Synopsis
Tobias Lamb, a harsh and ugly scientist "held in high esteem" yet also in "puzzled esteem" by his colleagues, conducts an experiment. He places a microscopic "realm" of reactive molecular jelly inside a rifle bullet and fires it at a cliff four kilometers across the valley. The bullet's flight time: approximately two and a half seconds.
For the short-aeon nation inside the bullet, those two and a half seconds are equivalent to roughly eight thousand years. During that time, they must wake to consciousness, evolve, develop science and technology, invent a space drive, and navigate the bullet back to its origin—or perish against the cliff.
The experiment succeeds. The bullet returns—in unelapsed time—and shoots Tobias through the right eye, killing him. A coroner appears and examines the body. Then dead Tobias speaks, explaining that his death is "a valid event in unelapsed time." The coroner vanishes. Tobias, it turns out, has only a black eye—a "shiner." The practical result: a nation of "consummate atomic-speed invention" that can solve any problem.
The mockingbird Tobias was aiming at also loses an eye in the fly-by—but unlike Tobias's wound, the bird's loss is permanent. Where before it sang "imperfectly"—"too saccharine to mock"—it now sings with "inimitable mockery and arrogance" and "burning belief."
Master Diagram: Complete System
How all elements interact: theological source, narrator chain, activation mechanism, paradox, emblematic transformation. Click any box for details.
I. Structure: Recursive Chain
The story operates on nested levels of motivation through narrative. Each level creates the conditions for invention by transmitting heroic myth to the level below.
"Somebody larger tells me such narrations now and then. Yes, to motivate me, I suppose, as I motivate the small molecular smudges." — Tobias Lamb
The chain does not terminate. The closing: "those students who are now developing best ways to motivate and mythologize sub-microscopic smears to get maximum performance and invention from them." They are "an odd lot... working with small, left-handed orders that are more goatish than sheepish, that are very near to the grotesque heart of matter."
Myth-transmission occurs when Tobias addresses the glob as he seals it into the bullet:
"Principality and Nation, in you go! Your history and your destiny begin right now. This is the first instant of your Heroic Age. Be Heroic then, which is the same thing as being inventive." — Tobias Lamb, to the micro-nation
The Cainite voyage is not analogous to the experiment—it is narrated into the bullet as the micro-nation's origin myth. Their history begins with Tobias's declaration.
The closing reveals that micro-nations are not blank slates receiving Tobias's narrative. They have their own mythic structures:
"They have accumulated and analyzed a frightening amount of dream material from molecular-level and smaller entities, and the dream material in those little worlds is absolutely grotesque. And the mythic configurations can not even be conceived of in the geometry of human myth. They are quite otherwise." — Narrator
Activation awakens something already present. The micro-nations have autonomous mythic lives that human geometry cannot contain.
The micro-nation's flight recapitulates the Cainite space-ark's voyage. Tobias presents this as his own ancestral history—transmitted to the realm as their founding myth.
Cainite Space-Ark
- Vessel: Bronze sphere, sealed
- Passengers: "A dozen of us"
- Pilots: "Two brothers, Jabelcain and Jubelcain. And their half-brother Tubalcain."
- Escape: "Set our bronze sphere as a cork in the throat of that erupting fountain" when "the fountains of the deep should burst open"
- Duration: "a little less than eight thousand years of elapsed time"
- Starting conditions: "We already had a city established on Earth, no mean city... We had metallurgy. We had been working bronze and iron for a full generation."
- Task: "to orient ourselves in space, to develop a propulsion power from nothing while traveling at something more than escape velocity in cramped quarters in the dark... a purpose and a philosophy, and a navigation to return to earth, and to soft-land on earth"
- Return: "Within the last several hundred years. When invention returned to the Earth, that was the space-ark homing back."
