‘The End of Outward” (1979/1983)

“Lord Randal had invented the bow-and-arrow. But Axel could shoot the arrows farther and faster. And higher. And when he was six years old, Axel did what many persons have dreamed of doing: he made his mark on the sky. He dipped the heads of his arrows in mud, and he shot them up with uncanny accuracy and made mud marks on that transparent sky-cover which was twenty meters above them. He made about a hundred mud marks that conveyed a message in the written form of ‘code Chaldee’ that the three had independently reinvented. The message was ‘If there is anybody up above that sky, let him give us a sign.’ And the sign came at once, quick lightning and a water shower on the top side of the sky. The Three were pleased to see that their message was not washed away by the rain shower. There was someone else out there, someone more important than the overly silent caretakers who sometimes came into the area to make major or minor adjustments, trying to look invisible when they came.” — Serpent's Egg

What would the perfect Lafferty atlas look like? Some exhilarating combo of historical atlas and dictionary of imaginary places, most likely. Somewhere on its maps you would find your own life, The Bank and Shoal of Time, and it would not be a bad idea to place near it another of Lafferty’s quasi-oceanic hazards, the depressing thing he called The Great Doldrum Reef. The Reef can be found in “The End of Outward,” one of Lafferty’s great metaphysical black comedies. It’s name is informal shorthand, given by the story’s science to a current era of stagnation—the “end-of-outward” period, as it were—when great human projects stall just before breakthrough and cannot fructify. The connection between The Bank and Shoal and The Great Doldrum Reef may seem tenuous, but Lafferty wrote the stories that mention them in the same year of 1979, about five months apart, and I like to imagine that the five time-attempters of “Bank and Shoal” appear here. In the Arpad Arutinov headnote that opens Section 2 of “The End of Outward,” we find the following: “Five others were compelled to other sorts of symbolism to express the reverse flow of history.” Why should these five not be Kemp, Roaring, MacBean, Farquharson, and Charteris?

The must be a frustrating short story for some readers. Its architecture is self-denyingly frugal: dialogue then speechifying, two locations, with an in between arrival and withdrawal of horse-drawn carriages with names from the Age of Gasoline. Beyond that, it’s all theater of ideas.

It starts with Ike Casad and Fausto Barra, two scientists, shooting arrows straight into the air while discussing progress and decline. “An arrow should hang at its high point for at least a moment before it falls back,” Ike says, setting up the story’s central metaphor. Fausto agrees, and he gives the idea a name. An arrow shot straight up has flop-over time. And the world itself, he says, now lives in cosmic “flop-over time.” To prove a point about a returning Age of Trickery in the current flop-over, Ike performs an illusion. He makes the arrow he shoots hang impossibly at its apex in the sky.

But the trick effect doesn't last. A weird duality is created when Fausto shifts his footing and accidentally breaks the arrow. “You’ve broke it!” Ike cries, and for a moment the illusory arrow is suspended above them while the real, broken one lies at their feet (“the broken arrow on the grass was the real arrow”). With that, the two men walk toward Ike’s ornate gazebo, a hybrid of “bandstand, summer-house, gazebo, and belvedere,” to join a meeting of scientists.

Not just scientists, but fringe scientists. They are men of “high style, elite exuberance, and magnetic personalities.” They arrive in magnificent, custom-built vehicles, and Lafferty has fun with their names. One by one, the figures give updates on projects that have been stalled for over a decade in the Great Doldrum Reef. Charles Cogsworth talks about the manned Mars landing; Diogenes Pontifex discusses the creation of artificial life.

At the meeting, the unstylish Jordan “Dinosaur Droppings” Dorner shows up. Dorner will argue that all the science projects are failing because the time for them has passed. “We cannot go onward,” he insists. “We cannot even stay where we are. We go backwards.” The universe has reached the end of outward; it has stopped expanding and begun to contract. Just look at the small indicators: domestic animals like Hereford cattle are “becoming tall and lean and wild-looking,” and cultural trends are regressing. In fact, Dorner says, the moon landing thirty years earlier was the end of outward, the peak of their civilization, “the turning of the tide.”

