I came across this in a second-hand anthology of stories from the late (and not sufficiently lamented ) Unknown fantasy magazine, which was written by demigods. Thirty-five years later, I can practically quote it by heart.
It belongs to the ancient category of “a story told by a mysterious stranger.” It’s a simple narrative, not big on suspense, but it left white-hot lines across my brain. It made me think.
This immortal isn’t planning to conquer the world by chopping off heads. He invents soup when his teeth fall out, he gets into armor making (because who would kill a good armorer?), and he keeps out of the way of important people because they’re dangerous to know. Don’t ask him about history. You don’t know it’s history until later. If he was around, he was the man at the back of the crowd, wondering what the all excitement was about and planning to move on.
The image has remained with me for years—the patient, skilled immortal, the template of ancient smithy gods and ugly story tellers, forever avoiding dogs and taking the late-night bus out of town and surviving. You think: this is how it could have been, this is how it would have to be. When an author spins your head like that, you’re in the presence of genius.
—Terry Pratchett
THE GNARLY MAN
by L. Sprague de Camp
Dr. Matilda Saddler first saw the gnarly man on the evening of June 14, 1946, at Coney Island.
The spring meeting of the Eastern Section of the American Anthropological Association had broken up, and Dr. Saddler had had dinner with two of her professional colleagues, Blue of Columbia and Jeffcott of Yale. She mentioned that she had never visited Coney, and meant to go there that evening. She urged Blue and Jeffcott to come along, but they begged off.
Watching Dr. Saddler’s retreating back, Blue of Columbia cackled: “The Wild Woman from Wichita. Wonder if she’s hunting another husband?” He was a thin man with a small gray beard and a who-the-hell-are-you-sir expression.
“How many has she had?” asked Jeffcott of Yale.
“Two to date. Don’t know why anthropologists lead the most disorderly private lives of any scientists. Must be that they study the customs and morals of all these different peoples, and ask themselves, ‘If the Eskimos can do it, why can’t we?’ I’m old enough to be safe, thank God.”
“I’m not afraid of her,” said Jeffcott. He was in his early forties and looked like a farmer uneasy in store clothes. “I’m so very thoroughly married.”
“Yeah? Ought to have been at Stanford a few years ago, when she was there. Wasn’t safe to walk across the campus, with Tuthill chasing all the females and Saddler all the males.”
Dr. Saddler had to fight her way off the subway train, as the adolescents who infest the platform of the B.M.T.’s Stillwell Avenue station are probably the worst-mannered people on earth, possibly excepting the Dobu Islanders, of the western Pacific. She didn’t much mind. She was a tall, strongly built woman in her late thirties, who had been kept in trim by the outdoor rigors of her profession. Besides, some of the inane remarks in Swift’s paper on acculturation among the Arapaho Indians had gotten her fighting blood up.
Walking down Surf Avenue toward Brighton Beach, she looked at the concessions without trying them, preferring to watch the human types that did and the other human types that took their money. She did try a shooting gallery, but found knocking tin owls off their perch with a .22 too easy to be much fun. Long-range work with an army rifle was her idea of shooting.
The concession next to the shooting gallery would have been called a side show if there had been a main show for it to be a side show to. The usual lurid banner proclaimed the uniqueness of the two-headed calf, the bearded woman, Arachne the spider girl, and other marvels. The pièce de résistance was Ungo-Bungo, the ferocious ape-man, captured in the Congo at a cost of twenty-seven lives. The picture showed an enormous Ungo-Bungo squeezing a hapless Negro in each hand, while others sought to throw a net over him.
Dr. Saddler knew perfectly well that the ferocious ape-man would turn out to be an ordinary Caucasian with false hair on his chest. But a streak of whimsicality impelled her to go in. Perhaps, she thought, she could have some fun with her colleagues about it.
The spieler went through his leather-lunged harangue. Dr. Saddler guessed from his expression that his feet hurt. The tattooed lady didn’t interest her, as her decorations obviously had no cultural significance, as they have among the Polynesians. As for the ancient Mayan, Dr. Saddler thought it in questionable taste to exhibit a poor microcephalic idiot that way. Professor Yoki’s legerdemain and fire eating weren’t bad.
There was a curtain in front of Ungo-Bungo’s cage. At the appropriate moment there were growls and the sound of a length of chain being slapped against a metal plate. The spieler wound up on a high note: “—ladies and gentlemen, the one and only UNGO-BUNGO!” The curtain dropped.
The ape-man was squatting at the back of his cage. He dropped his chain, got up, and shuffled forward. He grasped two of the bars and shook them. They were appropriately loose and rattled alarmingly. Ungo-Bungo snarled at the patrons, showing his even, yellow teeth.
Dr. Saddler stared hard. This was something new in the ape-man line. Ungo-Bungo was about five feet three, but very massive, with enormous hunched shoulders. Above and below his blue swimming trunks thick, grizzled hair covered him from crown to ankle. His short, stout-muscled arms ended in big hands with thick, gnarled fingers. His neck projected slightly forward, so that from the front he seemed to have but little neck at all.
His face—well, thought Dr. Saddler, she knew all the living races of men, and all the types of freak brought about by glandular maladjustment, and none of them had a face like that. It was deeply lined. The forehead between the short scalp hair and the brows on the huge supraorbital ridges receded sharply. The nose, although wide, was not apelike; it was a shortened version of the thick, hooked Armenoid nose, so often miscalled Jewish. The face ended in a long upper lip and a retreating chin. And the yellowish skin apparently belonged to Ungo-Bungo.
