The Ultimate Egoist

by Theodore Sturgeon

“Babs!” Steve grinned at her. “You’re marvellous. You’re quite the most hideous woman I’ve ever seen.”

  “Continental as ever, aren’t you? Hello, Sandra. You’re not so bad yourself.”

  “Check!”

  “Oh!” said Babs. “I had an idea that’s the way it was. Come and meet people.”

  They went. Sandra stayed close to his elbow like a President’s secretary, whispering names, thumbnail sketches, and comebacks; nudging, covering up, and ordering retreats. Time and again she subtly changed the subject; time and again Steve grew conveniently deaf. They carried it off well.

  Wherever Steve went he was surrounded by an admiring mob. Dubois’s surgery was unparalleled. He was asked a thousand and one questions about it, and congratulated a thousand times. It was in just such a group that he sensed a malignant and unpleasant stare. Turning, he looked at the man beside him.

  He was quite the slimiest-looking individual Steve Roupe had ever seen. He had small eyes and a mouth oddly pointed at the corners. He was wall-eyed and flat-faced, and his dark skin shone liquidly. He had too many pointed little teeth.

  Steve squeezed Sandra’s arm, and she followed his eyes. They broke away from the group.

  “Who’s the greasy gentleman?”

  “Goyaz. Your private enemy number one.”

  “Oh? What seems to be his trouble?”

  Sandra giggled. “Last year you called him a ______.” She whispered it in his ear. “He sued you for defamation of character and you proved that it was true.”

  Steve looked over his shoulder at Goyaz. “Come to think of it, I wouldn’t be surprised if he were … Sandra, he makes me feel—oh, I don’t know.”

  Alarmed by the sudden flare in his eyes, Sandra asked, “Steve! Steve, what is it?”

  His brain began to rock. Up. Down. There was a light in his eyes … “Shark …”

  She shook his arm. “Steve! Darling! Snap out of it!”

  His face was white and she knew he didn’t hear.

  “Let’s get out of here.” She piloted him to the door, where they bumped into Babs. “My god!” she shrilled. “You’re not going? You can’t do this to me!” And before Sandra could stop her, “Hey, everybody! Steve’s running out on us!”

  “Shut up!” hissed Sandra, too late. “He’s sick!”

  They crowded over, Goyaz with them. As he approached Steve left the floor in a great arc. Never had any of them seen a leap like that. He hit Goyaz before he hit the floor, and Goyaz skittered across the room on his back. Steve lay where he had fallen, flopping, flopping, making a noise like a baby crying …

  They took him home, those shaken, frightened people, and left him alone with Sandra.

  For two weeks he lay like a log, unmoving, silent. Sandra and a trained nurse cared for him, fed him, bathed him. And gradually he regained his senses. He was Stephen Roupe again, but he was a frightened, trembling travesty of himself. But under Sandra’s care he slowly returned to normal, with but occasional attacks of weakness.

  They were married soon after that, and they sailed on the Trigger for a leisurely coastwise trip, casually exploring Florida’s thousand and one lovely inlets. Sea and sun and quiet completed the cure, and that could be the happy ending.

  But there was one thing more. One afternoon they outran a tanker, heading south in ballast.

  She was old, but she was clean. She was a well-decker, with a high poop and midship house. The gang on deck were chipping; they could hear the roar of her pneumatic hammers. As they drew abreast, a deep-toned bell rang twice, calling the 4 to 8 watch to relieve the 12 to 4. Its sound echoed and re-echoed in his brain, and the mental reflex of years of training made him look over his shoulder to look for his relief. But instead of a stretch of steel deck, and the flying bridge, and the skeleton outline of the ladders to the poop, a vision in blue slacks and a red bandanna halter sprawled on a polished teak deck met his eyes … It was with an astonishing calm that he met the fact that he did not know where or who he was …

  Whacker.

  Roupe.

  He clutched at one, and then the other identity. And then the little pieces of his personalities began to fit together, and bit by bit he knew the truth.

  “Hey!” cried Mrs. Roupe. “Off course! — Steve! What is it?”

  She came into the cockpit and he reached out an arm and gathered her close. “Look over there,” he said.

