The Nail and the Oracle

by Theodore Sturgeon

  Happy’s head was whirling. “Please,” she said faintly. “Will s-somebody tell me what—I mean—are you the Chief of Police?”

  The pudgy man smiled and nodded. “You, young lady, are worth your weight in gold. I mean it. This fellow has a record as long as my arm, and rewards to go with it.

  “Chief,” said Hart in a bewildered voice, “will you please start from the beginning and tell me just what’s been going on here?”

  “Why, sure, son.” The Chief leaned back against an undamaged table. “The way I got into it—well, I must confess that you Association men shamed me into it. If merchants have to get together for protection against a holdup man, instead of relying on the police, why, it’s a sad business. I put on these old clothes and mooched around trying to think like a criminal. I spotted this place as a natural for a holdup. Only a girl to watch it—but what a girl! Know what she did? She booby-trapped the cash drawer, and on top of that, she knocked Lowell down and ran for the police.”

  “Knocked—” Hart looked at her with amazement. “And what do you mean, booby-trapped the cash drawer?”

  Happy gulped. “I was scared about the cash. So I b-broke into your locker, Hart, and got all your fishhooks and sewed them into the cash bag with their points downward. And I nailed the bag to the bottom of the drawer, so if anyone tried to get it out, they couldn’t, and they’d have to reach into it for the money and—oh!”

  “What’s the matter?” asked the Chief.

  Happy said, “You really did leave your wallet in your other clothes, didn’t you?”

  The Chief’s eyes twinkled. “I really did. I never want you for an enemy, young lady. You had sparks flying out of you! Anyway, this crook Lowell didn’t recognize me. He was probably going to pretend to guard me while he sent the girl for the police. Then he’d take the money and run, and the poor old deadbeat—me!—would be in for it. Of course, I knew he wasn’t one of my boys the minute I laid eyes on him, so I decided to sit tight and try to catch him in the act. You beat me to it, young lady,” he finished, wagging his head admiringly.

  After they had all gone, after Hart had laughingly waved off the Chief’s insistence that he owed him for a meal, Happy turned to right the overturned table. Hart caught her arm. “Hap—” She waited.

  “Hap, I—” She had never heard him stumble over his words before. “Hap, what do you suppose a fellow works for—works hard and saves and tries to build something up?”

  “To get ahead.”

  “Yes, but not only in business. Hap, I’ve worked twice as hard since I—you came here. Some day maybe I’ll have enough—be enough to—to—” He stopped, turned her to face him. “Would you wait until then?”

  She lowered her voice. “If I had a part interest in this place I don’t think I’d break things, Hart.”

  “You mean you—”

  “—and with the reward money I get, you could buy a cash register and—and—because husbands and wives can jointly own—oh, Hart!”

  How to Forget Baseball

  Once upon a possible (for though there is only one past, there are many futures), after twelve hours of war and forty-some years of reconstruction, and at a time when nothing had stopped technology (for technological progress not only accelerates, so does the rate at which it accelerates), the country was composed of strip-cities, six blocks wide and up to eighty miles long, which rimmed the great superhighways, and wildernesses. And at certain remote spots in the wilderness lived primitives, called Primitives, a hearty breed that liked to stay close to nature and the old ways. And it came about that a certain flack, whose job it was to publicize the national pastime, a game called Quoit, was assigned to find a person who had never seen the game; to invite him in for one game, to get his impressions of said game and to use them as flacks use such things. He closed the deal with a Primitive who agreed to come in exchange for the privilege of shopping for certain trade goods. So …

