Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (183 page)

“All right, Cro-Magnon,” said Boyd, “tell me how you did it. How does a man survive as long as you have? You do not age, of course. Your body will not accept disease. But I take it you are not immune to violence or to accident. You’ve lived in a violent world. How does a man sidestep accident and violence for two hundred centuries?”

“There were times early,” Luis said, “when I came close to not surviving. For a long time I did not realize the kind of thing I was. Sure, I livea longer, stayed younger than all the others—I would guess, however, that I didn’t begin to notice this until I began to realize that all the people I had known in my early life were dead—dead for a long, long time. I knew then that I was different from the rest. About the same time, others began to notice I was different. They became suspicious of me. Some of them resented me. Others thought I was some sort of evil spirit. Finally I had to flee the tribe. I became a skulking outcast. That was when I began to learn the principles of survival.”

“And those principles?”

“You keep a low profile. You don’t stand out. You attract no attention to yourself. You cultivate a cowardly attitude. You are never brave. You take no risks. You let others do the dirty work. You never volunteer. You skulk and run and hide. You grow a skin that’s thick; you don’t give a damn what others think of you. You shed all your noble attributes, your social consciousness. You shuck your loyalty to tribe or folk or country. You’re not a patriot. You live for yourself alone. You’re an observer, never a participant. You scuttle around the edges of things. And you become so self-centered that you come to believe that no blame should attach to you, that you are living in the only logical way a man can live. You went to Roncesvalles the other day, remember?”

“Yes. I mentioned I’d been there. You said you’d heard of it.”

“Heard of it? Hell, I was there the day it happened—August 15, 778. An observer, not a participant. A cowardly little bastard who tagged along behind that noble band of Gascons who did in Roland. Gascons, hell. That’s the fancy name for them. They were Basques pure and simple. The meanest crew of men who ever drew the breath of life. Some Basques may be noble, but not this band. They weren’t the kind of warriors who’d stand up face to face with the Franks They hid up in the pass and rolled rocks down on all those puissant knights. But it wasn’t the knights who held their interest. It was the wagon tram. They weren’t out to fight a war or to avenge a wrong. They were out for loot. Although little good it did them.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It was this way,” said Luis. “They knew the rest of the Frankish army would return when the rear guard didn’t come up, and they had not the stomach for that. They stripped the dead knights of their golden spurs, their armor and fancy clothes, the money bags they carried, and loaded all of it on the wagons and got out of there. A few miles farther on, deep in the mountains, they holed up and hid. In a deep canyon where they thought they would be safe. But if they should be found, they had what amounted to a fort. A half-mile or so below the place they camped, the canyon narrowed and twisted sharply. A lot of boulders had fallen down at that point, forming a barricade that could have been held by a handful of men against any assault that could be launched against it. By this time I was a long way off. I smelled something wrong, I knew something most unpleasant was about to happen. That’s another thing about this survival business. You develop special senses. You get so you can smell out trouble, well ahead of time. I heard what happened later.”

He lifted the bottle and had another drink. He handed it to Boyd.

“Don’t leave me hanging,” said Boyd. “Tell me what did happen.”

“In the night,” said Luis, “a storm came up. One of those sudden, brutal summer thunderstorms. This time it was a cloudburst. My brave fellow Gascons died to the man. That’s the price of bravery.”

Boyd took a drink, lowered the bottle, held it to his chest, cuddling it.

“You know about this,” he said. “No one else does. Perhaps no one had ever wondered what happened to those Gascons who gave Charlemagne the bloody nose. You must know of other things. Christ, man, you’ve lived history. You didn’t stick to this area.”

“No. At times I wandered. I had an itching foot. There were things to see. I had to keep moving along. I couldn’t stay in one place any length of time or it would be noticed that I wasn’t aging.”

“You lived through the Black Death,” said Boyd. “You watched the Roman legions. You heard firsthand of Attila. You skulked along on Crusades. You walked the streets of ancient Athens.”

“Not Athens,” said Luis. “Somehow Athens was never to my taste. I spent some time in Sparta. Sparta, I tell you—that was really something.”

“You’re an educated man,” said Boyd. “Where did you go to school?”

“Paris, for a time, in the fourteenth century. Later on at Oxford. After that at other places. Under different names. Don’t try tracing me through the schools that I attended.”

“You could write a book,” said Boyd. “It would set new sales records. You’d be a millionaire. One book and you’d be a millionaire.”

“I can’t afford to be a millionaire. I can’t be noticed, and millionaires are noticed. I’m not in want. I’ve never been in want. There’s always treasure for a skulker to pick up. I have caches here and there. I get along all right.”

Luis was right, Boyd told himself. He couldn’t be a millionaire. He couldn’t write a book. In no way could he be famous, stand out in any way. In all things he must remain unremarkable, always anonymous.

The principles of survival, he had said. And this was part of it, although not all of it. He had mentioned the art of smelling trouble, the hunch ability. There would be, as well, the wisdom, the street savvy, the cynicism that a man would pick up along the way, the expertise, the ability to judge character, an insight into human reaction, some knowledge concerning the use of power, power of every sort, economic power, political power, religious power.

Was the man still human, he wondered, or had he, in 20,000 years, become something more than human? Had he advanced that one vital step that would place him beyond humankind, the kind of being that would come after man?

“One thing more,” said Boyd. “Why the Disney paintings?”

“They were painted some time later than the others,” Luis told him. “I painted some of the earlier stuff in the cave. The fishing bear is mine. I knew about the grotto. I found it and said nothing. No reason I should have kept it secret. Just one of those little items one hugs to himself to make himself important. I know something you don’t know—silly stuff like that. Later I came back to paint the grotto. The cave art was so deadly serious. Such terribly silly magic. I told myself painting should be fun. So I came back after the tribe had moved, and painted simply for the fun of it. How did it strike you, Boyd?”

“Damn good art,” said Boyd.

“I was afraid you wouldn’t find the grotto and I couldn’t help you. I knew you had seen the cracks in the wall; I watched you one day looking at them. I counted on your remembering them. And I counted on your seeing the fingerprints and finding the pipe. All pure serendipity, of course. I had nothing in mind when I left the paint with the fingerprints and the pipe. The pipe, of course, was the tipoff, and I was confident you’d at least be curious. But I couldn’t be sure. When we ate that night, here by the campfire, you didn’t mention the grotto and I was afraid you’d blown it. But when you made off with the bottle, sneaking it away, I knew I had it made. And now the big question. Will you let the world in on the grotto paintings?”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it. What are your thoughts on the matter?”

“I’d just as soon you didn’t.”

“Okay,” said Boyd. “Not for the time at least. Is there anything else I can do for you? Anything you want?”

“You’ve done the best possible,” said Luis. “You know who I am, what I am. I don’t know why that’s so important to me, but it is, A matter of identity, I suppose. When you die, which I hope will be a long time from now, then, once again, there’ll be no one who knows. But the knowledge that one man did know, and what is more important, understood, will sustain me through the centuries. A minute—I have something for you.”

He rose and went into the tent, came back with a sheet of paper, handing it to Boyd. It was a topographical survey of some sort.

“I’ve put a cross on it,” said Luis. “To mark the spot.”

“What spot?”

“Where you’ll find the Charlemagne treasure of Roncesvalles. The wagons and the treasure would have been carried down the canyon in the flood. The turn in the canyon and the boulder barricade I spoke of would have blocked them. You’ll find them there, probably under a deep layer of gravel and debris.”

Boyd looked up questioningly from the map.

“It’s worth going after,” said Luis. “Also it provides another check against the validity of my story.”

“I believe you,” said Boyd. “I need no further evidence.”

“Ah, well!” said Luis “It wouldn’t hurt. And now it’s time to go.”

“Time to go! We have a lot to talk about.”

“Later, perhaps,” said Luis. “We’ll bump into one another from time to time. I’ll make it a point we do. But now it’s time to go.”

He started down the path, and Boyd sat watching him.

After a few steps, Luis halted and half turned back to Boyd.

“It seems to me,” he said in explanation, “it’s always time to go.”

Boyd stood and watched him move down the trail toward the village. There was about the moving figure a deep sense of loneliness—the most lonely man in all the world.

* * * *

Copyright © 1980 by Condé Nast Publications, Inc.

THEODORE STURGEON

(1918–1985)

In some ways, Ted Sturgeon’s reputation fell victim to changes in the SF market. One of the best-known science fiction wrtiers in the field through the 1970s, Sturgeon was primarily a short story writer. While he wrote influential novels such as the International Fantasy Award–winning
More Than Human
(which was actually a fixup of three novellas), people remembered him for his stories. As the field has become less driven by short fiction and more by novels, and as fewer reprint anthologies are available, Sturgeon’s work has become harder to find. Recent science fiction fans may know him just as a name if at all, while writers like Heinlein and Asimov who more frequently wrote book-length works are still widely read.

