The Ultimate Egoist

by Theodore Sturgeon

“Me wreck it? Me didn’t wreck it … I wrecked it,” I said groggily. “I was standing in front of the mirror when who should kick it down and poke me but myself”—I shook my head and let the pain of it shake my carcass—“Ow! Whew. I was just—”

  “Stop it!” Berbelot snapped.

  Almost as suddenly I recovered. “Receiver … what do you mean receiver?”

  Berbelot was hopping mad. “The new job,” he shouted, pointing at the debris. “My first three-dimensional television receiver!”

  “Three … what are you talking about, man?”

  He calmed down the way he invariably did when he was asked a question about television. “It’s a box of tiny projectors,” he said. “They’re set … studded … inside that closet affair behind the screen you just broke. The combined beams from them give a three-dimensional, or stereoscopic, effect. And now you’ve gone and wrecked my screen,” he wailed. “Why were you ever born? Why must I suffer so because of you? Why—”

  “Wait a minute, Pop—hold on there. I didn’t bust your precious screen.”

  “You just said you did.”

  “Mmm-mm. So help me. It was the Breather. I had a little argument with him and he kicked down the screen and came out and beat the stern off me.”

  “What?” Berbelot was really shocked this time. “You’re a gibbering maniac! That was your own image! You were broadcast and your image reproduced there!”

  “You’re a muddy-headed old stink-merchant!” I bellowed. “I suppose I kicked down your mirror, put three teeth on hinges, and then knocked myself colder’n a cake of carbon ice just for a chance to lie to you!”

  “This is what comes of getting an overgrown cretin to help out in an experiment,” moaned Berbelot. “Don’t try my patience any more, Hamilton!”

  “Your patience? What the hell was that new-fangled set doing in this room anyway?”

  He grinned weakly. “Oh—that. Well, I just wanted to have some fun with you. After you left I tuned in on the Breather and told him to stand by; I’d put him in touch with … with the guy that was smelling up his world.”

  “You old crumb! Fun! You wanted me to argue with that misplaced gamma-particle all night, hey? Why I ought to … I think I will at that!” And I grabbed him by the neck.

  “Allow me,” said a voice behind us, and we were seized, each by a shoulder. Then our heads were cracked violently together and we found ourselves groveling at the feet of my spittin’ image. Berbelot looked up at my erstwhile reflection in silent awe.

  “Where were you?” I growled.

  “In the corner,” he said, throwing a thumb over his shoulder. “You’re a pretty-looking pair, I must say.”

  “Berbelot,” I said, “meet your Ether Breather. Now I’m going to stand on your face until you eat the shoes off my feet, because you called me a liar.”

  Berbelot said, “Well, I’m damned!”

  The Breather remarked quietly, “You two better explain yourselves in a hysterical hurry. Otherwise I shall most certainly take you apart and put you together again, alternating the pieces.”

  “Oh, we were just trying to get in contact with you again.”

  “What for?”

  “We were interested in you. We talked to you a year or so ago and then you disappeared. We wanted to talk to you again.” In spite of my anger at him I found something else to admire Berbelot for. He had remembered the Breather’s peculiar childishness and was using it just when somebody had to do something, quickly.

  “But you told me to stop interfering!” Presto—the creature was already plaintive, on the amicable defensive. Its mutability was amazing.

  “He told you,” Berbelot snorted, indicating me, where I rolled and moaned over my twice-bruised sconce. “I didn’t.”

  “Don’t you speak for each other, then? We do.”

  “You—singular and plural—are a homogeneous being. All humanity is not blessed with my particularly affable nature.”

  “Why you old narcissist!” I snorted, and lunged at him. For every inch of my lunge the Breather calmly kicked me back a foot. I did some more moaning.

  “You mean you are my friend and he is not?” said the Breather, staring at me coldly as one does at a roach which is going to be stepped on if and when it moves out from the wall.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that,” said Berbelot kindly.

  I had an inspiration which, for all I know, saved my life. “You said you learned from me how to come out of the television set!” I blurted.

  “True. I should be grateful for that, I suppose. I shall not tear you in little pieces.” He turned to Berbelot. “I heard your call, of course, but being told once was enough for me. I did not understand. When I say something I generally mean it. Humans are not understandable, but they are very funny.”

  The scientist in Berbelot popped up. “What was that you said about Hamilton showing you how to come out of the set?”

  “Oh, I was watching him from the screen over there. I am sorry I broke it. He was walking around the room making pictures on the walls with shadows. That’s what I am doing now.”

  “Shadow pictures?”

  “Certainly. I am a creature living in five dimensions and aware of four, just as you live in four dimensions and are aware of three. He made three-dimensional shadows that were projected on a two-dimensional surface. I am making four-dimensional pictures that are being projected in three dimensions.”

  Berbelot frowned. “On what surface?”

  “On that of your fourth dimension, of course.”

  “Our fourth. Hm-m-m … with what light source?”

  “A five-dimensional one just as your Sun, for instance, has four.”

  “How many dimensions are there altogether?”

  “How high is up?” twinkled the Breather.

  “Could I project myself into your world?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe … maybe not. Are you going to stop making that awful smell?” he said suddenly.

  “Of course! We only made it to get you angry enough to come to us for a talk. We didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “Oh!” squealed the Ether Breather delightedly. “A joke! Fun!”

  “Told you he’d take it well,” murmured Berbelot.

  “Yeah … suppose he hadn’t? You’re a rat, Berbelot. You made darn sure that if someone had to take a rap from this aeration here, it wouldn’t be you. Nice guy.” There was a strained silence for a while, and then I grinned. “Aw, hell, you had it doped out, Berbelot. Shake. I’d have done the same if I had the brains.”

  “He isn’t bad at all, is he?” asked the Breather in surprise, staring at me.

  “Well, is everything all right now, Breather? Do you feel that you’re welcome to come any time you wish?”

  “Yes … yes, I think so. But I won’t come this way again. I can only take form in that lovely new three-dimensional machine of yours, and I have to break a screen to get out. I am sorry. I’ll talk to you any time, though. And may I do something for you sometime?”

  “Why should you?” I piped up glumly.

  “Oh, think of the fun we’ll have!”

  “Would you really like to do something for us?”

  “Oh, yes. Please.”

  “Can you direct that interference of yours into any radio frequency at any time?”

  “Sure.”

  “Now look. We are going to start a company to advertise certain products. There are other companies in the same business. Will you leave our programs strictly alone and have all the fun you want with our competitors?”

  “I’d love that!”

  “That will be splendid!”

  “Berbelot, we’re rich!”

  “You’re rich,” he corrected gleefully, “I’m richer!”

  BACK WORDS

  Story Notes by Paul Williams

  “Heavy Insurance”: released for newspaper syndication July 16, 1938 by the McClure Newspaper Syndicate; published in the Milwaukee Journal July 16, 1938; beli
eved to be Theodore Sturgeon’s first sale as a professional writer and his first published story.

  Comments by Theodore Sturgeon:

  I was in the merchant marine. I began to write while I was doing that, while I was at sea. And finally, one magical day, I got a letter when I got back north that said I’d sold a story. I sold one to a newspaper syndicate, and I was so excited I quit my job, I went ashore and I was going to be a writer.

  Well, I sold the story for five dollars. On publication. It had taken me three months to research it. And they were willing to buy one story, sometimes two, a week. No more. So for almost six months, I lived on five dollars and sometimes ten a week. I lived on West 63rd Street, where Lincoln Center now is, and it cost me seven and a half dollars a week for the room; and I ate on whatever was left. [interview with Paul Williams, December 1975]

  I worked out a way to rob the American Express Company out of several hundred thousand dollars. And I did my homework, I wrote to the company and I found out precisely how they shipped this and that and the other thing, and I got it all worked in, and I wrote it as a story because I didn’t have quite the guts to do it myself. [interview with David Hartwell, September 1972]

  … I was certain that it was a “perfect crime” which would net me a fortune. When the time came to pull the caper, I lacked the immoral courage to try it, so wrote it as a story instead. The research fell down in the matter of “carbon ice”—dry ice—which was a curiosity at the time, and I couldn’t find data on the actual weight; I don’t think I had ever seen any. All I knew for sure was that it deliquesces—changes from a solid to a gas without going through a liquid stage. [from TS’s notes accompanying republication of the story in the Program Guide, Colorado Mountain College, 1984 (in connection with a TS speaking appearance)]

  Editor’s notes:

  It is not known what newspapers other than the Milwaukee Journal published the McClure short-short story series, which appeared in the Journal under the heading “Daily Short Story.” Sturgeon was only one of many free-lance writers contributing to the series.

  “Heavy Insurance,” on the evidence of Sturgeon’s letters to his mother in the spring of 1938, was titled by him “—So They Put Me in Here,” and was purchased by McClure in the last week of May, 1938. His often-repeated tale about quitting the merchant marine when he stopped in New York and found that the story had sold was not strictly true, although there’s no lack of romance in what did happen. Sturgeon graduated from high school in 1936 (though in correspondence and interviews he sometimes claimed with pride not to have graduated), and later that year enrolled in the Pennsylvania State Nautical Schoolship Annapolis (“the Annie”). He quit the nautical school in the spring of 1937, got Ordinary Seaman’s papers, and shipped out on a merchant marine ship. Over the course of the next year he served on various ships, all coastwise freighters or oil tankers making calls on the Atlantic coast between Providence, Rhode Island and Port Arthur, Texas (with some trips further south, including stops in Guatemala and Panama).

  In April of 1938 Sturgeon got in an argument with the mate of the ship he’d been on, the California, and told him off and quit. When he went to get his bags, he was confronted by a fellow crewman who’d had TS’s words (“I don’t like this ship or the crew”) repeated to him. A fight ensued, with a number of sailors involved, and Sturgeon, who’d employed a kind of judo trick that caused another seaman to break his jaw against the bulkhead, was arrested and offered a choice of 30 days in the Tombs (they were docked in New York, apparently) or a $30 fine. He paid the fine, and spent some time “beached” in New York, writing and submitting stories (as he had been doing already while at sea) and considering whether and when to ship out again.

  About a month later, May 21, 1938, still in New York, he wrote his mother (she’d moved to Scotland): The short on which I put my fondest hopes, a detective story and, if I may say so, a very unusual one, is always being kept for approval and then rejected. Liberty had it for 10 weeks, Collier’s for two months; now it is out again and has been out for a month. Everything else I send is rejected within two weeks. But “—So They Put Me in Here” is driving me mad. (We can deduce from this that he probably wrote the story at the end of 1937, at the age of 19.)

  On May 31, he wrote her (rather casually, saving this news for the fourth page of his letter): But my life is not unremunerative and pointless. The other day I sold my story “—So They Put Me in Here,” and was so encouraged that I wrote a longer one called “Beauty Transplanted.” He goes on to talk about his agent-to-be’s enthusiasm for the new story and her insistence that he should be writing for the slick magazines, not wasting himself on the pulps.

  The week “Heavy Insurance” was published Sturgeon shipped out again, and he remained at sea for the rest of 1938. He did live in New York between January and July of 1939, selling short-short stories to McClure (and doing some contract work for them rewriting other people’s stories) and struggling to sell stories to other and better-paying markets. Then he shipped out again in July, returning to New York in October. The apartment on West 63rd is one he lived in for a few months at the beginning of 1940.

  “The Heart”: first published in Other Worlds, May 1955. In his introduction to this story when it was included in the collection Sturgeon in Orbit (1964), Sturgeon describes it as This odd little thing—actually one of the first stories I ever wrote in my life. If this recollection is accurate, we can suppose that it was written in 1937-1938, or possibly earlier.

  “Cellmate”: first published in Weird Tales, January 1947. In a letter to his mother dated April 25, 1946, TS mentions: Sold a story to Weird Tales last week, by the way—an old one I wrote when I was 19. This could refer to either “Cellmate” or “Fluffy.” In a conversation with Sam Moskowitz (circa 1961), Sturgeon apparently gave the impression that all of the stories he sold to Weird Tales in the late 1940s were early (pre-1942) stories that he’d been unable to sell when he wrote them. Moskowitz, in his book of biographical sketches Seekers of Tomorrow (1965), lists “Cellmate,” “The Deadly Ratio” (“It Wasn’t Syzygy”), “The Professor’s Teddy Bear,” “Abreaction,” “The Perfect Host,” and “The Martian and the Moron” as stories “resurrected from the trunk.” A study of Sturgeon’s correspondence from 1946–1948 indicates quite clearly that “Deadly Ratio,” “Professor’s Teddy Bear,” “The Perfect Host,” and “The Martian and the Moron” were not from the trunk but were written after the war. “Abreaction” is also not a prewar story; the indisputable evidence is the bulldozer, which TS learned to drive in 1942.

  That leaves “Cellmate,” and “Fluffy” (which is not on Moskowitz’s list, although it appeared in Weird Tales in the issue after “Cellmate”). Sturgeon told me in 1975 that “Fluffy” was a prewar story. I don’t consider that definite proof, memory being what it is, but for the purposes of this collection, which attempts to present stories in chronological order of composition, these two stories are being grouped with Sturgeon’s earliest work.

  “Fluffy”: first published in Weird Tales, March 1947. Sturgeon himself had a fair amount of experience as a house guest after his parents moved to Scotland while he was at sea in 1937. On shore he stayed with various relatives, family friends, and new friends that he’d met on his travels.

  The protagonist, Ransome, is a stock Sturgeon character: the glib, utterly self-absorbed male (he usually comes to a bad end). TS to his mother, October 31, 1938: My best stories are those in which I play up and magnify my own weaknesses. Contrary to the psychology of, say, Burroughs, who was a frail tubercular and thus created the immortal Tarzan, my best pieces are those which deal with those parts of my own make-up which are highly undesirable and unlikeable and inadmirable, as you will see for yourself soon.

  “Alter Ego”: unpublished (the unpublished manuscripts and fragments from this period are almost all from a trunk that was left in Staten Island, as described in the notes on “Helix the Cat”). This may have been written in fall 1938, after the i
nvasion of Czechoslovakia, or any time in the following year.

  “Mailed through a Porthole”: unpublished. Written November 1938. While many of the early stories here are efforts at writing to formula that Sturgeon was embarrassed by even as he worked on them, this is one that he was proud of. He told his mother (May 13, 1939): I went up to see the editor of Unknown which is a new Street and Smith book. He liked me. He told me what he wanted and I liked the idea of it because I thought he was right when he said he had no formula. I gave him a story without a plot called “Mailed through a Porthole” which was very beautiful. He rejected it. I wrote another story which he liked but said it had “Purely intellectual appeal” which was true. It was called “Sudden Death?” and had to do with a hypothetical acceleration of the perceptions when anyone is killed suddenly, so that the thing is slowed interminably to him. It was about a man getting run over by a subway train and dying slowly in horrible agony and someone on the platform says “He never knew what hit him.” It was cold and scientific and very horrible and it was rejected.

  (“Sudden Death?” is not included here because no manuscript for it has been found. Every Sturgeon story that the editor knows of and has been able to obtain a copy of is or will be included in these volumes.)

  In the same letter Sturgeon describes going to see the editor of Adventure (which he calls the oldest pulp magazine there is), who rejected “Porthole,” then asked to see it again, and eventually rejected it again.

  The story derives from Sturgeon’s experience on the tanker W.W. Mills, waiting out one hurricane and having a near miss with another. To his mother, August 26, 1938: A hurricane considers no man’s plans; that’s what we’re hove to for. I’m going to write this trip up some time—it’s been quite an experience. Not that anything has happened; it’s just the tension aboard, wondering whether we’ll miss it or not. To his mother, October 15, 1938, referring to the great September hurricane: We met it when it was a baby down off the Bahamas; and a large-sized baby it was too. The engines broke down when we were directly in the path of it, off Miami; fortunately for us it took a freakish turn north and came near depopulating Connecticut … A hurricane may be exciting and mildly fictional; but it may strike anywhere, and if it comes around the one who scoffs, he scoffs no longer—if he’s alive. No fun.