Selected Stories (64 page)

He continued around until they reached the wooden chest, then stopped and looked into her eyes. “I believe you. I don’t know why you decided that, but I’m willing to believe you.” He set her down on the chest and stood back.

“It’s that act of faith you mentioned,” she said gravely. “I thought you ought to have it, at least once in your life, so you can never say such a thing again.” She tapped her heels gingerly against the slate floor. “Ow.” She made a pained smile. “Pins and needles.”

“You must have been thinking for a long time.”

“Yes. Want more?”

“Sure.”

“You are an angry, frightened man.”

He seemed delighted. “Tell me about all that!”

“No,” she said quietly. “You tell me. I’m very serious about this. Why are you angry?”

“I’m not!”

“Why are you so angry?”

“I tell you I’m not! Although,” he added good-naturedly, “you’re pushing me in that direction.”

“Well then, why?”

He gazed at her for what, to her, seemed a very long time indeed. “You really want to know, don’t you?”

She nodded.

He waved a sudden hand, up and out. “Where do you suppose all this came from—the house, the land, the equipment?”

She waited.

“An exhaust system,” he said, with a thickening of the voice she was coming to know. “A way of guiding exhaust gases out of internal-combustion engines in such a way that they are given a spin. Unburned solids are embedded in the walls of the muffler in a glass-wool liner that slips out in one piece and can be replaced by a clean one every couple of thousand miles. The rest of the exhaust is fired by its own spark plug and what will burn, burns. The heat is used to preheat the fuel; the rest is spun again through a five-thousand mile cartridge. What finally gets out is, by today’s standards at least, pretty clean; and because of the preheating, it actually gets better mileage out of the engine.”

“So you’ve made a lot of money.”

“I made a lot of money,” he echoed. “But not because the thing is being used to cut down air pollution. I got the money because an automobile company bought it and buried it in a lockbox. They don’t like it because it costs something to install in new cars. Some friends of theirs in the refining business don’t like it because it gets high performance out of crude fuels. Well all right—I didn’t know any better and I won’t make the same mistake again. But yes—I’m angry. I was angry when I was a kid on a tankship and we were set to washing down bulkheads with chipped brown-soap and canvas, and I went ashore and bought a detergent and tried it and it was better, faster and cheaper so I took it to the bos’n, who gave me a punch in the mouth for pretending to know his job better than he did … well, he was drunk at the time, but the rough part was when the old shellbacks in the crew got wind of it and ganged up on me for being what they called a ‘company man’—that’s a dirty name in a ship. I just couldn’t understand why people got in the way of something better.

“I’ve been up against that all my life. I have something in my head that just won’t quit: it’s a way I have of asking the next question: Why is so-and-so the way it is? Why can’t it be such-and-such instead? There is always another question to be asked about any thing or any situation; especially you shouldn’t quit when you like an answer because there’s always another one after it. And we live in a world where people just don’t want to ask the next question!

“I’ve been paid all my stomach will take for things people won’t use, and if I’m mad all the time it’s really my fault—I admit it; because I just can’t stop asking that next question and coming up with answers. There’s a half-dozen real blockbusters in that lab that nobody will ever see, and half a hundred more in my head; but what can you do in a world where people would rather kill each other in a desert even when they’re shown it can turn green and bloom, where they’ll fall all over themselves to pour billions into developing a new oil strike when it’s been proved over and over again that the fossil fuels will kill us all?

“Yes, I’m angry. Shouldn’t I be?”

She let the echoes of his voice swirl around the court and out through the hole in the top of the atrium, and waited a little longer to let him know he was here with her and not beside himself and his fury. He grinned at her sheepishly when he came to this, and she said:

“Maybe you’re asking the next question instead of asking the right question. I think people who live by wise old sayings are trying not to think, but I know one worth paying some attention to. It’s this: If you ask a question the right way, you’ve just given the answer.” She paused to see if he was paying real attention. He was. She went on, “I mean, if you put your hand on a hot stove you might ask yourself, how can I stop my hand from burning? And the answer is pretty clear, isn’t it? If the world keeps rejecting what you have to give, there’s some way of asking why that contains the answer.”

“It’s a simple answer,” he said shortly. “People are stupid.”

“That isn’t the answer and you know it,” she said.

“What is?”

“Oh, I can’t tell you that! All I know is that the way you do something, when people are concerned, is more important than what you do, if you want results. I mean … you already know how to get what you want with the tree, don’t you?”

“I’ll be damned.”

“People are living growing things too. I don’t know a hundredth part of what you do about bonsai, but I do know this: when you start one, it isn’t often the strong straight healthy ones you take. It’s the twisted sick ones that can be made the most beautiful. When you get to shaping humanity, you might remember that.”

