --"
"What do you have in mind?" the robin asked.
"Ah, robin, if you're not going to cat the other half of that worm --"
"No, I've had plenty. Go ahead," the robin said.
SELENIUM GHOSTS OF THE EIGHTEEN SEVENTIES
Even today, the "invention" of television is usually ascribed to Paul Nipkow of Germany, and the year is given as 1884. Nipkow used the principle of the variation in the electrical conductivity of selenium when exposed to light, and he used scanning discs as mechanical effectors. What else was there for him to use before the development of the photo tube and the current-amplifying electron tube? The resolution of Nipkow's television was very poor due to the "slow light" characteristics of selenium response and the lack of amplification. There were, however, several men in the United States who transmitted a sort of television before Nipkow did so in Germany.
Resolution of the images of these even earlier experimenters in the field (Aurelian Bentley, Jessy Polk, Samuel J. Perry, Gifford Hudgeons) was even poorer than was the case with Nipkow. Indeed, none of these pre-Nipkow inventors in the television field is worthy of much attention, except Bentley.
And the interest in Bentley is in the content of his transmissions and not in his technical ineptitude.
It is not our object to enter into the argument of who really did first
"invent" television (it was not Paul Nipkow, and it probably was not Aurelian Bentley or Jessy Polk either); our object is to examine some of the earliest true television dramas in their own queer "slow light" context. And the first of those "slow light" or selenium ("moonshine") dramas were put together by Aurelian Bentley in the year ]873.
The earliest art in a new field is always the freshest and is often the best. Homer composed the first and freshest, and probably the best, epic poetry. Whatever cave man did the first painting, it remains among the freshest as well as the best paintings ever done. Aeschylus composed the first and best tragic dramas, Euclid invented the first and best of the artful mathematics (we speak here of mathematics as an art without being concerned with its accuracy or practicality). And it may be that Aurelian Bentley produced the best of all television dramas in spite of their primitive aspect.
Bentley's television enterprise was not very successful despite his fee of one thousand dollars per day for each subscriber. In his heyday (or his hey-month, November of 1873), Bentley had fifty-nine subscribers in New York City, seventeen in Boston, fourteen in Philadelphia, and one in Hoboken. This gave him an income of ninety-one thousand dollars a day (which would be the equivalent of about a million dollars a day in today's terms), but Bentley was extravagant and prodigal, and he always insisted that he had expenses that the world wotted not of. In any case, Bentley was broke and out of business by the beginning of the year 1874. He was also dead by that time.
The only things surviving from The Wonderful World of Aurelian Bentley are thirteen of the "slow light" dramas, the master projector, and nineteen of the old television receivers. There are probably others of the receivers around somewhere, and person coming onto them might not know what they are for. They do not look much like the television sets of later years.
The one we use for playing the old dramas is a good kerosene powered model which we found and bought for eighteen dollars two years ago. If the old sets are ever properly identified and become collectors' items, the price on them may double or even triple. We told the owner of the antique that it was a chestnut roaster, and with a proper rack installed it could likely be made to serve as that.
