Killdozer! (49 page)

The doctor scratched his head. “He’s out of this world. I can tell you that. Obviously adult, but every fracture but one is a green stick break; kind of thing you see on a three-year old. Transparent membranes over his—What are you laughing at?” he asked suddenly.

Jack had started easily, with a chuckle, but it got out of control. He roared.

Zinsser said, “Jack! Cut it out. This is a hosp—”

Jack shoved his hand away. “I got to,” he said helplessly and went off on another peal.

“You’ve got to what?”

“Laugh,” said Jack, gasping. He sobered, he more than sobered. “It has to be funny, Harry. I won’t let it be anything else.”

“What the devil do you—”

“Look, Harry. We assumed a lot about Mewhu, his culture, his technology, his origin. We’ll never know anything about it!”

“Why? You mean he won’t tell us?”

“He won’t tell us. I’m wrong. He’ll tell us plenty. But it won’t do any good. Here’s what I mean. Because he’s our size, because he obviously arrived in a space ship, because he brought a gadget or two that’s obviously the product of a highly advanced civilization, we believe that
he
produced the civilization, that he’s a superior individual in his own place.”

“Well, he must be.”

“He must be? Harry, did Molly invent the automobile?”

“No, but—”

“But she drove one through the back of the garage.”

Light began to dawn on Zinsser’s moon face.” You mean—”

“It all fits! Remember when Mewhu figured out how to carry that heavy trap door of mine on the jet stick, and then left the problem half-finished? Remember his fascination with Molly’s yo-yo? What about that peculiar rapport he has with Molly? Doesn’t that begin to look reasonable? Look at Iris’ reaction to him—almost maternal, though she didn’t know why.”

“The poor little fellow,” breathed Zinsser. “I wonder if he thought he was home when he landed?”

“Poor little fellow—sure,” said Jack, and began to laugh again. “Can Molly tell you how an internal combustion engine works? Can she explain laminar flow on an airfoil?” He shook his head. “You wait and see. Mewhu will be able to tell us the equivalent of Molly’s ‘I rode in the car with Daddy and we went sixty miles an hour.’ ”

“But how did he get here?”

“How did Molly get through the back of my garage?”

The doctor shrugged his shoulders helplessly. “His biological reactions do look like those of a child—and if he is a child, then his rate of tissue restoration will be high, and I’ll guarantee he’ll live.”

Zinsser groaned. “Much good will it do us—and him, poor kid. With a kid’s faith in any intelligent adult, he’s probably been sure we’d get him home somehow. Well, we haven’t got what it takes, and won’t have for a long, long time. We don’t even know enough to start duplicating that jet of his—and that was just a little kid’s toy on his world.”

The first period in Theodore Sturgeon’s writing career began in December 1937 and ended in June 1941 when he and his wife and child moved from New York City to the British West Indies. The first five stories in this volume date from late in that first period. He then did no writing of any sort until April-May 1944, when he wrote the novella “Killdozer!” The rest of the stories included here were written between 1944 and early 1946.

In an interview at the 1972 World Science Fiction Convention in Los Angeles, David Hartwell asked TS why he stopped writing for that long stretch in the West Indies. Sturgeon replied:

Well, the tropics is funny. The sun’s going to shine tomorrow the way it’s shining today, and you can put it off; and also I was running a hotel and I was extremely busy. I’d been very recently married and had a baby by that time and, uh, I don’t know, it just got lost. But anyway, I couldn’t write successfully in the tropics. I had one more session of that, in the late 50’s, when I went down to the West Indies again, and again the same thing happened. And I will
never
go down to the West Indies again, or any tropical clime like that, without an assured income of some sort, because really it terrifies—something clicks off as soon as I go down there, and I don’t know what it is or whether that indeed is it. But I wouldn’t risk it again
.

