Damon Knight - Orbit 14

“I’ll have to get hold of that Licorice Man,” C. H. A. Johnson told himself. “I’d better get another big jug of it. That’ll come to seventy-one cents, taking the exemption for excise tax. I’ll have to find a way to afford it.”

Deprived of elixir, a horse,

A pitch, a Pres, a lassie:

And three erupted crass and coarse,

And one was kind of classy.

-Boomer Flats Ballads

There would have to be confrontation. And just how does one go about arranging a confrontation with a vagabond peddler like the Licorice Man who has no regular residence except the misty, muddy, half-mythical place named Boomer Flats?

One uses intuition; one uses deduction; one uses that other thought process whose name is at the moment forgotten. And one does not eschew luck. (Is eschew a real word? It sure does sound funny, and it sure does look funny.)

Young Cy Slocum had pitched in Dallas the day before, and he had lost three to nothing. Never before in his young career had he allowed three runs in one game. He had tired. And new gray hairs had been peppering his youthful head for several days now. He heeded another jug of the Royal Licorice and he needed it quickly. He got permission to drive up to his ranch in the gypsum hills. He borrowed a car and drove. He stopped at his ranch only an hour or so. Then he drove at random. His receptors were open to any kind of signal.

Half a dozen miles from his own ranch, on the fringe of the Big Bluestem Country, by the side of a little country road where the gypsum begins to merge with honest limestone, Slocum saw an angry young colt who seemed not quite so young as he should be. This colt was widely known, and his name was Red Licorice.

With the colt was his owner, a man whom Slocum had known casually for a dozen years.

“Are we looking for the same thing, Cy?” the owner asked.

“I think so,” said the young, but not quite so young as he should have been, Cy Slocum.

“Red got a package from that devilish old codger,” the colt owner said. “It was full of either pills or dung-beetle rollings. Red took a few of them. They didn’t have the same restoring effect on him as the original elixir had. They had an effect quite otherwise, unique, and unpleasant. I can’t stand a horse when he gets too smart.”

Red Licorice snorted his contempt for his owner, for the old codger who had sent him either pills or dung-beetle rollings, and for the woozy world itself.

Eleven new, beautiful, turreted, bulletproof cars approached in caravan. They stopped by the pitcher, the colt owner, and the angry young colt. Out of the cars boiled Presidential candidate Clayborne Hiram Andrew Johnson, a speechwriter, a lawyer who was also bodyguard, a chauffeur, and twenty-one security men.

“Disperse, all of you!” the head security man ordered. “We are commandeering this area. An important meeting will take place here soon.”

“I think so too,” the colt owner said, “but I’ll not be commandeered into or out of anything.”

“You are standing in a public roadway,” that head security man said. “And the road was built with mixed funds that included five percent Federal monies. Therefore, we as Federal men can commandeer this region.”

The colt owner took one step backward.

“I’m on my own land now,” he said. “Let’s see you commandeer me.”

“It is all right,” Candidate C. H. A. Johnson said. “I know the colt and both the men. All three are solid citizens.”

“Careful, careful,” the speechwriter said. “You’ll put your foot in it some way.” (Johnson wasn’t supposed even to say good morning unless he read it off a piece of paper handed to him by his speechwriter.)

A golden-haired young, or almost young, lady came over the hill in a Dusenberg car. The Dusenberg also was almost young, but it had developed a bad cough. It stopped and died there.

“So, that’s the way it is,” said the almost-young lady. “A sharp young pitcher (but not quite as sharp as he was for a while) who is his own grandfather; a rock-headed colt who’s had to run on his father’s hoofs; a Presidential candidate trying to stand out of his great-uncle’s shadow, but those shadows grow longer when evening comes and they will swallow a man. Who are we kidding? We are all second-timers. We are all in the same barkentine. But the Licorice Man will be along in a moment. I heard the hoofbeats of the horse Peegosh: the hoofs never quite touch the road, you know.”

And the Licorice Man, the medicine wagon, and the horse Peegosh had arrived suddenly in clattering silence (the clatter was on a different plane: these weren’t normal people, not the Licorice Man, not the wagon, not the horse Peegosh).

“Quickly, quickly, a large jug,” said Candidate Johnson. “That will be seventy-one cents, figuring the excise-tax exemption.”

“Careful, careful,” the speechwriter said. “You’ll put your foot in it some way.” The speechwriter rapidly wrote out something on a sheet of paper and handed it to Candidate Johnson to read.

“Quickly, quickly, a large jug,” Candidate Johnson read dutifully. “That will be seventy-one cents, figuring the excise-tax exemption.”

“My equine associate would like a dollar jug of the elixir this time,” the colt owner said. “I’m afraid that the effect of the fifty-cent jug has worn a little thin.”

“I’ll have to have a stock of it to last me through the season,” Pitcher Cy Slocum said. “And I’ll have to have a firm guarantee of sufficient supply every springtime. You let me run short, Licorice. They tagged me for seven hits yesterday, and that’s something that never happens.”

“I’m not sure that I want any more for myself,” said Flambeau La Flesche. She was the golden-haired almost-young lady. “If I ever do want it and want it bad enough, I could probably make it myself. After all, I know the one thing that makes a mud-goose cry. I never did use that story, Licorice. Really, it was a little too raw to tell.

“But Dusie here needs a jug now. This poor car has been suffering all sorts of ailments for the last several days.”

“No, you’d not be able to make it yourself, Flambeau,” the Licorice Man said. “Licorice can mean so many different things. I alone use the genuine licorice, and I alone know which it is. Do you believe it is the lykyrrhiza or wolf-root? Or that it is the glykyr-rhiza or sweet-root? Try them and see.”

“Enough of this,” said Cy Slocum the pitcher. “You have customers waiting while you jabber. A large dollar jug, please, and enough more to carry me through the season.”

“There’s only one jug of it left,” said the Licorice Man, “and I’in going to pour it into the car Dusie. There won’t be any more of it. I’m going on to other things.”

“Aw, horse hokey!” snorted the horse Red Licorice.

“There’s got to be more of it. Say, how come that horse can talk?” Cy Slocum asked in angry puzzlement.

“I sent him some smart pills,” the Licorice Man said. “That’s what I’m working on now. Anyone else want to try some smart pills?”

“No, I sure don’t. I’m plenty smart now,” Cy said emphatically. “I want the elixir!”

“Smart pills are the one thing I don’t need,” declared Candidate Johnson. “I’ve got more smart than anyone I’ve ever seen. I want some of the youth elixir. I want all of it!”

“Would smart pills make me smart enough to do that tough scene in The World Under Louisiana Haystack?” little golden-head asked.

“No, Flambeau. The World Under Louisiana Haystack should not be finished. Accolade Revisited shouldn’t have been finished either, you know, and it was. Too bad. Here, try these. One is a smart pill. The other is a dung-beetle rolling. Take one.”