The Man Who Lost the Sea (46 page)

Tandy poked out her lips briefly. “It wasn’t a house, it was a factory, I told you,” she said. “And anyway it’s all finished with anyway.”

“You better understand,” said the father doggedly, “that brownie did burn.”

“You remember. You left him sitting right there,” said the mother.

“Oh,” said Tandy, “
that
wasn’t a brownie! You can’t see a brownie, silly. I’ve got the brownie. Don’t you know that? Didn’t you see the ’port card?”

“How did the …” She couldn’t say it.

“It was easy. Any time I got to do something, I think about should I or not, and if I should, how I should do it; when I think of the right way, something inside here goes
bwoop-eee!
” (she made a startlingly electronic sound, the first syllable glissading upward and the second flat and unmusical, like a “pure” tone) “and I know that’s what I should do. It’s easy, And that’s the brownie.”

“Inside you.”

“Mm-hm. That dirty old doll, that was just a way to get some fun out of all that hard work. I couldn’t’ve done it without having some sort of fun. So I made it easy for brownies to live in this whole world and they make it easy for me.”

The mother thought about a metallic twisted thing with a purple mystery atremble in it. It was like looking through a window into a—another place. Or a door.

“Tandy,” she said, moved as she sometimes was by sheer impulse, “how many brownies came through the door?”

“Four,” said Tandy blithely, and began to skip. “One for me, one for Robin, one for Noël and one for the baby. Could I have some juice?”

They walked back to the house. Robin was home. He was giving Noël back her lollipop and saying “Thank you” the way they always wished he would. Noël always was a generous child. She had already given the baby a lick.

The analogy of the profit-sharing plan appears as we imagine a self-satisfied tycoon at his desk and a bright-eyed junior exec sprinting in bearing mimeographed sheets. “Gosh, J. G., this is that first look I had at the new plan. You’re doing a lot for your people here, J. G., a whole lot.” And homiletically the great man inclines his head, accepting the tribute, and says “A happy worker is a loyal worker, my boy.” And while bobbing his head, the junior executive is thinking. “Yeah, and what’s good for the happy workers is good for management, how about that?”

Yet enlightened and cooperative self-interest is not always to be sneered at. Ask any symbiote. Whatever it was that bubbled up out of that blue orifice had been designed simply and solely to adapt a host fully to its environment, in order to induce that cardinal harmony called joy.

Not satisfaction, not contentment, not pleasure. These can be had in other ways, and by using less than all of the environment. A surge of joy within the host created that special substance on which the symbiote fed, and it was as simple as that. Oh happy worker. Oh happy management …

“Well, thank God anyway she’s back to normal,” said the father. He came in from the porch where he and the mother had stood watching the neighborhood kids and Robin and Tandy playing on the lawn. The mother did not point out to him that Tandy, in and of the
whole group now, may have been playing normally, but she wasn’t back to it; she’d come to it. The mother stood watching, silent, happy, and frightened.

Inside, the father picked up his newspaper and threw it down again when he heard one of those special in-group code sounds which come to families like secret ciphers. This one was the click of heavy glass against hardwood, and meant that the baby, who had been put down in the crib in the master bedroom, had lashed out with a strong left hook in his random way and belted his bottle out of his mouth and up against the crib bars.

The father stopped just inside the bedroom. His jaw dropped, and all he could do was slowly to raise a hand to his chin and close it and hold it closed. For the baby, the six-months-old Timothy, who only yesterday could hopelessly lose a bottle five-eighths of an inch away from his hungry face, pulled himself to a sitting position by the bars, half-turned to the left and pulled the pillow on which the bottle had been perched away from the side of the crib and up to a formal position across the end of the mattress; half-turned to the right to grasp the bottle, then lay back.

He not only took the bottle firmly in his two hands; he not only got his mouth on it; he also elevated it so it would flow freely.

And for a long moment there was no sound but his suckings, his rhythmic murmurs of sheer joy, and the faint susurrus of tiny bubbles valving back into the bottle; for the father was holding his breath. At last the father inhaled and opened his mouth to call his wife witness to this miracle. He then thought better of it, closed his mouth, wagged his head and quietly left the room.

