The Nail and the Oracle

by Theodore Sturgeon

  The most important thing, obviously, that ever happened to Guy Gibbon in his life was his first encounter with the Wyke entity, and like many a person before and since, he had not the faintest idea he had done so. It was when he was in his late teens, and he and Sammy Stein went trespassing.

  Sammy was a school sidekick, and this particular day he had a secret; he had been very insistent on the day’s outing, but refused to say why. He was a burly-shouldered, good-natured, reasonably chinless boy whose close friendship with Guy was based almost exclusively on the attraction of opposite poles. And since, of the many kinds of fun they had had, the most fun was going trespassing, he wanted it that way on this particular occasion.

  “Going trespassing,” as an amusement, had more or less invented itself when they were in their early teens. They lived in a large city surrounded (unlike many today) by old suburbs, not new ones. These included large—some, more than large—estates and mansions, and it was their greatest delight to slip through a fence or over a wall and, profoundly impressed by their own bravery, slip through field and forest, lawn and drive, like Indian scouts in settler country. Twice they had been caught, once to have dogs set on them—three boxers and two mastiffs, which certainly would have torn them to very small pieces if the boys had not been more lucky than swift—and once by a dear little old lady who swamped them sickeningly with jelly sandwiches and lonely affection. But over the saga of their adventures, their two captures served to spice the adventure; two failures out of a hundred successes (for many of these places were visited frequently) was a proud record.

  So they took a trolley to the end of the line, and walked a mile, and went straight ahead where the road turned at a discreet NO ADMITTANCE sign of expensive manufacture and a high degree of weathering. They proceeded through a small wild wood, and came at last to an apparently unscalable granite wall.

  Sammy had discovered this wall the week before, roaming alone; he had waited for Guy to accompany him before challenging it, and Guy was touched. He was also profoundly excited by the wall itself. Anything this size should have been found, conjectured about, campaigned against, battled and conquered long since. But as well as being a high wall, a long wall, and mysterious, it was a distant wall, a discreet wall. No road touched it but its own driveway, which was primitive, meandering, and led to ironbound, solid oak gates without a chink or crack to peek through.

  They could not climb it nor breach it—but they crossed it. An ancient maple on this side held hands with a chestnut over the crown of the wall, and they went over like a couple of squirrels.

  They had, in their ghost-like way, haunted many an elaborate property, but never had they seen such maintenance, such manicure, such polish of a piece of land and, as Sammy said, awed out of his usual brashness, as they stood in a solid marble pergola overlooking green plush acres of rolling lawn, copses of carven boxwood, park-lake woods and streams with little Japanese bridges and, in their bends, humorful little rock-gardens: “—and there’s goddamn miles of it.”

  They had wandered a bit, that first time, and had learned that there were after all some people there. They saw a tractor far away, pulling a slanted gang of mowers across one of the green-plush fields. (The owners doubtless called it a lawn; it was a field.) The machines, rare in that time, cut a swath all of thirty feet wide, “and that,” Sammy said, convulsing them, “ain’t hay.” And then they had seen the house—

  Well, a glimpse. Breaking out of the woods. Guy had felt himself snatched back. “House up there,” said Sammy. “Someone’ll see us.” There was a confused impression of a white hill that was itself the house, or part of it; towers, turrets, castellations, crenellations; a fairy-tale palace set in this legendary landscape. They had not been able to see it again; it was so placed that it could be approached nowhere secretly nor even spied upon. They were struck literally speechless by the sight and for most of an hour had nothing to say, and that expressible only by wags of the head. Ultimately they referred to it as “the shack,” and it was in this vein that they later called their final discovery “the ol’ swimmin’ hole.”

  It was across a creek and over a wooded hill. Two more hills rose to meet the wood, and cupped between the three was a pond, perhaps a lake. It was roughly L-shaped, and all around it were shadowed inlets, grottoes, inconspicuous stone steps leading here to a rustic pavilion set about with flowers, there to a concealed forest glade harboring a tiny formal garden.

