Bright Segment

by Theodore Sturgeon

  But most of all, far and away most of all, from his books to his beard, from his scalp to his scholarship, I cursed Fortley Grantham who had leapt from the altitude of the Pudley Chair in Botany into this dehydrated wilderness. He could have died under the wheels of a brewery-dray, and I’d have wept and honored him. He might have risen to be Dean, perhaps even to Chairman. Failing these things, if he felt he must immolate himself in this special pocket of Hell, why, why could he not resign?

  But no, not Fortley Grantham. He simply stayed out west, drifting, faintly radiating rumors that he was alive. If mail ever reached him, he never answered it. If he intended to return, he informed no one. He would not come back, he would not be decently dead, he would not resign.

  And I wanted that Chair. I had worked for it. I had earned it. What was I to do—wait for some sort of Enoch Arden divorce between Grantham and the Chair, so that he would be legally dead and the Chair legally vacant? No, I must find him or his grave, bring him back or prove him dead.

  His last letter had come from Silver King, and at Silver King they told me he’d gone to Florence. He had not, and I was tired and sick when I got there to learn that. A Mohave up from Arizola had seen him, though, and from there the trail led along the Union Pacific to Red Rock and then to the railhead at Silverbell.

  Had it not been for a man of the cloth at Silverbell, a Reverend Sightly, I’d have lost the trail altogether. But the good man told me, with horror in his voice, of the orgies indulged in by the local Indians, who sat in a ring around a fire gobbling mescal buttons and having visions. I took the trouble to correct the fellow as to the source of the narcotic, which comes from the peyotl and not from the mescal at all, whereupon he grew positively angry with me—not, as I first supposed, because I had found him in error, but because he took me to be “that unholy scoundrel who has brought the gifts of science to aid and abet the ignorant savage in his degraded viciousness.” When at last I convinced him of the innocence of my presence and person, he apologized and explained to me that a renegade botanist was loose in the desert, finding the rare and fabled peyotl with unheard-of accuracy, and trading the beastly stuff to whomever wanted it.

  From that point on the trail was long and winding, but at least it was clear. When I could, I enquired after Grantham, and when no one had heard of Grantham I had merely to ask about the problem of obtaining mescal buttons. Always there were stories of the white man who was not a prospector nor a miner nor a drummer nor anything else but the purveyor of peyotl. He was a tall, broad man with a red-and-silver beard and a way of cocking his head to one side a bit when he spoke. He was Grantham, all right—may the vultures gulp his eyeballs and die of it.

  Between the Eagle Tails and Castle Dome is the head of Posas Valley, and at its head is a filthy little oasis called Kofa. I confess I was happy to see it. It was August, and the heat and the glare had put knobs like knuckles in my sinus tissues; I could feel them grind together as I breathed.

  I was afoot, the spavined nag I had bought in Arlington having died in New Water Pass. I had a burro for my pack and gear, and it was all she could handle. She was old and purblind, and if she had left her strength and durability behind with her youth, she had at least left her stubbornness too. She carried the little she could and let me walk.

  I could hardly have been more depressed. I had little money left, and less hope. My canteen was a quarter-full of tepid mud which smelled faintly of the dead horned toad I’d seen in the waterhole in the pass. My feet hurt and my hipjoints creaked audibly as I plodded along. Half silently I mumbled what I once facetiously had called my “Anthem for Grantham,” a sort of chant which ran:

  … I shall people his classroom with morons. I shall have him seduced by his chambermaid and I shall report it to the Dean. I shall publicly refute his contention that the Echinopsis cacti are separate from the genus Cereus. I shall lock him in his rooms at banquet time on Founder’s Day. I shall uproot his windowboxes and spread rumors about him with the Alumni Association …

  It was the only way I had left of cheering myself up.

  For weeks now I had trailed the rumors of Grantham’s peyotl traffic farther and farther from peyotl grounds. It was saguaro country here, and all about they stretched their yearning, otherworldly arms out and upward, as if in search for a lover who might forget their thorns. Down the valley, westward, was a veritable forest of Dracenoideae, called yucca hereabouts. I did not know if yucca and peyotl could coexist, and I thought not. If not, my main method of trailing Grantham was lost.

