Damon Knight - Orbit 14

Isn’t it a lovely world?

And so it is. It is.

For reasonable people.

You too can live forever. The formula is simple— if you know which is the true licorice.

From catfish crop and mud-goose tears

And Cimmaron mud river:

For fifty cents a thousand years, And for a buck for-iver.

-Boomer Flats Ballads

Black Red had been sixteen years at stud. This was after a strict colthood and eight years of competitive horse-racing. Now he had become a very slow and undependable stud. He was one old horse.

He gnawed a clump of prickly pear. He had been a stupid and rock-headed horse from his youth, and now that his eyes were shot he would eat anything. His owner chewed on a length of big bluestem grass and contemplated him. It was too bad to sell, for nine dollars for cat meat, a horse that had earned five million dollars. But what else could be done with the old animal?

But Black Red smelled a brother horse, an old flyer like himself, and he raised his head. So did the owner, and he saw in the distance a rare contraption: an ancient horse pulling an ancient medicine wagon that had once known gay paint. And the driver was more than ancient; he was timeless.

Then the contraption had bridged the distance too quickly to be believed, and it came to a halt in that grassy lane across the rail fence from Black Red and his owner.

“I, sir,” said the driver of the contraption, “am selling Royal Licorice, the concoction that will halt and reverse aging in any creature. Buy it and use it, and you can have for your horse restored youth and great length of days. I sell it for fifty cents a small jug and a dollar a large.”

“Why don’t you use it yourself, old man?” the owner of Black Red asked.

“I do. Would you believe that I am more than a thousand years old?”

“No, I wouldn’t, but you look as if you were. And your own horse?”

“Would you believe that he also is more than a thousand years old? Why do you hesitate? I don’t make a lot of this, and I offer it only by chance as I go. It’s by your happy chance that I’ve met you here today, sir.”

Black Red neighed hopefully.

“See,” said the peddling man. “He wants it. Your horse is smarter than yourself, sir.”

“Not at all. Some of my horses may be, but Black Red is a rockhead. In his own day he made his way by his great speed and strength. He’d never have made it by his wits.”

Black Red reached a very long neck through the rail fence, grasped the small jug of Royal Licorice in his uneven teeth, and then swallowed the whole thing in one brave, horsy gulp.

“Will it hurt him, do you think?” the owner asked. “It won’t matter really, for he’s about at the end of his line. But I like the Roman-nosed fool, and I’d not have him suffer a choking death.”

“It will hurt him not at all,” the timeless peddling man said. “The clay of the jug dissolves at once when it reaches the stomach. Watch now! The change is startling if you’ve never seen it before. You have the finest and fastest colt in the world here, sir. Watch.”

Black Red gave a great snort, a youthful snort. He took off through the short cropped bluestem with a clatter of hoofs. He ran, and he changed. His was a great coltish gallop, and he now had the movements and appearance of a fine colt. When he was a half-mile off, he half turned as if going into the backstretch. He stretched and he ran, and the owner was seized with the shouting madness. That man knew speed when he saw it, real speed, winning speed. And the big colt was growing more glossy and more beautifully muscled by the second. He was dark cherry color. He was heroically swift.

“You owe me fifty cents for the small jug he took,” the peddler said.

“Yes, here,” said the owner. “I don’t believe it, but my eyes have never lied to me before. Where can I find you if I want some more of it?”

“Oh, I’ll be around before he needs it again.”

“What’s your name, old fellow? Or should I say thousand-year-young fellow?”

“They call me the Licorice Man.”

Old Cyrus Slocum was throwing rocks at a fencepost. This was up in the gypsum hills where old Cy had his ranch. It wasn’t much of a ranch, but the rocky, bitter gypsum of it was in accord with the man himself.

Slocum wasn’t really unhappy. He had money; he had his stingy land (as stingy as he used to be with a bingle); he had his memories; he had his good right arm, a little mellow now, it’s true; he had a few cattle.

Cy Slocum (you may not remember it about him if you are young, young for the first time) had been about the greatest baseball pitcher ever. But the end of his. career had been more than forty years before. He had been a six-hundred-game winner. He had once pitched ninety-nine consecutive scoreless innings; he had maintained an earned-run average of .92 over a five-year period. He had had it all.

And even now, as an old man, Slocum was hitting that fencepost resoundingly. He would angle off a knee-high slider that just caught a bit of the post. He would hit it dead center with a shoulder-high fast rock. And when he threw his change-up, that fencepost seemed to lean weakly toward him in frustration.

“I could have been halfway to second, and you skylarking there on the mound,” came a voice, friendly but full of timeless authority. “What? Do you no longer use the eyes in the back of your head?”

“I remember you from somewhere,” Slocum said as he turned to see the ancient man with the venerable horse and medicine wagon. How could it have slipped up on him when it had to clatter up that rough and rocky gypsum road?

“It was the year you first tried out with the St. Louis Browns,” the timeless man said, “and what antiquarian remembers the old Browns now? You ran athwart a barnstorming bunch of bearded men.”

“The House of David!” said Slocum with friendly awe in his voice. “Now they were ball players, and they beat many of the major-league teams. But we took them three to nothing that afternoon. I two-hit them.”

“It’s another and more outsized bunch of bearded blokes that I meant,” said the ancient traveler.

“Now you open an angry wound,” Slocum almost moaned. “That afternoon-mare of a game has stuck in my undermind for more than half a century. They called themselves the Flats, I believe it was. Odd name, odd bunch. They had half a dozen real giants; must have been over eight feet tall, some of them. The Flats, the Boomer Flats they called themselves.”

“Yes, we had some pretty good-sized fellows on our team,” the traveling man said. “They were the Uncles, the Old Bachelors, the Bashful and Silent Ones.”

“You’d unwind pretty long,” Slocum said, “but not that long.”

“I’m six six,” said the traveler. “I was a little taller then but I’m not one of the Uncles. I’m the little shrimp who played third base.”

“Eighteen runs they tagged me for in that first inning,” Slocum remembered blackly, “and the man kept me in there and let me suffer.”

“It was fortuitous,” said the traveler. “You made every mistake that a young pitcher could make. But most of them you never made again. ’Twas luck you met us. Slocum, how would you like to have your arm back again, at its strongest, and at the same time keep your wits at their wisest? How would you like your youth back without losing a drop of your later-acquired wisdom and savvy?”

“Wouldn’t that be something, fellow? Who are you?”

“I’m the Licorice Man. This horse here is named Peegosh. He’s better than my regular horse. He belongs to the Comet: but the Comet isn’t traveling this year, and Peegosh wanted to amble the country with me a bit. What I sell is Royal Licorice: fifty cents a small jug, a dollar a large.”