  But the lake, the ol’ swimmin’ hole …

  They went swimming, splashing as little as possible and sticking to the shore. They explored two inlets to the right (a miniature waterfall and a tiny beach of obviously imported golden sand) and three to the left (a square-cut one, lined with tile the color of patina, with a black glass diving tower overhanging water that must have been dredged to twenty feet; a little beach of snow-white sand; and one they dared not enter, for fear of harming the fleet of perfect sailing ships, none more than a foot long, which lay at anchor; but they trod water until they were bone-cold, gawking at the miniature model waterfront with little pushcarts in the street, and lamp-posts, and old-fashioned houses) and then, weary, hungry, and awestruck, they had gone home.

  And Sammy cracked the secret he had been keeping—the thing which made this day an occasion: he was to go wild-hairing off the next day in an effort to join Chennault in China.

  Guy Gibbon, overwhelmed, made the only gesture he could think of: he devotedly swore he would not go trespassing again until Sammy got back.

  “Death from choriocarcinoma,” Dr. Weber began, “is the result of—”

  “But he won’t die,” she said. “I won’t let him.”

  “My dear,” Dr. Weber was a small man with round shoulders and a hawk’s face. “I don’t mean to be unkind, but I can use all the euphemisms and kindle all the false hope, or I can do as you have asked me to do—explain the condition and make a prognosis. I can’t do both.”

  Dr. Rathburn said gently, “Why don’t you go and lie down? I’ll come when we’ve finished here and tell you all about it.”

  “I don’t want to lie down,” she said fiercely. “And I wasn’t asking you to spare me anything. Dr. Weber, I simply said I would not let him die. There’s nothing in that statement which keeps you from telling me the truth.”

  Keogh smiled. Weber caught him at it and startled; Keogh saw his surprise. “I know her better than you do,” he said, with a touch of pride. “You don’t have to pull any punches.”

  “Thanks, Keogh,” she said. She leaned forward. “Go ahead, Dr. Weber.”

  Weber looked at her. Snatched from his work two thousand miles away, brought to a place he had never known existed, of a magnificence which attacked his confidence in his own eyes, meeting a woman of power—every sort of power—quite beyond his experience … Weber had thought himself beyond astonishment. Shock, grief, fear, deprivation like hers he had seen before, of course; what doctor has not? but when Keogh had told her baldly that this disease killed in six weeks, always, she had flinched, closed her eyes for an interminable moment, and had then said softly, “Tell us everything you can about this—this disease. Doctor.” And she had added, for the first time, “He isn’t going to die. I won’t let him”; and the way she held her head, the way her full voice handled the words, he almost believed her. Heaven knows, he wished he could. And so he found he could be astonished yet again.

  He made an effort to detach himself, and became not a man, not this particular patient’s doctor, but a sort of source-book. He began again:

  “Death from choriocarcinoma is a little unlike other deaths from malignancies. Ordinarily a cancer begins locally, and sends its chains and masses of wild cells growing through the organ on which it began. Death can result from the failure of that organ; liver, kidney, brain, what have you. Or the cancer suddenly breaks up and spreads through the body, starting colonies, throughout the system. This is called metastasis. Death results then from the loss of efficiency of many organs instead of j
ust one. Of course, both these things can happen—the almost complete impairment of the originally cancerous organ, and metastatic effects at the same time.

  “Chorio, on the other hand, doesn’t originally involve a vital organ. Vital to the species, perhaps, but not to the individual.” He permitted himself a dry smile. “This is probably a startling concept, to most people in this day and age, but it’s nonetheless true. However, sex cells, at their most basic and primitive, have peculiarities not shared by other body cells.