The curtain was whisked up again.
Dr. Saddler went out with the others, but paid another dime, and soon was back inside. She paid no attention to the spieler, but got a good position in front of Ungo-Bungo’s cage before the rest of the crowd arrived.
Ungo-Bungo repeated his performance with mechanical precision. Dr. Saddler noticed that he limped a little as he came forward to rattle the bars, and that the skin under his mat of hair bore several big whitish scars. The last joint of his left ring finger was missing. She noted certain things about the proportions of his shin and thigh, of his forearm and upper arm, and his big splay feet.
Dr. Saddler paid a third dime. An idea was knocking at her mind somewhere. If she let it in, either she was crazy or physical anthropology was haywire or—something. But she knew that if she did the sensible thing, which was to go home, the idea would plague her from now on.
After the third performance she spoke to the spieler. “I think your Mr. Ungo-Bungo used to be a friend of mine. Could you arrange for me to see him after he finishes?”
The spieler checked his sarcasm. His questioner was so obviously not a—not the sort of dame who asks to see guys after they finish.
“Oh, him,” he said. “Calls himself Gaffney—Clarence Aloysius Gaffney. That the guy you want?”
“Why, yes.”
“I guess you can.” He looked at his watch. “He’s got four more turns to do before we close. I’ll have to ask the boss.” He popped through a curtain and called, “Hey, Morrie!” Then he was back. “It’s okay. Morrie says you can wait in his office. Foist door to the right.”
Morrie was stout, bald, and hospitable. “Sure, sure,” he said, waving his cigar. “Glad to be of soivace, Miss Saddler. Chust a min while I talk to Gaffney’s manager.” He stuck his head out. “Hey, Pappas! Lady wants to talk to your ape-man later. I meant lady, O.K.” He returned to orate on the difficulties besetting the freak business. “You take this Gaffney, now. He’s the best damn ape-man in the business; all that hair rilly grows outa him. And the poor guy rilly has a face like that. But do people believe it? No! I hear ’em going out, saying about how the hair is pasted on, and the whole thing is a fake. It’s mawtifying.” He cocked his head, listening. “That rumble wasn’t no rolly-coaster; it’s gonna rain. Hope it’s over by tomorrow. You wouldn’t believe the way a rain can knock ya receipts off. If you drew a coive, it would be like this.” He drew his finger horizontally through space, jerking it down sharply to indicate the effect of rain. “But as I said, people don’t appreciate what you try to do for ’em. It’s not just the money; I think of myself as an ottist. A creative ottist. A show like this got to have balance and propawtion, like any other ott—”
It must have been an hour later when a slow, deep voice at the door said: “Did somebody want to see me?”
The gnarly man was in the doorway. In street clothes, with the collar of his raincoat turned up and his hat brim pulled down, he looked more or less human, though the coat fitted his great, sloping shoulders badly. He had a thick, knobby walking stick with a leather loop near the top end. A small, dark man fidgeted behind him.
“Yeah,” said Morrie, interrupting his lecture. “Clarence, this is Miss Saddler. Miss Saddler, this is Mr. Gaffney, one of our outstanding creative ottists.”
“Pleased to meetcha,” said the gnarly man. “This is my manager, Mr. Pappas.”
Dr. Saddler explained, and said he’d like to talk to Mr. Gaffney if she might. She was tactful; you had to be to pry into the private affairs of Naga headhunters, for instance. The gnarly man said he’d be glad to have a cup of coffee with Miss Saddler; there was a place around the corner that they could reach without getting wet.
As they started out, Pappas followed, fidgeting more and more. The gnarly man said: “Oh, go home to bed, John. Don’t worry about me.” He grinned at Dr. Saddler. The effect would have been unnerving to anyone but an anthropologist. “Every time he sees me talking to anybody, he thinks it’s some other manager trying to steal me.” He spoke general American, with a suggestion of Irish brogue in the lowering of the vowels in words like “man” and “talk.” “I made the lawyer who drew up our contract fix it so it can be ended on short notice.”
Pappas departed, still looking suspicious. The rain had practically ceased. The gnarly man stepped along smartly despite his limp.
A woman passed with a fox terrier on a leash. The dog sniffed in the direction of the gnarly man, and then to all appearances went crazy, yelping and slavering. The gnarly man shifted his grip on the massive stick and said quietly, “Better hang onto him, ma’am.” The woman departed hastily. “They just don’t like me,” commented Gaffney. “Dogs, that is.”
They found a table and ordered their coffee. When the gnarly man took off his raincoat, Dr. Saddler became aware of a strong smell of cheap perfume. He got out a pipe with a big knobby bowl. It suited him, just as the walking stick did. Dr. Saddler noticed that the deep-sunk eyes under the beetling arches were light hazel.
“Well?” he said in his rumbling drawl.
She began her questions.
“My parents were Irish,” he answered. “But I was born in South Boston . . . let’s see . . . forty-six years ago. I can get you a copy of my birth certificate. Clarence Aloysius Gaffney, May 2, 1900.” He seemed to get some secret amusement out of that statement.
