Killdozer!

by Theodore Sturgeon

  Any money in it? Would anybody pay for pictures you could live in? And die in?

  He had a wholesome urge to take his little humdinger—a machinist’s hammer—and ding the hum out of the set. He got the better of the urge. He did, however, solemnly swear never to eat another bite of lamb or mutton. That noise Farrel had made—

  Mutton? Wasn’t there some mutton involved in the radio? He looked at it—at the phone condenser. An innocent-looking little piece of bone, hollow, with the tinfoil inside and out. Giggling without mirth, he took a piece of wire and shorted the homemade condenser out of the circuit, set his time switch, and put on the phones. Nothing happened. He reached over, snatched the wire away. Immediately he was eating gray-green grass under a blank sky, and it was good—good—and now the cold—and then the alarm, and he was back in his chair, staring at the mutton-bone condenser.

  “That bone,” he whispered, “just ain’t dead yet!”

  He went and stood at the front door, thinking of the unutterable horror of that dark building, the milling sheep. Farrel’s sprained wrist. The mutton bone. “Somewhere, somehow,” he told himself, “there’s a hundred billion in it!”

  Ringing a doorbell with a hand burdened by a huge bundle of groceries while the other is in a sling, presents difficulties, but Sheriff Farrel managed it. Turning the knob was harder, but Farrel managed that, too, when there was no response to the bell. From the inside room came the most appalling series of sounds—a chuckling, hysterical gabbling which rose in pitch until it was cut off with a frightful gurgling. Farrel tossed his burden on a seedy divan and ran into the workshop.

  Donzey was lolling in the chair by the radio with the earphones on. His face was pale and his eyes were closed, and he twitched. The radio, in the two weeks since Farrel had seen it, had undergone considerable change. It was now compactly boxed in a black enameled sheet-iron box, from which protruded the controls and a pair of adjustable steer clips, which held what looked like a small white stick. The old speaker, the globular antenna, and all of the external spaghetti was gone. Among the dials on the control panel was that of a clock with a sweep second-hand. This and Donzey’s twitching were the only movements in the room.

  Suddenly the set clicked and Donzey went limp. Farrel gazed with sad apprehension at the mechanic, thinking that being his pallbearer would be little trouble.

  “Donzey—”

  Donzey shook his head and sat up. He was thinner, and his eyes told the sheriff that he was in the throes of something or other. He leaped up and pumped Farrel’s good hand. “Just the man I wanted to see. It works, Farrel—it works!”

  “Yeah, we’re rich,” said Farrel dourly. “I heard all that before. Heck with it. Come out o’ here.” He dragged Donzey into the living room and indicated the bundle on the divan. “Start in on that.”

  Donzey investigated. “What’s this for?”

  “Eatin’, dope. The whole town’s talkin’ about you starvin’ yourself. If I hadn’t given you that money, you wouldn’t have built that radio.”

  “Well, you don’t have to feed me,” said Donzey warmly.

  “I feed any stray dog that follers me home,” said Farrel. “An’ I ain’t responsible for ’em bein’ hungry. Eat, now.”

  “Who said I was hungry?”

  “Goes without sayin’. A guy that goes scrabblin’ around Tookey’s butcher shop lookin’ for bones twice a day just ain’t gettin’ enough Vitamin B.”

  Donzey laughed richly, looked at the sheriff and laughed again. “Oh—that! I wasn’t hungry!”

  “Don’t start pullin’ the wool over my eyes. You’ll eat that stuff or I’ll spread it on the floor and roll you in it.” He took the bag and upended it over the couch.

  Donzey, with awe, looked at the bread, the butter, the preserves, canned fruit, steak, potatoes, lard, vegetables—“Farrel, for gosh sakes! Black market. It must be, for all that—”

  “It ain’t,” said the sheriff grimly. He herded Donzey into the kitchen, brushed a lead-crucible and a miniature steam engine off the stove and started to cook.

  Donzey protested volubly until the steak started to sizzle, and then was stopped by an excess of salivary fluid. He was a little hungry, after all.

