Selected Stories

by Theodore Sturgeon

  It came to him also why this particular cultural matrix did this to itself. In its large subconscious, it probably knew quite clearly the true status of its sensual appetites. It must reason, then, that unless it kept these appetites whipped up to a froth at all times, it might not increase itself, and it felt it must increase. This was not a pretty thought, but neither is the pounce of a cat on a baby bird; yet one cannot argue with the drive behind it.

  So it was that Halvorsen’s reasons for not living ceased to be reasons; with the purest of truth he could say I am not unmanned; I am not unfit; I am not abnormal … I am not alone.

  All this in no-time, as he closed his eyes to await the mass even now falling on him. And the reflex of reflexes acted just as eyelids met; he spun off the bed, bounced out of the nearby window, and was on the grass outside as the ceiling and walls together met the floor in a gout of flame.

  XV

  The girl climbed up to the front seat of the fire engine. “Move over.”

  Miss Schmidt swung her worried gaze away from the burning house, and said in a preoccupied tone, “I don’t think you’d be allowed to, little girl. We’re from that hou—why, it’s Mary Haunt!”

  “Didn’t recognize me, huh?” said Mary Haunt. She swung a hip and shunted Miss Schmidt over. “Can’t say I blame you. What a mess!” she said, indicating the house.

  “Mr. O’Banion is in there; he went after Mrs. Martin. And have you seen Mr. Halvorsen?”

  “No.”

  “Tonio! Tonio!” Robin suddenly cried.

  “Shh, dear. He’ll be along.”

  “Dare he iss! Dare he iss! Momee!” he shrieked, “Come see my fire engine, shall we?”

  “Oh, thank God, thank God they’re safe,” said Miss Schmidt. She hugged Robin until he grunted.

  “I’m all choked up,” growled Mary Haunt. Again she made the angry gesture at the house. “What a mess. Everything I own—the war-paint, the clothes, all my magazines—everything, gone. You know what that means. I—”

  I’ve got to go home now. And it was here, on the slightest matter of phrasing that the strange flash of silver suffused Mary Haunt; not under the descending scythe of Death, nor under the impact of soul found, heart found: just for the nudge of a word, she had her timeless instant.

  All her life and the meaning of her life and all the things in it: the dimity curtains and home-baked bread, Jackie and Seth whamming away at each other for the privilege of carrying her books, the spice-shelf and the daffodils under the parlor windows. She’d loved it so, and reigned over it; and mostly, she’d been a gentle princess and ruled kindly.

  Did they throw you out, gal?

  She’d never known where it started, how it came about, until now. Now, with astonishment, she did. Daddy started it, before she was old enough to walk, Daddy one of the millions who had applauded a child actress called Shirley Temple, one of the thousands who had idolized her, one of the hundreds who had deified her. “Little Mary Hollywood,” he’d called his daughter, and it had been “When you’re in pictures, honey—” Every morning was a fountain to empty the reservoir of his dreams; every night he filled again from the depthless well of his ambition for her.

  And everyone believed him. Mom came to believe him, and her kid brother, and finally everyone in town. They had to; Daddy’s unswerving, undoubting conviction overrode any alternatives, and she herself clinched it, just by being what she was, an exquisite child exquisitely groomed, who grew more beautiful (by Hollywood standards) every year. She wanted what every child wants: loving attention. She got it in fullest measure. She wanted to do what every child wants to do: gain the approval of her elders. She tried; and indeed, no other course was open to her.

  Did they throw you out, gal?

  Perhaps Daddy might have outgrown it; or if not, perhaps he’d have known, or found out, how to accomplish his dream in a real world. But Daddy died when she was six, and Mom took over his dream as if it had been a flower from his dead hand. She did not nourish it; she pressed it between the leaves of her treasured memories of him. It was a live thing, true, but arrested at the intensity and the formlessness of his hopes for her when she was six. She encouraged the child only to want to be in pictures, and to be sure she would be; it never occurred to her that there might be things for the child to learn. Her career was coming; it was coming like Christmas.

  But no one knew when.