“Blabbermouth”:
first published in
Amazing Stories
, February 1947. Very likely written before June 1941. Sturgeon’s papers contain an untitled 2½ page manuscript, written between August 1940 and June 1941, which is identical to the first thirteen paragraphs of “Blabbermouth” with the exception of a few word changes. Separately
his surviving papers contain a half-page unfinished story idea, from the same period or possibly earlier, which starts:
Introduce Blabbermouth by an incident—past tense. Guy is irresistibly led to mischief-making. Consciously (at first reluctantly) imparts false information to total strangers—accosts an aging woman and tells her that her boss is about to replace her with a younger woman, and that her son will also lose his job
. Apart from the “blabbermouth” being male, this fragment demonstrates that the core idea of the story has not yet occurred to Sturgeon, because the information is described as “false.” So it was later in the story-creating process that he came up with the notion of a person compelled, under certain circumstances, to blab the truth.

It is possible that story-opening and story idea were not combined and developed until after the War, but much more likely that the story was written by 1941, rejected, and resubmitted when Sturgeon returned to active writing in 1946.

Sturgeon’s “in one sentence” summary of “Blabbermouth”’s message, in a 1954 exercise, was:
Any “haunted” individual expression can be circumvented
. Presumably this refers to the curse-turned-into-a-blessing resolution of the story, which is similar in this respect to his earlier fantasy “Derm Fool.” It also strikes me that this one-liner could result from confusing “Blabbermouth” with “Ghost of a Chance” (both written around the same time, both included in Sturgeon’s 1955 collection
Caviar
). Whether or not this is the case, I am struck by the way the phrase “ ‘haunted’ individual expression” points to the ghost story as an allegorical representation of a psychological condition. In fact, in “Ghost of a Chance” one of the characters is a psychologist who is unable to help the “haunted” girl because of his scientific skepticism.

To me the central idea in “Blabbermouth”—not well-developed but still a powerful, original, stimulating insight—is that something synergistic occurs when one person’s mood—suspicion—meets another’s mood—specifically, guilt. Sturgeon, as a very young (and attractive, charming) husband, presumably drew this insight from personal experience. And what he observes (and it is his treatment of this sort of insight that makes Sturgeon close to unique among fiction writers,
sf or otherwise) is that something tangible is created, an energy being which is not matter but nonetheless measurably, experientially real. In this case it’s referred to as a poltergeist, and its reality is measured by its impact on one of the characters in the story (who happens also to be the love object, as in “Ghost of a Chance”). In other Sturgeon stories the (psychologically created) energy being evolves to the level of a kind of life form (“The Perfect Host”), or manifests as an emotional field (doubt in “The Pod and the Barrier,” guilt in “Rule of Three,” fear in “Mr. Costello, Hero”) with the measurable physical power to paralyze or otherwise dominate an entire planet or civilization. This is genuine psychological science fiction, containing insights arguably as original and worthwhile as those of Erickson or Jung or Freud. And because of the uneasy status of psychology (shamanism, science, art form?) in the twentieth century, Sturgeon’s fiction of this sort mixes science fiction, fantasy, and so-called mainstream or literary fiction in a very unusual way.

Because psychology is not a “hard” science, and also because Sturgeon chooses not to develop his idea in a pseudoscientific psychological framework (something he does do, effectively and appropriately, in his 1956 story “The Other Man”), it’s easy to understand editor John Campbell rejecting “Blabbermouth” for
Astounding Science-Fiction;
and it is also not too hard to imagine him concluding, perhaps regretfully, that the fantastic element is not strong enough for the story to fit in his other magazine,
Unknown
. On the other hand, such a story was then and probably is still today too idea-driven to be published as literary or mainstream popular fiction. (In this case it is also not a very strong story outside of its idea. But many first-rate Sturgeon tales fall between the cracks in precisely the same way, notably “And Now the News,” in my opinion one of the finest short stories ever written by an American writer.)

For readers from other countries or eras, be it noted that the last lines of “Blabbermouth” were presumably universally recognized by readers at the time as a reference to Walter Winchell.

The blurb above the story in its original pulp magazine publication read: SHE WAS POSSESSED—OR SO SHE SAID—AND A LITTLE IMP WHISPERED TO HER … THINGS SHE HAD TO REPEAT!

“Medusa”:
first published in
Astounding Science-Fiction
, February 1942, and certainly written before June 1941. The concept of a spaceship of fools (on a dangerous and vital mission), each of whom has been told there’s only one sane man aboard the ship, is a memorable one. Eminent science fiction critic Damon Knight later wrote a groundbreaking essay on Robert A. Heinlein entitled “One Sane Man.”