“Were either of your parents of your somewhat unusual physical type?”
He paused before answering. He always did, it seemed. “Uh-huh. Both of ’em. Glands, I suppose.”
“Were they both born in Ireland?”
“Yep. County Sligo.” Again that mysterious twinkle.
She thought. “Mr. Gaffney, you wouldn’t mind having some photographs and measurements made, would you? You could use the photographs in your business.”
“Maybe.” He took a sip. “Ouch! Gazooks, that’s hot!”
“What?”
“I said the coffee’s hot.”
“I mean, before that.”
The gnarly man looked a little embarrassed. “Oh, you mean the ‘gazooks’? Well, I . . . uh . . . once knew a man who used to say that.”
“Mr. Gaffney, I’m a scientist, and I’m not trying to get anything out of you for my own sake. You can be frank with me.”
There was something remote and impersonal in his stare that gave her a slight spinal chill. “Meaning that I haven’t been so far?”
“Yes. When I saw you I decided that there was something extraordinary in your background. I still think there is. Now, if you think I’m crazy, say so and we’ll drop the subject. But I want to get to the bottom of this.”
He took his time about answering. “That would depend.” There was another pause. Then he said: “With your connections, do you know any really first-class surgeons?”
“But . . . yes, I know Dunbar.”
“The guy who wears a purple gown when he operates? The guy who wrote a book on ‘God, Man, and the Universe’?”
“Yes. He’s a good man, in spite of his theatrical mannerisms. Why? What would you want of him?”
“Not what you’re thinking. I’m satisfied with my . . . uh . . . unusual physical type. But I have some old injuries—broken bones that didn’t knit properly—that I want fixed up. He’d have to be a good man, though. I have a couple of thousand dollars in the savings bank, but I know the sort of fees those guys charge. If you could make the necessary arrangements—”
“Why, yes, I’m sure I could. In fact, I could guarantee it. Then I was right? And you’ll—” She hesitated.
“Come clean? Uh-huh. But remember, I can still prove I’m Clarence Aloysius if I have to.”
“Who are you, then?”
Again there was a long pause. Then the gnarly man said: “Might as well tell you. As soon as you repeat any of it, you’ll have put your professional reputation in my hands, remember.
“First off, I wasn’t born in Massachusetts. I was born on the upper Rhine, near Mommenheim. And I was born, as nearly as I can figure out, about the year 50,000 B.C.”
Matilda Saddler wondered whether she’d stumbled on the biggest thing in anthropology, or whether this bizarre personality was making Baron Munchausen look like a piker.
He seemed to guess her thoughts. “I can’t prove that, of course. But so long as you arrange about that operation, I don’t care whether you believe me or not.”
“But . . . but . . . how?”
“I think the lightning did it. We were out trying to drive some bison into a pit. Well, this big thunderstorm came up, and the bison bolted in the wrong direction. So we gave up and tried to find shelter. And the next thing I knew I was lying on the ground with the rain running over me, and the rest of the clan standing around wailing about what had they done to get the storm god sore at them, so he made a bull’s-eye on one of their best hunters. They’d never said that about me before. It’s funny how you’re never appreciated while you’re alive.
“But I was alive, all right. My nerves were pretty well shot for a few weeks, but otherwise I was okay, except for some burns on the soles of my feet. I don’t know just what happened, except I was reading a couple of years ago that scientists had located the machinery that controls the replacement of tissue in the medulla oblongata. I think maybe the lightning did something to my medulla to speed it up. Anyway, I never got any older after that. Physically, that is. I was thirty-three at the time, more or less. We didn’t keep track of ages. I look older now, because the lines in your face are bound to get sort of set after a few thousand years, and because our hair was always gray at the ends. But I can still tie an ordinary Homo sapiens in a knot if I want to.”
“Then you’re . . . you mean to say you’re . . you’re trying to tell me you’re—”
“A Neanderthal man? Homo neanderthalensis? That’s right.”
Matilda Saddler’s hotel room was a bit crowded, with the gnarly man, the frosty Blue, the rustic Jeffcott, Dr. Saddler herself, and Harold McGannon, the historian. This McGannon was a small man, very neat and pink-skinned. He looked more like a New York Central director than a professor. Just now his expression was one of fascination. Dr. Saddler looked full of pride; Professor Jeffcott looked interested but puzzled; Dr. Blue looked bored—he hadn’t wanted to come in the first place. The gnarly man, stretched out in the most comfortable chair and puffing his overgrown pipe, seemed to be enjoying himself.
McGannon was formulating a question. “Well, Mr.—Gaffney? I suppose that’s your name as much as any.”
“You might say so,” said the gnarly man. “My original name meant something like Shining Hawk. But I’ve gone under hundreds of names since then. If you register in a hotel as ‘Shining Hawk,’ it’s apt to attract attention. And I try to avoid that.”
“Why?” asked McGannon.
The gnarly man looked at his audience as one might look at willfully stupid children. “I don’t like trouble. The best way to keep out of trouble is not to attract attention. That’s why I have to pull up stakes and move every ten or fifteen years. People might get curious as to why I never get any older.”
“Pathological liar,” murmured Blue. The words were barely audible, but the gnarly man heard them.
“You’re entitled to your opinion, Dr. Blue,” he said affably. “Dr. Saddler’s doing me a favor, so in return I’m letting you all shoot questions at me. And I’m answering. I don’t give a damn whether you believe me or not.”