  And when she cleaned house, they all thought it was sweet, so pretty to watch, but they’d rather take the broom away from her; and when she baked, it was pretty too but not what she was really for, and when she read the diet sections in the grocery magazines, that was all right, but the other features—how to make tangerine gravy for duck, how to remove spots from synthetic fibers—“Why, Mary! you’ll have a little army worrying about those things for you!”

  Movie magazines then, and movies, and waiting, until the day she left.

  Did they throw you out, gal?

  Screen Society had a feature on Hollywood High School, and it mentioned how many stars and starlets had come from there, and the ages some of them had been when they signed contracts. And suddenly she wasn’t the Shirley Temple girl at all, she was older, years older than two girls in the article, the same age as five of them. Yet here she was still, while the whole town waited … suppose she never made it? Suppose nothing happened here? And she began to interpret this remark, that look, the other silence, in ways that troubled her, until she wanted to hide, or to drop dead, or leave.

  Just like that, leaving was the answer. She told no one, she took what clothes she had that were good, she bought a ticket for just anywhere and wrote thrilling, imaginative, untrue letters at wider and wider intervals. Naïvely she got a job which might mean her Big Break and which actually never would. And at last she reached a point where she would not look back, for wanting home so much; she would not look forward, for knowing there was nothing there; she held herself in a present of futility and purposive refusal to further the ambition she insisted she had; and she had no pleasure and no outlet but anger. She took refuge in her furies; she scorned people and what they did and what they wanted, and told them all so. And she took the picture of Mom standing in front of the house in the spring, with the jonquils all about and the tulips coming, and she wrapped it up in the cotton print Mom had made for her fourteenth birthday and never given her because Screen Society had said princess-style for teeners was corny.

  Did they throw you out, gal?

  Old Sam had asked her that; he knew, even when she didn’t. But now, in this strange silver moment, she knew; she knew it all. Yes, they had thrown her out. They had let her be a dead man’s dream until she was nearly dead herself. They never let her be Mary Haunt who wanted to fix the new curtains or bake a berry pie, and have a square hedge along the Elm Street side and go to meeting on Sundays. They had marked her destiny on her face and body and on the clothes she wore, and stamped it into her speech and fixed her hair the way they wanted it, and to the bottom of her heart she was angry.

  And now, all of a sudden, and for the very first time, it occurred to her that she could, if she wanted, be Mary Haunt her own self, and be it right there at home; that home was the best place to be that very good thing, and she could replace their disappointment with a very real pride. She could be home before the Strawberry Festival at the church; she would wear an apron and get suds on her forehead when she pushed her hair back, the way Bitty did sometimes.

  So Mary Haunt sat on a fire engine, next to the high-school librarian who was enveloped in a tremendous raincoat, saying that everything was burned up, lost; and about to say, “I’ve got to go home now.” But she said, “I can go home now.” She looked into Miss Schmidt’s eyes and smiled a smile the older woman had never seen before. “I can, I can! I can go home now!” Mary Haunt sang. Impulsively she took Miss Schmidt’s hand and squeezed it. She looked into her face and laughed, “I’m not mad any more, not at you or anybody … and I’ve been a little stinker and I
’m sorry; I’m going home!” And Miss Schmidt looked at the smudged face, the scorched hair drawn back into a childish ponytail and held by a rubber band, the spotless princess dress. “Why,” said Miss Schmidt, “you’re beautiful, just beautiful!”

  “I’m not. I’m seventeen, only seventeen,” Mary Haunt said out of a wild happiness, “and I’m going home and bake a cake.” And she hugged her mother’s picture and smiled; even the ruined house did not glow quite this way.

  EXCERPT FROM FIELD EXPEDITION [NOTEBOOK]: [! ! !] Did it ever work! [You]’d think these specimens had used Synapse Beta sub Sixteen all their lives! If [we] had a [tenth] as much stamina [we] could [lie down] in a [bed] of paradoxes and go to [sleep].

  [We] will observe for a [short period] longer, and then pack up and leave. This is a [fascinating] place to visit, but [I] wouldn’t want to [live] here.