  “Have you ever heard of the condition known as ectopic pregnancy?” He directed this question at Keogh, who nodded. “A fertilized ovum fails to descend to the uterus; instead it attaches itself to the side of the very fine tube between the ovaries and the womb. And at first everything proceeds well with it—and this is the point I want you to grasp—because in spite of the fact that only the uterus is truly specialized for this work, the tube wall not only supports the growing ovum but feeds it. It actually forms what we call a counterplacenta; it enfolds the early fetus and nurtures it. The fetus, of course, has a high survival value, and is able to get along quite well on the plasma which the counterplacenta supplies it with. And it grows—it grows fantastically. Since the tube is very fine—you’d have difficulty getting the smallest sewing needle up through it—it can no longer contain the growing fetus, and ruptures. Unless it is removed at that time, the tissues outside will quite as readily take on the work of a real placenta and uterus, and in six or seven months, if the mother survives that long, will create havoc in the abdomen.

  “All right then: back to chorio. Since the cells involved are sex cells, and cancerous to boot, they divide and redivide wildly, without pattern or special form. They develop in an infinite variety of shapes and sizes and forms. The law of averages dictates that a certain number of these—and the number of distorted cells is astronomical—resemble fertilized ova. Some of them resemble them so closely that I personally would not enjoy the task of distinguishing between them and the real thing. However, the body as a whole is not that particular; anything which even roughly resembles a fertilized egg-cell is capable of commanding that counterplacenta.

  “Now consider the source of these cells—physiologically speaking, gland tissue—a mass of capillary tubes and blood vessels. Each and every one of these does its best to accept and nurture these fetal limitations, down to the tiniest of them. The thin walls of the capillaries, however, break down easily under such an effort, and the imitations—selectively, the best of them, too, because the tissues yield most readily to them—they pass into the capillaries and then into the bloodstream.

  “There is one place, and only one place, where they can be combed out; and it’s a place rich in oxygen, lymph, blood and plasma: the lungs. The lungs enthusiastically take on the job of forming placentae for these cells, and nurturing them. But for every segment of lung given over to gestating an imitation fetus, there is one less segment occupied with the job of oxygenating blood. Ultimately the lungs fail, and death results from oxygen starvation.”

  Rathburn spoke up. “For years chorio was regarded as a lung disease, and the cancerous gonads as a sort of side effect.”

  “But lung cancer—” Keogh began to object.

  “It isn’t lung cancer, don’t you see? Given enough time, it might be, through metastasis. But there is never enough time. Chorio doesn’t have to wait for that, to kill. That’s why it’s so swift.” He tried not to look at the girl, and failed; he said it anyway: “And certain.”

  “Just exactly how do you treat it?”

  Weber raised his hands and let them fall. It was precisely the gesture Rathburn had made earlier, and Keogh wondered distantly whether they taught it in medical schools. “Something to kill the pain. Orchidectomy might make the patient last a little longer, by removing the supply of wild cells to the bloodstream. But it wouldn’t save him. Metastasis has already taken place by the time the first symptom appears. The cancer becomes generalized … perhaps the lung condition is only God’s mercy.”

  “What’s ‘orchidectomy’?” asked Keogh.

  “Amputation of the—uh—source,” said Rathburn uncomfortably.

  “No!” cried the girl.

  Keogh sent her a pitying look. There was that about him which was cynical, sophisticated, and perhaps coldly angry, at anyone who lived as he could never live, had what he could never have. It was a stirring of the grave ancient sin which old Cap’n Gamaliel had isolated in his perspicacious thoughts. Sure, amputate, if it’ll help, he thought. What do you think you’re preserving—his virility? What good’s it to you now?… but sending her the look, he encountered something different from the romantically based horror and shock he expected. Her thick level brows were drawn together, her whole face intense with taut concentration. “Let me think,” she said, oddly.

  “You really should—” Rathburn began, but she shushed him with an impatient gesture. The three men exchanged a glance and settled back; it was as if someone, something had told them clearly and specifically to wait. What they were waiting for, they could not imagine.

  The girl sat with her eyes closed. A minute crawled by. “Daddy used to say,” she said, so quietly that she must surely be talking to herself, “that there’s always a way. All you have to do is think of it.”

  There was another long silence and she opened her eyes. There was a burning down in them somewhere; it made Keogh uneasy. She said, “And once he told me that I could have anything I wanted; all it had to be was … possible. And … the only way you can find out if a thing is impossible is to try it.”

  “That wasn’t Sam Wyke,” said Keogh. “That was Keogh.”