McGannon hastily threw in another question. “How is it that you have a birth certificate, as you say you have?”
“Oh, I knew a man named Clarence Gaffney once. He got killed by an automobile, and I took his name.”
“Was there any reason for picking this Irish background?”
“Are you Irish, Dr. McGannon?”
“Not enough to matter.”
“Okay I didn’t want to hurt any feelings. It’s my best bet. There are real Irishmen with upper lips like mine.”
Dr. Saddler broke in. “I meant to ask you, Clarence.” She put a lot of warmth into his name. “There’s an argument as to whether your people interbred with mine, when mine overran Europe at the end of the Mousterian. Some scientists have thought that some modern Europeans, especially along the west coast of Ireland, might have a little Neanderthal blood.”
He grinned slightly. “Well—yes and no. There never was any back in the stone age, as far as I know. But these long-lipped Irish are my fault.”
“How?”
“Believe it or not, but in the last fifty centuries there have been some women of your species that didn’t find me too repulsive. Usually there was no offspring. But in the sixteenth century I went to Ireland to live. They were burning too many people for witchcraft in the rest of Europe to suit me at that time. And there was a woman. The result this time was a flock of hybrids—cute little devils, they were. So the Irishmen who look like me are my descendants.”
“What did happen to your people?” asked McGannon. “Were they killed off?”
The gnarly man shrugged. “Some of them. We weren’t at all warlike. But then the tall ones, as we called them, weren’t either. Some of the tribes of the tall ones looked on us as legitimate prey, but most of them let us severely alone. I guess they were almost as scared of us as we were of them. Savages as primitive as that are really pretty peaceable people. You have to work so hard to keep fed, and there are so few of you, that there’s no object in fighting wars. That comes later, when you get agriculture and livestock, so you have something worth stealing.
“I remember that a hundred years after the tall ones had come, there were still Neanderthalers living in my part of the country. But they died out. I think it was that they lost their ambition. The tall ones were pretty crude, but they were so far ahead of us that our things and our customs seemed silly. Finally we just sat around and lived on the scraps we could beg from the tall ones’ camps. You might say we died of an inferiority complex.”
“What happened to you?” asked McGannon.
“Oh, I was a god among my own people by then, and naturally I represented them in their dealings with the tall ones. I got to know the tall ones pretty well, and they were willing to put up with me after all my own clan were dead. Then in a couple of hundred years they’d forgotten all about my people, and took me for a hunchback or something. I got to be pretty good at flint working, so I could earn my keep. When metal came in, I went into that, and finally into blacksmithing. If you’d put all the horseshoes I’ve made in a pile, they’d—well, you’d have a damn big pile of horseshoes, anyway.”
“Did you . . . ah . . . limp at that time?” asked McGannon.
“Uh-huh. I busted my leg back in the Neolithic. Fell out of a tree, and had to set it myself, because there wasn’t anybody around. Why?”
“Vulcan,” said McGannon softly.
“Vulcan?” repeated the gnarly man. “Wasn’t he a Greek god or something?”
“Yes. He was the lame blacksmith of the gods.”
“You mean you think that maybe somebody got the idea from me? That’s an interesting theory. Little late to check up on it, though.”
Blue leaned forward and said crisply: “Mr. Gaffney, no real Neanderthal man could talk so fluently and entertainingly as you do. That’s shown by the poor development of the frontal lobes of the brain and the attachments of the tongue muscles.”
The gnarly man shrugged again. “You can believe what you like. My own clan considered me pretty smart, and then you’re bound to learn something in fifty thousand years.”
Dr. Saddler beamed. “Tell them about your teeth, Clarence.”
The gnarly man grinned. “They’re false, of course. My own lasted a long time, but they still wore out somewhere back in the Paleolithic. I grew a third set, and they wore out, too. So I had to invent soup.”
“You what?” It was the usually taciturn Jeffcott.
“I had to invent soup, to keep alive. You know, the bark-dish-and-hot-stones method. My gums got pretty tough after a while, but they still weren’t much good for chewing hard stuff. So after a few thousand years I got pretty sick of soup and mushy foods generally. And when metal came in I began experimenting with false teeth. Bone teeth in copper plates. You might say I invented them, too. I tried often to sell them, but they never really caught on until around 1750 A.D. I was living in Paris then, and I built up quite a little business before I moved on.” He pulled the handkerchief out of his breast pocket to wipe his forehead; Blue made a face as the wave of perfume reached him.
“Well, Mr. Shining Hawk,” snapped Blue with a trace of sarcasm, “how do you like our machine age?”
The gnarly man ignored the tone of the question. “It’s not bad. Lots of interesting things happen. The main trouble is the shirts.”
“Shirts?”
“Uh-huh. Just try to buy a shirt with a twenty neck and a twenty-nine sleeve. I have to order ’em special. It’s almost as bad with hats and shoes. I wear an eight and one half hat and a thirteen shoe.” He looked at his watch. “I’ve got to get back to Coney to work.”
McGannon jumped up. “Where can I get in touch with you again, Mr. Gaffney? There’s lots of things I’d like to ask you.”
The gnarly man told him. “I’m free mornings. My working hours are two to midnight on weekdays, with a couple of hours off for dinner. Union rules, you know.”