  The dust cloud had a chromium nose and a horrible hiss. It labored down the lane, swinging from side to side, climbed the final rise, slowed beside the rustic gate with the ancient enameled legend OURSER over it, slewed around and stopped, whereupon it was enveloped in its own streaming tail. The hissing subsided, and the dust cloud seemed to slump at its swirling heart. In the silence the dust settled on and around the ground-effect vehicle, its impregnable, scratchproof, everlasting finish ignominiously surrendering its gleam and glitter to the pall of bone-dry marl. There was a moment of silence, accented by the râles of cooling metal and the barbarous comments of faraway frightened crickets and a nearby unabashed frog. Then the vehicle emitted a faint rising whine as a circular section in a side window began to spin; in a second the sound was up out of the audible range and the dust vanished from the rotating part of the window, presenting a dark porthole in which a jovial head appeared, browless, hairless, and squinting nervously at all the unconditioned air. It stared through the bars of the gate at what would have been a footpath except that there were two of them, parallel and winding up through the meadow to a stand of maples. From these, in due course, issued an impossibility outside the pages of some historical treatise—not annealed plastic, but formed metal; not hovering, but wheeled; streamlined outlandishly only where it showed and, most surprising of all, producing constant sound from the power plant.

  The man in the hovercraft watched with incredulity the stately progress of this wheeled fossil as it bumped across the meadow and came to a stop on the other side of the gate. From it stepped a tall man dressed embarrassingly, bearing a burden of some kind. He closed the door of his antique and locked it with a key, and walked to the other side to try the door there. At last he turned to face the hovercar. He did so with an expression of distaste, which he wore the whole time he approached.

  The hairless man touched a stud on the dash and listened intently to the murmur that came from surrounding speakers. Then he palmed a pale spot on the dash and the side panel snicked out of sight, gone up, down, sidewise—who could tell?—and repeated what the recorder had told him: “Hello. Hello. Bil Ferry speaking. Is Mr. Ourser there?”

  The tall man put out a searching hand, found that there was indeed an opening and got in. The driver brushed the pale spot and the opening went snick! and was no longer an opening. The newcomer winced, then said, “I’m Ourser.”

  “Did I get it right?” asked Bil Ferry.

  “You mean the ‘hello, hello’ bit? That’s for the telephone,” said Mr. Ourser mercilessly.

  “Damn dim research department,” grumbled the flack, and started the hovercraft. “Anyway, I tried.”

  “Nobody but a Primitive tries,” said Mr. Ourser starchily. “There’s no reason to.”

  “Passpoint unreason there, classmate,” said Bil Ferry rapidly. “Y’ll know it, comes Ol’ Florio flippin.”

  “I,” said Mr. Ourser, “am a scholar, and among other things I am devoted to the purity of the tongue. I do not dig you one bit, man.”

  “Sorr, so sorr. All I mean, you’ll see Florio put out lots effort, plenty, today. You find me?”

  “I follow the general trend. This Florio, I take it, is your favorite and champion. Slow down, you idiot!” The hovercraft, as always when not automatically guided, had begun to indulge in its proclivity for heading at forty-five degrees to the direction it was traveling. Bil Ferry wrestled the tiny figure-eight–shaped wheel, corrected the heading and said, unabashed, “Positive, poz-poz-poz,” and slowed to a comparative crawl. “Every rockhead in the world thinks he’s an expert driver,” grumbled the Primitive. “Not me, classmate,” said the other cheerfully. “Who needs it? I am expert flack.”

  The hovercar hissed over the undulating marl road with its high wide white mantle of dust airborne in its wake. In time it turned onto the remains of a blacktop feeder road, the potholes and weed patches of which the craft ignored, and came at last to the superway approach. Bil Ferry placed the vehicle carefully on the center stripe of the approach ramp and accelerated to match the
flowing patches of violet on its buff background. There was the soft syllable of a gong, and a saucer-sized purple light appeared at the center of the dash. Bil Ferry sighed, folded up the steering wheel with a snap and pushed it forward, where it was swallowed without a trace by a gateway in the dash. The flack sighed again and swung his seat around on its pivot with his back to the windshield. Mr. Ourser was sitting rigid, perspiration starting visibly from his temples and his eyes tight closed, as the hovercraft swept around the curve of the ramp accelerating (100, 130, 150, 165) to the straightaway.

  “What’s the matter, classmate?”

  “I hate these things,” said Mr. Ourser. “Hate this.”

  Bil Ferry settled himself comfortably. “Now I got a chance to brief you about the Q this after.”

