Authors: Theodore Sturgeon
He walked most of the night with it and installed it in the dim early hours of the morning. The idea of “pleasant surprise” was far too whimsical a thing for Lone but it amounted to the same thing. He wanted it ready for the day’s work, without any time lost by the old man prancing around asking questions that he couldn’t answer.
The truck stood bogged in the field. Lone unwound the device from around his neck and shoulders and began to attach it according to the exact instructions he had winnowed out of Baby. There wasn’t much to do. A slender wire wrapped twice around the clutch housing outside and led to clamps on the front spring shackles, the little brushes touching the insides of the front wheels; and that was the front-wheel drive. Then the little box with its four silvery cables, box clamped to steering post, each cable leading to a corner of the frame.
He got in and pulled the knob towards him. The frame creaked as the truck seemed to raise itself on tiptoe. He pushed the knob forward. The truck settled its front axle and differential housing on solid ground with a bump that made his head rock. He looked at the little box and its lever admiringly, then returned the lever to a neutral position. He scanned the other controls there, the ones which came with the truck: pedals and knobs and sticks and buttons. He sighed.
He wished he had wit enough to drive a truck.
He got out and climbed the hill to the house to wake Prodd. Prodd wasn’t there. The kitchen door swung in the breeze, the glass gone out of it and lying on the stoop. Mud wasps were building under the sink. There was a smell of dirty dry floorboards, mildew, and ancient sweat. Otherwise it was fairly neat, about the way it was when he and Prodd had cleaned up last time he was here. The only new thing there aside from the mud wasps’ nest was a paper nailed to the wall by all four corners. It had writing all over it. Lone detached it as carefully as he could, and smoothed it out on the kitchen table, and turned it over twice. Then he folded it, put it in his pocket. Again he sighed.
He wished he had sense enough to learn to read.
He left the house without looking back and plunged into the forest. He never returned. The truck stood out in the sun, slowly deteriorating, slowly weakening its already low resistance to rust, slowly falling to pieces around the bright, strong, strange silver cables. Powered inexhaustibly by the slow release of atomic binding energy, the device was the practical solution of flight without wings, the simple key to a new era in transportation, in materials handling, and in interplanetary travel. Made by an idiot, harnessed idiotically to replace a spavined horse, stupidly left, numbly forgotten... Earth’s first anti-gravity generator.
The
idiot!
Dear loan Ill nale this up wher you cant hep see it I am cleering ot of here I dont no why I stade as long as I did. Ma is back east Wmsport pennsilvana and she been gone a long time and I am tied of wating. And I was goin to sell the truck to hep me on the way but it is stuck so bad now I cant get it to town to sell it. So now I am jest goin to go whatever and Ill make it some way long as I no Ma is at the othr end. Dont take no trouble about the place I guess I had enuf of it Anyway. And borrow any thing you want if you should want any Thing. You are a good boy you been a good frend well goodbeye until I see you if I ever do god Bless you your old frend E. Prodd.
Lone made Janie read him the letter four times in a three-week period, and each reading seemed to add a fresh element to the yeasty seething inside him. Much of this happened silently; for some of it he asked help.
He had believed that Prodd was his only contact with anything outside himself and that the children were merely fellow occupants of a slag dump at the edge of mankind. The loss of Prodd—and he knew with unshakeable certainty that he would never see the old man again—was the loss of life itself. At the very least, it was the loss of everything conscious, directed, cooperative; everything above and beyond what a vegetable could do by way of living.
“Ask Baby what is a friend.”
“He says it’s somebody who goes on loving you whether he likes you or not.”
But then, Prodd and his wife had shucked him off when he was in the way, after all those years, and that meant they were ready to do it the first year and the second and the fifth—all the time, any time. You can’t say you’re a part of anything, anybody, that feels free to do that to you. But friends... maybe they just didn’t like him for a while, maybe they loved him all the way through.