“You mean there’s a union for you show people?”
“Sure. Only they call it a guild. They think they’re artists, you know. Artists don’t have unions; they have guilds. But it amounts to the same thing.”
Blue and Jeffcott saw the gnarly man and the historian walking slowly toward the subway together. Blue said: “Poor old Mac! Always thought he had sense. Looks like he’s swallowed this Gaffney’s ravings, hook, line, and sinker.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Jeffcott, frowning. “There’s something funny about the business.”
“What?” barked Blue. “Don’t tell me that you believe this story of being alive fifty thousand years? A caveman who uses perfume! Good God!”
“N-no,” said Jeffcott. “Not the fifty thousand part. But I don’t think it’s a simple case of paranoia or plain lying, either. And the perfume’s quite logical, if he were telling the truth.”
“Huh?”
“Body odor. Saddler told us how dogs hate him. He’d have a smell different from ours. We’re so used to ours that we don’t even know we have one, unless somebody goes without a bath for a month. But we might notice his if he didn’t disguise it.”
Blue snorted. “You’ll be believing him yourself in a minute. It’s an obvious glandular case, and he’s made up this story to fit. All that talk about not caring whether we believe him or not is just bluff. Come on, let’s get some lunch. Say, see the way Saddler looked at him every time she said ‘Clarence’? Like a hungry wolf. Wonder what she thinks she’s going to do with him?”
Jeffcott thought. “I can guess. And if he is telling the truth, I think there’s something in Deuteronomy against it.”
The great surgeon made a point of looking like a great surgeon, to pince-nez and Vandyke. He waved the X-ray negatives at the gnarly man, pointing out this and that.
“We’d better take the leg first,” he said. “Suppose we do that next Thursday. When you’ve recovered from that we can tackle the shoulder. It’ll all take time, you know.”
The gnarly man agreed, and shuffled out of the little private hospital to where McGannon awaited him in his car. The gnarly man described the tentative schedule of operations, and mentioned that he had made arrangements to quit his job. “Those two are the main thing,” he said. “I’d like to try professional wrestling again some day, and I can’t unless I get this shoulder fixed so I can raise my left arm over my heard.”
“What happened to it?” asked McGannon.
The gnarly man closed his eyes, thinking. “Let me see. I get things mixed up sometimes. People do when they’re only fifty years old, so you can imagine what it’s like for me.
“In 42 B.C. I was living with the Bituriges in Gaul. You remember that Cæsar shut up Werkinghetorich—Vercingetorix to you—in Alesia, and the confederacy raised an army of relief under Coswollon.”
“Coswollon?”
The gnarly man laughed shortly. “I meant Warcaswollon. Coswollon was a Briton, wasn’t he? I’m always getting those two mixed up.
“Anyhow, I got drafted. That’s all you can call it; I didn’t want to go. It wasn’t exactly my war. But they wanted me because I could pull twice as heavy a bow as anybody else.
“When the final attack on Cæsar’s ring fortifications came, they sent me forward with some other archers to provide a covering fire for their infantry. At least, that was the plan. Actually, I never saw such a hopeless muddle in my life. And before I even got within bowshot, I fell into one of the Romans’ covered pits. I didn’t land on the point of the stake, but I fetched up against the side of it and busted my shoulder. There wasn’t any help, because the Gauls were too busy running away from Cæsar’s German cavalry to bother about wounded men.”
The author of “God, Man, and the Universe” gazed after his departing patient. He spoke to his head assistant: “What do you think of him?”
“I think it’s so,” said the assistant. “I looked over those X rays pretty closely. That skeleton never belonged to a human being. And it has more healed fractures than you’d think possible.”
“Hm-m-m,” said Dunbar. “That’s right, he wouldn’t be human, would he? Hm-m-m. You know, if anything happened to him—”
The assistant grinned understandingly. “Of course, there’s the S.P.C.A.”
“We needn’t worry about them. Hm-m-m.” He thought, you’ve been slipping; nothing big in the papers for a year. But if you published a complete anatomical description of a Neanderthal man—or if you found out why his medulla functions the way it does—Hm-m-m. Of course, it would have to be managed properly—
“Let’s have lunch at the Natural History Museum,” said McGannon. “Some of the people there ought to know you.”
“Okay,” drawled the gnarly man. “Only I’ve still got to get back to Coney afterward. This is my last day. Tomorrow, Pappas and I are going up to see our lawyer about ending our contract. Guy named Robinette. It’s a dirty trick on poor old John, but I warned him at the start that this might happen.”
“I suppose we can come up to interview you while you’re . . . ah . . . convalescing? Fine. Have you ever been to the museum, by the way?”
“Sure,” said the gnarly man. “I get around.”
“What did you . . . ah . . . think of their stuff in the Hall of the Age of Man?”
“Pretty good. There’s a little mistake in one of those big wall paintings. The second horn on the woolly rhinoceros ought to slant forward more. I thought of writing them a letter. But you know how it is. They’d say: ‘Were you there?’ and I’d say, ‘Uh-huh,’ and they’d say, ‘Another nut.’ ”
“How about the pictures and busts of Paleolithic men?”
“Pretty good. But they have some funny ideas. They always show us with skins wrapped around our middles. In summer we didn’t wear skins, and in winter we hung them around our shoulders, where they’d do some good.
