Haunter of Moons, Traitors of Tarshish, and The Giant Ratchet of Sumatra (1984)
Oh hang the cliffs with corpses nailed, For revel and for banger. Our enemies are here impaled In Cliff-and-Mountain-Hanger "Song of the Traitors of Tarshish"
“We here are seven moral buzzards, yes. And we are up against an evil so enormous that only we evils can even see it.”
Haunter of Moons and The Giant Ratchet of Sumatra were round-robin collaborations in which members of Oklahoma Science Fiction Writers (OkSFW) took turns continuing a story. OkSFW began in 1977, when C. J. Cherryh wrote to twenty-four people in Oklahoma proposing a group for writers interested in science fiction. Later that year, Stephen J. Kimmel proposed a Tulsa section, the branch that survives today. Both stories include contributions from Kimmel and Lafferty. In each, Lafferty wrote the second chapter, following an opening by Cherryh and Kimmel in Haunter of Moons and one by Sharon Scott in The Giant Ratchet of Sumatra. Given how unpredictable he is, Lafferty is an ideal choice for the second chapter, where someone has to complicate what has already been set in motion.
In the fragmentary Traitors of Tarshish, Lafferty took the lead and wrote the first chapter. Regina Raffles comes to the shabby H and H Detective Agency because she believes she has been turned into an involuntary eavesdropper on the mysterious Tarshishi enclave: someone has planted a probe in her mind that can tap the information she receives. As far as I know, only a few pages survive.
Haunter of Moons opens with Paul Marrion and Marj Brent investigating a communications failure at a lunar mining station. Outside, they encounter an ancient intelligence that feeds on dreams and calls them to follow it. In Lafferty’s second chapter, they enter the station and find two dead Russians who resemble them, along with strange beings attached to the personnel. These beings guard a hidden door through which certain travelers must pass to get from one room on Earth to an adjacent room. Their spokesman, the Warden, poses riddles, then condemns Paul and Marj for failing to answer. The extract ends with him controlling Marj’s hand and threatening to make her shoot herself and then Paul.
The Giant Ratchet of Sumatra is a seven-chapter group-writing exercise that begins with Sharon Scott’s pulp-adventure spoof. Harmony Smith, a Greenstreet Fan Company repairman, is mistaken for a secret agent and caught in a conspiracy to rearrange continents and restore a submerged empire. In Lafferty’s chapter, he gains an ally in Katak, a giant frog, and discovers that Greenstreet manufactured the threatening Ratchet. Successive writers carry him through rival conspiracies, mechanical death traps, and an attempted sacrifice. Harmony finally reveals that he has adjusted the Ratchet to expend its energy in smaller geological disturbances and protect him when threatened. The ending undercuts his success: Rollo Hatch has bought control of Greenstreet, and Myrna, with whom Harmony has become involved, leaves with Hatch, her husband. Still a Greenstreet repairman, Harmony departs intending to drown his sorrows.
Both texts will be of little interest to anyone who isn’t interested in all things Lafferty, but his contributions are worth a closer look. In Haunter of Moons, he directs the opening’s visionary encounter into his own neighborhood of black comedy. Misunderstanding rules the day. The humans become the haunts instead of the aliens; their lunar station is somebody else’s attic. Their pioneering expedition has intruded into an ancient arrangement whose rules they do not understand. The reversal gives us one of the best lines in the chapter:
“You are the haunts in our attic. You are the bats in our belfry.”
The Warden is very much a Lafferty creation. He mishandles a cigar, cannot solve his own Copernicus riddle, and nevertheless condemns Paul and Marj for failing to solve it. The walking dead become part of the joke:
“Even worse than you haunts are the haunts of you haunts, the ghosts of you ghosts!”
Ridiculous, but not harmless, he calls himself peaceful while shooting the dead and preparing to kill Paul and Marj.
In The Giant Ratchet of Sumatra, Lafferty doubles down on the spy spoofery. He takes Scott’s setup and twists it up through misleading appearances and compromised alliances. A monster swallowing Harmony turns out to be treating his wound. The evil-looking conspirators oppose something worse than themselves. Making the Ratchet a Greenstreet product also implicates Harmony’s employer and deepens the conspiratorial plot. The chapter culminates in a literal treatment of “thinking caps.” They give their wearers mental clarity while crushing their skulls. Katak alone expects to survive because his head contains no bones:
“We giant Sumatran Frogs have no bones in our heads at all.”
Harmony recognizes that a rubber-toothed frog with a silly-putty head is the world’s best hope. In both contributions, Lafferty takes what the previous writers have given him, makes it his own, and leaves the next writer with a more complicated problem to solve. Of course, he stands out like a zebra in a herd of horses.