“Ask Baby can you be truly part of someone you love.”
“He says only if you love yourself.”
His bench-mark, his goal-point, had for years been that thing which happened to huh on the bank of the pool. He had to understand that. If he could understand that, he was sure he could understand everything. Because for a second there was this other, and himself, and a flow between them without guards or screens or barriers—no language to stumble over, no ideas to misunderstand, nothing at all but a merging.
What had he been then? What was it Janie had said?
Idiot. An idiot.
An idiot, she had said, was a grown person who could hear only babies’ silent speech. Then—what was the creature with whom he had merged on that terrible day?
“Ask Baby what is a grown person who can
talk
like the babies.”
“He says, an innocent.”
He had been an idiot who could hear the soundless murmur. She had been an innocent who, as an adult, could speak it.
“Ask Baby what if an idiot and an innocent are close together.”
“He says when they so much as touched, the innocent would stop being an innocent and the idiot would stop being an idiot.”
He thought, An innocent is the most beautiful thing there can be. Immediately he demanded of himself, What’s so beautiful about an innocent? And the answer, for once almost as swift as Baby’s: It’s the waiting that’s beautiful.
Waiting for the end of innocence. And an idiot is waiting for the end of idiocy too, but he’s ugly doing it. So each ends himself in the meeting, in exchange for a merging.
Lone was suddenly deep-down glad. For if this was true, he had made something, rather than destroyed something... and when he had lost it, the pain of the loss was justified. When he had lost the Prodds the pain wasn’t worth it.
What am I doing? What am I doing? he thought wildly. Trying and trying like this to find out what I am and what I belong to... Is this another aspect of being outcast, monstrous,
different?
“Ask Baby what kind of people are all the time trying to find out what they are and what they belong to.”
“He says,
every
kind.”
“What kind,” Lone whispered, “am I, then?”
A full minute later he yelled, “
What kind?
”
“Shut up a while. He doesn’t have a way to say it... uh... Here. He says he is a figure-outer brain and I am a body and the twins are arms and legs and you are the head. He says the ‘I’ is all of us.”
“I belong. I belong. Part of you, part of you and you too.”
“The head, silly.”
Lone thought his heart was going to burst. He looked at them all, every one: arms to flex and reach, a body to care and repair, a brainless but faultless computer and—the head to direct it.
“And we’ll grow, Baby. We just got born!”
“He says not on your life. He says not with a head like that. We can do practically
anything
but we most likely won’t. He says we’re a thing, all right, but the thing is an idiot.”
So it was that Lone came to know himself; and like the handful of people who have done so before him he found, at this pinnacle, the rugged foot of a mountain.
I finally got into see this Stern. He wasn’t an old man at all. He looked up from his desk, flicked his eyes over me once, and picked up a pencil. “Sit over there, Sonny.”
I stood where I was until he looked up again. Then I said, “Look, if a midget walks in here, what do you say—sit over there, Shorty?”
He put the pencil down again and stood up. He smiled. His smile was as quick and sharp as his eyes. “I was wrong,” he said, “but how am I supposed to know you don’t want to be called Sonny?”
That was better, but I was still mad. “I’m fifteen and I don’t have to like it. Don’t rub my nose in it.”
He smiled again and said okay, and I went and sat down.
“What’s your name?”
“Gerard.”
“First or last?”
“Both,” I said.
“Is that the truth?”
I said, “No. And don’t ask me where I live either.”
He put down his pencil. “We’re not going to get very far this way.”
“That’s up to you. What are you worried about? I got feelings of hostility? Well, sure I have. I got lots more things than that wrong with me or I wouldn’t be here. Are you going to let that stop you?”
“Well, no, but—”
“So what else is bothering you? How you’re going to get paid?” I took out a thousand-dollar bill and laid it on the desk. “That’s so you won’t have to bill me.