Bullet Micro-Nation
- Vessel: Rifle bullet
- Passengers: "Principality and Nation" (thousands of individuals)
- Pilots: Unknown (tyranny implied)
- Escape: Fired at cliff 4 kilometers distant; "I do this for them"
- Duration: "about two and a half or three seconds" = ~8,000 micro-years
- Starting conditions: None—"They don't have an intelligence system sufficient to know when next a rifle will be shooting off"
- Task: "wake to consciousness, form local governments, expand to a limited universal government, develop science and technology... learn to navigate the bullet, avoid destruction against the cliff; and return it here in quest of their origin"
- Return: Instantaneous in macro-time (unelapsed time)
"There is a tight and almost total analogy between our old flight and the flight that I'll shoot off in just a moment." — Tobias Lamb
The ratio is explicit: "our eight thousand years was a very close equivalent to their two and a half seconds." This equivalence depends on "the order of size to be considered, direct cubical relations, inverse squares, angular velocity, and the relationship of tight-turning to elapsed time and to the pace of technology development."
Tobias acknowledges: "we had a better start than they have, but we may not have had as good an inclination and indoctrination." The micro-nation begins with nothing but receives superior motivation.
II. Theology: The Cainite Inheritance
The cosmology is not decorative. Tobias claims literal descent from Cain, and the theological particulars explain why the Cainites are the only early inventors.
Tobias identifies himself as belonging to:
- "The left-handed fraternity"
- "The goatish rather than the sheepish brotherhood"
- "We of the line of Cain, we who lost our innocence for the second time, we who ate of the horrible tree of knowledge for the second time"
The twice-fallen: Adam fell once; Cain fell again. This double loss of innocence produces a specific capacity—invention.
"We were the only early inventors, you know. Genesis 4:20-22 gives only the barest hints of our inventions, but they were the only human inventions in their time." — Tobias Lamb
The story mentions "Jabelcain and Jubelcain. And their half-brother Tubalcain" but does not specify their roles. The following identifications come from Genesis, not from the story itself:
The referenced verses from Genesis:
- Jabal (Genesis 4:20): "father of those who dwell in tents and have livestock"
- Jubal (Genesis 4:21): "father of all those who play the lyre and pipe"
- Tubal-cain (Genesis 4:22): "forger of all instruments of bronze and iron"
If Lafferty's Jabelcain, Jubelcain, and Tubalcain correspond to these figures, then the three brothers represent the origins of pastoral life, music, and metallurgy—and all human technology descends from Cain's line. The story's claim that the Cainites "had been working bronze and iron for a full generation" before the Flood aligns with Tubal-cain's identity.
Lucius Cockburn objects that he knows a different survival myth:
"I have met the myth that either Gog or Magog rode astraddle of the roof-ridge of the ark for the whole trying time of the flood and so prevented the old race of giants from being entirely wiped out. So we have half-giants in the world even now. But that the descendents of Cain escaped Earth in a space-ark, that is new to me. I believe that it's cheating." — Lucius Cockburn
Tobias's response: "No, not cheating, not cheating at all. To have taken the gamble with the odds a billion to one against, that is not cheating."
Tobias paints "strong and grotesque pictures" called the Cainite Space Ship series—"wrenching and a little bit distasteful, but they were also funny."
The paintings foreshadow and self-portray. Alwin Garvie notes:
"If the units (if there are units in one of those globs) of a reacting molecular group should have faces, I would have to imagine their faces like those of the people or slobs in the 'Cainite Space Ship'. Yourself, of course, have one of those faces, Toby." — Alwin Garvie
The micro-nation is Cainite; Tobias is Cainite; the paintings depict both. The same grotesque inventive capacity operates at every scale.
When Alwin smells "tyranny in the wee realm," Tobias affirms it:
"You smell right, hump-nosed man. The strong impetus of outright tyranny! There is nothing like it for a realm that is at the same time a space ship." — Tobias Lamb
Not political commentary—cosmological structure. A nation that is a space ship requires absolute coordination. Tyranny is the price of survival under impossible conditions.
III. Mechanism: Myth as Activator
The insight: narrative creates capability in matter. Tobias's colleagues cannot make their reactive jelly react because they do not believe it is alive. Tobias succeeds because he treats the "small chemical smudge" as a nation with destiny.
Not a one-way chain but a self-reinforcing loop:
The loop is self-sealing. Once the invention succeeds, it proves the narrative true—or true enough.