As with so many stories from this period (and very few from later in Sturgeon’s career), a related false start can be found in the Sturgeon papers. This untitled, unfinished eight-page manuscript is about a man brought before a panel of distinguished “psychoscientists,” one of eight men who has been intentionally rendered insane and who will now crew a space cruiser on a special mission against a mysterious galactic enemy. In other details it’s quite a different story: it’s told in the third person, the enemy are seemingly friendly galactic traders similar to the Artnans in “Artnan Process,” etc.

Sturgeon’s 1957 story “The Pod and the Barrier” can be considered an extremely sophisticated rewrite of “Medusa.”

TS’s introduction to “Medusa” in his 1984 collection
Alien Cargo: This is fun too, but of a whole different order of magnitude. Some fun is, by its nature, trivial. This kind, however, is at base deeply thoughtful, though it masquerades as a comedy. It is, in short—metaphor
.

Magazine blurb (title page): “YOU,” SAID THE HEADQUARTERS MEN, “WILL BE THE ONLY SANE MAN IN THE CREW. THE REST ARE MADMEN BUT DON’T KNOW IT, OF COURSE—”

“Ghost of a Chance”:
first published in
Unknown Worlds
, June 1943, under the title “The Green-Eyed Monster.” The title was changed, probably by Sturgeon, when the story was reprinted in a magazine entitled
Suspense
in 1951, and the title change was retained in 1955 when the story appeared in Sturgeon’s collection
Caviar
.

See related comments under “Blabbermouth.” Sturgeon wrote a number of stories in which the hero falls in love with a beautiful woman at first sight, after a chance encounter, and then must do battle with a mysterious circumstance that makes her unavailable.

Magazine blurb (contents page): SHOOING OFF A JEALOUS
LOVER IS ORDINARILY SOMETHING OF A PROBLEM, BUT WHEN THE JEALOUS ONE IS A GHOST, AND A GHOST WITH A NASTY HABIT OF HAUNTING MOST UNPLEASANTLY HIS MORE SOLID RIVALS—

“The Bones”:
by Theodore Sturgeon and James H. Beard; first published in
Unknown Worlds
, August 1943. Beard, according to Sam Moskowitz in his book
Seekers of Tomorrow
, was “a crippled old man who had submitted several stories to [John] Campbell which were strongly plotted but inadequately written. Campbell asked Sturgeon if he would take Beard’s plots and turn them into stories.” How closely Sturgeon followed Beard’s original plot-line is not known. “The Bones” was jointly credited to Sturgeon and Beard when it appeared in
Unknown Worlds
, but Beard’s credit was omitted when the story was reprinted in Sturgeon’s 1960 collection
Beyond
.

I was a great one for crystal
[radio]
sets, made them all sorts of ways
, Sturgeon said in a childhood reminiscence written for his therapist in 1965 (and later published as
Argyll
).

Magazine blurb (contents page): THE INTENTION WAS TO MAKE A SUPER-RADIO. IT NEVER GLEANED A MESSAGE FROM THE AIR-WAVES, BUT IT “HEARD”—BONES TALK!

“The Hag Séleen”:
by Theodore Sturgeon and James H. Beard; first published in
Unknown Worlds
, December 1942. When the story was included in D.R. Bensen’s 1964 anthology
The Unknown Five
, Sturgeon was given sole credit. The editor noted that the story had been credited in the magazine to Sturgeon and Beard, but added: “All the same, it’s a Sturgeon story—Beard, who collaborated sometimes with Sturgeon on other pieces, supplied the background information for this one, and Sturgeon did the writing.” In the 1978 Sturgeon collection
Visions and Venturers
, the story title is followed by the line “(written with James H. Beard)”.

In a letter dated March 22, 1941, Beard wrote to Sturgeon:

“In case you elect to do the River Spider story, I think you had better have a copy of the rune used by devotees of the spider when launching their tiny canoes on the river.

“These canoes by the way are often delicately and beautifully made, sometimes carved of cedar or cypress, sometimes made of bark, brightly colored with dyes which are prepared from various plants growing in the swamp.

“The rune follows: