Killdozer!

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “Well, it isn’t. For those with strong stomachs, there is proof there galore that Segundo was right in every way. That’s unimportant. The primary thing is that Segundo knew that someday someone—a sociologist, a technologist—anybody—would perhaps doubt the validity of Segundo’s precepts, or get the idea that Segundo’s researches had not been inclusive. In the Archives the doubter can find out how wrong he is. That’s why I say that the important thing isn’t what the proof might be, but the fact that it’s there. Segundo has always been right. A visit to the Archives will convince anybody that nothing in there is applicable to the Wholly Efficient.” He shuddered. “I was there once. A horrible place. Piles and bales and racks of scattered, fragmentary and now useless information—recordings on brittle acetate and clumsily magnetized wire, great chunks of wood-pulp rolled flat and printed and bound together at one edge so that you have to turn the sheets as you read. All of it opinionated, inaccurate, emotional. There is no system there. I asked Mauritius about it, and he said that most of it was deposited there by some forgotten idealist, probably during the Third War, as a feeble attempt to do the same thing that Segundo did perfectly, so much later. The stuff is shovelled in there—tons of it—apparently to await an editing and filing that was never done. Much of it was destroyed during the Third. What is left is a potpourri of opinionated trash, historical rationalization, prejudicial texts of what should be exact sciences, instruction pamphlets on machine operation and manufacturing techniques based on inefficient—beg pardon, Jay—principles; anything and everything. But there is nothing there of benefit to us, who have progressed so far. Even their art-forms are puny and puerile—and by the way, did it ever occur to you that Segundo’s complete lack of art-form demonstrations in the Vaults was a studied oversight?”

  “I always assumed that he ignored artistic accomplishment because he was a scientist—and that perhaps he thought art forms were not necessary to a functional culture.”

  “My eyeball! He knew that like religion, art is a self-perpetuating thing; that while sociology and technology can slip into the doldrums, art will go on, if it’s no more than a new way a man finds of humming to himself. And he knew also that his researches were based on unchanging, natural laws. It was those laws and their application that he wanted to leave for us. But any and all art-forms he chose to leave for us would be chosen by his personal opinion and that of his group. Segundo left personalities out. Our art is necessary to us, as it must be to any culture, and he saw to it that it was our art, not his. And they talk about inconsistencies!”

  “He seems to have thought of everything,” mused Jay. “I—I wonder if he thought of Mauritius?”

  “The Drip is different. Just how, I don’t know—yes I do. The hunger for research is a strange and wonderful thing. Part of it is ingrained in our culture and condition—namely, the part that diverts research to the good of the Wholly works. But there is a part of the research psychosis that is self-energizing—the desire to do research for research’s own sweet sake. That seems to be what Mauritius has to the exclusion of everything else. It is probably the basis of his social imbalance. I doubt that Segundo overlooked the possibility of a warping of that sort, but I think he probably trusted the inertia of a stable society to dissipate any harmful effect it might have.”

  “There’s plenty about that guy that needs dissipating,” growled Jay. “Unimportant or not, though, he doesn’t fit into my conception of Segundo’s idea that everything has its constructive social function, if that function can only be found.”

  Pellit spread his hands. “We need him now, don’t we?” He laughed suddenly.

  “Now what?”

  “I was just thinking of the circular you’re going to have to write,” Pellit said. “Mauritius won’t back down about the use of the word bul—ah, that word. I know him. It’ll require a semantic defense. The situation will have to be explained to the personnel, and your circular will have to follow the 46-C program. There isn’t any other way.”

  “You mean it has to be flashed on the public-address teletype every five minutes? Included in office correspondence? Used by the office force as a greeting?”

  “All that.”

  “We’ll be the laughingstock of the entire Wholly Union!”

  “That’s right. And you’d better do some laughing yourself first, or you’ll never put over a 46-C.”

  OFFICE CIRCULAR

  TO: All Personnel, Universal Synthetics, and all subcontractors on Star Ship project, Chicago Center

  FROM: Jay Scanlon, Executive Director

  SUBJECT: Use of term BULLDOZER

  1. Circumstances force this office to unearth ancient techniques for moving raw material in bulk. In connection with this work, it is necessary to study, design or redesign, manufacture and operate several of the machines known to the ancients as BULLDOZER.

  2. This word will of necessity occur repeatedly in connection with its preparation and work, in all departments. In the interest of the Wholly Efficient, its modern connections must be suppressed and, as far as possible, forgotten.

  3. This end will be accomplished best if all personnel make a determined effort to remove its present undesirable effect, to lessen the semantic impact of its current definition.

  4. It is therefore directed that all personnel make every effort toward a truly casual use of this term. BULLDOZER is a noun. BULLDOZE and TO BE BULLDOZED are its active and passive verb-forms. There are innumerable ways in which it may be employed. To begin this effort, it is directed that all personnel greet each other as follows:

  “Good morning, Bulldozer.”

  5. The subject matter of this circular is not to be construed as carte blanche in the use of bad language in these offices.

  August Sixth 1945

  (THERE IS MUSIC; it is sibelius and bach, it is richness and exactitude, a rushing bass and a wrenching treble, the bass aimed for the belly and the treble for the tear ducts …

  there is a man asleep. he walks and moves and builds but he is asleep. his eyes are closed because he is asleep. he does not know how big he is because he is asleep. he is made of scar tissue.

  there are voices. they are all his voice. the places where the voices are heard are all here where he is.)

  Magazine Store:

  who buys this crap?

  that kind of thing is ridiculous. just to settle it for once and for all, where would they get the power?

  (the echo begins. it whispers “power power power” until the whisper is a sheet, a screen, a thing all one color getting brighter. it never stops again. it gets behind the music and brings the music forward.)

  School:

  i am trying to be reasonable about this, children. i must make you understand that it harms you to escape into such tripe. confine yourselves to the books i give you. you must not clutter up your minds with such impossible nonsense.

  Home:

  pulp magazines again! must you read stories

  about rockets

  about space flight

  about time travel

  about space warps

  about new sociologies

  silly! where would they get the power?

  (the echo deepens)

  Cemetery:

  … to finally prove the impossibility of the railroad’s replacing the canal. how can you expect the smooth wheels of a locomotive resting with only the locomotive’s weight on a smooth track—only one point for each wheel, gentlemen—to yield traction enough to move a train? who wants a means of transportation which would prohibit a man’s using his own carriage as he now may use his own canal boat?

  … these dreamers who want to build flying machines heavier than the air that supports them have not faced the issue. what would be the status of shipping today if ships depended upon their engines, not only to drive them, but to keep them afloat?

  (from somewhere, the fingers of Langley, Lilienthal, Stephenson, Fulton touch the man’s sealed eyelids. he rubs them, and rubs again, and
finds that scars have not covered his eyes. he is afraid and keeps them closed.)

  News Stand:

  who writes this crap?

  Places with Typewriters:

  i wrote a story about decentralization, because cities could not dare exist when each city had bombs that …

  i wrote a story about a meteor detector that worked controls when it received the reflection of a radio signal …

  i wrote a story about a reaction engine …

  i wrote a story about a rocket projectile …

  i wrote a story about a robot flying bomb …

  Subway:

  the heck with that stuff. i druther read stories about real life. i druther read something that has to do with me.

  A Place with a Typewriter:

  i am afraid. i tell you that deep down inside i have a cold lump about this thing. i know we must be doing something about it because although it is old stuff to us we have been asked not to mention it in our stories for security reasons. it is too big for us. it can be good—it can give us power so cheap it would be free. it can give us a four-day work week, five hours a day. it can give us riches. but we are not old enough for it yet. i pray god that it will be discovered and used before this war is finished, so that everyone will know how big it is, how good, how horrible … atomic power

  (the “atomic” finds its place in the echo, in the interstices between “power power power” and gives a staccato tone to the sheet of sound. the man’s eyes open a crack and now he sees, but he sees death, because death came to stand before him when his eyes opened. he is afraid and tries to close them but a whisper, a transparent whisper, creeps between his eyelids and holds them open.)

  Whisper:

  on december seventh, nineteen forty four, the newspaper said there was no bombing activity over japan. somewhere else the newspaper said there was a small b-29 reconnaissance flight off the japanese coast, just where the japan deep is. the japanese islands sit on the edge of the japan deep like houses on the edge of a cliff. somewhere else the newspaper said there was a hell of an earthquake that day. that day was december the seventh, december the seventh, remember?

  (the whisper slips away to the figure of death, and the man who can see now realizes that death is transparent like the whisper, and through death he can see how big he is. he stretches his body and feels how strong he is. he opens his eyes a little more.)

  Radio:

  the president says that the bomb that struck hiroshima on august the sixth nineteen forty five was atomic. the president does not call it atomic explosive. the president calls it atomic power. (the echo is greater than the music now; greater than anything else but the man now.)

  Places with Typewriters:

  we are writing stories about the future

  about machines that can think creatively

  about interstellar flight

  about the psychological fulfillment of mankind

  about mutations caused by hard radiation from atomic bombs

  about empathy, second-order space. contra-terrene matter, levitation, astral separation, telepathy, the intuitive mutation, universal synthesis, time-travel, silicon life, and the evolution of intelligence in rats.

  Street Corner:

  why do you read that crap?

  (but the man with the open eyes does not hear that. he is looking at himself, on the other side of death. he knows—he learned on august the sixth nineteen forty five that he alone is big enough to kill himself, or to live forever.)

  The Chromium Helmet

  “DADDY,” SAID THE Widget.

  “Yes, dear,” I said, without detaching my eyes or my mind from the magazine I was reading.

  “When was the time I had a great big doll, bigger’n me, and she suddenly laughed at me and gave me a handful of jellybeans?”

  “Yes, dear,” I said.

  “Well, when was it?”

  “When was what?”

  The Widget clucked her tongue in disapproval. “I said, when was it I had a doll bigger’n me, that could laugh and talk and give me jelly beans?”

  “Doll?” I said vaguely. “You never had a doll like that. You had one two years ago that said not only ‘Mama’ but ‘Papa’.”

  “I stinkly remember about the jelly beans.”

  I sighed, feeling that this conversation was a little unproductive. “Why do you talk all the time?” I asked. It was a rhetorical question, but she cocked her head on one side and considered it carefully.

  “I think it’s ’Cause I don’t know any big words, like you and Mummy,” she said, just in time to pull me out of my magazine again, “so I have to use lots and lots of little ones.”

  I grinned at her, and she nodded to herself, acknowledging her success in getting between me and what I was reading. She removed the conquest from the abstract by running and jumping up on one knee, sitting on the magazine. “Now tell me about the doll with the jelly beans.”

  “Widget, you never had a doll like that.”

  “Oh yes I did.”

  “Oh no—” I checked myself. That could go on for hours. “Tell me about it. Maybe I’ll remember.”

  “She was a big doll. I put her to bed in Susie’s crib.” Susie was the Widget’s Number One toy, a horrible pale-blue monolith of an earless rabbit. “The doll was so big her feet stuck out. I singed her to sleep and all of a sudden she threw up her hands and threw all the covers off, and she laughed at me and said I had a funny nose. I jumped up and started to ran away, but she called me. She said, ‘Here’s a pres-net for you.’ And she reached into her pocket and gave me the presnet. It was jelly beans. She had on a red giggum pifanore.”

  “She had on a red gingham pinafore, and she gave you some jelly beans. What do you know. And I sup—oh!” In the time it took me to get that “oh” enunciated, I had seen my wife standing just inside the living-room door, with flour on her hands and on the tip of her nose, her bright head cocked to one side, listening; I had met her eye and caught her signal to go on talking to the Widget. I grinned; Carole was always poking and prying into what the Widget said, and coming up with starling conclusions culled from Freud and Jung and Watson. “And I suppose,” I went on, “that the doll told you her name?”

  “I didn’t ask her.”

  “Darling, you always have names for your dolls,” said Carole.

  “Wh—Oh, hello, Mummy. No, this doll was differ-net. She wasn’t my doll so much. It was like I was her doll.”

  Carole looked at me, puzzled. “Widget, you really remember about this?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “You’re just pretending.”

  “No, Mummy, it isn’t a pretend. I really and truly remember. Only I can’t remember just when.” She sounded very patient. “So that’s why I asked Daddy.”

  I started to speak, but Carole checked me. “Was it a long time ago?”

  “The doll?” The Widget’s round little face wrinkled in concentration. “I don’t know.”

  “Widget. Listen. You say you put her to bed in Susie’s crib.”

  “Yes, in Susie’s crib, an’ she was so big her feet stuck out.”

  I suddenly realized the line Carole was taking. The Widget had gotten the crib for her birthday, nine months ago. “What were you wearing?” Carole asked.

  The Widget closed her eyes. “It … was … mmm. Oh yes; it was my Aunt Marie dress, the one with the pink squirl.”

  “Marie sent that about four months ago, didn’t she?” I asked. Carole nodded, and asked, “When did you first remember about the doll?”

  “Oh, ‘safternoon,” said the Widget, without hesitation. “When I was having my hair dried under the cormium hemlet.”

  “Translate that,” I said.

  “Chromium helmet,” said Carole. “I took her to the beauty parlor and had her shampooed while I finished the shopping. She loved it. And she went fast asleep under the drier. I was interested in all this because, for once in her young life, she hasn’t said ten consecutive words all after
noon until now.”

  “Oh, heck, she obviously dreamed the whole thing.”

  “Oh heck, I obverlously did not,” said the Widget with composure. “Dreams is all fuzzy. But I stinkly remember about that doll.”

  “Drop it, Godfrey,” Carole said swiftly as I came up out my chair. I don’t like to be flatly contradicted by anybody, even my infant daughter. “Widget, run on outside. Don’t go away from the house. And don’t contradict your father.”

  The Widget skipped across the room. “Yes Mummy. I’m sorry, Daddy.” She opened the door, letting her body walk out while she kept her head inside. “But he contra-dicted me first,” she said, and was gone.

  “Parthian shot,” I laughed. “Also, touché. Carole, why all the third degree?”

  “Oh … I dunno, Godfrey. It isn’t like her to make up tall tales.”

  “Nonsense! Every kid does it.”

  “Every kid doesn’t, only most kids. The Widget never has.”

  “O.K. So she’s started. It’s perfectly normal. Darling,” I said, going to her, “wipe off that troubled look! You women amaze me. You really do. Fond as I am of my own kid, I’ve never been able to understand how a woman can study a baby’s face literally by the hour, and always seem to find something new and different in it. You’ve always done that, and now you’re doing it with her mind. What’s wrong in a child’s being imaginative?”

  She shook her head. “All right. Maybe I’m silly. But there’s a difference between imagination and an actual remembrance of something which couldn’t have happened.”

  “Don’t be fooled because the Widget can’t express herself any better than she does. I don’t—”

  Carole jumped up. “My cake!” and ran into the kitchen.

  It began just as simply as that.

  It was only a couple of days later that I got to the lab to find Henry straddling a chair, with the back holding his chin up, staring out of the window. I spoke to him twice before he heard me at all. Henry is a regular guy. Not only that, but he’s married to my one and only sister.