Killdozer! (51 page)

Sept. 23, 1958, Sturgeon wrote his agent:
I would like to correct galleys on the collection called KILLDOZER. One reason … has to do with the title story, which has been talked about for films ever since it was written. It is a World War II story and needn’t be; a very little invisible mending will take care of that. It also needs a touch here and there in characterization and dialogue—for example, Street & Smith’s editing “damn” into “care” every time they
saw it, so that your bulldozer operators keep saying “I don’t give a care …” and one or two other small repairs
.

So Sturgeon did rewrite the last eight paragraphs. In cases like this, this series chooses to assume that the last revision the author chose to make for publication is the proper text for his Collected Stories. So our text has been set from the book that reflects Sturgeon’s 1959 corrections and revisions. For the readers’ interest, we do include in these notes the text of the original ending, as published in
Astounding
in 1944 and
The Best of Science Fiction
in 1946.

Text of the original ending of “Killdozer!”:

This is the story of
Daisy Etta,
the bulldozer that went mad and had a life of its own, and not the story of the flat-top
Marokuru
of the Imperial Japanese Navy, which has been told elsewhere. But there is a connection. You will remember how the
Marokuru
was cut off from its base by the concentrated attack on Truk, how it slipped far to the south and east and was sunk nearer to our shores than any other Jap warship in the whole course of the war. And you will remember how a squadron of five planes, having been separated by three vertical miles of water from their flight deck, turned east with their bomb-loads and droned away for a suicide mission. You read that they bombed a minor airfield in the outside of Panama’s far-flung defenses, and all hands crashed in the best sacrificial fashion
.

Well, that was no airfield, no matter what it might have looked like from the air. It was simply a roughly graded runway, white marl against brown scrub-grass
.

The planes came two days after the death of
Daisy Etta,
as Tom and Kelly sat in the shadow of the pile of fuel drums, down in the coolth of the swag that
Daisy
had dug there to fuel herself. They were poring over paper and pencil, trying to complete the impossible task of making a written statement of what had happened on the island, and why they and their company had failed to complete their contract. They had found Chub and Harris, and had buried them next to the other three. Al Knowles was tied up in the camp, because they had heard him raving in his sleep, and it seemed he could not believe
that
Daisy
was dead and he still wanted to go around killing operators for her. They knew that there must be an investigation, and they knew just how far their story would go; and having escaped a monster like
Daisy Etta,
life was far too sweet for them to want to be shot for sabotage. And murder
.

The first stick of bombs struck three hundred yards behind them at the edge of the camp, and at the same instant a plane whistled low over their heads, and that was the first they knew about it. They ran to Al Knowles and untied his feet and the three of them headed for the bush. They found refuge, strangely enough, inside the mound where
Daisy Etta
had first met her possessor
.

“Bless their black little hearts,” said Kelly as he and Tom stood on the bluff and looked at the flaming wreckage of a camp and five medium bombers below them. And he took the statement they had been sweating out and tore it across
.

“But what about him?” said Tom, pointing at Al Knowles, who was sitting on the ground, playing with his fingers. “He’ll still spill the whole thing, no matter if we do try to blame it all on the bombing.”

“What’s the matter with that?” said Kelly
.

Tom thought a minute, then grinned. “Why, nothing! That’s just the sort of thing they’ll expect from him!”

“Abreaction”:
first published in
Weird Tales
, July 1948. Written between July and October 1944. In a letter to TS dated Dec. 19, 1944, his friend Art Kohn said, “What cooks on the literary front? By now maybe comes words of acceptance from
Colliers
of one or two stories—but howzabout the ones you had already prepared—to wit ‘Poor Yorick,’ ‘Crossfire,’ ‘Abreaction’ et all. Surely must be a market for ’em somewheres. Also and to wit the Campbell inspired yarn anent polarized fields of rotators or some such.” In context, this seems to refer to stories Sturgeon told Kohn he had written (or showed him) before he left St. Croix.

Sturgeon was a gymnast in high school and may well have fallen off the parallel bars.

Magazine blurb: HE WANTED TO GO BACK TO A PLACE HE’D SURELY NEVER VISITED!