  “What; the ship?”

  “Do you see what I see under the bow?”

  “Yes. Porpoises; a whole school of them. But—”

  “A porpoise is a wonderful creature, Sandra. He isn’t a fish, but he swims. He isn’t a bird, but he flies. A porpoise won’t harm a live man, but he’ll roll a dead one for miles … Sharks can’t live where there are porpoises. He does things for the hell of it and he’s nobody’s fool.”

  The Right Line

  EVERY MAN A Casanova? Sure. Every man can be, if he has the right line. A little experience, and you get to know just what line to use for each of them. Nine times out of ten, you land. What happens the tenth time is a tossup. Like Gay, for instance.

  I saw Gay first as she walked into the Blue Anchor and spoke to the Syrian. I don’t know what she said to him, but she got the job. He always hires assured-looking girls. He didn’t see what I saw through the showcase as I knelt there cracking ice for the seafood display; her white, damp hands twisting and pulling at her handkerchief.

  Her hair swept her slim shoulders, and her almond-shaped green eyes were deeply shadowed. She had a way of tilting her pointed chin as she spoke, parting her lips as if her teeth were a joyful secret.

  The Syrian told the chef to feed her, and she walked across the dance floor and sank into a booth. I brought her dinner over, and she scarcely saw me as I put it before her. She was very hungry.

  She had what it takes, and far be it from me to pass anything up. “Congratulations,” I said.

  Startled, her great eyes flashed at me like heat lightning, radiant but undirected. “I mean the job,” I went on. “There’s plenty in it if you want it.”

  “Oh—yes. Yes. The job. Thank you.” Her voice was small, pinched like her cheeks. Deep, though. A voice that could sing.

  I liked her. She ate hungrily, but she broke her bread before she buttered it, and she cut her meat into very tiny pieces. Her fingernails were coral, not scarlet or crimson like the rest of the come-on girls at the Anchor. I glanced at the short-order counter where the chef was absent-mindedly greasing the hot plate. No orders, then. I slid into the booth opposite her. I think she saw me for the first time.

  “Like it?” I asked, indicating the food.

  Again that quick, impersonal glance. “Yes. He’s a good cook, isn’t he?”

  I thought, now we’re getting somewhere. “Say, you’re not a Southerner.”

  “How on earth did you find that out?”

  Watch my smoke, says I to me. I have just the right line.

  “Meet me,” I spouted. “Name’s Leo. Besides being the best combination bouncer and sandwich man on the Gulf Coast, I’m a master philologist. No Southerner cuts off his words or speaks as precisely as you do. Speak me a hundred words and I’ll name your origin within two hundred square miles. I’ll tell you more, too. You don’t want this job and you don’t like it, because you are not the type for it. You don’t need the job or you wouldn’t be wearing clothes like that. But you’ll go through with it because you have to, and you have to because something’s bothering you and this is the way to clear it up. See,” I wound up, just to prove how clever I was, “It’s written all over you!”

  She smiled charmingly, but there was a gleam in her eye. “I know about you, too. You’re not a Southerner either. Yet you don’t cut off your words.” The smile disappeared. “That is a pity.”

  Right on the chin. “Listen, sister—”

  She slid her empty plate across the table to me. “Take that back where you got it, and see if you can’t find something besides me to keep y
ou busy.” She wasn’t kidding.

  And before I knew what I was doing I was toting that plate back to the counter. Retreat in disorder. Me!

  They can’t do that to me.

  The evening dragged along, and the crews started straggling in. As I whipped into my work, turning out hamburgers and Westerns, I burned. First, because I was sore. But after a while I began to wonder why I was sore, and that’s when I started to be surprised.