  “Please don’t,” said the Primitive. “It never made any sense to me before and I don’t think it or anything else would make any sense to me just now.” He opened his eyes, took in the blur of continuous village at the sides, the hurtling hovercraft that preceded them a precise one hundred yards ahead and the other, which followed one hundred yards behind, all three vehicles strung on the broad yellow stripe of the center line. He glanced at, and winced from, the luminous yellow figures that seemed to hang unsupported three inches away from the dash, with the information (175) he so little desired at the moment. “Talk if you want. Just don’t ask me to think.”

  “Kay,” said the unpuncturable Bil Ferry agreeably. “You don’t got a Q stadium your place, poz?”

  “We haven’t, we can’t, we wouldn’t and, as you say, we don’t.”

  “What you do instead?”

  “Instead of what?”

  “Sitement. Root. You trace me? The big game.”

  “Oh. Well, football. Then in the winter there’s basketball and hockey. And some of us like tennis. But the main thing is baseball.” The flack shook his head. “Not baseball. Nobody can und’stan’ baseball.”

  “Not understand baseball?” cried Mr. Ourser.

  “I researched baseball,” said Bil Ferry. “Chit and chat with you, home ground, friendly, you find me? I don’t und’stan’ it. RBI. MVP. Earned runs. Hittin zungos.”

  “Fungos. Anyone can understand baseball! Why—”

  And so it was that the Primitive began to lecture the flack, the one still tensely gripping the sides of his seat and averting his eyes from the outscape, the other relaxed and puzzled, listening with birdlike cockings of the head and bright, unreceptive eyes. It would have been clear to Mr. Ourser, had he been observing the evolution of the flack’s expression from interest through perplexity, that the flack had eventually tuned him out and was just listening to the noise.

  “What I don’t und’stan’,” said Bil Ferry at length, “is, everything stay still, yes? First base here, third base here, foul line here, home run here, poz?”

  “Home plate. Yes.”

  “Thass dead, classmate. You want everything movin. Well, alive is movin, you find me? Now, what you should do, you should get those bases movin around a circle. You get your pitcher to turn and turn to follow. He got a special throw to lead the target, hey?”

  “That wouldn’t be baseball!” cried Mr. Ourser.

  “And hey,” said the flack eagerly, “why you want one team up, th’other team up? It take all day. What you want, you got two diamonds, one on top the other, you find me? You put your pitchers out there back to back an the whole thing goin round and round. Now it moves, classmate, hey? Alive?”

  “You keep your obscenities to yourself!”

  “Kay,” said Bil Ferry, uninsulted. “So I don’t und’stan’ baseball, and I don’t und’stan’ you Primmies either. P’centage points, magic numbers to win or lose, battin’ averages, and they tell me you live computerless.”

  “Our cornerstone,” acknowledged Mr. Ourser. “Then y’r all unsane,” said Bill Ferry amiably. “Y’r all like this baseball thing. Fella stand on a place, uses knowledge skill and ergs to get himself where? Right back where he started only he’s tired. Gimme a Q any day. We’re here.”

  What “here” turned out to be was an exit ramp, one like a dozen others they had passed. The flack turned into it by touching the right-hand one of two wartlike lumps on the dash. It began to flash lime-green, and the hovercraft edged off the center line onto the buff roadway and then the blue margin and began to decelerate. Mr. Ourser fixed his companion with an apprehensive gaze, opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it, and started to tremble. The hovercraft, still decelerating, followed the ramp across a bewildering web of crossroads and cloverleafs and rushed by a lake and two thousand-foot cylindrical housing units encrusted with balconies and standing on stilts. Ahead was the chiaroscuro of one of the nation’s few remaining cities—and it was less a city than the monstrous clutter caused by the crossing of five major highways and their strip-villages. The skyline showed a heavy preponderance of “inverted structure”—the architectural gimmickry of the period which, by using superstrength materials below and ultralight ones above, created buildings like upside-down pyramids and impossibly leaning and curving towers.