  In such hopeless depression I staggered into Kofa, which, primitive as it was, afforded a chance of better company than my black thoughts and a doddering burro. I knew better than to hope for a restaurant and so went to the sole source of refreshment, the bar.

  It seemed so dark inside, after the merciless radiance outside, that I stood blinking like an owl for thirty seconds before I could orient myself. At last I could locate the bar and deduce that a man stood behind it.

  I croaked out an order for a glass of milk, which the bartender greeted with a thundering laugh and the quotation of a price so fantastic that I was forced to order whiskey, which I despise. The fool’s nostrils spread when I demanded water with the whiskey, but he said nothing as he poured it from a stone jar.

  I took the two glasses as far back in that ‘dobe cavern as I could get from him, and slumped down into a chair. For a long moment there was nothing in my universe but the feel of my lips in the water, which, though alkaline, was wet and cool.

  Only then, leaning back and breathing deeply, did I realize that someone sat across the table from me. He cocked his head on one side and said, “Well, well! If Mahomet won’t come to the mountain, the Institute brings forth a mouse.”

  “Dr. Grantham!”

  He watched me for a moment and then laughed. It was the same laugh, the deep rumble, the flash of strong white teeth which I used to envy so much. His eyes opened after it and he leaned forward. “Better shut your mouth now, sonny.”

  I had not realized it was open. I shut it and felt it with my fingers while I looked at him. He was in worn Levi’s and a faded shirt to which had been sewn four or five extra pockets and a sort of shoulder cape with its lower edge cut into a fringe in the buckskin style. His hair and beard were untrimmed. His hands seemed stiff with yellowish calluses in the palms, and they were indifferently clean. A broad strap hung over one shoulder and across his chest to support a large leather pouch. He was a far cry from Fortley Grantham, M.A., F.B.S., D.Sc., with lifetime tenure of the Pudley Chair in Botany at the Institute; yet there was no mistaking him.

  “Big Horn!” he roared to the bartender. “Set ’em up here. This here’s a perfessor from back East an’ we’re goin’ to have a faculty meetin’.” That’s how he pronounced it—“perfessor.” He dealt me a stunning thump on the left biceps. “Right, Chip?”

  “Chip?” I looked behind me; there was no one there. And the bartender’s name obviously was Big Horn. It penetrated that he was calling me Chip. “You surely haven’t forgotten my name, Doctor.”

  “I surely ain’t, Doctor,” he said mimicking my voice. He smiled engagingly. “Everybody’s got two names,” he explained, “the name they’s born with an’ the name I think they ought to have. The name you ought to have, now, it’s Chip. There’s a little crittur lives in an’ out of the rocks, sits up straight an’ looks surprised, holds up its two little paws, an’ lets its front teeth hang out. Chipmunk, they call it back East, though it’s a rock squirrel other places. Get me, Chip?”

  I put both hands on the table and pressed my lips together. Big Horn arrived just then and put more whiskey down before me. I said coldly, “No, thank you.” Big Horn paid absolutely no attention to me, but walked away leaving the whiskey where it was.

  “Come on, climb down. This ain’t the hallowed halls.”

  “That is the one thing I’m sure of,” I said haughtily.

  He shook his head in pity. He looked down at his glass
and his eyebrows twitched. He made no attempt to say anything and I began to feel that perhaps I, not he, should be making the overtures. I said, for want of anything better, “I suppose ‘Big Horn’ is another of your appellations.”

  He nodded. “To him it’s a sort of compliment.” He laughed. “Some people carry their vanity in the damnedest places.”

  I felt I should not pursue this, somehow. He tilted his head and said, “You’re not jumpin’ salty because I call you Chip?”

  “I don’t read a compliment into it.”

  “Shucks, now, son—they’re real purty little animals!” He waved. “Drink up now, an’ warm yoreself. I’m not insultin’ you. You wouldn’t be wonderin’ about it if I did—I’d see to that. Don’t you understand, I was callin’ you Chip—privately, I mean—from the minute I saw you, years back.”

  “I was beginning to think,” I said acidly, “that you had forgotten everything that happened before you came to Arizona.”

  “Never fear, colleague,” he intoned in precisely the voice that once boomed through the lecture halls. “I can still distinguish a rhizome from a tuber and a faculty tea from deep hypnosis.” Instantly he reverted to this appalling new self. “I got a handle too. They call me Buttons.”

  “To what characteristic is that attributed?”

  He looked at me admiringly. “I druther listen to that kind of talk than a thirsty muleskinner cussin’.” He pulled at the thongs that tied down the flap of his pouch, reached in, and tossed a handful of what seemed to be small desiccated mushrooms to me.

  I picked one up, squeezed it, turned it over, smelled it. “Lophophora.”

  “Good boy,” he said sincerely. “Know which one?”

  “Williamsii, I think.”

  “Sharp as a sidewinder’s front fang,” he said, giving me another of those buffets. “Hereabouts they’re mescal buttons.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh yes. So they call you Buttons. You—uh—are rather widely known in connection with this—uh—vegetable.”

  He laughed. “I didn’t think a botanist ever used the word ‘vegetable.’ ”

  I ignored this. I rose. “One moment, please. I think I can show you that you have a wider reputation in this matter than you realize.”

  He made as if to stop me but did not. I went out to my burro. She was standing like a stone statue in the blazing sun, her upper lip just touching the surface of the water in the horse-trough, breathing water-vapor in patient ecstasy. I dug into my pack and wormed out the book. Inside again, I placed it carefully by Grantham’s glass.

  He looked at it, at me, then picked it up. Holding it high, he moved his head back and his chin in with the gesture of a seaman forcing his horizoned eyes to help with threading a needle.

  “Journal of the Botanical Sciences,” he read. “Catalogue, Volume Four, revised. 1910, huh? Right up to the minute. Oh bully.” He squinted. “Cactaceae. Phyla and genera reclassified. Hey, Big Horn,” he roared, “the perfessor here’s got reclassified genera.”

  The bartender clucked sympathetically. Grantham leafed rapidly. “Nice. Nice.”

  “We thought you’d like it. Look up lophophora.”

  He did. Suddenly he grunted as if I had kneed him, and stabbed a horny forefinger onto the page. “ ‘Lophophora granthamii’ I’ll be Billy-be-damned! So they took note of old Grantham, did they?”

  “They did. As I said, you are widely known in connection with peyotl.”

  He chuckled. He made no attempt to hide the fact that he was vastly pleased.

  “When you were sending back specimens and reports, you were of great value to us,” I pointed out. I coughed. “Something seems—ah—to have happened.”

  He kept his eyes on the listing, wagging his big head delightedly. “Yup, yup,” he said. “Something happened.” He suddenly snapped the book closed and slid it across to me. “Last thing in the world I ever expected to see again.”

  “I didn’t think you would, either,” I said bitterly. “Dr. Grantham—”

  “Buttons,” he corrected.

  “Dr. Grantham, I have traveled across this continent and through some of the most Godforsaken topography on Earth just to put this volume in your hands.”

  He started. I think that he realized only then that I had sought him out, that this was no accident on a field trip.

  “You didn’t!” He lifted his glass and tossed it to his lips, found it empty, looked around in a brief confusion, then reached and took mine. He wiped his mouth with the bristly back of his hand. “What in hell for?”

  I tapped the book. “If I may speak frankly—”

  “Fire away.”

  “We felt that this might—uh—bring you back to your senses.”

  “I got real healthy senses.”

  “Dr. Grantham, you don’t understand. You—you—” I floundered, picked up my second whiskey and drank some of it. It made my eyes stream. My throat made a sort of death-rattle and suddenly I could breathe again. I could feel the whiskey sinking a tap-root down my esophagus while tendrils raced up and out to my earlobes where, budding, they began to heat.

  “You left for a field trip and did not return. You were granted your sabbatical year to cover this because of your prominence in the field and because of the excellence of the collections you sent back; specimens such as the peyotl now named for you. Then the specimens dwindled and ceased, the reports dwindled and ceased—and then nothing, nothing at all.”