You
keep track of it. Tell me when it’s used up and I’ll give you more. So you don’t need my address. Wait,” I said, when he reached towards the money. “Let it lay there. I want to be sure you and I are going to get along.”
He folded his hands. “I don’t do business this way, Son—I mean, Gerard.”
“Gerry,” I told him. “You do, if you do business with me.”
“You make things difficult, don’t you? Where did you get a thousand dollars?”
“I won a contest. Twenty-five words or less about how much fun it is to do my daintier underthings with Sudso.” I leaned forward. “This time it’s the truth.”
“All right,” he said.
I was surprised. I think he knew it, but he didn’t say anything more. Just waited for me to go ahead.
“Before we start—
if
we start,” I said, “I got to know something. The things I say to you—what comes out while you’re working on me—is that just between us, like a priest or a lawyer?”
“Absolutely,” he said.
“No matter what?”
“No matter what.”
I watched him when he said it. I believed him.
“Pick up your money,” I said. “You’re on.”
He didn’t do it. He said, “As you remarked a minute ago, that is up to me. You can’t buy these treatments like a candy bar. We have to work together. If either one of us can’t do that, it’s useless. You can’t walk in on the first psychotherapist you find in the phone book and make any demand that occurs to you just because you can pay for it.”
I said tiredly, “I didn’t get you out of the phone book and I’m not just guessing that you can help me. I winnowed through a dozen or more head-shrinkers before I decided on you.”
“Thanks,” he said, and it looked as if he was going to laugh at me, which I never like. “Winnowed, did you say? Just how?”
“Things you hear, things you read. You know. I’m not saying, so just file that with my street address.”
He looked at me for a long time. It was the first time he’d used his eyes on me for anything but a flash glance. Then he picked up the bill.
“What do I do first?” I demanded.
“What do you mean?”
“How do we start?”
“We started when you walked in here.”
So then I had to laugh. “All right, you got me. All I had was an opening. I didn’t know where you would go from there, so I couldn’t be there ahead of you.”
“That’s very interesting,” Stern said. “Do you usually figure everything out in advance?”
“Always.”
“How often are you right?”
“All the time. Except—but I don’t have to tell you about no exceptions.”
He really grinned this time. “I see. One of my patients has been talking.”
“One of your ex-patients. Your patients don’t talk.”
“I ask them not to. That applies to you, too. What did you hear?”
“That you know from what people say and do what they’re about to say and do, and that sometimes you let’m do it and sometimes you don’t. How did you learn to do that?”
He thought a minute. “I guess I was born with an eye for details, and then let myself make enough mistakes with enough people until I learned not to make too many more. How did you learn to do it?”
I said, “You answer that and I won’t have to come back here.”
“You really don’t know?”
“I wish I did. Look, this isn’t getting us anywhere, is it?”
He shrugged. “Depends on where you want to go.” He paused, and I got the eyes full strength again. “Which thumbnail description of psychiatry do you believe at the moment?”
“I don’t get you.”
Stern slid open a desk drawer and took out a blackened pipe. He smelled it, turned it over while looking at me. “Psychiatry attacks the onion of the self, removing layer after layer until it gets down to the little sliver of unsullied ego. Or: psychiatry drills like an oil well, down and sidewise and down again, through all the muck and rock until it strikes a layer that yields. Or: psychiatry grabs a handful of sexual motivations and throws them on the pinball machine of your life, so they bounce on down against episodes. Want more?”
I had to laugh. “That last one was pretty good.”
“That last one was pretty bad. They are all bad. They all try to simplify something which is complex by its very nature. The only thumbnail you’ll get from me is this: no one knows what’s really wrong with you but you; no one can find a cure for it but you; no one but you can identify it as a cure; and once you find it, no one but you can do anything about it.”
“What are
you
here for?”
“To listen.”
“I don’t have to pay somebody no day’s wage every hour just to listen.”
“True. But you’re convinced that I listen selectively.”