“And then they show those tall ones that you call Cro-Magnon men clean-shaven. As I remember, they all had whiskers. What would they shave with?”
“I think,” said McGannon, “that they leave the beards off the busts to . . . ah . . . show the shape of the chins. With the beards they’d all look too much alike.”
“Is that the reason? They might say so on the labels.” The gnarly man rubbed his own chin, such as it was. “I wish beards would come back into style. I look much more human with a beard. I got along fine in the sixteenth century when everybody had whiskers.
“That’s one of the ways I remember when things happened, by the haircuts and whiskers that people had. I remember when a wagon I was driving in Milan lost a wheel and spilled flour bags from hell to breakfast. That must have been in the sixteenth century, before I went to Ireland, because I remember that most of the men in the crowd that collected had beards. Now—wait a minute—maybe that was the fourteenth. There were a lot of beards, then, too.”
“Why, why didn’t you keep a diary?” asked McGannon with a groan of exasperation.
The gnarly man shrugged characteristically. “And pack around six trunks full of paper every time I moved? No, thanks.”
“I . . . ah . . . don’t suppose you could give me the real story of Richard III and the princes in the tower?”
“Why should I? I was just a poor blacksmith, or farmer, or something most of the time. I didn’t go around with the big shots. I gave up all my ideas of ambition a long time before that. I had to, being so different from other people. As far as I can remember, the only real king I ever got a good look at was Charlemagne, when he made a speech in Paris one day. He was just a big, tall man with Santa Claus whiskers and a squeaky voice.”
Next morning McGannon and the gnarly man had a session with Svedberg at the museum. Then McGannon drove Gaffney around to the lawyer’s office, on the third floor of a seedy office building in the West Fifties. James Robinette looked something like a movie actor and something like a chipmunk. He looked at his watch and said to McGannon: “This won’t take long. If you’d like to stick around, I’d be glad to have lunch with you.” The fact was that he was feeling just a trifle queasy about being left with this damn queer client, this circus freak or whatever he was, with his barrel body and his funny slow drawl.
When the business had been completed, and the gnarly man had gone off with his manager to wind up his affairs at Coney, Robinette said: “Whew! I thought he was a half-wit, from his looks. But there was nothing half-witted about the way he went over those clauses. You’d have thought the damn contract was for building a subway system. What is he, anyhow?”
McGannon told him what he knew.
The lawyer’s eyebrows went up. “Do you believe his yarn? Oh, I’ll take tomato juice and filet of sole with tartar sauce—only without the tartar sauce—on the lunch, please.”
“The same for me. Answering your question, Robinette, I do. So does Saddler. So does Svedberg up at the museum. They’re both topnotchers in their respective fields. Saddler and I have interviewed him, and Svedberg’s examined him physically. But it’s just opinion. Fred Blue still swears it’s a hoax or . . . ah . . . some sort of dementia. Neither of us can prove anything.”
“Why not?”
“Well . . . ah . . . how are you going to prove that he was, or was not, alive a hundred years ago?” Take one case: Clarence says he ran a sawmill in Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1906 and ’07, under the name of Michael Shawn. How are you going to find out whether there was a sawmill operator in Fairbanks at that time? And if you did stumble on a record of a Michael Shawn, how would you know whether he and Clarence were the same? There’s not a chance in a thousand that there’d be a photograph or a detailed description that you could check with. And you’d have an awful time trying to find anybody who remembered him at this late date.
“Then, Svedberg poked around Clarence’s face, yesterday, and said that no Homo sapiens ever had a pair of zygomatic arches like that. But when I told Blue that, he offered to produce photographs of a human skull that did. I know what’ll happen. Blue will say that they’re obviously different. So there we’ll be.”
Robinette mused, “He does seem damned intelligent for an ape-man.”
“He’s not an ape-man, really. The Neanderthal race was a separate branch of the human stock: they were more primitive in some ways and more advanced in others than we are. Clarence may be slow, but he usually grinds out the right answer. I imagine that he was . . . ah . . . brilliant, for one of his kind, to begin with. And he’s had the benefit of so much experience. He knows an incredible lot. He knows us; he sees through us and our motives.”
The little pink man puckered up his forehead. “I do hope nothing happens to him. He’s carrying around a lot of priceless information in that big head of his. Simply priceless. Not much about war and politics; he kept clear of those as a matter of self-preservation. But little things, about how people lived and how they thought thousands of years ago. He gets his periods mixed up sometimes, but he gets them straightened out if you give him time.
“I’ll have to get hold of Pell, the linguist. Clarence knows dozens of ancient languages, such as Gothic and Gaulish. I was able to check him on one of them, like vulgar Latin; that was one of the things that convinced me. And there are archeologists and psychologists—
“If only something doesn’t happen to scare him off. We’d never find him. I don’t know. Between a man-crazy female scientist and a publicity-mad surgeon—I wonder how it’ll work out—”
The gnarly man innocently entered the waiting room of Dunbar’s hospital. He, as usual, spotted the most comfortable chair and settled luxuriously into it.
Dunbar stood before him. His keen eyes gleamed with anticipation behind their pince-nez. “There’ll be a wait of about half an hour, Mr. Gaffney,” he said. “We’re all tied up now, you know. I’ll send Mahler in; he’ll see that you have anything you want.” Dunbar’s eyes ran lovingly over the gnarly man’s stumpy frame. What fascinating secrets mightn’t he discover once he got inside it?