  XVI

  It was October, and possibly the last chance they’d have for a picnic, and the day agreed and was beautiful for them. They found a fine spot where a stand of birch grew on both sides of an old split-rail fence, and a brook went by just out of sight. After they were finished O’Banion lay on his stomach in the sun, and thoughtfully scratched his upper lip with a bit of straw.

  His wife laughed softly.

  “Hm?”

  “You’re thinking about the Bittelmans again.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Just used to it. When you go off into yourself and look astonished and mystified and annoyed all at once, it’s the Bittelmans again.”

  “Harmless hobby,” said Halvorsen, and smiled.

  “Is it, Phil? Tonio, how would you like me to go all pouty and coy and complain that you’ve spent more time thinking about them than about me?”

  “Do by all means go all pouty and coy. I’ll divorce you.”

  “Tony!”

  “Well,” he said lazily, “I had so much fun marrying you in the first place that it might be worth doing again. Where’s Robin?”

  “Right b—Oh, dear, Robin!”

  Down in the cleft, where the brook gurgled, Robin’s voice answered instantly. “Frogs here, Mommy. Deelicious!”

  “Does he eat ’em raw?” asked Halvorsen mildly.

  Sue laughed. “That just means ‘pretty’ or ‘desirable’ or even ‘bright green.’ Robin, don’t you dare get wet, you promise me?”

  “I promise me,” said the voice.

  “And don’t go away!”

  “I don’t.”

  “Why don’t they show up?” demanded O’Banion. “Just once, that’s all I’d ever want. Just show their faces and answer two questions.”

  “Why don’t who—oh, Sam and Bitty. What two questions?”

  “What they did to us, how and why.”

  “That’s one question, counselor?” asked Halvorsen.

  “Yes. Two: What they are.”

  “Now, why’d you say ‘what’ instead of ‘who’?”

  “It comes to that.” He rolled over and sat up. “Honey, would you mind if I ran down everything we’ve found out so far, just once more?”

  “Summarize and rest your case?”

  “I don’t know about resting it … reviewing the brief.”

  “I often wonder why you call it a brief,” Halvorsen chuckled.

  O’Banion rose and went to the fence. Putting one hand on a slender birch trunk, he hopped upward, turning, to come to rest sitting on the top rail. “Well, one thing I’m sure of: Sam and Bitty could do things to people, and they did it to all of us. And I refuse to believe that they did it with logic and persuasion.”

  “They could be pretty persuasive.”

  “It was more than that,” O’Banion said impatiently. “What they did to me changed everything about me.”

  “How very intriguing.”

  “Everything about the way I think, hussy. I can look back on that now and realize that I was roped, thrown, and notched. When he wanted me to answer questions I had to answer them, no matter what I was thinking. When he was through with me he turned me loose and made me go back to my business as if nothing had happened. Miss Schmidt told me the same thing.” He shifted his weight on the rail and said excitedly, “Now there’s our prize exhibit. All of us were—changed—by this thing, but Reta—she’s a really different person.”

  “She wasn’t more changed than the others,” said Sue soberly. “She’s thirty-eight years old. It’s an interesting age because when you’re there and look five years older, and then spruce up the way she did and look five years younger, it looked like twenty years’ difference, not ten. That’s all cosmetics and clothes, though. The real difference is as quiet and deep as—well, Phil here.”

  Again Halvorsen found a smile. “Perhaps you’re right. She shifted from library to teaching. It was a shift from surrounding herself with other people’s knowledge to surrounding other people with hers. She’s alive.”

  “I’ll say. Boyfriend too.”

  “Quiet and deep,” said O’Banion thoughtfully, swinging his feet. “That’s right. All you get out of Halvorsen when you ask him about it is a smile like a light going on and, ‘Now it’s right for me to be me.’”

  “That’s it—all of it,” chuckled Halvorsen happily.

  “And Mary Haunt, bless her. Second happiest child I ever saw. Robin! Are you all right?”

  “Yis!” came the voice.