"Whether the little nation did those space marvels or not, it is absolutely essential that it believes it did them. Its motivation lies in its high history." — Tobias Lamb
"There is not any such thing as inanimate matter. The smallest subatomic particle is alive and at least partly conscious, and at least partly thinking. If you do not believe this, pretend that you believe it at least. You'll get better results that way." — Tobias Lamb
The operational principle. The colleagues fail because they regard the reactive jelly as a "supersmall glob"—inert, unconscious. Tobias succeeds because he addresses it as "Principality and Nation."
The distinction between genuine belief and pragmatic pretense collapses. The results are identical.
When Paul Kradzesh accuses Tobias of telling "fairy tales" to the reactive jelly, Tobias responds:
"Perhaps you don't understand Faerie at all. When it is finally discovered (which is to say 'When its lair is finally unroofed') it will be found to possess thousands and thousands of annals. Ah, heroic history, primordial inventiveness, ages of greatness!" — Tobias Lamb
Faerie is deep structure, not fantasy. Francie Jack explains:
"In the circuit of re-entrant thought and style and mentation, the mythic meets again with the subatomic and the atomic and the molecular on the field of small aeonics." — Francie Jack
This is why Tobias's New Physics for Middle-School Children was "forced off the market"—"He seemed to be teaching physics by means of a hairy sort of mythology. Even his mathematics was more myth than math." The method was sound; the audience was unprepared.
But the book found its audience: "some of those students had a hop on the subject, those who had read Tobias Lamb's New Physics for Middle-School Children and had been enchanted by it."
IV. Paradox: Unelapsed Time
The experiment produces a causality violation: the bullet returns and kills Tobias, yet dead Tobias speaks. This is not a flaw but "a bonus that almost dwarfs the rest of it."
| Macro-Time | Micro-Time | Event |
|---|---|---|
| t = 0 | Year 0 | Tobias fires rifle |
| t ≈ 2.5s (inside) | Years 0–8,000 | Nation wakes, evolves, invents, decides to return |
| t ≈ 2.5s (unelapsed) | — | Bullet returns; "shot him in the right eye and clear through his head. It killed him too." |
| t ≈ 2.5s (unelapsed) | — | Tobias "dead standing up... so stocky and solid that he did not fall" |
| t ≈ 2.5s (unelapsed) | — | Coroner appears, examines body: "It's a rare happening, and yet I've seen it twice before" |
| t ≈ 2.5s (unelapsed) | — | Dead Tobias speaks: "You lie. Such a thing never happened before." |
| t ≈ 2.5s (unelapsed) | — | Coroner vanishes |
| t > 2.5s (elapsed) | — | Tobias has only a "shiner" (black eye); mockingbird has lost an eye permanently |
The coroner's appearance and vanishing illustrates the paradox: "You cannot say properly 'He was here' because there are no tenses in unelapsed time."
Tobias's wound softens from lethal (shot through the eye) to cosmetic (a shiner). The mockingbird's wound persists: "had lost an eye to the fly-by either coming or going." Unexplained but significant—the human inventor emerges with reduced damage; the animal emblem bears the permanent cost.
"You really don't understand the possibilities and paradoxes that are present in the context of 'unelapsed time'? It's a property of very small realms and societies. It's a bonus that almost dwarfs the rest of it. Oh, how howlingly valuable it will be to us!" — Tobias Lamb
Key properties:
- Tenses do not apply. Events exist in perpetual present. "He was here" cannot be said because there is no past tense.
- Valid events coexist. "Nor will I assure you that my death is an illusion. It is a valid event in unelapsed time, that first remarkable fall-out of the miniature space flight and return."
- Practical value. Not a curiosity—it enables instant problem-solving: "Set it any problem and it will solve it."
When Paul asks "Why did you do such a thing as that?", Tobias answers:
"For the joy of discovery, for dramatic affect, for open fun, and to perform a valid experiment." — Tobias Lamb
"Affect" (not "effect")—emotional display, theatrical impact. The experiment is simultaneously scientific and performative.
V. Emblem: The One-Eyed Mocking-Bird
The title names the symbol. The mockingbird transforms parallel to—but asymmetrical with—Tobias.
"What we want are mockers who at the same time have total faith. I want that in the director of every project and every public board and government. And I want it in the short-aeon inventive realms and in the miniaturized intelligences that make them up. But deliver us from the mocker who sings too sweetly." — Tobias Lamb
This is the thesis. Two qualities must coexist:
- Mockery: Ironic distance. Refusal to be credulous. The capacity to see through pretense.