As he entered by one door, Robin, the firstborn, bounded in at the front. The screen door went to the stretch, and uncorked a curve that promised to tear out the moldings when it hit. The father squinched up his face and eyes in preparation for the crash, but Robin, for the first time in his life—a boy has to be at least eleven before he stops slamming screen-doors, and Robin was only eight—Robin reached behind him without looking and buffered the door with his fingertips, so it closed with a whisper and a click. He galloped past the unthunderstruck father and went into the kitchen; a
moment later he was seen, all unbidden, lugging the garbage out.

The father fell weakly back into the big wicker chair.

“Daddy …”

He put down his paper. Noël came to him with a long cardboard box stretching her three-year-old arms out almost straight. She pleaded, “You wanna play chest with me?”

He looked at her for a long moment. Many times they had sat on the carpet and made soldier-parades with the chessmen. But now he—he …

He shuddered. He tried to control it but he couldn’t. “No, Noël,” he said. “I don’t want to play chest with you …” But oh, that’s Noël’s story, not Tandy’s.

By Paul Williams

“A Crime for Llewellyn”:
first published in
Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine
, October 1957. Probably written spring or summer 1957. In August 1957, in a proposal sent to Doubleday editor Walter Bradbury describing the stories that could be included in a new Sturgeon collection (A
Touch of Strange)
he hoped Doubleday would publish, TS said of this story:
In spite of its title and its berth
[the magazine it was already scheduled to be published in],
it is not a crime or mystery story in the usual sense; call it rather an off-trail, straight fiction story
.

In chapter 7 (“Art and Artistry”) of her 1981 book/monograph
Theodore Sturgeon
, Lucy Menger identifies a subcategory of Sturgeon’s writing as “his portrait stories,” and says, “In these, the protagonist’s subjective experience provides the framework and tone for the narrative.” She cites as examples “Scars,” “A Way Home,” “Bright Segment,” “Bulkhead,” “And Now the News,” “To Here and the Easel,” “The Man Who Lost the Sea,” and “It’s You!” Menger writes, “Sturgeon’s portrait stories are the most powerful and moving of his works. Only one of these tales [‘Bulkhead’] is also science fiction.… These portrait stories show what the author can do when not constrained by the strictures of speculative fiction.”

After a brief discussion of how plot functions in speculative fiction (science fiction), Menger writes: “In most other types of fiction, both genre and mainstream, human character is the basis of plot. A plot may involve conflicts between humans or between one or more humans and circumstances, or within a human, etc., but in every instance, the plot explores the ramifications of the human character. This is what Sturgeon’s portrait stories do. They are journeys of discovery into man himself.

“These journeys follow many paths,” Menger continues. “Two of Sturgeon’s portrait stories, ‘How to Kill Aunty’ and ‘A Crime for Llewellyn,’ involve crimes. In this pair, however, as in life, the crime is only a symptom. In ‘A Crime for Llewellyn,’ the subject is the problems
of a human who, like the protagonist in ‘Bright Segment,’ can only marginally cope.”

“It Opens the Sky”:
first published in
Venture Science Fiction
, November 1957. In his 8/13/57 proposal for Doubleday, TS described this one as
written only a few days ago and too new for evaluation. It’s space opera cum personal regeneration
.

Interesting that years before writing “Tandy’s Story,” Sturgeon used his three-year-old daughter’s name as the name of his attractive, idealistic teenage heroine in this space adventure about moral values.

“A Touch of Strange”:
first published in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, January 1958. In the 8/13/57 proposal, Sturgeon said of this:
Contemporary sci-fantasy. Sold only a few days ago to
Fantasy & Science Fiction.

TS, in his introduction to a 1982 book called
The Eureka Years, Boucher and McComas’s The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 1949–1954
, without identifying this story by name, talked about his nervous reaction to “A Touch of Strange” when he first read it:
I shall close with what, to me, is the definitive Boucher anecdote
.