“Am I?” I wondered about it. “I guess I am. Well, don’t you?”
“No, but you’ll never believe that.”
I laughed. He asked me what that was for. I said, “You’re not calling me Sonny.”
“Not you.” He shook his head slowly. He was watching me while he did it, so his eyes slid in their sockets as his head moved. “What is it you want to know about yourself, that made you worried I might tell people?”
“I want to find out why I killed somebody,” I said right away.
It didn’t faze him a bit. “Lie down over there.”
I got up. “On that couch?”
He nodded.
As I stretched out self-consciously, I said, “I feel like I’m in some damn cartoon.”
“What cartoon?”
“Guy’s built like a bunch of grapes,” I said, looking at the ceiling. It was pale gray.
“What’s the caption?”
“ ‘I got trunks full of ’em.’ ”
“Very good,” he said quietly. I looked at him carefully. I knew then he was the kind of guy who laughs way down deep when he laughs at all.
He said, “I’ll use that in a book of case histories some time. But it won’t include yours. What made you throw that in?” When I didn’t answer, he got up and moved to a chair behind me where I couldn’t see him. “You can quit testing, Sonny. I’m good enough for your purposes.”
I clenched my jaw so hard, my back teeth hurt. Then I relaxed. I relaxed all over. It was wonderful. “All right,” I said, “I’m sorry.” He didn’t say anything, but I had that feeling again that he was laughing. Not at me, though.
“How old are you?” he asked me suddenly.
“Uh—fifteen.”
“Uh—fifteen,” he repeated. “What does the ‘uh’ mean?”
“Nothing. I’m fifteen.”
“When I asked your age, you hesitated because some other number popped up. You discarded that and substituted ‘fifteen.’ ”
“The hell I did! I am fifteen!”
“I didn’t say you weren’t.” His voice came patiently. “Now what was the other number?”
I got mad again. “There wasn’t any other number! What do you want to go pryin’ my grunts apart for, trying to plant this and that and make it mean what you think it ought to mean?”
He was silent.
“I’m fifteen,” I said defiantly, and then, “I don’t like being only fifteen. You know that. I’m not trying to insist I’m fifteen.”
He just waited, still not saying anything.
I felt defeated. “The number was eight.”
“So you’re eight. And your name?”
“Gerry.” I got up on one elbow, twisting my neck around so I could see him. He had his pipe apart and was sighting through the stem at the desk lamp. “Gerry, without no ‘uh!’ ”
“All right,” he said mildly, making me feel real foolish.
I leaned back and closed my eyes.
Eight, I thought. Eight.
“It’s cold in here,” I complained.
Eight. Eight, plate, state, hate. I ate from the plate of the state and I hate. I didn’t like any of that and I snapped my eyes open. The ceiling was still gray. It was all right. Stern was somewhere behind me with his pipe, and he was all right; I took two deep breaths, three, and then let my eyes close. Eight. Eight years old. Eight, hate. Years, fears. Old, cold.
Damn
it! I twisted and twitched on the couch, trying to find a way to keep the cold out. I ate from the plate of the—
I grunted and with my mind I took all the eights and all the rhymes and everything they stood for, and made it all black. But it wouldn’t stay black. I had to put something there, so I made a great big luminous figure eight and just let it hang there. But it turned on its side and inside the loops it began to shimmer. It was like one of those movie shots through binoculars. I was going to have to look through whether I liked it or not.
Suddenly I quit fighting it and let it wash over me. The binoculars came close, closer, and then I was there.
Eight. Eight years old, cold. Cold as a bitch in the ditch. The ditch was by a railroad. Last year’s weeds were scratchy straw. The ground was red, and when it wasn’t slippery, clingy mud, it was frozen hard like a flowerpot. It was hard like that now, dusted with hoar-frost, cold as the winter light that pushed up over the hills. At night the lights were warm, and they were all in other people’s houses. In the daytime the sun was in somebody else’s house too, for all the good it did me.