- Total faith: Complete commitment. The willingness to act as if the myth were true.
The mockingbird before the experiment sings "imperfectly"—"too saccharine to mock." It has sweetness without irony. This is useless.
"Damn that mocking-bird! A mocker that will not mock must be changed, or extinguished." — Tobias Lamb
Tobias Lamb
Before: "A harsh mocker; and yet he had a pleasant strain (or it was meant to be pleasant) in him." The balance is imperfect—his pleasantness is uncertain.
Wound: Shot through right eye and killed (in unelapsed time) → black eye only (in elapsed time)
After: "Still had his big grin, more grotesque than ever, almost more life-like than ever." Speaks in death. Gains access to unelapsed time as resource.
Mockingbird
Before: "Singing so imperfectly"—"too saccharine to mock." Has sweetness but lacks authentic mockery.
Wound: "Had lost an eye to the fly-by either coming or going." (Permanent loss.)
After: "A new song that you had to respect whether you liked it or not"—"The inimitable mockery and arrogance of it! And the burning belief!"
Both are wounded; both are transformed. But Tobias's wound heals (lethal → cosmetic) while the mockingbird's persists (permanent eye loss). The bird pays the full price. Tobias's exclamation—"A one-eyed bird had better be a true believer around here!"—acknowledges this: the permanently wounded creature has no choice but total commitment.
"A little discipline in its life was all that bird needed. Aye, get that glob of irony in its song! Mock, bird, mock! And believe at the same time." — Tobias Lamb
The story closes on the students who inherit the method:
"Those brilliant, odd-lot students have their own cultus and fraternity now, and their token and mascot is the One-Eyed Mocking-Bird." — Narrator
The one-eyed mocking-bird is not a symbol but a program: mockery + faith, instantiated in flesh and feather, adopted by those who will motivate matter with myth.
VI. Characters
Role: Protagonist; scientist; Cainite descendant; harsh mocker with total faith
Physical description: "Physically powerful and exceptionally ugly, loutish and impossible." "So stocky and solid that he did not fall" when killed. His palms make a "clang" rather than a "clap" when he bangs them together.
Reputation: "Held in high esteem by the scientific community" (p. 1); elsewhere "held in puzzled esteem" (p. 3). A cult hero to groups outside his profession—the "rattling rock sort" have made his clanging music into "cult things."
Character: "A harsh mocker; and yet he had a pleasant strain (or it was meant to be pleasant) in him. He was a hard driver. If he didn't actually hold a whip in his hand when he was working on a project, there was always a whip in his voice. He was avid, even feverish, to drive a project to success; and yet he didn't seem at all hungry for personal glory."
Works:
- New Physics for Middle-School Children: "Forced off the market"—"He seemed to be teaching physics by means of a hairy sort of mythology. Even his mathematics was more myth than math." But later students who were "enchanted by it" had "a hop on the subject."
- Not For Everybody Book: "not for everybody"
- The "Cainite Space Ship" paintings: "strong and grotesque pictures"—"wrenching and a little bit distasteful, but they were also funny"
- Music on "supposed reproductions of very ancient instruments, according to probably faulty interpretations of ancient musical notations"—"clanging iron 'harps' and howling flutes"
Contra Elton Cabot's dictum: The "ideal scientist" should be "serene, handsome with inner and outer perfection, into every field of the mind, something of a poet, totally cultured, completely free of hokum, very much of the philosopher, everything of the humanist." Tobias is "into every field of the mind"—"but how clumsily he was into many of those fields!" He lacks serenity, handsomeness, and freedom from hokum.
