Killdozer! (53 page)

In fifty years of storytelling Sturgeon spoke to us of love, again and again and yet again, without ever repeating himself. One of the marks of his art was his unique talent for looking at an old situation from a new angle, one that no one else had ever noticed. He did not imitate (and could not be imitated) … and each of his stories was a love story.

Examples:

“Bianca’s Hands.” (That one? A story so horrible that editors not only bounced it but blacklisted the author? Yes, that one.)

“The World Well Lost.” (A love story, obviously—one about homosexuals. But please note that the copyright on it is 1953, many years before “gay pride” was even whispered, much less shouted. And Ted was not speaking in defense of himself but out of empathy for others. Ted was not even mildly homosexual. You can check this for yourself if you wish. I have no need to; I knew him intimately for more than forty years.)

“Some of Your Blood.” (Go back and read it again. Yes, George Smith makes Count Dracula look like a tenderfoot Scout. But Sturgeon invites you to look at it from George Smith’s angle.)

And so on, story after story for half a century. Some of Sturgeon’s yarns had adventure trappings, or science-fiction gadgets, or fantasy/weird/horror props, or whodunnit gimmicks or other McGuffins, but in each, tucked away or displayed openly, you will find some searching comment on love, a new statement, not something borrowed from another writer.

In addition to this prime interest Ted was alive to every facet of the world around him: He had a lifelong passion for machinery; his interest in music was intense and professional; he delighted in travel; he relished teaching others what he had learned—but above all and at all times, waking and sleeping, he loved his fellow humans and expressed it in all aspects of his life.

I first met Theodore Sturgeon in 1944. He had just returned from the Caribbean, where he had been a heavy-machinery operator building airstrips for the U.S. Army Air Force. That job played out in ’44; no more airfields were being built in the Antilles; the emphasis was shifting to the Pacific Theater. Ted was 4-F, a waste of skin; his draft board laughed at him. He was not even eligible for limited service. Rheumatic fever in his high-school days had left him with a heart so disabled that simply staying alive through each day was a separate miracle.

That damaged heart not only kept Ted out of military service;
ten years earlier it had robbed him of his dearest ambition: to be a circus acrobat. In high school, by grueling daily practice, he had transformed himself from that fabled ninety-pound weakling into a heavily muscled and highly skilled tumbler, one who could reasonably hope to join someday the “Greatest Show on Earth.” Then one morning he woke up ill.

He recovered … but with a badly damaged heart. A circus career was out of the question, and many other pursuits were foreclosed. Eventually his disability forced him into the one career open to anyone whose body is warm and mind still functioning: free-lance writing.

I once collected notes for an essay—the relation between physical disability and the literary pursuit; or Shakespeare was 4-F and so was Lord Byron and Julius Caesar and Somerset Maugham—and what’s your excuse, brother? Was it a queasy itch to see your name in print and a distaste for hard work? Or was it diabetes (polio, consumption, heart trouble) and a pressing need to pay the rent?

If we limit the discussion to science fiction, I can recall offhand several writers who got into the business not from choice but from physical disability coupled with financial necessity: Theodore Sturgeon, Robert A. Heinlein, Cleve Cartmill, H. G. Wells, Fletcher Pratt, Daniel F. Galouye, J. T. McIntosh. Each on this list wound up as a free-lance writer through physical limitations that crowded him into it … and I am sure that the list could be much longer, if we but knew.

So what was Sturgeon doing running bulldozers and backhoes and power shovels? Driving a Daisy Eight is not as easy as driving a car; rassling a dozer is no job for a man with a bad heart.

The answer is simple: Ted never paid any more attention to his physical limitations than he was forced to, and in wartime the physical examination for a civilian employee of the army or navy consisted of walking past the surgeon, who would then mark the prospect “fit for heavy manual labor.” I am not joking. In World War II, I hired many civilians for the Navy Field Service; the Army Field Service was not more demanding than we were—or we would have snatched their prospects away from them. This was a time when any warm body would do. A typist was a girl who could tell a typewriter from a washing machine. (Later we took out the washing machine.)

So Ted built airstrips in broiling sun and 120-degree heat and failed to drop dead. He outlasted the job and then came to New York.

I think Ted worked for a while for the University of California, in the Empire State Building, with John W. Campbell, Jr., the editor of
Astounding Science Fiction
, as his supervisor. No, I have not jumped my trolley; at that time the University of California occupied one entire floor in the Empire State Building. Campbell was supervisor in a classified section that wrote radar operation and maintenance manuals—and even the word “radar” was classified; one did not say that word. (And didn’t even
think
the word “uranium,” not even in one’s sleep.)

I am not certain what work Ted did, because in 1944 one did not poke into another man’s classified work. I knew a trifle about this radar project because I had a radar project of my own, with a touch of overlap. But Campbell is dead now, and so is George O. Smith and so is Ted; I can’t check. (Ted’s wife Jayne can’t be certain; I am speaking of the year she was born.)

As may be, Ted was writing at night for Campbell and sharing lodging with Jay Stanton, who was both Campbell’s assistant supervisor on the radar writing project and Campbell’s assistant editor at Street and Smith … and all three men were part of another project I ran for OpNav-23, a brainstorming job on antikamikaze measures. (I was wearing three hats, not unusual then. One tended to live on aspirin and soothing syrup.)