Before he was able to make a living as a writer, Sturgeon was more-or-less a wanderer and adventurer. After a bout with rheumatic fever ended his ambitions as a professional athlete, Sturgeon left home at seventeen to join the merchant marine. Over the years he spent time as a bulldozer driver, hotel manager, gas station operator, and door-to-door refrigerator salesman, as well as a few publishing-related jobs. All the while he wrote stories. Sturgeon sold his first story at age twenty-one and wrote prolifically through the 1940s and 50s, marred by bouts of writer’s block. (Robert Heinlein helped him through one of those bouts by sending Sturgeon a letter with twenty-six story ideas, two of which Sturgeon based stories on.) Nearly all of his writing continued to be in short forms such as stories and novellas (along with two episodes of Star Trek he authored in the 1960s). Sturgeon continued to write, though less prolifically, until shortly before his death in 1985 of lung fibrosis. The bulk of his best writing predated the field’s major awards, but he won both the Hugo and Nebula in 1971, for “Slow Sculpture,” and the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement posthumously in 1985. In 1987, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for the year’s best short story was established.

Sturgeon is also remembered for Sturgeon’s Law which (with a number of variations) reads: “Ninety percent of everything is crud.”

The story which follows is one of Sturgeon’s most popular and frequently reprinted. It reads more cold-bloodedly to contemporary readers than it did on the eve of America’s entry into World War II, but the story literally overflows with ideas.

First published in
Astounding Science Fiction
, April 1941

Here is a story about a man who had too much power, and a man who took too much, but don’t worry; I’m not going political on you. The man who had the power was named James Kidder and the other was his banker.

Kidder was quite a guy. He was a scientist and he lived on a small island off the New England coast all by himself. He wasn’t the dwarfed little gnome of a mad scientist you read about. His hobby wasn’t personal profit, and he wasn’t a megalomaniac with a Russian name and no scruples. He wasn’t insidious, and he wasn’t even particularly subversive. He kept his hair cut and his nails clean and lived and thought like a reasonable human being. He was slightly on the baby-faced side; he was inclined to be a hermit; he was short and plump and—brilliant. His specialty was biochemistry, and he was always called Mr. Kidder. Not “Dr.” Not “Professor.” Just Mr. Kidder.

He was an odd sort of apple and always had been. He had never graduated from any college or university because he found them too slow for him, and too rigid in their approach to education. He couldn’t get used to the idea that perhaps his professors knew what they were talking about. That went for his texts, too. He was always asking questions, and didn’t mind very much when they were embarrassing. He considered Gregor Mendel a bungling liar, Darwin an amusing philosopher, and Luther Burbank a sensationalist. He never opened his mouth without leaving his victim feeling breathless. If he was talking to someone who had knowledge, he went in there and got it, leaving his victim breathless. If he was talking to someone whose knowledge was already in his possession, he only asked repeatedly, “How do you know?” His most delectable pleasure was cutting a fanatical eugenicist into conversational ribbons. So people left him alone and never, never asked him to tea. He was polite, but not politic.

He had a little money of his own, and with it he leased the island and built himself a laboratory. Now I’ve mentioned that he was a biochemist. But being what he was, he couldn’t keep his nose in his own field. It wasn’t too remarkable when he made an intellectual excursion wide enough to perfect a method of crystallizing Vitamin B1 profitably by the ton—if anyone wanted it by the ton. He got a lot of money for it. He bought his island outright and put eight hundred men to work on an acre and a half of his ground, adding to his laboratory and building equipment. He got to messing around with sisal fiber, found out how to fuse it, and boomed the banana industry by producing a practically unbreakable cord from the stuff.

You remember the popularizing demonstration he put on at Niagara, don’t you? That business of running a line of the new cord from bank to bank over the rapids and suspending a ten-ton truck from the middle of it by razor edges resting on the cord? That’s why ships now moor themselves with what looks like heaving line, no thicker than a lead pencil, that can be coiled on reels like garden hose. Kidder made cigarette money out of that, too. He went out and bought himself a cyclotron with part of it.

After that money wasn’t money any more. It was large numbers in little books.