Heritage: Claims "racial memory" of the Cainite voyage: "I say 'we', for I have a racial memory of it. All of you were born yesterday. I was born several days before yesterday."
| Name | Role | Notable |
|---|---|---|
| Francie Jack | Colleague; interlocutor | "Always made an effort to understand Big Toby"; provides theoretical explanation of "re-entrant thought"; recognizes "it will take a new sort of people to accept it fully" |
| Alwin Garvie | Colleague | Called "hump-nosed man" by Tobias; perceptive about the Cainite parallel and the paintings; smells "tyranny in the wee realm" |
| Lucius Cockburn | Colleague; skeptic | Accuses Tobias of "anthropomorphism"; knows alternative Flood survival myth (Gog/Magog on the ark); declares "We do hate you, Toby" |
| Paul Kradzesh | Colleague; thief | Stole credit for the "Crisley Communicator"; accuses Tobias of telling "fairy tales"; "We do not like you, Tobias!... We do not like you because of tricks like this." |
| Viola Rafter | Colleague | Talks to her house plants "to motivate them"; appreciates Tobias's style: "Is some larger person telling you this to motivate you for something?" |
Multiple colleagues express variations of dislike: "We do not like you, Tobias!" (Paul); "We do hate you, Toby" (Lucius). Yet they cannot deny his results.
The three brothers who piloted the Cainite space-ark:
- Jabelcain and Jubelcain: "Two brothers"
- Tubalcain: "their half-brother"
Total passengers: "A dozen of us shot ourselves off, half accidentally and half on purpose, in a sealed sphere."
These are Tobias's ancestors—the "tyrants" who made the impossible voyage work. Alwin calls them such, and Tobias affirms: "The strong impetus of outright tyranny! There is nothing like it for a realm that is at the same time a space ship."
- Elton Cabot: Source of the dictum describing the "ideal scientist." Not present in the story; his standards are cited as a foil to Tobias.
- Creager: Works "at the 'Evolvate Science Conglomerate'" and "does talk with much success to his reactive molecular jelly"—but Paul doubts he tells "such fairy tales as you tell yours."
- The Coroner: Appears in unelapsed time to examine Tobias's body; vanishes when the paradox resolves. His claims to have "seen it twice before" are lies, per Tobias.
VII. Glossary
Click any highlighted term in the text to view its definition, or browse the full glossary below.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Cainite | Descendant of Cain; member of "the left-handed fraternity" and "goatish rather than sheepish brotherhood." The Cainites are "the only early inventors" because they "ate of the horrible tree of knowledge for the second time." Tobias claims Cainite descent and "racial memory" of the space-ark voyage. |
| Crisley Communicator | An invention whose credit Paul Kradzesh stole from Tobias. Tobias "didn't react to it at all. Whether credit should redound to him or to another was less than nothing to Toby." |
| Mockingbird | A bird outside the laboratory that sings "imperfectly" before the experiment—"too saccharine to mock." Loses one eye permanently in the bullet's fly-by; afterward sings with "inimitable mockery and arrogance" and "burning belief." Becomes "the token and mascot" of the students who inherit the method. |
| Motivation | The act of transmitting heroic narrative to create capability in matter. "You folks talk to the other smudges. I'll talk to this one." The micro-nations must believe they have heroic history; whether they do is secondary. |
| Reactive Jelly | A molecular syndrome—also called "reacting molecular jelly," "activated molecular syndrome," or dismissively "molecular smudge"—that can be activated into rapid invention if properly motivated. "The 'Reacting Jelly' does react amazingly fast sometimes... and most times it does not react at all." |
| Realm | Tobias's term for a micro-nation of reactive molecular jelly. "If they are made up of thousands of individuals of a kindred, and if they are able to live, elect, and proclaim a destiny, then they are nations." His colleagues call them "smudges" or "globs." |
| Short-Aeon Nation | A miniaturized society that experiences time at an accelerated rate. 2.5 seconds of macro-time ≈ 8,000 years of micro-time. "The concept of delay would not be possible to it." |
| Small Aeonics | The field where "the mythic meets again with the subatomic and the atomic and the molecular"—the "circuit of re-entrant thought and style and mentation" that allows myth to function as physics. |
| Tobias Lamb | The protagonist. A scientist of Cainite descent, "physically powerful and exceptionally ugly, loutish and impossible," who conducts the experiment in activating reactive molecular jelly through heroic narrative. Ends with a black eye; the mockingbird loses its eye permanently. |
| Unelapsed Time | A property of very small realms in which events occur without duration from the macro perspective. Tenses do not apply: "You cannot say properly 'He was here.'" Tobias's death is "a valid event in unelapsed time"—not an illusion, but not final in elapsed time. "A bonus that almost dwarfs the rest of it." |