“Poor Yorick”:
unpublished. A handwritten note on the manuscript says “submitted—NJ [agent’s initials] 8–2–44.” Manuscript is untitled, probably a rough draft, but surely is the “Poor Yorick” referred to in Kohn’s 12/44 letter. Some pages of “synopses,” ideas for stories he might try to write, survive from this era (dated by a reference to “NJ” in one of the notes). One of the 32 entries reads as follows:

Wicked little short short—and I dare you sell it. Girl gets present from boy-friend in the South Pacific of Japanese skull. Is a little queasy but proud. Some character—friend of the family, Lionel Barrymore type, gives deep pronouncements on the basic fellowship of man and so forth, and rather deplores the gift. Family dentist drops around, takes one look at it, and then what you will. It’s the manhandled skull of her own brother, picked up already sunbleached and to an expert not recognizable as caucasian
.

“Crossfire”:
unpublished. Another single-spaced rough draft, probably written in summer ’44. No title on ms., but quite possibly the “Crossfire” Kohn refers to.

“Noon Gun”:
first published in
Playboy
, September 1963. The existence of a manuscript with Sturgeon’s St. Croix address on the top sheet alongside the name of the agent he got in late ’44 to replace Nannine Joseph, dates it as having been written in the second half of 1944 or the early months of 1945. Never included in a Sturgeon book until now, this was scheduled for a collection called
Slow Sculpture
that was cancelled by the publisher sometime after TS wrote an introduction and rubrics for it in 1980. The “Noon Gun” rubric:

I’ve been very fortunate; what I write, I sell. There have been just two stories I couldn’t even give away for years: “Bianca’s Hands,” which ultimately won a prestigious literary award in England and the first check I had ever seen for over a thousand dollars, and this one, written in 1946 and sold in 1962 to
Playboy
for $100 per typed page. It’s a highly autobiographical tale
.

On Feb. 9, 1947 Sturgeon wrote to his mother about his new association with still another agent, Scott Meredith:
In my files was one 5000 worder called NOON GUN, written during that desperate
period in early ’45 when I was starving in New York and my family likewise in St. Croix. Scott was mightily pleased with it. I had given it to my current agent, a sweet old has-been called Ed Bodin, and he had mismarketed it dreadfully. Since its one or two submissions it had lain in the files. (Two others he had had, I sold instantly when I picked up my stuff from him last spring.) So I rewrote NOON GUN, making only slight changes in the dialogue which referred to the war (the magazines don’t know there was a war any more!) and gave it to him. It’s been out for quite a few weeks, and Scott says that’s good
.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if that story, of all stories, should be my first slick sale! If it had sold when written, I wouldn’t have been stuck in New York. I’d have been home (St. Croix) for Christmas with my pockets bulging and my faith in myself (which later took such a dreadful fall) intact and blooming!

Magazine blurb: AS THEY WALKED, HE TRIED TO ENVISION THE BIG GUY GROVELING—BUT ALL HE COULD SEE WAS THAT KID WAITING FOR THE CANNON TO FIRE.

“Bulldozer Is a Noun”:
unpublished. Again, the St. Croix address on the manuscript shows it was written before June 1945, perhaps in spring ’45 when Sturgeon briefly held the first office job of his life. On August 3, 1945, TS wrote his mother:
Finally in March met some people in the Biltmore Bar and found myself Copy Director of Advertising Division of a big electronics firm. $85
. [ellipses his] … 
something happened. I didn’t send any money south. I didn’t know why. Fifty bucks just then would have saved the whole situation. I went psychotic over food. I couldn’t get enough to eat. I ate five, six meals a day; cost me $30, $40 a week to eat. I put money into insurance, things like that
.

No title on surviving manuscript; this title assigned by PW.

“August Sixth 1945”:
unpublished. Probably written soon after. The authorial address in the upper right corner of the first page suggests TS did consider this something to be submitted for possible publication; whether and where it was submitted is not known.