Kidder used little amounts of it to have food and equipment sent out to him, but after a while that stopped, too. His bank dispatched a messenger by seaplane to find out if Kidder was still alive. The man returned two days later in a bemused state, having been amazed something awesome at the things he’d seen out there. Kidder was alive, all right, and he was turning out a surplus of good food in an astonishingly simplified synthetic form. The bank wrote immediately and wanted to know if Mr. Kidder, in his own interest, was willing to release the secret of his dirtless farming. Kidder replied that he would be glad to, and enclosed the formulas. In a P.S. he said that he hadn’t sent the information ashore because he hadn’t realized anyone would be interested. That from a man who was responsible for the greatest sociological change in the second half of the twentieth century—factory farming. It made him richer; I mean it made his bank richer. He didn’t give a rap.

Kidder didn’t really get started until about eight months after the messenger’s visit. For a biochemist who couldn’t even be called “Doctor” he did pretty well. Here is a partial list of the things that he turned out:

A commercially feasible plan for making an aluminum alloy stronger than the best steel so that it could be used as a structural metal.

An exhibition gadget he called a light pump, which worked on the theory that light is a form of matter and therefore subject to physical and electromagnetic laws. Seal a room with a single source, beam a cylindrical vibratory magnetic field to it from the pump, and the light will be led down it. Now pass the light through Kidder’s “lens”—a ring which perpetuates an electric field along the lines of a high-speed iris-type camera shutter. Below this is the heart of the light pump—a ninety-eight-per-cent efficient light absorber, crystalline, which, in a sense,
loses
the light in its internal facets. The effect of darkening the room with this apparatus is slight but measurable. Pardon my layman’s language, but that’s the general idea.

Synthetic chlorophyll—by the barrel.

An airplane propeller efficient at eight times sonic speed.

A cheap goo you brush on over old paint, let harden, and then peel off like strips of cloth. The old paint comes with it. That one made friends fast.

A self-sustaining atomic disintegration of uranium’s isotope 238, which is two hundred times as plentiful as the old stand-by, U-235.

That will do for the present. If I may repeat myself; for a biochemist who couldn’t even be called “Doctor,” he did pretty well.

Kidder was apparently unconscious of the fact that he held power enough on his little island to become master of the world. His mind simply didn’t run to things like that. As long as he was left alone with his experiments, he was well content to leave the rest of the world to its own clumsy and primitive devices. He couldn’t be reached except by a radiophone of his own design, and the only counterpart was locked in a vault of his Boston bank. Only one man could operate it. The extraordinarily sensitive transmitter would respond only to Conant’s own body vibrations. Kidder had instructed Conant that he was not to be disturbed except by messages of the greatest moment. His ideas and patents, what Conant could pry out of him, were released under pseudonyms known only to Conant—Kidder didn’t care.

The result, of course, was an infiltration of the most astonishing advancements since the dawn of civilization. The nation profited—the world profited. But most of all, the bank profited. It began to get a little oversize. It began getting its fingers into other pies. It grew more fingers and had to bake more figurative pies. Before many years had passed, it was so big that, using Kidder’s many weapons, it almost matched Kidder in power.

Almost.

Now stand by while I squelch those fellows in the lower left-hand corner who’ve been saying all this while that Kidder’s slightly improbable; that no man could ever per-fect himself in so many ways in so many sciences.

Well, you’re right. Kidder was a genius—granted. But his genius was not creative. He was, to the core, a student. He applied what he knew, what he saw, and what he was taught. When first he began working in his new laboratory on his island he reasoned something like this:

“Everything I know is what I have been taught by the sayings and writings of people who have studied the sayings and writings of people who have—and so on. Once in a while someone stumbles on something new and he or someone cleverer uses the idea and disseminates it. But for each one that finds something really new, a couple of million gather and pass on information that is already current. I’d know more if I could get the jump on evolutionary trends. It takes too long to wait for the accidents that increase man’s knowledge—my knowledge. If I had ambition enough now to figure out how to travel ahead in time, I could skim the surface of the future and just dip down when I saw something interesting. But time isn’t that way. It can’t be left behind or tossed ahead. What else is left?

“Well, there’s the proposition of speeding intellectual evolution so that I can observe what it cooks up. That seems a bit inefficient. It would involve more labor to discipline human minds to that extent than it would to simply apply myself along those lines. But I can’t apply myself that way. No man can.

“I’m licked. I can’t speed myself up, and I can’t speed other men’s minds up. Isn’t there an alternative? There must be—somewhere, somehow, there’s got to be an answer.”