The editors had asked me for a story, and had, in time, pressed a little by telling me there was a spot for it in the upcoming issue, but it had to be in by such-and-such. Finding just the right story to tell wasn’t easy, and the calendar and then the clock began to run awfully fast, and finally I sat down with my head as blank as the paper and started to put out words more or less at random, until some thirty sleepless, eatless, even coffee-less hours had gone by. Somehow I got it into the mail and then fell over sidewise. In due course I convalesced, and sat down to read my carbon
.

I was horrified. I felt that I had violated one of the most cardinal edicts of story. I felt that the manuscript was too long, the story too thin, and the whole thing totally unprofessional and unworthy of the magazine
.

I tottered to the typewriter and banged out (as I remember) five single-spaced pages saying all the above in much greater detail, begging the editors to fill my slot with someone else’s story, pleading for advice as to how to fix this one if it could be fixed, or giving me some sort of plot or idea or springboard for another story that I could get out in the next four weeks before deadline. All but weeping, I fired this moany missive off to California
[where Boucher lived].

By return mail I got the only airmail, special delivery
post card
I have ever seen. It read:

Dear Ted:

   
I love you
.

You write such beautiful stories.

      
Tony

Editor’s introduction to this story (above the title) in the original magazine appearance: “A reviewer can’t win for losing. If he doesn’t write, the reviewed will exclaim, ‘Who’s he to talk? He’s not a writer.’ And if he
is
a writer, they’ll say, ‘Who’s he to talk? Look at his own stuff!’ The book reviewer of
Venture Science Fiction
is at least safer than most in this respect; for Theodore Sturgeon’s own stuff is, as a rule, just about the best science-fantasy being written today. I hope that reviewing remains only an avocation with him: the shrewdest criticism ever achieved in s.f. would be small repayment for the loss of such stories as this one, with a title that could fit the
Collected Works
of Sturgeon.” The story did indeed give its title to Sturgeon’s fifth story collection,
A Touch of Strange
(Doubleday, 1958).

“The Comedian’s Children”:
first published in
Venture Science Fiction
, May 1958. The comedian protagonist (or antagonist) of this story, Heri Gonza, was of course inspired by Sturgeon watching Jerry Lewis conduct early versions of his fund-raising “telethons” for the Muscular Dystrophy Association and children with neuromuscular diseases.

I’d like to mention that Gonza in this story joins a short list of very memorable and hate-inspiring villains in Sturgeon stories, including the narrator of “When You’re Smiling” and Costello in “Mr. Costello, Hero” and the Maneater in
The Dreaming Jewels
. These characters, like Gonza, have an unusual power over their fellow men that can be described as “charm” and that seems characteristic of the modern psychological archetype known as the psychopath or sociopath.

I’d also like to quote myself. In a biographical profile called “Theodore Sturgeon” in
The Berkley Showcase, Vol. 3
(1981), I wrote: “ ‘The Comedian’s Children,’ about a manipulative TV personality, was another impossible triumph—that story tore me into little pieces when I was twelve years old, and it remains one of the most powerful pieces of fiction I’ve ever read.”

“The Graveyard Reader”:
first published in an anthology edited by Groff Conklin called
The Graveyard Reader
and published by Ballantine Books in 1958.

In 1958 one of my dearest friends, the late Groff Conklin, sent me a permission form to enable him to include a story of mine in a new anthology, as he did for almost every one of the many anthologies he produced. I forget what story he asked for, but I recall thinking that it wasn’t suitable altogether for this book, which was to be called
The Graveyard Reader.
In a rush of gratitude for the many kindnesses that remarkable man had done for me, I sat down and wrote him an original story with the same title as his book. I wrote it without getting up from the typewriter, and gave it to him. I mean, I really gave it, asking him not to send me a check, an offer which he subsequently and forcefully refused, though he cried when he read it. Just by the way, the first time I read it in public, I did too. And it wasn’t until I began compiling this special book [Maturity
, 1979; this quote is from the introduction to that collection]
that it came to me that this story expresses a highly refined aspect of maturity that isn’t even hinted at in the two preceding it
[“Maturity” and “Bulkhead”]:
Words are by no means the best means of communication, and they need all the help they can get
.