  Farrel kept packing it in him until he couldn’t move, and then sat down opposite and began to eye him coldly. “Now what’s all this about?” he asked. “Why didn’t you come to me for a handout?”

  “I didn’t need a handout,” said Donzey, “and if I did I was too busy to notice it. Farrel, we’ve got the biggest thing of the century sitting in there!”

  “It shoots a signal where you want it to, like you said?”

  “Huh? What do you.… Oh, you mean the Heaviside beam thing? Nah,” said Donzey with scorn. “Son, this is big!”

  “Hm-m-m,” said Farrel, looking at his sling. “But what good is it?”

  “An entirely new school of thought will be built up around this thing,” exulted Donzey. “It touches on philosophy, my boy, and metaphysics—the psychic sciences, even.”

  “What good is it?”

  “Course, I can only guess on the whys and wherefores. When you came in, I was a chicken. I got my neck wrung. Sound silly? Well, it wouldn’t to you … you know. But nobody else would believe me. I was a chicken—”

  “What good is it?”

  “—because between the clips I’ve built on the set I put a sliver of chicken bone. There was mutton on it when you tried it. I’ve been cattle and swine through that gadget, Farrel. I’ve been a sparrow and a bullfrog and an alley cat and a rock bass. I know how each one of them lived and died!”

  “Swell,” said Farrel. “But what good is it?”

  “What good is it? How can you ask me such a question? Can’t you think of anything but money?”

  This sudden reversal caught Farrel right between the eyes. He rose with dignity, as if he were sitting on an elevator. “Donzey,” he said, “you’re a thief an’ a robber, an’ I don’t want no more to do with you. Miz’ Curtis was sayin’ the other day that Donzey is a boy that’s goin’ places. I guess it’s up to me to tell you where to go.” He told him and stamped out.

  Donzey laughed, reached for a toothpick and set about enjoying the last of that delicious steak. Farrel was a nice guy, but he lacked imagination.

  Come to think of it, what good was the gadget?

  Two hours later a small package was delivered. It contained a note and a splinter of bone. The note read:

  I know I’m bein a fool, but I can’t forget the first time I met that FM thing of yours. Maybe for once in your life you can put one of your contraptions to work.

  Seems as how Bill Kelley just was in here wantin me to trace his wife Eula. They been havin fights—well, you know Bill, he always treated her like she was in third grade. I often wondered why she didn’t take out a long time ago, the way he used to smack her around and all, and seems like she did.

  Bill allows she has run out with somebody, he don’t know who. Anyway, right after he left a deputy comes in and says he has found Eula out on the highway in her car. Says she is all busted up. I drove out there and sure enough there she is. She is all by herself and she is dead. Car climbed a power pole on the wrong side of a cyclone fence. What I want you to find out is whether there was anyone with her. She had a compound fracture and it wasn’t no trouble to get this sample. See what you can get.

  FARREL

  Donzey realized that he still had the bone splinter in his hand. He laid it quickly on the table and stared at it as if he expected it to moan at him. He had known for some time that he would have to get a human bone to experiment with, but he would rather have had an anonymous one. He had known Eula Kelley for years. Farrel’s clumsy note didn’t begin to state the tragedy of her life since she married the town’s rich man. She was a Kelley, and she had been a Walsh before that, and he wasn’t surprised that she had finally decided to leave him. But it didn’t make sense that she had left with another man. Not Eula.

&n
bsp; Feeling a little sick, Donzey clipped the bone into his machine, set it for twenty seconds, put on the phones and threw the switch. He sat quite still until it clicked off, and then, white and shaken, adjusted the time switch for forty seconds. Once again he “listened,” then made his final setting of fifty-two seconds—enough to take him right up to the mental image of Eula’s death. More than that he dared not do. His great fear was that someday his psychic identification with the bone’s individuality would be carried with it into death.

  Farrel arrived and found him sitting on the steps, his jaw muscles knotting furiously, his sharp eyes full of puzzled anger. Farrel left a deputy in his car and went inside with Donzey.

  “Get anything?” he asked.

  “Plenty. Farrel, that Bill Kelley ought to be shot, and I’d like to do the shooting.”

