"I don't remember seeing this shack a few minutes ago," Boomer said to the man standing in front of the last shanty on the line.
"Oh, I just made it," the man said.
Weathered boards, rusty nails and he had just made it.
"Why didn't you ah make a decent building while you were at it?" Slick asked.
"This is more inconspicuous," the man said. "Who notices when an old building appears suddenly? We're new here and want to feel our way in before we attract attention. Now I'm trying to figure out what to make. Do you think there is a market for a luxury automobile to sell for a hundred dollars? I suspect I would have to respect the local religious feeling when I make them though."
"What is that?" Slick asked.
"Ancestor worship. The old gas tank and fuel system still carried as vestiges after natural power is available. Oh, well, I'll put them in. I'll have one done in about three minutes if you want to wait."
"No, I've already got a car," Slick said. "Let's go, Jim."
That was the last shanty in the block, so they turned back.
"I was just wondering what was down in this block where nobody ever goes," Slick said. "There's a lot of odd corners in our town if you look them out."
"There are some queer guys in the shanties that were here before this bunch," Boomer said. "Some of them used to come up to the Red Rooster to drink. One of them could gobble like a turkey. One of them could roll one eye in one direction and the other eye the other way. They shoveled hulls at the cottonseed oil float before it burned down."
They went by the public stenographer shack again.
"No kidding, honey, how do you type without a typewriter?" Slick asked.
"Typewriter is too slow," the girl said.
"I asked how, not why," Slick said.
"I know. Is it not nifty the way I turn away a phrase? I think I will have a big oak tree growing in front of my shop tomorrow for shade. Either of you nice men have an acorn in your pocket?"
"Ah no. How do you really do the typing, girl?"
"You promise you won't tell anybody."
"I promise."
"I make the marks with my tongue," the girl said.
They started slowly on up the block.
"Hey, how do you make the carbon copies?" Jim Boomer called back.
"With my other tongue," the girl said.
There was another forty-foot trailer loading out of the first shanty in the block. It was bundles of half-inch plumbers' pipe coming out of the chute in twenty-foot lengths. Twenty-foot rigid pipe out of a seven-foot shed.
"I wonder how he can sell trailer-loads of such stuff out of a little shack like that," Slick puzzled, still not satisfied.
"Like the girl says, he cuts prices," Boomer said. "Let's go over to the Red Rooster and see if there's anything going on. There always were a lot of funny people in that block."
THE GNARLY MAN
by L. Sprague de Camp
Chosen by Terry Pratchett
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
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 pičce 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 apeman 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.