  I watched her. A honky-tonk in a Southern oil-seaport is no bed of roses. She was green, but she caught on fast. Soon she was wheedling nickels from drunken sailors to feed the hungry maw of the phonograph, dancing with two-legged wolves, drinking numberless glasses of cracked ice with three drops of cheap wine in it at two bits a throw on somebody else, coaxing trayfuls of water-cut kidney-killer down their thirsty throats—doing all this, and doing it like an old timer. She had grit, and it did things to me. I’m no lily of the valley. Five years of being a truck driver, tanker sailor, hash-slinger, had, until she came along, cured me of being impressionable and idealistic. But something about Gay cracked that veneer of tough living, tough thinking, tough acting. When I saw a flash of disgust, quickly concealed, on her pale face, or a flash of shock at some particularly flowery bit of profanity, it hit me somewhere deep, in a place I thought was dead. Because she had shown me up, I couldn’t bring myself to say a word to her. But I watched her. It seemed as if I had spent my whole life getting ready for a chance to watch her … And I had to find the right line.

  About eleven o’clock she was fooling around the second pumpman off the Swansea Queen. He’d stopped spending and the Syrian caught Gay’s eye and motioned her over to a two-table party of jabbering squareheads. But when she tried to break away the pumpman took two round turns and a half-hitch around her waist with his sweaty arms and seemed to be there for the night. I vaulted over the oyster bar, slipped into the next booth, and leaning over the pair of them brought the edges of my hands scissorwise, and with everything I had, down on the back of his neck. He stayed where he was, and Gay and I went back to work. But not before I grabbed her arm and whispered, “How’m I doin’?”

  “Fine,” she said. “As a bouncer.”

  Point two.

  So not even rough stuff, that old standby, would do it. Well, I wasn’t at the end of my rope. By this time I’d stopped fooling around.

  When we broke up for the night I left the odds and ends to the cook, who saw I was on the make and that it would do no good to keep me, and slipped out early, crossed the street and stood in the shadows of a store. Soon Gay came out and started up Flimson Street. I gave her a block, and then followed, catching her just as she crossed Sixth. Coming up from behind I confidently took her arm. She started, pulled away violently, and looked into my face. Then, “Oh,” she said, without enthusiasm, “it’s you.”

  “Looking out for you, as usual,” I said breezily. “Youngster like you has no business parading around town this time of the morning alone.”

  “Good grief!” she cried in exasperation. “Don’t I have enough trouble getting away from the customers without having to fight the help too?”

  “Help”! How do you like that? “Listen, sub-deb,” I said roughly, “if you can’t see an honest gesture when your nose is rubbed in it, you can live happily ever after without it.”

  “Swell!” she said, and as I started off, called, “Leo! Did you mean that?”

  “Yeah.” And suddenly, I did!

  “Come on,” she said briefly.

  It was a heavy night, and the sky was luminous from the reflection of one of the occasional “flashes” at the refinery, where a heater had got out of control and lighted up a few hundred barrels of crude. By the soft glare Gay seemed strange, other-worldly. I was trying to find a name for the precise shade of her green eyes under neon, and having a hard time of it; but as long as puzzling over it made me keep my mouth shut she seemed content to have me along. Imagine getting on the right side of a cool cookie like her without a line!

  Suddenly she gasped and clutched my arm. A drunk was lying sprawled out on the sidewalk almost under our feet. His arms were stretched out and his head was back. A thin trickle of blood ran from the corner of his mouth and he had a nasty knot on his forehead. He was moaning quietly.

  I bent down, took him under the armpits and set him on his feet, but he seemed to have no control over his legs. I put him in a doorway out of the way, and came back to Gay. She was hysterical, sobbing in painful little shrieks.

  “What’s the matter?” She stood there, sobbing crazily, openly, her hands at her sides. God! No woman should cry like that. I slapped her, hard, but it seemed only to add me to the legion of terrors that plagued her. I started to bawl her out. I called her things … but none of it did any good until I snapped, “It’s nobody’s fault but your own. You would come to this God-forsaken hole. When you came here, you were looking for just what you’re getting. It’s your own damned fault!”

  “It isn’t!” she wailed; then pushed me away and started walking. I was beside her as soon as I could make it, but she said no more.

  “Why isn’t it?” I prompted gently.

  Irrelevantly, she asked, “Why did he have to be there just as we passed?”

  “Who; that rumdum? Gay! Don’t tell me that’s what’s bothering you? Holy smoke! Didn’t you ever see a drunk before?”

  “Not like that,” she said brokenly. “Oh, I’m sorry, Leo. But I hate it so here, and seeing him just topped it off.” And she began crying again.