Mahler appeared, a healthy-looking youngster. Was there anything Mr. Gaffney would like? The gnarly man paused as usual to let his massive mental machinery grind. A vagrant impulse moved him to ask to see the instruments that were to be used on him.
Mahler had his orders, but this seemed a harmless enough request. He went and returned with a tray full of gleaming steel. “You see,” he said, “these are called scalpels.”
Presently the gnarly man asked: “What’s this?” He picked up a peculiar-looking instrument.
“Oh, that’s the boss’s own invention. For getting at the mid-brain.”
“Mid-brain? What’s that doing here?”
“Why, that’s for getting at your—That must be there by mistake—”
Little lines tightened around the queer hazel eyes. “Yeah?” He remembered the look Dunbar had given him, and Dunbar’s general reputation. “Say, could I use your phone a minute?”
“Why . . . I suppose . . . what do you want to phone for?”
“I want to call my lawyer. Any objections?”
“No, of course not. But there isn’t any phone here.”
“What do you call that?” The gnarly man got up and walked toward the instrument in plain sight on a table. But Mahler was there before him, standing in front of it.
“This one doesn’t work. It’s being fixed.”
“Can’t I try it?”
“No, not till it’s fixed. It doesn’t work, I tell you.”
The gnarly man studied the young physician for a few seconds. “Okay, then I’ll find one that does.” He started for the door.
“Hey, you can’t go out now!” cried Mahler.
“Can’t I? Just watch me!”
“Hey!” It was a full-throated yell. Like magic more men in white coats appeared.
Behind them was the great surgeon. “Be reasonable, Mr. Gaffney,” he said. “There’s no reason why you should go out now, you know. We’ll be ready for you in a little while.”
“Any reason why I shouldn’t?” The gnarly man’s big face swung on his thick neck, and his hazel eyes swiveled. All the exits were blocked. “I’m going.”
“Grab him!” said Dunbar.
The white coats moved. The gnarly man got his hands on the back of a chair. The chair whirled, and became a dissolving blur as the men closed on him. Pieces of chair flew about the room, to fall with the dry, sharp ping of short lengths of wood. When the gnarly man stopped swinging, having only a short piece of the chair back left in each fist, one assistant was out cold. Another leaned whitely against the wall and nursed a broken arm.
“Go on!” shouted Dunbar when he could make himself heard. The white wave closed over the gnarly man, then broke. The gnarly man was on his feet, and held young Mahler by the ankles. He spread his feet and swung the shrieking Mahler like a club, clearing the way to the door. He turned, whirled Mahler around his head like a hammer thrower, and let the now mercifully unconscious body fly. His assailants went down in a yammering tangle.
One was still up. Under Dunbar’s urging he sprang after the gnarly man. The latter had gotten his stick out of the umbrella stand in the vestibule. The knobby upper end went whoosh past the assistant’s nose. The assistant jumped back and fell over one of the casualties. The front door slammed, and there was a deep roar of “Taxi!”
“Come on!” shrieked Dunbar. “Get the ambulance out!”
James Robinette was sitting in his office, thinking the thoughts that lawyers do in moments of relaxation, when there was a pounding of large feet in the corridor, a startled protest from Miss Spevak in the outer office, and the strange client of the day before was at Robinette’s desk, breathing hard.
“I’m Gaffney,” he growled between gasps. “Remember me? I think they followed me down here. They’ll be up any minute. I want your help.”
“They? Who’s they?” Robinette winced at the impact of that damn perfume.
The gnarly man launched into his misfortunes, He was going well when there were more protests from Miss Spevak, and Dr. Dunbar and four assistants burst into the office.
“He’s ours,” said Dunbar, his glasses agleam.
“He’s an ape-man,” said the assistant with the black eye.
“He’s a dangerous lunatic,” said the assistant with the cut lip.
“We’ve come to take him away,” said the assistant with the torn coat.
The gnarly man spread his feet and gripped his stick like a baseball bat by the small end.
Robinette opened a desk drawer and got out a large pistol. “One move toward him and I’ll use this. The use of extreme violence is justified to prevent commission of a felony, to wit: kidnapping.”
The five men backed up a little. Dunbar said: “This isn’t kidnapping. You can only kidnap a person, you know. He isn’t a human being, and I can prove it.”
The assistant with the black eye snickered. “If he wants protection, he better see a game warden instead of a lawyer.”
“Maybe that’s what you think,” said Robinette. “You aren’t a lawyer. According to the law, he’s human. Even corporations, idiots, and unborn children are legally persons, and he’s a damned sight more human they they are.”
“Then he’s a dangerous lunatic,” said Dunbar.
“Yeah? Where’s your commitment order? The only persons who can apply for one are: (a) close relatives and (b) public officials charged with the maintenance of order. You’re neither.”
Dunbar continued stubbornly: “He ran amuck in my hospital and nearly killed a couple of my men, you know. I guess that gives us some rights.”
“Sure,” said Robinette. “You can step down to the nearest station and swear out a warrant.” He turned to the gnarly man. “Shall we throw the book at ’em. Gaffney?”
“I’m all right,” said that individual, his speech returning to its normal slowness. “I just want to make sure these guys don’t pester me any more.”