I was dying in that ditch. Last night it was as good a place as any to sleep and this morning it was as good a place as any to die. Just as well. Eight years old, the sick-sweet taste of pork fat and wet bread from somebody’s garbage, the thrill of terror when you’re stealing a gunnysack and you hear a footstep.
And I heard a footstep.
I’d been curled up on my side. I whipped over on my stomach because sometimes they kick your belly. I covered my head with my arms and that was as far as I could get.
After a while I rolled my eyes up and looked without moving. There was a big shoe there. There was an ankle in the shoe, and another shoe close by. I lay there waiting to get tromped. Not that I cared much any more, but it was such a damn shame. All these months on my own, and they’d never caught up with me, never even come close, and now this. It was such a shame I started to cry.
The shoe took me under the armpit, but it was not a kick. It rolled me over. I was so stiff from the cold, I went over like a plank. I just kept my arms over my face and head and lay there with my eyes closed. For some reason I stopped crying. I think people only cry when there’s a chance of getting help from somewhere.
When nothing happened, I opened my eyes and shifted my forearms a little so I could see up. There was a man standing over me and he was a mile high. He had on faded dungarees and an old Eisenhower jacket with deep sweat-stains under the arms. His face was shaggy, like the guys who can’t grow what you could call a beard, but still don’t shave.
He said, “Get up.”
I looked down at his shoe, but he wasn’t going to kick me. I pushed up a little and almost fell down again, except he put his big hand where my back would hit it. I lay against it for a second because I had to, and then got up to where I had one knee on the ground.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”
I swear I felt my bones creak, but I made it. I brought a round white stone up with me as I stood. I hefted the stone. I had to look at it to see if I was really holding it, my fingers were that cold. I told him, “Stay away from me or I’ll bust you in the teeth with this rock.”
His hand came out and down so fast I never saw the way he got one finger between my palm and the rock and flicked it out of my grasp. I started to cuss at him, but he just turned his back and walked up the embankment towards the tracks. He put his chin on his shoulder and said, “Come on, will you?”
He didn’t chase me, so I didn’t run. He didn’t talk to me so I didn’t argue. He didn’t hit me, so I didn’t get mad. I went along after him. He waited for me. He put out his hand to me and I spit at it. So he went on, up to the tracks, out of my sight. I clawed my way up. The blood was beginning to move in my hands and feet and they felt like four point-down porcupines. When I got up to the road-bed, the man was standing there waiting for me.
The track was level just there, but as I turned my head to look along it, it seemed to be a hill that was steeper and steeper and turned over above me. The next thing you know, I was lying flat on my back looking up at the cold sky.
The man came over and sat down on the rail near me. He didn’t try to touch me. I gasped for breath a couple of times and suddenly felt I’d be all right if I could sleep for a minute—just a little minute. I closed my eyes. The man stuck his finger in my ribs, hard. It hurt.
“Don’t sleep,” he said.
I looked at him.
He said, “You’re frozen stiff and weak with hunger. I want to take you home and get you warmed up and fed. But it’s a long haul up that way, and you won’t make it by yourself. If I carry you, will that be the same to you as if you walked it?”
“What are you going to do when you get me home?”
“I told you.”
“All right,” I said.
He picked me up and carried me down the track. If he’d said anything else in the world, I’d of laid right down where I was until I froze to death. Anyway, what did he want to ask me for, one way or the other? I couldn’t of done anything.
I stopped thinking about it and dozed off.
I woke up once when he turned off the right of way. He dove into the woods. There was no path, but he seemed to know where he was going. The next time I woke from a crickling noise. He was carrying me over a frozen pond and the ice was giving under his feet. He didn’t hurry. I looked down and saw the white cracks raying out under his feet, and it didn’t seem to matter a bit. I bleared off again.