“The Chromium Helmet”:
first published in
Astounding Science-Fiction
, June 1946. Written at the end of 1945. Sam Moskowitz in
Seekers of Tomorrow
reports what TS told him in a 1961 interview: “Sturgeon returned to New York … He was in a daze for months. John Campbell befriended him, inviting him as a house guest for periods as prolonged as two weeks at a stretch. Gradually, Campbell coaxed him out of his depression, until one day, in the basement of the editor’s home, Sturgeon sat down at a typewriter and wrote ‘The Chromium Helmet.’ Campbell read the first draft straight from the typewriter and accepted the story.” In 1972 TS told David Hartwell,
I was really in a zombieish condition. Gradually I began to write again, and finally I wrote a story called “The Chromium Helmet” in John’s cellar out in Westfield, New Jersey. And that was really the first of these so-called “therapeutic” or optimum humanity stories. And they just went on from there
. However, an undated (probably mid-’46) fragment of a letter from TS to a friend found in Sturgeon’s papers complicates things by saying,
 … began to write again, and sold “The Chromium Helmet,” four thousand words of which had been done for a year or more. That broke the ice, and I began to pull out of it
. Could this possibly be “the Campbell inspired yarn anent polarized fields of rotators” Art Kohn mentioned in his 12/44 letter (see “Crossfire” note)? Regardless of when Sturgeon began it, finishing and
selling
the story in Campbell’s cellar was certainly an event, a breakthrough, TS long remembered and recounted.

Your editor, who’s done much of the research for these notes in Sturgeon’s daughter’s cellar, wishes to report that he now considers “The Chromium Helmet” a major and surprising and visionary story, even though other readers including the estimable Mr. Silverberg, and myself two decades ago when I first read it, have failed to appreciate it. Sturgeon almost alone among modern writers seems to have some insight into the psychological and cultural significance of the technological advances being made in the realm of “wish fulfillment” in the Media Age. I missed this story’s allegorical power until now, even though TS told me in 1975:
“The Chromium Helmet,” according to that man I told you about
[a renegade therapist who treated Sturgeon with LSD in 1965 at the therapist’s country home over a
period of weeks, just like a character in a Pynchon novel]
is the first of my “therapy” stories—it’s not too exceptionable as a story, but it does have that component, as does everything else that I’ve ever written since then. And from then on, I started turning out a tremendous amount of stuff, and finally busted it wide open
.

He was able to point out to me that the nature of my work changed so drastically between 1940 and 1946, that they were not wasted years, that clearly something was going on all the time. There was an evolution towards something infinitely more important and infinitely more serious than anything I’d ever done before. And that there was no break, there were no “wasted years.” This was a tremendous comfort to me, it is to this day as a matter of fact. And now, when I go through long periods, which I do, when I’m not writing anything, I don’t panic
.

Hartwell (’72): “You’ve said that love is the principal theme of practically everything you’ve ever written. Have you ever written anything that it wasn’t?” Sturgeon:
No, except that my preoccupation in a larger sense is the optimum man. The question of establishing an internal ecology, where the optimum liver works with the optimum spleen and the optimum eyeball and so forth. Now, when you get to the mind—not the brain, but the optimum mind—then you have the whole inner space idea; my conviction is that there’s more room there than there is in outer space, in each individual human being. Love of course has a great deal to do with that, as a necessary coloration and adjunct to everything that we do—to love oneself, to love the parts of oneself, to love the interaction of the parts of oneself, and then the interaction of that whole organism with those of another person. Which is as good a definition of love as you can get, I think
.

And to PW in 1975:
It wasn’t until comparatively recently, before I discovered that there
is
a common denominator in all my stories, and that is, the search for the optimum human being. This was pointed out to me by a therapist many years ago, when I was bemoaning the fact of a time when I would let six years go by without writing anything. He said that the stories I’d written before that hiatus were good enough in their way, and brilliant in some ways, but they
were entertainments. And the ones I wrote
after
that six year period were all—well, we all take our own specialty, you know, and graft it onto what we’re talking about—but he said they’re all
therapy
stories. In the sense that they are almost always about somebody who is no good who gets good, somebody who is good who gets better, somebody who is sick and gets well, somebody who gets well and turns into a super-person, and so on. “The Other Man,” “Maturity” and all these different stories are very much obsessed with the search for the optimum human being. Not the superman …
PW: “We’re talking here about human potential.” TS:
That’s right. And everything that I’ve ever done since then has been—well, the one that I won all those awards for, “Slow Sculpture,” is purely and simply a description of that search. Not only for the optimum human being but for
human acceptance
of the optimum human being
.