“Okay Now listen, Dunbar. One hostile move out of you and we’ll have a warrant out for you for false arrest, assault and battery, attempted kidnapping, criminal conspiracy, and disorderly conduct. And we’ll slap on a civil suit for damages for sundry torts, to wit: assault, deprivation of civil rights, placing in jeopardy of life and limb, menace, and a few more I may think of later.”
“You’ll never make that stick,” snarled Dunbar. “We have all the witnesses.”
“Yeah? And wouldn’t the great Evan Dunbar look sweet defending such actions? Some of the ladies who gush over your books might suspect that maybe you weren’t such a damn knight in shining armor. We can make a prize monkey of you, and you know it.”
“You’re destroying the possibility of a great scientific discovery, you know, Robinette.”
“To hell with that. My duty is to protect my client. Now beat it, all of you, before I call a cop.” His left hand moved suggestively to the telephone.
Dunbar grasped at a last straw. “Hm-m-m. Have you got a permit for that gun?”
“Damn right. Want to see it?”
Dunbar sighed. “Never mind. You would have.” His greatest opportunity for fame was slipping out of his fingers. He drooped toward the door.
The gnarly man spoke up. “If you don’t mind, Dr. Dunbar, I left my hat at your place. I wish you’d send it to Mr. Robinette here. I have a hard time getting hats to fit me.”
Dunbar looked at him silently and left with his cohorts.
The gnarly man was giving the lawyer further details when the telephone rang. Robinette answered: “Yes. . . . Saddler? Yes, he’s here. . . . Your Dr. Dunbar was going to murder him so he could dissect him. . . . okay.” He turned to the gnarly man. “Your friend Dr. Saddler is looking for you. She’s on her way up here.”
“Zounds!” said Gaffney. “I’m going.”
“Don’t you want to see her? She was phoning from around the corner. If you go out now you’ll run into her. How did she knew where to call?”
“I gave her your number. I suppose she called the hospital and my boardinghouse, and tried you as a last resort. This door goes into the hall, doesn’t it? Well, when she comes in the regular door I’m going out this one. And I don’t want you saying where I’ve gone. It’s nice to have known you, Mr. Robinette.”
“Why? What’s the matter? You’re not going to run out now, are you? Dunbar’s harmless, and you’ve got friends. I’m your friend.”
“You’re durn tootin’ I’m going to run out. There’s too much trouble. I’ve kept alive all these centuries by staying away from trouble. I let down my guard with Dr. Saddler, and went to the surgeon she recommended. First he plots to take me apart to see what makes me tick. If that brain instrument hadn’t made me suspicious, I’d have been on my way to the alcohol jars by now. Then there’s a fight, and it’s just pure luck I didn’t kill a couple of those interns, or whatever they are, and get sent up for manslaughter. Now Matilda’s after me with a more-than-friendly interest.
I know what it means when a woman looks at you that way and calls you ‘dear.’ I wouldn’t mind if she weren’t a prominent person of the kind that’s always in some sort of garboil. That would mean more trouble, sooner or later. You don’t suppose I like trouble, do you?”
“But look here, Gaffney, you’re getting steamed up over a lot of damn—”
“Ssst!” The gnarly man took his stick and tiptoed over to the private entrance. As Dr. Saddler’s clear voice sounded in the outer office, he sneaked out. He was closing the door behind him when the scientist entered the inner office.
Matilda Saddler was a quick thinker. Robinette hardly had time to open his mouth when she flung herself at and through the private door with a cry of “Clarence!”
Robinette heard the clatter of feet on the stairs. Neither the pursued nor the pursuer had waited for the creaky elevator. Looking out the window, he saw Gaffney leap into a taxi. Matilda Saddler sprinted after the cab, calling: “Clarence! Come back!” But the traffic was light and the chase correspondingly hopeless.
They did hear from the gnarly man once more. Three months later Robinette got a letter whose envelope contained, to his vast astonishment, ten ten-dollar bills. The single sheet was typed, even to the signature.
DEAR MR. ROBINETTE:
I do not know what your regular fees are, but I hope that the inclosed will cover your services to me of last June.
Since leaving New York I have had several jobs. I pushed a hack—as we say—in Chicago, and I tried out as pitcher on a bush league baseball team. Once I made my living by knocking over rabbits and things with stones, and I can still throw fairly well. Nor am I bad at swinging a club, such as a baseball bat. But my lameness makes me too slow for a baseball career, and it will be some time before I try any remedial operations again.
I now have a job whose nature I cannot disclose because I do not wish to be traced. You need pay no attention to the postmark; I am not living in Kansas City, but had a friend post this letter there.
Ambition would be foolish for one in my peculiar position. I am satisfied with a job that furnishes me with the essentials, and allows me to go to an occasional movie, and a few friends with whom I can drink beer and talk.
I was sorry to leave New York without saying good-by to Dr. Harold McGannon, who treated me very nicely. I wish you would explain to him why I had to leave as I did. You can get in touch with him through Columbia University.
If Dunbar sent you my hat as I requested, pleased mail it to me: General Delivery, Kansas City, Mo. My friend will pick it up. There is not a hat store in this town where I live that can fit me. With best wishes, I remain,
Yours sincerely,
SHINING HAWK
Alias CLARENCE ALOYSIUS GAFFNEY
