Tales From Gavagan's Bar (2 page)

             
Mr. Cohan had been working in a bar on the far side of town (a city in the northeastern United States) when Gavagan suffered his accident. At about the same time, this place was purchased by a chain bar-and-restaurant organization, which insisted on serving ice cream in all its establishments. This so revolted Mr. Cohan (a fundamentalist on the subject of liquor) that he resigned on the spot. He was on the point of returning to Sligo when Father McConaghy placed him in touch with Gavagan. The former geologist did not hesitate for a moment at the opportunity of simultaneously obtaining a bartender of unrivalled virtuosity and the patronage that would turn his bar into the kind of place he wished to maintain. He not only obtained the refund of his passage money for Mr. Cohan but also paid back to his new factotum the amount that had been expended on passport and visa.

             
Mr. Cohan's value to Gavagan's will become more apparent in
the course of our reports. The material for them has been gathered over a considerable space of time, and we believe that, taken together, they constitute a document of no small social importance. Too little investigation has been given, and too little importance has previously been attached to certain sequences of incident for which Mr. Cohan, both as a bartender and an unlettered philosopher, acts as a catalytic agent.

L
.
Sprague de Camp

Fletcher Pratt

September 1952

TALES

from

GAVAGAN'S BAR

(Expanded Edition)

             
The thin, balding man in tweeds almost tipped over his glass as he set it down with a care that showed care had become necessary. "Think of dogs," he said. "Really, my dear, there is no practical limit to what can be accomplished by selective breeding."

             
"Except that where I come from, we sometimes think of other things," said the brass-blonde, emphasizing the ancient
New Yorker
joke with a torso-wiggle that was pure
Police Gazette.

             
Mr. Witherwax lifted his nose from the second Martini. "Do you know them, Mr. Cohan?" he asked.

             
Mr. Cohan turned in profile to swab a glass. "That would be Professor Thott, and a very educated gentleman, too. I don't rightly know the name of the lady, though I think he has been calling her Ellie, or something like that. Would you like to be meeting them, now?"

             
"Sure. I was reading in a book about this selective breeding, but I don't understand it so good, and maybe he could tell me something about it."

             
Mr. Cohan made his way to the end of the bar and led ponderously toward the table. "Pleased to meet you, Professor Thott," said Witherwax.

             
"Sir, the pleasure is all mine, all mine. Mrs. Jonas, may I present an old friend of mine, yclept Witherwax? Old in the sense that he is aged in the admirable liquids produced by
Gavagan's, while the liquids themselves are aged in wood, ha—ha—a third-premise aging. Sit down, Mr. Witherwax. I call your attention to the remarkable qualities of alcohol, among which
peripeteia
is not the least."

             
"Yeah, that's right," said Mr. Witherwax, his expression taking on a resemblance to that of the stuffed owl over the bar. "What I was going to ask—"

             
"Sir, I perceive that I have employed a pedantry more suitable to the classroom, with the result that communication has not been established.
Peripeteia
is the reversal of roles. While in a state of saintly sobriety, I pursue Mrs. Jonas; I entice her to alcoholic diversions. But after the third Presidente, she pursues me, in accordance with the ancient biological rule that alcohol increases feminine desire while decreasing masculine potency."

             
From the bar, Mr. Cohan appeared to have caught only a part of this speech. "Rolls we ain't got," he said. "But you can have some pretzel sticks." He reached under the bar for the bowl. "All gone; and I just laid out a new box this morning. That's where Gavagan's profits go. In the old days it was the free lunch, and now it's pretzel sticks."

             
"What I was going to ask—" said Witherwax.

             
Professor Thott stood up and bowed, a bow which ended in his sitting down again rather suddenly. "Ah, the mystery of the universe and music of the spheres, as Prospero might have phrased it! Who pursues? Who flies? The wicked. One preserves philosophy by remaining at the Platonian mean, the knife edge between pursuit and flight, wickedness and virtue. Mr. Cohan, a round of Presidentes please, including one for my aged friend."

             
"Let me buy this one," said Witherwax firmly. "What I was going to ask was about this selective breeding."