  “Yeah. He’s a louse. That ain’t our affair. Was there anyone with her?”

  “I—think there was. You better see for yourself.”

  Farrel shot him a quizzical glance and then sat down beside the machine. Donzey turned it on as the sheriff donned the headset, and then sat back, watching. He was sorry that he had to put Farrel through it, but he felt that the sheriff should know the story that splinter had to tell. His mind ran back over Eula’s idea-patterns, the images they yielded. It was a story of incredible sordidness, and of a man’s utter cruelty to a woman. It told of the things he had done, things he had said. Eula had borne it and borne it, and her ego had slowly been crushed under the weight of it. Then there was that last terrible incident, and she had run away from him. It didn’t matter where she was running to, as long as it was away. And there was the flight of hope, the complete death of relief, when she realized, out there on the highway, that there was no escape. Bill Kelley’s mark was on her; she couldn’t leave him or her life with him. She knew exactly what she was doing when she threw the wheel hard over and closed her eyes against the beginning of that tearing crash.

  The set clicked off. Farrel stared at Donzey, and drew a deep, shuddering breath.

  “It don’t seem right, Donzey, knowing things like that about a woman. I always knew Bill was a snake, but—”

  “Yeah,” said Donzey. “I know.”

  Farrel peeled off the headset and went to the door. “Harry,” he called to his deputy, “go get Bill Kelley.”

  “What’s that for?” asked Donzey when he returned.

  “Strictly outside the law,” said Farrel very quietly. “I’m goin’ to give Bill Kelley somethin’ he needs.” He took off his badge and laid it on the bench.

  Donzey suddenly remembered hearing that, years ago, Eula Walsh had married Bill Kelley when she was engaged to Farrel. He wondered if would have called Farrel in if he had remembered that before, and decided that he would have.

  “Farrel,” he said after a time, “about that other person in the car—”

  Farrel’s big head came up. “That’s right—there was somebody—I got just the impression of it, just before the crash. I don’t rightly remember—seems like it was someone I know, though.”

  “Me, too. I can’t understand it, Farrel. She wasn’t running away with anybody. She wasn’t interested in anybody or anything except in getting away. I didn’t get any intimation of her meeting anyone, or even being with anyone until that last few seconds.”

  “That’s right. What did he look like?”

  “Sort of … well, medium-sized and … damn if I remember. But I don’t think I’ve seen him before.”

  “I haven’t, either,” said Farrel. “I don’t know that it’s really important. If she ran away with somebody, she rated it. I don’t think she did, but … heck, he was probably just a hitchhiker that she was too upset to think about,” he finished lamely.

  “A woman don’t commit suicide with a stranger along,” Donzey said.

  “A woman’s liable to do anything after she’s been through what Eula went through.” The doorbell pealed. “That’ll be Kelley.”

  As Farrel went to the door, Donzey noticed that his palms were wet. Farrel opened the door and the deputy’s voice drifted in: “I saw Kelley, sheriff. He wouldn’t come.”

  “He wouldn’t come? Why?”

  Harry’s voice was aggrieved. “Aw, he seemed to have a wild hair up his nose. Got real mad. Started foamin’ at the mouth. Said by golly the police were public servants. Said he wasn’t used to bein’ ordered around like a criminal. Said if you want to see him you got to come to him, or prove he committed a crime. Sour-castic son-of-a-gun.”

  “That ain’t all he is,” said Farrel. “Forget it, Harry. Shove off. I’ll walk into town when I’m through here.” He banged the door. “Donzey, we’re goin’ to fix that feller.”

  Donzey didn’t like to see a big, easy-going lug like Farrel wearing that icy grin. The huge hands that pinned the badge back in its place shook ever so little.

  “Sure,” said Donzey futilely, “sure—we’ll get him.”

  Farrel spun on his heel as if Kelley’s face were under it, and stalked out.

  It was about three days later that one of Farrel’s stooges at the county hospital sent up a bone specimen from an appendicitis death. Attached was a brief case history:

  Cause of death, appendicitis. Age, about forty; male. Appendix ruptured suddenly in Sessions Restaurant at 8:30 pm. Went on operating table about 9:15. Doctor in charge administered adrenalin by pericardial hypodermic. Patient roused sufficiently to allow operation. Removal of appendix and sponging of peritoneum successful. Death by post-operative hemorrhage, 9:28.