  He scratched his thick pelt of red-and-silver. “Reckon I just figured it didn’t matter much no more.”

  “Didn’t matter?” I realized I squeaked, and then that my voice was high and nagging, but I no longer cared. “Don’t you realize that as long as you are alive you hold the Pudley Chair?”

  I saw the glint in his eye and clutched his wrist. “If you shout out to that bartender that you have a Pudley Chair, I’ll—I’ll—” I whispered, but could not finish for the cannonade of rich laughter he sent up. I sat tense and furious, helpless to do or say anything until he finished. At last he wiped his eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he said sincerely, quite as if he were civilized. “You caught me off guard. I’m really sorry, Professor.”

  “It’s all right,” I lied. “Doctor, I want that Chair if you don’t. I’ve worked hard for it. I’ve earned it. I—I need it.”

  “Well gosh, son, go to it. It’s all yours.”

  I had wanted to hear that for so long, I’d dreamed of it so much—and now, hearing it, I became furiously angry. “Why didn’t you resign?” I shouted. “That’s all you had to do, resign, put a two-cent stamp on an envelope, save me all this work, this worry—I nearly died with a hole in my canteen,” I wept, waving at the pottery kiln they call “outdoors” in this terrible land. “Two horses I killed, my work is waiting, my books, students—”

  I found myself patting the table inarticulately, glaring into his astonished eyes. “Why?” I yelled. “Why, why, why—” I moaned.

  He got up and came round the table and stood behind me. On my shoulders he put two huge warm hands like epaulets. “I didn’t know, son. I—damn it, I did know, I guess.” I hated myself for it, but my shoulders shook suddenly. He squeezed them. “I did know. I reckon I just didn’t care.”

  He took his hands away and went back to his chair. He must have made a sign because Big Horn came back with more whiskey.

  After a time I said, with difficulty, “All the way out here I hated you, understand that? I’m not—I don’t—I mean, I never hated anything before, I lived with books and people who talk quietly and—and scholastic honors … Damn it, Dr. Grantham, I admired and respected you, you understand? If you’d stayed at the Institute for the next fifty years, then for fifty years I’d’ve been happy with it. I admired the Chair and the man who was in it, things were the way they should be. Well, if you didn’t want to stay, good. If you didn’t want the Chair, good. But if you care so little about it—and I respect your judgment—you understand?”

  “Oh go
sh yes. Shut up awhile. Drink some whiskey. You’re going to bust yourself up again.”

  We sat quietly for a time. At length he said, “I didn’t care. I admit it. Not for the Institute nor the Chair nor you. I should’ve cared about you, or anyone else who wanted it as bad as you do. I’m sorry. I’m real sorry. I got—involved. Other things came to be important.”

  “Peyotl. Selling drugs to the Indians,” I snarled. “You’ve probably got a nice little heap of dust salted away!”

  The most extraordinary series of expressions chased each other across his face. I think if the first one—blind fury—had stayed, I’d have been dead in the next twelve seconds.

  “I don’t have any money,” he said gently. “Just enough for a stake every once in a while, so I can—” He stared out at the yellow-white glare. Then, as if he had not left an unfinished sentence, he murmured, “Peyotl. Professor, you know better than to equate these buttons with opium and hashish. Listen, right near here, in the seventeenth century, there used to be a mission called Santo de Jesús Peyotes. Sort of looks as if the Spanish priests thought pretty well of it, hm? Listen,” he said urgently, “Uncle Sam brought suit against an Indian by the name of Nah-qua-tah-tuck, because Uncle’s mails had been used to ship peyotl around. When the defense witnesses were through testifying about how peyotl-eaters quit drinking, went back to their wives, and began to work hard; when a sky pilot name of Prescott testified about his weekly services where he served the stuff to his parish, and they were the most God-fearing parish in the Territories, why, Uncle Sam just packed up and went right back home.”

  I knew something of the forensics of the alkaloid mescaline. I said, “Well and good, but you haven’t told me how you—how you could—”