He put me down at last. We were there. “There” was inside a room. It was very warm. He put me on my feet and I snapped out of it in a hurry. The first thing I looked for was the door. I saw it and jumped over there and put my back against the wall beside it, in case I wanted to leave. Then I looked around.
It was a big room. One wall was rough rock and the rest was logs with stuff shoved between them. There was a big fire going in the rock wall, not in a fireplace, exactly; it was a sort of hollow place. There was an old auto battery on a shelf opposite, with two yellowing electric light bulbs dangling by wires from it. There was a table, some boxes, and a couple of three-legged stools. The air had a haze of smoke and such a wonderful, heartbreaking, candy-and-crackling smell of food that a little hose squirted inside my mouth.
The man said, “What have I got here, Baby?”
And the room was full of kids. Well, three of them, but somehow they seemed to be more than three kids. There was a girl about my age—eight, I mean—with blue paint on the side of her face. She had an easel and a palette with lots of paints and a fistful of brushes, but she wasn’t using the brushes. She was smearing the paint on with her hands. Then there was a little Negro girl about five with great big eyes who stood gaping at me. And in a wooden crate, set up on two sawhorses to make a kind of bassinet, was a baby. I guess about three or four months old. It did what babies do, drooling some, making small bubbles, waving its hands around very aimless, and kicking.
When the man spoke, the girl at the easel looked at me and then at the baby. The baby just kicked and drooled.
The girl said, “His name’s Gerry. He’s mad.”
“What’s he mad at?” the man asked. He was looking at the baby.
“Everything,” said the girl. “Everything and everybody.”
“Where’d he come from?”
I said, “Hey, what is this?” but nobody paid any attention. The man kept asking questions at the baby and the girl kept answering. Craziest thing I ever saw.
“He ran away from a state school,” the girl said. “They fed him enough, but no one bleshed with him.”
That’s what she said—‘bleshed’.
I opened the door then and cold air hooted in. “You louse,” I said to the man, “you’re from the school.”
“Close the door, Janie,” said the man. The girl at the easel didn’t move, but the door banged shut behind me. I tried to open it and it wouldn’t move. I let out a howl, yanking at it.
“I think you ought to stand in the corner,” said the man. “Stand him in the corner, Janie.”
Janie looked at me. One of the three-legged stools sailed across to me. It hung in midair and turned on its side. It nudged me with its flat seat. I jumped back and it came after me. I dodged to the side, and that was the corner. The stool came on. I tried to bat it down and just hurt my hand. I ducked and it went lower than I did. I put one hand on it and tried to vault over it, but it just fell and so did I. I got up again and stood in the corner, trembling. The stool turned right side up and sank to the floor in front of me.
The man said, “Thank you, Janie.” He turned to me. “Stand there and be quiet, you. I’ll get to you later. You shouldn’ta kicked up all that fuss.” And then, to the baby, he said, “He got anything we need?”
And again it was the little girl who answered. She said, “Sure. He’s the one.”
“Well,” said the man. “What do you know!” He came over. “Gerry, you can live here. I don’t come from no school. I’ll never turn you in.”
“Yeah, huh?”
“He hates you,” said Janie.
“What am I supposed to do about that?” he wanted to know.
Janie turned her head to look into the bassinet. “Feed him.” The man nodded and began fiddling around the fire. Meanwhile, the little Negro girl had been standing in the one spot with her big eyes right out on her cheekbones, looking at me. Janie went back to her painting and the baby just lay there same as always, so I stared right back at the little Negro girl. I snapped, “What the hell are you gawking at?”
She grinned at me. “Gerry ho-ho,” she said, and disappeared. I mean she really disappeared, went out like a light, leaving her clothes where she had been. Her little dress billowed in the air and fell in a heap where she had been, and that was that. She was gone.
“Gerry hee-hee,” I heard. I looked up, and there she was, stark naked, wedged in a space where a little outcropping on the rock wall stuck out just below the ceiling. The second I saw her she disappeared again.