  Mr. Ourser, past the point of tact and even reason, suddenly screamed, “The wheel! For the love of God, you forgot your wheel!” At that moment the lime-green light gonged softly and went out. The flack reached behind him (he still sat with his back to the windshield) and touched the wart again; it resumed its flashing and the machine whirled off again to the right, this time on a much narrower ramp which was now a ramp, now a tunnel, now an arrow-straight path through swampland and meadow. “The wheel, who needs it?” laughed the flack, as the car banked sharply around a turn like that of a bobsled run, braked silently almost to a halt and settled, with the descending whine of its throttled-out turbines, to rest on a moving belt.

  Above and ahead, great shining letters hung in the sky, surrounded by a nutating ring of blue light. The letters read QUOIT TODAY and then FLORIO and then ADAM THE GREAT, and then again QUOIT TODAY. The hovercraft was borne down perhaps a hundred feet, then turned broadside and decanted into a niche between two other cars, part of a row, a rank, a serried myriad of distance-dwindled shining cars. The flack touched the doorplate, and the side of the car snicked out of existence. “Out, classmate. We’re here.”

  Mr. Ourser, still trembling, dismounted and reached back in for his burden, at which the flack raised the ridges from which his eyebrows had been shaved, but made no comment. The flack led the way and assisted his unwilling guest onto the first and second bands of a slideway on which they were whisked, standing, to the gateway. Mr. Ourser flicked self-conscious glances at the people around him and their impossible clothes. There was a preponderance of a substance that was colored like skin and clung like skin to areas of skin and showed no margin where the substance stopped and skin began. This made possible such effects as braided earlobes and skintight torso coverings, which to all intents and purposes did not cover. There were also bald girls and men with shoes that looked like bare feet with no toes. Mr. Ourser and the flack were grateful, each in his way, for the tradition that made clothing style the privilege of each individual, and derogatory comments inexpressible. “Modesty is not so simple a virtue as honesty,” a wise man once said, and he said it before entire populations lived in an air-conditioned environment.

  Bil Ferry flashed a medallion, swung from a chain around his neck, at the gate-keeping machine, and they were admitted and swept by another slideway under the stadium and through to daylight on their aisle. Their box was perhaps seven rows back from the edge of the playing field but, once in it, Mr. Ourser had the feeling it was suspended in space over the action. Before he could determine how this was done he was diverted by the flack’s demonstration of the box’s conveniences: heat control, cold control, refreshments, the scoreboard (a blank bulkhead at the moment) and the Options.

  “What are Options?”

  Bil Ferry pointed to the two nubs on the scoreboard section of the bulkhead. “Each quarter, the quoiters run u
p provisional score, shows here. Now we decide if it adds zero-sum or nonzero-sum.”

  “I do not,” said the Primitive, “know what you are talking about.”

  “Oh,” said the flack, and thought for a moment. “Look. You got something out wildernessville called ‘games theory’?”

  “I’ve heard of it. A kind of high-grade math, or logic.”

  “Right-eo. Games theory derived from games, hey? Well, Quoit is first game derived from games theory.” He looked at Mr. Ourser’s expression and shrugged. “Skip, classmate. Y’ll und’stan’ better at the quarter when the scores come up.”

  “I doubt it,” said the Primitive, and sat down (with all but an astonished yelp at the seat’s superb softness) and directed his attention to the field.

  The field was oval, about two hundred feet long and a hundred wide, and covered with what seemed to be perfect greensward. Centered in the oval was a circle fifty feet in diameter. “Thass the Track,” said Bil Ferry, pointing to the circle. “There’s three things you got to know: the Track, the Quoit, the Spot. Track’s fifty feet across. Quoit rolls on it. Spot is where edge of Quoit touches Track.”

  “I don’t see this Spot. Or the Quoit either.”

  “You will. This is North,” said the flack, waving left, “and this is South. Object is for South to get his body, or part of it, into the Spot while Spot’s traveling in North’s side of the track. You trace me?”

  “And to keep the North player out of the Spot when it’s in his own territory.”

  “You listen real good, classmate,” the flack said approvingly.

  “How fast does this Spot travel around the track?”

  “Four times a minute. Once in fifteen seconds. Bout seven miles ’n hour.”

  “And a player scores by getting into the Spot?”

  “Any part of his body, for five seconds. He gets points ’pending on where Spot is at end of five seconds.”