Most of the scientists dismiss Dorner’s ideas, but Fausto Barra says that he intends to outflank the slide. “I'm not going to take the return trip,” he says. With tightrope mathematics (Matthew 7:14), he and a select few can calculate the quantum interval exquisitely and remain in the present, even if it renders them transparent to the rest of the world. After a final round of booze, the meeting breaks up. The scientists climb into what are horse-drawn buggies and carriages and ride away, full of “high amusement at the idea of Dorner that their civilization had begun to regress.”

Then Lafferty gives an afternote as the ending. An elite, it is rumored, does exist in a place called "The End of Outward." It is separated from the rest of humanity by a mini-event-horizon. This group, which belongs to "a race that once flew to the moon," has preserved the pinnacle of achievement. He adds that "they are as far out as anybody ever went, and nobody can ever take that away from them."

“The End of Outward” is pretty deep-end Lafferty. It piggybacks on many of his more idiosyncratic techniques. In what follows, I want to focus on two aspects of the story. One is how it fits into his recurring rejection of natural selection and evolution. The other is its use of the Vernier scale as the story’s conceptual master idea, with what it means for works such as Fourth Mansions.

Lafferty made much of the idea that the world began minutes ago and that deep time is a hoax. It shows up in novels and is the basis of one short story. As far as I know, the first person to formulate this idea systematically was Philip Henry Gosse, a 19th-century English naturalist and Christian. In his 1857 book Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot, Gosse seems to have come up with the idea that God created the world with the appearance of age, complete with fossils, tree rings, and geology, the appearance of a prehistory that never occurred. He wrote: “Admit for a moment, as a hypothesis, that the Creator had before his mind a projection of the whole life-history of the globe, commencing with any point which the geologist may imagine to have been a fit commencing point, and ending with some unimaginable acme in the indefinitely distant future. He determines to call this idea into actual existence, not at the supposed commencing point, but at some stage or other of its course. It is clear, then, that at the selected stage it appears exactly as it would have appeared at that moment of its history, if all the preceding eras of its history had been real.”

That Lafferty sometimes entertains this idea shows he saw deep time as a genuine philosophical problem, though. But one can always dissolve a philosophical problem by accepting a few auxiliary premises. In “The End of Outward,” he uses a changing rate of cosmic expansion to suggest that our estimates of the universe’s age are flawed, his version of the Cosmic Age Problem. He imagines that, because of the delay in light reaching us, we have not yet observed the violet shift that would prove the contraction that has already taken place.

Set within this cosmological picture, Lafferty offers a second, oblique critique aimed at evolution. The story makes its case that human progress has stalled. At the same time, Lafferty makes it clear that evolution is not real progress, or even true evolution at all. Of course, those who believe in non-theistic evolution are careful to say that, biologically, evolution is not progressive; it concerns change, not ascent. Lafferty turns that inside out: his universe no longer evolves in any way but retracts, undoing its own elaboration, perhaps a better word than evolution to characterize its expansion. He emphasizes that new species leaps will not occur (and presumably never have) while giving the reader images of what appears to be devolution, animals coming unbred, and outwardly expressive forms moving back toward their origins. In this way, the story separates ideas of progress from questions of creation and speciation, showing how its skepticism toward evolutionary theory parallels doubts about cosmic chronology.

The story’s major symbol of human progress (the moon landing) measures the culmination of the outward age on the instrument: a gesture made “at the turning of the tide.” It is revered as a permanent achievement precisely because it marks an apex. By contrast, the scientists’ current attempts at “species leaps,” such as creating new animals, are doomed, since they try to move forward after the turn. Dorner can therefore assert that the time for such efforts “has gone by,” attributing their failure to a change in natural law, a “tightening and not a loosening of the bonds of species.”

The most interesting part of "The End of Outward" to me is the Vernier scale image. It's not quite, but almost a microcosm and a macrocosm. No hermeticism needed, not of the kind we get in Serpent's Egg.