“Of all the—I don’t know whether to laugh in your face or punch you right in the mouth!”

She rose. He hadn’t realized she was quite this tall. “I’d better go.”

“Come on now. You know a figure of speech when you hear one.”

“Oh, I didn’t feel threatened. But—I’d better go, all the same.”

Shrewdly, he asked her, “Are you afraid to ask the next question?”

“Terrified.”

“Ask it anyway.”

“No!”

“Then I’ll do it for you. You said I was angry—and afraid. You want to know what I’m afraid of.”

“Yes.”

“You. I am scared to death of you.”

“Are you really?”

“You have a way of provoking honesty,” he said with some difficulty. “I’ll say what I know you’re thinking; I’m afraid of any close human relationship. I’m afraid of something I can’t take apart with a screwdriver or a mass spectroscope or a table of cosines and tangents.” His voice was jocular but his hands were shaking.

“You do it by watering one side,” she said softly, “or by turning it just so in the sun. You handle it as if it were a living thing, like a species or a woman or a bonsai. It will be what you want it to be if you let it be itself and take the time and the care.”

“I think,” he said, “that you are making me some kind of offer. Why?”

“Sitting there most of the night,” she said, “I had a crazy kind of image. Do you think two sick twisted trees ever made bonsai out of one another?”

“What’s your name?” he asked her.

Theodore Hamilton Sturgeon (1918–1985) is the acclaimed author of eleven novels and more than two hundred short stories. Considered to be among the most influential writers of science fiction’s “Golden Age,” he won the International Fantasy Award for his novel
More Than Human
, and the Hugo and Nebula Awards for his short story “Slow Sculpture.”

Born Edward Hamilton Waldo in Staten Island, New York, Sturgeon was the son of Edward Molineaux Waldo, a paint and dye manufacturer, and Christine Hamilton Waldo, a teacher. At the age of eleven, following his mother’s remarriage, his name was legally changed to Theodore Sturgeon.

Sturgeon began writing stories and poems during the three years he spent working as an engine room laborer on a freighter. Beginning in 1938, he published short stories for genre and general market publications including
Astounding
(now
Analog Science Fiction and Fact
),
Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction
, and
Argosy
. His groundbreaking short story “The World Well Lost” (1953), which was among the first science fiction stories to include positive themes of homosexuality, went on to win the Gaylactic Spectrum Award in 2000.

Sturgeon’s 1953 novel
More Than Human
was considered groundbreaking for science fiction in its stylistic daring, fine characterization, and visionary impact. Offering the idea that the next step in human evolution was a gestalt organism composed of people with different and strange talents who “bleshed,”
More Than Human
was an inspiration to many in the 1960s counterculture, including artists and musicians such as the Grateful Dead and Crosby, Stills and Nash.

In the 1960s, Sturgeon ventured into television writing, penning the screenplays for two of the most popular
Star Trek
episodes: “Shore Leave” (1966) and “Amok Time” (1967). He is credited with inventing the story of Spock’s sex life, as well as the famous Vulcan greeting, “Live long and prosper,” and (with Leonard Nimoy) its accompanying hand signal. Two of Sturgeon’s stories were adapted for
The New Twilight Zone
, and his novella
Killdozer!
(1944) became a television movie in 1974. He is also the creator of Sturgeon’s Law—90 percent of everything is crap—which he developed to counter the common denigration of science fiction as a genre.

Beloved by critics and readers alike, Sturgeon inspired a generation of authors across genres, such as Samuel R. Delany, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Octavia E. Butler, Karen Joy Fowler, and Rad Bradbury. Kurt Vonnegut considered Sturgeon to be one of the best writers in America, and Sturgeon served as inspiration for Vonnegut’s recurring character, Kilgore Trout.

Survived by his seven children, Sturgeon died in Eugene, Oregon, on May 8, 1985. In 2000, he was posthumously inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

The decree wherein Sturgeon is officially adopted by his stepfather (William “Argyll” D. Sturgeon) and his mother, and his last name is changed accordingly, from “Waldo” to “Sturgeon.” (Photo courtesy of Special Collections, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas.)

Sturgeon’s report card from the Pennsylvania State Nautical Schoolship “Annapolis” postmarked April 10, 1937, showing his rank as last in his class of cadets. (Photo courtesy of Special Collections, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas.)

Sturgeon with his third wife, Marion McGahan, and (left to right) daughter Tandy (b. 1954), son Robin (b. 1952), and daughter Noël (b. 1956).