             
The professor shook himself, blinked twice, leaned back in his chair, and placed one hand on the table. "You wish me to be academic? Very well; but I have witnesses that it was at your own request."

             
Mrs. Jonas said: "Now look what you've done. You've got him started and he won't run down until he falls asleep."

             
"What I want to know—" began Witherwax, but Thott
beamingly cut across: "I shall present only the briefest and most non-technical of outlines," he said. "Let us suppose that, of sixteen mice, you took the two largest and bred them together. Their children would in turn be mated with those of the largest pair from another group of sixteen. And so on. Given time and material enough, and making it advantageous to the species to produce larger members, it would be easy to produce mice the size of lions."

             
"Ugh!" said Mrs. Jonas. "You ought to give up drinking. Your imagination gets gruesome."

             
"I see," said Witherwax, "like in a book I read once where they had rats so big they ate horses and wasps the size of dogs."

             
"I recall the volume," said Thott, sipping his Presidente. "It was
The Food of the Gods,
by H.G. Wells. I fear, however, that the method he describes was not that of genetics and therefore had no scientific validity."

             
"But could you make things like that by selective breeding?" asked Witherwax.

             
"Certainly. You could produce houseflies the size of tigers. It is merely a matter of—"

             
Mrs. Jonas raised a hand. "Alvin, what an awful thought. I hope you don't ever try it."

             
"There need be no cause for apprehension, my dear. The square-cube law will forever protect us from such a visitation."

             
"Huh?" said Witherwax.

             
"The square-cube law. If you double the dimensions, you quadruple the area and octuple the masses. The result is—well, in a practical non-technical sense, a tiger-sized housefly would have legs too thin and wings too small to support his weight."

             
Mrs. Jonas said: "Alvin, that's impractical. How could it move?"

             
The Professor essayed another bow, which was even less successful than the first, since it was made from a sitting position. "Madame, the purpose of such an experiment would not be practical but demonstrative. A tiger-sized fly would be a mass of jelly that would have to be fed from a spoon." He raised a hand. "There is no reason why anyone should produce such a monster; and since nature has no advantages to offer
             
insects of large size, it will decline to produce them. I agree that the thought is repulsive; myself, I should prefer the alternative project of producing elephants the size of flies—or swallows."

             
Witherwax beckoned to Mr. Cohan. "These are good. Do it again. But wouldn't your square-cube law get you in Dutch there, too?"

             
"By no means, sir. In the case of size reduction, it works in your favor. The mass is divided by eight, but the muscles remain proportionately the same, capable of supporting a vastly greater weight. The legs and wings of a tiny elephant would not only support him, but give him the agility of a hummingbird. Consider the dwarf elephant of Sicily during the Plish—"

             
"Alvin," said Mrs. Jonas, "you're drunk. Otherwise you'd remember how to pronounce Pleistocene, and you wouldn't be talking about elephants' wings."

             
"Not at all, my dear. I should confidently expect such a species to develop flight by means of enlarged ears, like the Dumbo of the movies."

             
Mrs. Jonas giggled. "Still, I wouldn't want one the size of a housefly. It would be too small for a pet and would get into things. Let's make it the size of a kitten, like this." She held out her index fingers about five inches apart.

             
"Very well, my dear," said the Professor. "As soon as I can obtain a grant from the Carnegie Foundation, the project will be undertaken."

             
"Yes, but," said Witherwax, "how would you feed an elephant like that? And could they be housebroke?"

             
"If you can housebreak a man, an elephant ought to be easy," said Mrs. Jonas. "And you could feed them oats or hay. Much cleaner than keeping cans of dog food around."

             
The professor rubbed his chin. "Hmm," he said. "The rate of absorption of nourishment would vary directly as the intestinal area—which would vary as the square of the dimensions—I'm not sure of the results, but I'm afraid we'd have to provide more concentrated and less conventional food. I presume that we could feed our
Elephas micros,
as I propose to call him, on lump sugar. No, not
Elephas micros, Elephas microtatus,
the 'utmost littlest, tiniest elephant'."