Bright Segment (2 page)

One of the songs he played that night, as cockroaches marched up and down the walls of his furnished room, was something he had written to a girl he’d just met, celebrating in verse after verse her
“deux yeux si bleu.”
Then he played her reply, a delightful little piece in which she thanked him for the song but mused over the cruel
dommage
that her eyes were
“brun pas bleu.”

Very definitely the improbable Sturgeon, I thought.

No, back then I was not all that impressed with Sturgeon as a guitarist, but when it came to sheer writing, it was a totally different matter.

He showed me manuscripts on which he was working for John Campbell’s
Unknown
, the sister magazine of
Astounding
.

He showed me early versions and first drafts of “Shottle Bop” and “Yesterday Was Monday” and “It.” I read them and grew more and more impressed.

He told me what he had been living on before selling work to Campbell and after having been beached as a seaman: short-short stories to the McClure daily newspaper syndicate for which the pay was five dollars (
five dollars!)
 … on publication. (True, money went a lot farther then, but after he had paid his room rent of four dollars
a week, indeed there was not very far at all left to go.)

Then he asked me what kind of ideas I had been trying to develop into science fiction or fantasy stories. He listened, and broke my plots down into their constituent elements, discussing them first in terms of craft, then in terms of art. “You must always begin with craft,” he cautioned, “but you must always move to art. Else why bother?”

It is no overstatement to say that my lips were dry with awe by the time I left.

Then there were three and a half years of war for me, and marriage and a family and a stint in construction work in the tropics for Ted. We lost touch with each other until I read a published letter by him that gave his current address on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. By that time I had read his “Killdozer,” and—to me, even more important—his “Microcosmic God.” I looked him up, determined not to show the enormous admiration which I was beginning to feel for him as a writer.

He was delighted to learn that I had just sold my first story to John Campbell. He read the manuscript in carbon, approved it (which even then I felt was too nice of him), and asked what I was working on. I showed him my latest and as yet unsold story, “Child’s Play.”

“It’s good, Phil,” he said. “Quite good. Listen, I’m also operating as a literary agent these days. Would you like me to represent you?”

I told him I could think of nothing I’d like more. And so I became his client, along with other struggling unknowns like James Blish, and Damon Knight, and Judith Merril.

He was a very good agent, selling each of us to many more markets than we’d ever have thought of for ourselves.

But more important, far more important than his agenting were his critiques. The hours he spent discussing a character, a plot twist, a goddam single sentence! I never had an agent like that afterwards, and I’ve had many, ranging from quite poor to moderately superb. Ted, Ted was pure gold.

He was a most rare, most improbable combination. He was a
true artist and poet who had an extraordinary amount of market savvy, unsurpassed in any commercial writer or literary agent I’ve encountered since. Except for a very brief period in his life when he wrote directly and only for John Campbell of
Astounding
, he was incapable of doing more than five consecutive sentences that were not literature—yet he was almost indecently proud of the medium, pulp science fiction, in which he worked and the statements which he felt only it could make.

When he asked Ray Bradbury to write an introduction to his first collection of short stories,
Without Sorcery
, and Bradbury came up with a piece praising Sturgeon’s work, but full of apologies about the cheapness and absurdity of most science fiction, Ted sent the intro back together with a letter that must have taken at least a quarter of an inch of skin off the full length of Bradbury’s body. This letter, please remember, was to a contemporary whose work Ted respected more than anyone else’s in the science fiction of that period. Bradbury returned a totally new introduction (note that in the publishing economy of that day, he correctly had no expectation of being paid a thin dime for either piece!) along with a beautifully written
mea culpa
. One of the word-pictures Bradbury painted in that second introduction was a view of Ted Sturgeon banging away at his typewriter as he sat under a gigantic toadstool around which other, nontyping, elves and various strange small creatures were romping merrily.

(And surely I will be pardoned for pointing out that today, individual hardbound copies of
Without Sorcery
bring many times more dollars than Ted got for his total advance
and
all his royalties on the book.)

All this, of course, was before Ted gave up his rather sizable agency, presenting it to Scott Meredith for nothing but zilch and good will. He always tended to be at his most improbable where his own finances were concerned. It was before the brief spell that he worked at a huge salary in the
Time-Life
publications circulation division, where he left behind him dozens of hilarious, coruscating anecdotes about his tenure and his contributions. And it was before …

It was before he at last found a comfortable literary home in
Horace Gold’s
Galaxy
and Tony Boucher’s
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
—thus, before he was able to write stories that pleased him completely (“The [Widget], the [Wadget] and Boff,” for example) and that he felt were utterly his all the way through; it was before the novels like
More Than Human
and
The Dreaming Jewels
, where he could roam freely through his improbable mind and flex his improbable literary muscles.

And it was before—speaking of unlikely, improbable beauty—it was before he met and married Marion and had his second set of offspring, the first three of which were Robin, Tandy, and Noël (my wife, Fruma, when asked at that time about his children, used to reply, “He has one of each”).

It was also long, long before I broke up with a woman after a two-year relationship, and left my low-rent-despite-the-housing-shortage apartment to her, as a gentleman should. And Ted, hearing of this and knowing that I had barely the price of a single day’s hotel room in my pocket, insisted on turning over his just-acquired and newly decorated East Village flat to me. (“But Ted, where will you sleep?” “Oh, I have friends. Here and there.”)

Also, and finally, it was before we quarreled—over some inconsequential matter like politics or life and death—and didn’t see each other for far, far too many years.

My improbable friend, Theodore Hamilton Sturgeon, died in 1985. We, the world, were left with nothing but genuine probability and damn grim reality.

It is so much less than we had had.

T
HE BOOK
,
THEY DECIDED
, would bring Fortley Grantham back East if nothing else would, and at first I’d agreed with them. Later, I didn’t know. Later still, I hardly cared, for it grew heavy in my pack. Once, somewhere in the desert between Picacho and Vekol, two prospectors found me squatted on the scorching sand, heat-mad, dreaming out loud. It wouldn’t do for them to explain to me about the puncture in my canteen; I insisted that the book had soaked up my water as I walked, and I could get it back by wringing it out. I still have the book, and on it still are my tooth-marks.

By train and stage and horse and mule I went, and, when I had to, on foot. I cursed the Territories in general and Arizona in particular. I cursed Prescott and Phoenix and Maricopa; Sacaton on the Gila River Reservation and Snowflake on Silver Creek. At Brownell in the Quijotas I learned that William Howard Taft had signed the enabling act that would make a state of that hellish country, and thereafter I cursed him too. From time to time I even cursed myself and the stubborn streak which ran counter to comfort and career and intelligence itself—it would have been so simple, so wise, to go back to the green lawns of the Institute, the tinkle of teacups, to soft polite laughter and the coolth of ivied libraries.

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.”