  “Gay, how long have you been here?”

  “Four days.”

  “Tonight’s Thursday,” I said conversationally. “Monday night a woman shot her husband in front of the Evergreen Tavern. Saturday two men were killed: one right there in the Anchor, the other across the street in front of the beer distributor’s. It averages three a week. No one keeps track of what happens over there across the tracks. An oil town isn’t Park Avenue. What did you come here for, a vacation?”

  She shuddered. “How can you be so matter-of-fact about it?”

  “You’ve got to be. You get to be. If you don’t, you might as well go back where you came from. That last goes for you too; go back where you came from. This is no place for people like you.”

  “You’re like me,” she said softly, quite taking my breath away.

  “I do, Gay, I do; and maybe I was once. But I’m not.”

  She was quiet a while, figuring that out. Then, “But I can’t go back—yet.”

  We had come to the Franklin, the four-a-week joint where she was staying, but she walked right past it and sank onto the shadowed steps of the next house. I stood before her feeling—what was it?—humble, by golly! Me! She glanced up, then moved over almost imperceptibly. I took the hint and sat down.

  “Who are you?” she asked quietly.

  “I told you. Leo. Hash-slinger, able seaman, midget Lothario.” I saw, out of the corner of my eye, her eyebrow go up three thirty-seconds of an inch, and added, “Blowhard, hey?”

  “You fool.” But she didn’t mean it.

  “Changee for changee.”

  “What? Oh. Who, me? Just somebody looking for someone.”

  I got up. Maybe if I acted like a gentleman—

  “Gay,” I said, “I’d like to know about it. But I’m not asking for anything you don’t want to give. Shall I beat it?”

  “Sit down again, Leo.”

  I did, and she sat for a moment with her chin in her hands. Then,

  “I’m down here looking for a boy on one of the ships that loads here.”

  “Which one?” I asked, immediately interested.

  “It’s called S.W. Wanderford.”

  “Midderland Oil? Coastwise? Loads here for Bayonne, Norfolk, and Revere, Massachusetts?”

  “Yes! Have you ever been on her?”

  “Yeah. Two years ago. I went wiper and then ordinary seaman. Got fired in the shipyards at Brooklyn for being careless about throwing my fists aro
und.”

  “Then you knew Billy—Bill Atherton?”

  “Atherton? No; I was only on her two months. What is he?”

  A glow came into her voice. “He’s a fireman. He was a wiper for only six months and then got a fireman’s papers!” I didn’t say anything about the legal qualifications for fireman, which are six months wiping time. “He works terribly hard; twelve hours a day, sometimes more, and the heat is terrible. The meals are very bad, and he told me that he is sometimes so sick he can hardly stand; but he goes right on stoking those fires.”

  This Billy is a pip, I thought to myself. I’d seen his kind before. Ride one of the ships for a month or two, and then get salty; tell the little woman all about the hardships of life at sea. Holy pumps! If four hours on and eight off comes to twelve hours work a day, and if the Midderland tankers are hungry, and if the Wanderford, which is a motorship, has anyone but the chief wiper “stoking” her oil-burning donkey-boiler, then I’m a Chinese Indian.

  I said, “And how does the gentleman rate having you chase some two thousand miles for him?”

  “It was all a misunderstanding,” she said miserably. “You see, I had known him for years; I was in school with him. And we had planned to—to get married when he had a good job—” she gulped, and then went on, “And then when he went to sea he used to write and tell me when he’d be in next, and I’d plan all sorts of things for us to do. Well, about a year ago he docked in Bayonne and took the train home, and hired a car and we rode all around the city. And when it got dark we went into the park and sat there talking, and—well, I hadn’t seen him for so long, and—” She stopped, confused.

  “All right,” I said. “You don’t have to draw me any pictures.”

  “Please, Leo,” she said angrily. “… well, then he just stopped writing. I couldn’t understand it, but all the time I knew it wasn’t his fault. Something must have happened to him. Mother said that he had run out, but she didn’t know Billy. And Father—he was rotten about it. He had a suspicion of what had happened, and actually took out a court order against poor Billy!”

  “Poor Billy,” I said under my breath.