So it was on this, and not on eugenics, or light pumps, or botany, or atomic physics, that James Kidder applied himself. For a practical man he found the problem slightly on the metaphysical side; but he attacked it with typical thoroughness, using his own peculiar brand of logic. Day after day he wandered over the island, throwing shells impotently at sea gulls and swearing richly. Then came a time when he sat indoors and brooded. And only then did he get feverishly to work.

He worked in his own field, biochemistry, and concentrated mainly on two things—genetics and animal metabolism. He learned, and filed away in his insatiable mind, many things having nothing to do with the problem at hand, and very little of what he wanted. But he piled that little on what little he knew or guessed, and in time had quite a collection of known factors to work with. His approach was characteristically unorthodox. He did things on the order of multiplying apples by pears, and balancing equations by adding log √-1 to one side and °° to the other. He made mistakes, but only one of a kind, and later, only one of a species. He spent so many hours at his microscope that he had quit work for two days to get rid of a hallucination that his heart was pumping his own blood through the mike. He did nothing by trial and error because he disapproved of the method as sloppy.

And he got results. He was lucky to begin with and even luckier when he formularized the law of probability and reduced it to such low terms that he knew almost to the item what experiments not to try. When the cloudy, viscous semifluid on the watch glass began to move itself he knew he was on the right track. When it began to seek food on its own he began to be excited. When it divided and, in a few hours, redivided, and each part grew and divided again, he was triumphant, for he had created life.

He nursed his brain children and sweated and strained over them, and he designed baths of various vibrations for them, and inoculated and dosed and sprayed them. Each move he made taught him the next. And out of his tanks and tubes and incubators came amoebalike creatures, and then ciliated animalcules, and more and more rapidly he produced animals with eye spots, nerve cysts, and then—victory of victories—a real blastopod, possessed of many cells instead of one. More slowly he developed a gastropod, but once he had it, it was not too difficult for him to give it organs, each with a specified function, each inheritable.

Then came cultured mollusklike things, and creatures with more and more perfected gills. The day that a nondescript thing wriggled up an inclined board out of a tank, threw flaps over its gills and feebly breathed air, Kidder quit work and went to the other end of the island and got disgustingly drunk. Hangover and all, he was soon back in the lab, forgetting to eat, forgetting to sleep, tearing into his problem.

He turned into a scientific byway and ran down his other great triumph—accelerated metabolism. He extracted and refined the stimulating factors in alcohol, cocoa, heroin, and Mother Nature’s prize dope runner, cannabis indica. Like the scientist who, in analyzing the various clotting agents for blood treatments, found that oxalic acid and oxalic acid alone was, the active factor, Kidder isolated the accelerators and decelerators, the stimulants and soporifics, in every substance that ever undermined a man’s morality and/or caused a “noble experiment.” In the process he found one thing he needed badly—a colorless elixir that made sleep the unnecessary and avoidable waster of time it should be. Then and there he went on a twenty-four-hour shift.

He artificially synthesized the substances he had isolated, and in doing so sloughed away a great many useless components. He pursued the subject along the lines of radiations and vibrations. He discovered something in the longer reds which, when projected through a vessel full of air vibrating in the supersonics, and then polarized, speeded up the heartbeat of small animals twenty to one. They ate twenty times as much, grew twenty times as fast, and—died twenty times sooner than they should have.

Kidder built a huge hermetically sealed room. Above it was another room, the same length and breadth but not quite as high. This was his control chamber. The large room was divided into four sealed sections, each with its individual miniature cranes and derricks—handling machinery of all kinds. There were also trapdoors fitted with air locks leading from the upper to the lower room.

By this time the other laboratory had produced a warm-blooded, snake-skinned quadruped with an astonishingly rapid life cycle—a generation every eight days, a life span of about fifteen. Like the echidna, it was oviparous and mammalian. Its period of gestation was six hours; the eggs hatched in three; the young reached sexual maturity in another four days. Each female laid four eggs and lived just long enough to care for the young after they hatched. The male generally died two or three hours after mating. The creatures were highly adaptable. They were small—not more than three inches long, two inches to the shoulder from the ground. Their forepaws had three digits and a triple-jointed, opposed thumb. They were attuned to life in an atmosphere, with a large ammonia content. Kidder bred four of the creatures and put one group in each section of the sealed room.

Then he was ready. With his controlled atmospheres he varied temperatures, oxygen content, humidity. He killed them off like flies with excesses of, for instance, carbon dioxide, and the survivors bred their physical resistance into the next generation. Periodically he would switch the eggs from one sealed section to another to keep the strains varied. And rapidly, under these controlled conditions, the creatures began to evolve.