When I think of a Vernier scale, I picture welder calipers: a smaller, more finely marked ruler (the microcosm analogue) sliding along a coarser main scale (the macrocosm analogue) to register shifts the large scale alone cannot show. The analogy isn’t exact, which is what makes it so interesting. The microcosm isn’t measuring anything on its own. But it is registering something in the story: the end of outward. Lafferty makes human culture the sliding ruler on the cosmic dial. Dorner explains this clearly, saying, “our lives and our civilization and society form a very small vernier scale . . . counterpart of the cosmic scale,” meaning we can read the universe’s great turn by first noticing small misalignments in ourselves.

No doubt that Lafferty knew that Pierre Vernier (1580–1637) was a French mathematician and engineer who, in 1631, invented the vernier scale to enhance the precision of scientific instruments. Vernier was driven by the needs of astronomy and surveying—fields that required exceptionally accurate angular measurements for charting the heavens and mapping the Earth. Before his innovation, instruments like quadrants and astrolabes offered only coarse readings. Vernier’s scale refined these tools, enabling users to read minute divisions beyond the limits of the main scale. In Lafferty’s story, he restores Vernier to this original context of precision and discovery.

In effect, the story acts a bit like a Vernier scale. The scientists’ discourse is like a vernier reading of the misalignment between potential progress and actual regression, picking up on the shift long before astronomy can detect the larger fact. The narrative models the cosmic cycle—rise, apex, fall—while our world is the vernier’s minute offset: the arrow’s flop. This gets spelled out in Ike’s claim of an apex “lasting thirty thousand years.” Because cosmic confirmation has to lag behind astronomical evidence (“no first-class evidence yet; violet shifts would take millions of years”), Dorner names human culture the small weather vane that turns first.

This is where all the strange theories and phenomena come in. They are fine-grained indicators: breeds become unbred, reversing what Darwin called artificial selection; fashions and technologies slide backward. Etc. One imagines God’s hand on the universe like an irritated welder’s on a set of Vernier calipers, with the Moon landing recast as the furthest outward tick before the dial begins to slide back. The small scale (our biology, taste, tools, and milestones) shows that the main scale, the universe itself, has already reached maximum outward. Judgment has been passed.

There is something sad about this, especially in how it touches Fourth Mansions and Lafferty’s many other works about the leap forward. Kevin Cheek has said he loves Fourth Mansions (1969) because it is so hopeful. “The End of Outward” stands about as far from being hopeful as one can get in Lafferty. I myself find Fourth Mansions less clear. Freddy must have failed for Carmody to return again in Fair Hills. Not that they share the same universe, but that some part of Lafferty as hopeful as Cheek by how things had gone.

Instead of the returnees, at the end of outward, we are given the Great Cosmic Verger, an incredibly memorable image of Lafferty’s creative imagination in a sour mood. Of him (Him, I think), Lafferty writes: “Who is the verger who with his verge-staff allows some things to pass and denies others? It is a cosmic verger nowadays, and he moves us back from the verge.”

A verger, from the word for “staff,” is a church official who assists the clergy during services, organizes processions, and tends to the building and its furnishings. It is as if the Argo as the ship of the Church was told the waters end here. You blew it. The communion of the saints (the Elite) exists, but you’re going to need more grace than had those lucky pre-July 16, 1969 folks before the flop of time’s arrow. There are more than a few shades of this in Serpent’s Egg.

Lastly, the boundary-setting figure with the staff appears elsewhere in Lafferty, most vividly in the following passage: “In the bodies of Kings and their Ladies, they strode down a High Road in the Levant. They were wondering what last thing they could contrive, when they found their way blocked by a Pilgrim with a staff.” The difference seems to be that the wicked children in “Hairy Earthmen” are now us.

If so, then in “The End of Outward,” the message is even more eristic. There will be no fourth mansion for us: “It recedes from you. The time for it has pulled away and left the project stranded, as it has left so many others. Shelve it, shelve it!”

End of Outward Notes.pdf

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