  “We have,” muttered Donzey as he clipped the bone into the machine, “a little scientist in our midst. Ol’ Doc Grinniver up to his tricks again! A ruptured appendix and he tosses in a jolt of adrenalin to ‘rouse’ the patient, in the meantime making his heart pump poison all over his body, high-pressure.” He picked up his earphones and glanced at the report again. “ ‘Post-operative hemorrhage’ my blue eyeballs! That was peritonitis! Oh, well, I guess he would have died anyway, and I guess the old butcher couldn’t get hold of a guinea pig with appendicitis.” He sat down at the machine, adjusted the time switch, and his mind slipped into the bone emanations.

  It was the usual life-and-death story, but with a difference. The man had been in the midst of a slimy little office intrigue which seemed to have taken command of most of his thoughts in the last few months; but the ragged stab of pain when his appendix burst drove all that out. Pain is like that, and Donzey had found that people handled it in two ways. They let it pile up on them until it suffocated them, or they floated up and up in it until it supported them; they lay in it like a bed. The second way, though, required a knack which took years to develop, and Donzey was glad he could learn it from other people’s experience.

  This particular case took it the first way, and it wasn’t very nice. The agony grew and dimmed all his senses except the one that feels pain; and that grew. Pretty soon he couldn’t even think. But when it got past that stage, it began to overwhelm his sensories, too, and the pain lessened. His eyes were open—had been, because he realized that his eyeballs were dry—but slowly he began to see again. Someone was bending over him. He was on the operating table. He had been to the movies, and he never remembered seeing anyone in dark clothes around an operating table before. And as his vision strengthened and the figure became clearer and clearer, he felt first curiosity, then awe, then the absolute, outside utmost in terror. Like a beam of negative energy, he felt it soaking up the heat of his body, his very life. It was a huge and monstrous thing. He had strength for just one thing; he closed his eyes just a tenth of a second before the dark one’s face swam into focus; and then, in the same instant, the doctor’s needle entered his heart. The warmth flowed back weakly, and when he dared to open his eyes again the dark one was gone.

  And then the operation; and he felt every scrape and slice of it. When Donzey thought about it afterward, he felt his own appendix literally squirm in sympathy—not an experience measuring up to the hig
hest standards of animal comfort. Soon enough it was over, and the set clicked off with a nice life margin of two minutes to go.

  Donzey sat for a long time thinking this over. His was a mechanic’s mind, and such a mind seldom rejects anything because it has never heard of it before, or because it has heard otherwise. This machine now—it proposed certain very important questions. Donzey spread the questions out on a blank spot in his brain and looked at them.

  The machine showed what death felt like, just before it happened. That was the really valuable point—it happened, it wasn’t a light going out. It was a force swinging into action, so strong that it could impress itself on the carefully constructed thought patterns mysteriously apparent in bones. All right—

  What was this force called Death?

  Donzey thought of that dark figure in the operating theater of the county hospital, and knew without a doubt that that question was answered. He was very happy that the late possessor of that piece of bone had had the consideration to close his eyes before he had taken a good look. Or was it the adrenalin that drove the dark thing out of sight? What had being in sight to do with death? Did looking on the Dark One—the capitalization was Donzey’s—result in death? Could that be it? Were sickness and accidents merely phenomena that gave man the power to see death? And was that sight the thing that took their life force out of their now useless bodies? And—

  Would seeing Death in the machine kill a man?

  Donzey looked respectfully at the machine and thought, “I could easy enough try it and find out,” without making the slightest move to do so.

  Farrel arrived that evening, and for once the grim old man looked benignly happy. He clapped Donzey on the back, smiled, and sat down wordlessly.

  “If I know you, Farrel,” said Donzey, “all that showing of the teeth means that you are about to be real unkind to someone. It wouldn’t be me, would it?”

  “In a way,” said the sheriff. “I’m goin’ to bust up your place a little. You won’t mind that, will you?”