Land of Unreason (9 page)

            Barber had jabbed at him
with the point of the wand, but before it made contact with the comfortable
belly that instrument gave off a long streak of blue fire. It touched
Three-eyes and ran all over him, leaving him shining with a phosphorescent
light. The mouth flew open and the creature gasped:

            "All right, I'll tell
you. Take that thing away. I'm an elemental force. You can't get away from me
till you propose a problem for which I can't find a logical solution ... But I
don't think you can do that," he added as Barber lowered the wand.
"Mortals lack a sense of process." A smile of self-satisfaction
spread across the inverted countenance. "Don't try Achilles and the
tortoise on me; I know that one."

            Barber fingered his chin in
puzzlement, considering the question. There was no reaction from his newly
developed instinct for lies; presumably this singular creature was perfectly
right when he said he would have to be outargued. Yet how to do that? ... His
fingers revealed a pronounced stubble of beard, far more than he should have
grown in two nights and a day. This was presumably another characteristic of
Fairyland—that it made his whiskers grow unreasonably. It certainly needed the
attention of either a barber or a Barber with a razor, which reminded him of
being called
ad nauseam,
"The Barber of Seville."

            Three-eyes, who had shut all
of them, opened one. "I thought so," he remarked. "Better give
it up."

            Barber of Seville! That was
it—Bertrand. Russell's paradox of the Spanish barber.

            "By no means," he
said. "Listen: suppose there's a village in Spain which nobody enters or
leaves. In this village there is one barber, male and clean-shaven. If this
barber shaves every man in the village who does
not
shave himself; if he
does
not
shave any man in the village who does shave himself: who shaves
the barber?"

            "I should have
mentioned that mortals who try to stick me and fail generally turn into
parasites of some kind," said the creature. "Want to withdraw the
question?"

            "I'll take my
chances," said Barber, gripping the wand firmly. It ought to be some
protection.

            "All right then."
The eyes closed. "Let's see—if he does shave himself—by Hecate, then he
doesn't—and if he doesn't, he does—"

            Barber turned, shaken with
inward amusement. As he did so, the now-declining moon threw a new shadow along
the hedge at the right. There was a narrow gap in it that-he had not noticed
before, and the brighter green of the grass in that direction showed a path led
through it. He turned into it; a long graceful curve swept away before him, but
he had not followed it for more than twenty steps before a vivid blue flash
from the direction of the crossroad paled the moon-glow.
Boom!
The shock
of an explosion almost took him off his feet.

            When his eyes recovered from
the glare, he walked quickly back to the gap in the hedge. Three-eyes had
vanished.

            Barber turned back, and saw
he was going down a gentle declivity toward a structure that resembled a large
metal hatbox. It had low windows all round, and a faint purring, as of
machinery, came from within. In front of it, a bald and burly brown elf was
squatted on the grass. His left hand held open the pages of a book. An
intricate system of flying trusses composed of small branches had been rigged
to one of the potted trees just beside him to hold a cage containing half a
dozen fireflies. Presumably they were to furnish light for his reading, but the
solid bottom to the cage prevented this from being altogether a success. The
elf did not appear to mind. His lips were moving rapidly as he followed the
text, and with his other hand he was busily writing something on several sheets
of paper, without noticing that his pen had run dry and was leaving no marks
whatever.

            "Pardon me," said
Barber. "Is your name Jib, by any chance?"

            "Yes, yes," said
the elf. "What can I do for you? Quick, now; I'm writing down my thoughts
about this book. I believe it will be my most important work."

            "Oh, I'm sorry to
interrupt you. Do you know the way to the Kobold Hills?"

            "No, no, not now. I
used to, but I haven't kept up with athletics recently. I have so much to do in
directing the currents of intellectual opinion. You really must read my
commentary on this book. It's about the theory of inverse value."

            "Would you mind
stepping along to introduce me to a fellow with a red sash who doesn't talk to
strangers?"

            "Yes, yes, surely. Very
glad to. The author's theory is sound, but he makes several slight mistakes in
arriving at the rationale of inverse values, with the result that he reaches
the correct result by the wrong route. My commentary will clarify the whole
matter."

            "What whole
matter?"

            "Why, the theory of
inverse values," said the elf, tucking the volume under his arm and
joining Barber in the path. "We can prove that nothing has any
value."

            "Huh?"

            "Certainly. Obviously
two oranges are worth twice as much as one orange."

            "I suppose so."

            "And one is worth half
as much as two. That is, value is proportionate to quantity."

            There seemed nothing to do
but humor this helpful but argumentative sprite. "I see," said
Barber.

            "But as quantity
approaches infinity, value becomes inverted. A thousand cubic feet of air has
no value. The amount of air is, practically speaking, infinite. But if the
amount of oranges in Fairyland were infinite? Suppose that, I say, suppose
it."

            "I am supposing it.
What then?"

            "Well, an orange is a
fruit. You add to the amount of oranges in existence that of lemons, pomegranates,
quinces, apples, et cetera, all the fruits that have a supposititious value.
The result is a total practically infinite, as in the case of air. Therefore,
all these fruits taken together must have an inverse value, or none at all, as
in the case of air. And if the total sum has no value, the individual
fractions—single oranges, for instance—have no value likewise ... The last part
is my commentary."