I had been ordered to round up science-fiction writers for this crash project—the wildest brains I could find, so Ted was a welcome recruit. Some of the others were George O. Smith, John W. Campbell, Jr., Murray Leinster, L. Ron Hubbard, Sprague de Camp, and Fletcher Pratt. On Saturday nights and Sundays this group usually gathered at my apartment in downtown Philadelphia.

At my request Campbell brought Sturgeon there. My first impression of Sturgeon was that no male had any business being that pretty. He was a golden boy, one that caused comparisons with Michelangelo’s David. Or Baldur. He was twenty-six but looked about twenty. He was tall, straight, broad-shouldered, and carried himself with the
grace of a tightwire artist. He had a crown of golden curls, classic features and a sweet, permanent smile.

All this would have been inexcusable had it not been that he was honestly humble and warmly charming. When others spoke, Sturgeon listened with full attention. His interest in others caused one to forget his physical beauty.

My flat was about three hundred yards from the Broad Street Station; people came to these meetings from Washington, Scarsdale, Princeton, the Main Line, Manhattan, Arlington, etc.; my place was the most convenient rendezvous for most of the group. No one could drive a car (war restrictions), but the trains every thirty minutes on the Pennsylvania Railroad could get any member of the group there in two hours or less. It was a good neutral ground, too, for meetings that might include several officers (lieutenant to admiral), a corporal from OSS, a State Department officer, one sergeant, civil servants ranging from P-1 to P-6, contractors’ employees with clearances up to “top secret” but limited by “need to know,” and civilians with no official status and no clearance. I never worried about security because there was always one member of naval intelligence invariably present.

On Saturday nights there would be two or three in my bed, a couple on the couch and the rest on the living-room floor. If there was still overflow, I sent them a block down the street to a friend with more floor space if not beds. Hotel rooms? Let’s not be silly; this was 1944.

The first weekend Sturgeon was there he slept on the hall rug, a choice spot, while both L. Ron Hubbard and George O. Smith were in the overflow who had to walk down the street. In retrospect that seems like a wrong decision; Hubbard should not have been asked to walk, as both of his feet had been broken (drumhead-type injury) when his last ship was bombed. Ron had had a busy war—sunk four times and wounded again and again—and at that time was on limited duty at Princeton, attending military governors’ school.

On Sunday afternoon the working meeting was over, and we were sitting around in my living room. Ron and Ted had been swapping stories and horrible puns and harmonizing on songs—both were fine vocalists, one baritone, one tenor. I think it was the first time
they had met, and they obviously enjoyed each other’s company.

Ron had run through a burlesque skit, playing all the parts; then Ted got up and made a speech “explaining” Marxism and featuring puns such as “Engels with dirty faces” (groan), and ending with “then comes the Revolution!” At that last word he jumped straight up into the air and into a full revolution—a back flip. His heels missed the ceiling by a scant inch, and he landed as perfectly as Mary Lou Retton on the exact spot on which he had been standing.

This with no warning—which is how I learned that Ted was a tumbler. This in a crowded room. This with no windup. I don’t think he could have done it in a phone booth but he did not have much more room.

Ron Hubbard leaned toward me, said quietly into my ear, “Uh huh, I can see him now, a skinny kid in a clown suit too big for him, piling out of that little car with the other clowns and bouncing straight into his routine.”

Ron was almost right.

I think it was a later weekend that we learned of Ted’s incredible ability to produce just from his vocal cords, no props, any sound he had ever heard—traffic noises, train noises, shipboard noises, animals, birds, machinery, any accent whatever.

Here is the first one I asked for: A frosty morning, a buzzsaw powered by a two-cycle engine cranked by a line. Start the engine despite the freezing weather, then use the saw to cut firewood. The saw hits a nail in the wood.

I’m sorry I can’t offer you a tape. Ted scored a cold four-oh.

Thirty-three years later, in front of a large audience at San Diego ComiCon, I asked Sturgeon to repeat that buzzsaw routine, defining it again for him, as he had forgotten ever doing it. He thought for a few seconds, then did it. Another four-oh.

The second one I demanded was this: A hen lays an egg, then announces it. The farm wife shoos her off the nest long enough to grab the egg and replace it with a china egg.

Another perfect score—I do not know when or where Sturgeon coped with cranky two-cycle engines or with temperamental hens’
… but this farm boy now speaking can testify that Ted had been there in each case and could reproduce the sounds as exactly as any equipment from Sony or Mitsubishi.

I hope that someone somewhere has taped and preserved some of Sturgeon’s jokes in dialect. I would like to hear again the one about the pub in London where one could get a bit of bread, a bit of cheese, a pint of bitter, a gammon of Yorkshire ham, a bit of pudding and a go with the barmaid, all for two and six. Try to imagine all
that
. Was anyone running a recorder?

Ted’s ear was phenomenal and not limited to parlor tricks. Mark Twain said that the difference between the right word and almost the right word was the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

Sturgeon did not deal in lightning bugs.