  She wet her lips and looked at them each in turn. She seemed not to see them at all. “I’m not going to let him die,” she said. “You’ll see.”

  Sammy Stein came back two years later, on leave, and full of plans to join the Army Air Force. He’d had, as he himself said, the hell kicked out of him in China and a lot of the hellishness as well. But there was enough of the old Sammy left to make wild wonderful plans about going trespassing; and they knew just where they were going. The new Sammy, however, demanded a binge and a broad first.

  Guy, two years out of high school, working for a living, and by nature neither binger nor wencher, went along only too gladly. Sam seemed to have forgotten about the “ol swimmin’ hole” at first, and halfway through the evening, in a local bar-and-dance emporium, Guy was about to despair of his ever remembering it, when Sam himself brought it up, recalling to Guy that he had once written Sam a letter asking Sam if it had really happened. Guy had, in his turn, forgotten the letter, and after that they had a good time with “remember-when”—and they made plans to go trespassing the very next day, and bring a lunch. And start early.

  Then there was a noisy involvement with some girls, and a lot more drinks, and out of the haze and movement somewhere after midnight, Guy emerged on a sidewalk looking at Sammy shoveling a girl into a taxicab. “Hey!” he called out, “what about the you know, ol’ swimmin’ hole?”

  “Call me Abacus, you can count on me,” said Sammy, and laughed immoderately. The girl with him pulled at his arm; he shook her off and weaved over to Guy. “Listen,” he said, and gave a distorted wink, “if this makes—and it will—I’m starting no early starts. Tell you what, you go on out there and meet me by that sign says keep out or we’ll castigate you. Say eleven o’clock. If I can’t make it by then I’m dead or something.” He bellowed at the cab, “You gon’ kill me, honey?” and the girl called back, “I will if you don’t get into this taxi.” “See what I mean?” said Sammy in a grand drunken non-sequitur, “I got to go get killed.” He zigged away, needing no zag because even walking sidewise he reached the cab in a straight line, and Guy saw no more of him that leave.

  That was hard to take, mostly because there was no special moment at which he knew Sammy wasn’t coming. He arrived ten minutes late, after making a super-human effort to get there. His stomach was sour fro
m the unaccustomed drinking, and he was sandy-eyed and ache-jointed from lack of sleep. He knew that the greater probability was Sammy had not arrived yet or would not at all; yet the nagging possibility existed that he had come early and gone straight in. Guy waited around for a full hour, and some more minutes until the little road was clear of traffic and sounds of traffic, and then plunged alone into the woods, past the NO ADMITTANCE sign, and in to the wall. He had trouble finding the two trees, and once over the wall, he could not get his bearings for a while; he was pleased, of course, to find the unbelievably perfect lawns still there by the flawless acre, the rigidly controlled museums of carven box, the edge-trimmed, rolled-gravel walks meandering prettily through the woods. The pleasure, however, was no more than confirmation of his memory, and went no further; the day was spoiled.

  Guy reached the lake at nearly one o’clock, hot, tired, ravenously hungry and unpleasantly nervous. The combination hit him in the stomach and made it echo; he sat down on the bank and ate. He wolfed down the food he had brought for himself and Sammy’s as well—odds and ends carelessly tossed into a paper sack in the bleary early hours. The cake was moldy but he ate it anyway. The orange juice was warm and had begun to ferment. And stubbornly, he determined to swim, because that was what he had come for.

  He chose the beach with the golden sand. Under a thick cover of junipers he found a stone bench and table. He undressed here and scuttled across the beach and into the water.

  He had meant it to be a mere dip, so he could say he’d done it. But around the little headland to the left was the rectangular cove with the diving platform; and he remembered the harbor of model ships; and then movement diagonally across the foot of the lake’s L caught his eye, and he saw models—not the anchored ships this time, but racing sloops, which put out from an inlet and crossed its mouth and sailed in again; they must be mounted on some sort of underwater wheel or endless chain, and moved as the breeze took them. He all but boiled straight across to them, then decided to be wise and go round.