  “I’m still not satisfied,” said O’Banion. “I have the feeling we’re staring at very petty and incidental results of some very important cause. In a moment of acute stress I made a decision which affected my whole life.”

  “Our.”

  He blew her a kiss. “Reta Schmidt says the same thing, though she wouldn’t go into detail. And maybe that’s what Halvorsen means when he says, ‘Now, it’s right for me …’ You annoy me.”

  “Sir!” she cried with mock horror.

  He laughed. “You know what I mean. Only you got exposed to the Bittelmans and didn’t change. Everybody else got wonderful,” he smiled, “You just stayed wonderful. Now what’s so special about you?”

  “Must we sit here and be—”

  “Shush. Think back. Was there any different kind of thing that happened to you that night, some kind of emergency thinking you did that was above and beyond anything you thought you could do?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  Suddenly he brought his fist down on his thigh. “There was! Remember right after we got out of the house, the wall fell on us? You dragged me back and held me still and that attic vent dropped right around us?”

  “That. Yes, I remember. But it wasn’t special. It just made sense.”

  “Sense? I’d like to put a computer on that job—after scorching it half through and kicking it around a while. Somehow you calculated how fast that thing was falling and how much ground it would cover when it hit. You computed that against our speed outward. You located the attic vent opening and figured where it would land, and whether or not it could contain us both. Then you estimated our speed if we went toward the safe spot and concluded that we could make it. Then you went into action, more or less over my dead body to boot. All that in—” He closed his eyes to relive the moment. “—all of one and a half seconds absolute tops. It wasn’t special?”

  “No, it wasn’t,” she said positively. “It was an emergency, don’t you see? A real emergency, not only because we might get hurt, but in terms of all we were to each other and all we could be if only you—”

  “Well, I did,” he smiled. “But I still don’t understand you. You mean you think more, not less—widen your scope instead of narrowing your focus when it’s that kind of emergency? You can think of all those things at once, better and faster and more accurately?”

  Halvorsen suddenly lunged and caught O’Banion’s foot, pulling it sharply upward. He shouted “Yoop!” His right hand whipped up and back and scrabbled at the tree-trunk; his torso twisted and his left hand shot straight down. His legs flailed and straightened; for a m
oment he see-sawed on the rail on his kidneys. At last he got his left hand on the rail and pulled himself upward to sit again. “Hey! What do you think you’re—”

  “Proving a point,” said Halvorsen. “Look, Tony: without warning you were thrown off balance. What did you do? You reached out for that tree-trunk without looking—got it, too; you knew just how fast and how far to go. But at the same time you put your left hand straight down, ready to catch your weight if you went down to the ground. Meantime you banged around with your legs and shifted your weight this way just enough to make a new balance on top. Now tell me: did you sit there after I pushed you and figure all those things out, one by one?”

  “By golly no. Snop—snap—synapses.”

  “What?”

  “Synapses. Sort of pathways in the brain that get paved better and better as you do something over and over. After a while they happen without conscious thought. Keeping your balance is that kind of thing, on the motor level. But don’t tell me you have a sort of … personal-cultural inner ear—something that makes you reach reflexively in terms of your past and your future and … but that’s what happened to me that night!” He stared at Halvorsen. “You figured that out long ago, you and your IBM head!”

  “It always happens if the emergency’s a bad one,” Sue said composedly. “Sometimes when you don’t even know it is an emergency. But what’s remarkable? Aren’t drowning men supposed to see their whole lives pass before them?”

  “Did you say that always happens with your emergencies?”

  “Well, doesn’t it?”

  Suddenly he began to chuckle softly, and at her questioning look he said, “You remind me of something a psychologist told me once. A man was asked to describe his exact sensations on getting drunk. ‘Just like anybody else,’ he says ‘Well, describe it,’ says the doctor. The man says, ‘Well, first your face gets a little flushed and your tongue gets thick, and after a while your ears begin to wiggle—’ Sue, honey, I’ve got news for you. Maybe you react like that in important moments, a great big shiny flash of truth and proportional relationships, but believe me, other people don’t. I never did until that night. That’s it!” he yelled at that top of his voice.