            "Beg pardon," said
Barber, "but isn't there a flaw in your reasoning?"

            "Not at all, not at
all, my dear fellow. Mechanically perfect. Cured my orbulina. Here's Cyril
now." They had climbed out of the declivity, and Barber saw the same
fairy, whacking away and muttering, "Forty-four, eighteen." Evidently
they were on the opposite side of his clearing than Barber had approached
before; he could see the tall thorn hedges beyond.

            "What's your
name?" demanded Jib. "Barber? I say, Cyril! I want you to meet my old
friend Barber."

            "Right-ho," said
the tweedy native, with energetic cordiality. "Delighted, charmed. How can
I help you?"

            Barber repeated the
now-wearisome question.

            "Oh, surely," said
Cyril. "Only too glad. Keep right along this path, but—let's see, this is
Monday, what? Then you have to take the left fork at the first turning. Carry
right on till you reach
the
forest. You'll have to ask your way after
you get into it, I'm afraid. The shapings do things to the forest paths. Look
here, do you want me to accompany you?"

            "It might be helpful,
but aren't you busy?"

            "Well, rather. I'm just
on the edge of setting a new record. But for a friend of old Jib's ..."

            "Oh, I wouldn't think
of bothering you, then. What do you mean by
the
forest?"

            "There are forests and
forests. This is
the
forest. Cheerio, then."

            He shook hands, and turned
to thumping at the sand again. Jib squatted down with his book on his knees,
and began to go through the motions of writing, oblivious of the fact that he
had left both the inkless pen and his paper behind.

-

            Meandering ahead the path
took a slight downward slope and the hedges opened out to reveal a new and
monotonous succession of flower beds. To Barber, trying to gain some sense of
the geography of the place for a homeward journey he supposed he would have to
make in time, it seemed that he was going in exactly the same direction as that
which had carried him past Cyril and back to the fork where Three-eyes held
forth. He cursed a faulty sense of orientation and craned his neck to catch a
glimpse of the thorn hedges, but a grove of impossible potted elms cut them
off, if, indeed, they were there at all. Carry on.

            There were long shadows
across the path that hinted of a setting moon. Barber was reminded that he had
been walking all night without food. He was not hungry yet, for that matter, but
if he were going to eat at all it had better be now. When Oberon's royal
chamberlain had handed him one of the ever-filled foodbags carried by Fairyland
travelers, it was with the warning that he had better use it before sunrise. A
single shaft of sunlight striking the thing was liable to cause a kind of minor
shaping. "I mind me well," the chamberlain added in a low voice,
"of the bag our gracious lady and Resplendency took on her journey to the
Marshes of Meraa. 'Tis no disrespect to mark that she's of careless habit; let
the dawn beams on't. Hoi The thing physicked her preciously with a fine
reducing diet—carrots uncooked, salads, and wee brown biscuits." Barber
had no difficulty in imagining Titania faced with a situation like that; the
explosion would—make the bombing of Bradford look weak. The bombing which
seemed as remote now as the discovery of the North Pole.

            He brushed the crumbs from
his lap and stood up. The shadows had lengthened and run together as he ate,
the moon was a cooky with a piece bitten out, at the very edge of the horizon.
There was still no sign of the sun that had driven away the previous night's
moon; perhaps even the ephemerides of Fairyland did not run on schedule. In the
weakened light the path was harder to trace. He strained forward to follow
it... and was swallowed in a dark as intense as though he had suddenly gone
blind.

            Something slightly chilly
brushed past his face from overhead, and he felt a rush of the most horrible
fear. To stand there in dark worse than a London blackout and be struck at from
above! Something else tapped him gently on one shoulder, like a falling leaf or
an insect, and his mind began to fill with pictures of giant winged spiders. He
brushed at the shoulder—nothing, and the something touched his leg. All around
were sounds and soft whisperings. Fred Barber jumped and would have run—but
where? in that maze of hedges and unknown traps. He would have given anything,
done anything, to be back at the Adelphi with the air-raid alarm screaming and
the Heinkels coming over. This was worse than being bombed, worse than lying in
the hospital with a head wound, wondering if you were going nuts, worse than—

            Without any preliminary
graying of the sky a big red sun jumped up and flooded the whole queer, smiling
landscape with light. Another touch came on Barber's hand; he looked down and
saw it damp with a big drop of simple rain, and between him and the sun were
the slanting silvery lines of a shower.

            Barber laughed, too happy
with relief to feel shame, and looked up. There was not a cloud in the sky. The
rain was coming out of nowhere, faster now, and making a gorgeous triple
rainbow against the coming day. He would be soaked—but what of it? The path
curved clear before him and he stepped out along it, twirling the wand. When it
reached the top of its arc, the rain, though coming faster than ever, didn't
seem to strike him. He experimented a little, and discovered that when he held
the wand point up it deflected the rain from a circle quite big enough to keep
him dry. A practical piece of magic; but he was getting tired, and the rather
heavy meal he had taken from the chamberlain's bag made him sleepy.