The Nail and the Oracle

by Theodore Sturgeon

  He slammed down the phone and ran back into the bedroom. He came up behind her and gently lifted the negligee onto her other shoulder, and speaking gently to her all the while, reached round her and tied the ribbon belt. “What happened?”

  “N-nothing, he just—”

  “Come on, girl—clear out of here. Rathburn’s practically outside the door, and I’ve sent for Weber. If there’s a better doctor than Rathburn, it could only be Weber, so you’ve got to leave it to them. Come!”

  “I won’t leave him.”

  “Come!” Keogh rapped, then murmured, looking over her shoulder at the bed, “He wants you to, can’t you see? He doesn’t want you to see him like this. Right?” he demanded, and the face, turned away and half-buried in the pillow shone sweatly; cramp mounded the muscles on the side of the mouth they could just see. Stiffly the head nodded; it was like a shudder. “And … shut … door … tight …” he said in a clanging half whisper.

  “Come,” said Keogh. And again, “Come.” He propelled her away; she stumbled. Her face turned yearningly until Keogh, both hands on her, kicked at the door and it swung and the sight of the bed was gone. Keogh leaned back against the door as if the latch were not enough to hold it closed.

  “What is it? Oh, what is it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You do, you do … you always know everything … why won’t you let me stay with him?”

  “He doesn’t want that.”

  Overcome, inarticulate, she cried out.

  “Maybe,” he said into her hair, “he wants to scream too.”

  She struggled—oh, strong, lithe and strong she was. She tried to press past him. He would not budge, so at last, at last she wept.

  He held her in his arms again, as he had not done since she used to sit on his lap as a little girl. He held her in his arms and looked blindly toward the unconcerned bright morning, seen soft-focused through the cloud of her hair. And he tried to make it stop, the morning, the sun, and time, but—

  —but there is one certain thing only about a human mind, and that is that it acts, moves, works ceaselessly while it lives. The action, motion, labor differ from that of a heart, say, or an epithelial cell, in that the latter have functions, and in any circumstance perform their functions. Instead of a function, mind has a duty, that of making of a hairless ape a human being … yet as if to prove how trivial a difference there is between mind and muscle, mind must move, to some degree, always change, to some degree, always while it lives, like a stinking sweat gland … holding her, Keogh thought about Keogh.

  The biography of Keogh is somewhat harder to come by than that of a Wyke. This is not in spite of having spent merely half a lifetime in this moneyed shadow; it is because of it. Keogh was a Wyke in all but blood and breeding: Wyke owned him and all he owned, which was a great deal.

  He must have been a child once, a youth; he could remember if he wished but did not care to. Life began for him with the summa cum laude, the degrees in both business and law and (so young) the year and a half with Hinnegan and Bache, and then the incredible opening at the International Bank; the impossible asked of him in the Zurich-Plenum affair, and his performance of it, and the shadows which grew between him and his associates over the years, while for him the light grew and grew as to the architecture of his work, until at last he was admitted to Wyke, and was permitted to realize that Wyke was Zurich and Plenum, and the International Bank, and Hinnegan and Bache; was indeed his law school and his college and much, so very much more. And finally sixteen—good heavens, it was eighteen years ago, when he became General Manager, and the shadows dark to totally black between him and any other world, while the light, his own huge personal illumination, exposed almost to him alone an industrial-financial complex unprecedented in his country, and virtually unmatched in the world.

  But then, the beginning, the other beginning, was when Old Sam Wyke called him in so abruptly that morning, when (though General Manager with many a board chairman, all unbeknownst, under him in rank) he was still the youngest man in that secluded office.

  “Keogh,” said old Sam, “this is my kid. Take ’er out. Give ’er anything she wants. Be back here at six.” He had then kissed the girl on the crown of her dark straw hat, gone to the door, turned and barked, “You see her show off or brag, Keogh, you fetch her a good one, then and there, hear? I don’t care what else she does, but don’t you let her wave something she’s got at someone that hasn’t got it. That’s Rule One.” He had then breezed out, leaving a silent, startled young mover of mountains locking gazes with an unmoving mouse of an eleven-year-old girl. She had luminous pale skin, blue-black silky-shining hair, and thick, level, black brows.

  The summa cum laude, the acceptance at Hinnegan and Bache—all such things, they were beginnings that he knew were beginnings. This he would not know for some time that it was a beginning, any more than he could realize that he had just heard the contemporary version of Cap’n Gamaliel’s “Thou shalt not … cause covetousness.” At the moment, he could only stand nonplussed for a moment, then excuse himself and go to the treasurer’s office, where he scribbled a receipt and relieved the petty cashbox of its by no means petty contents. He got his hat and coat and returned to the President’s office. Without a word the child rose and moved with him to the door.

  They lunched and spent the afternoon together, and were back at six. He bought her whatever she wanted at one of the most expensive shops in New York. He took her to just the places of amusement she asked him to.

  When it was all over, he returned the stack of bills to the petty cash box, less the one dollar and twenty cents he had paid out. For at the shop—the largest toy store in the world—she had carefully selected a sponge rubber ball, which they packed for her in a cubical box. This she carried carefully by its string for the rest of the afternoon.

  They lunched from a pushcart—he had one hot dog with kraut, she had two with relish.

  They rode uptown on the top of a Fifth Avenue double-decker, open-top bus.

  They went to the zoo in Central Park and bought one bag of peanuts for the girl and the pigeons, and one bag of buns for the girl and the bears.

  Then they took another double-decker back downtown, and that was it; that was the afternoon.

  He remembered clearly what she looked like then: like a straw-hatted wren, for all it was a well-brushed wren. He could not remember what they had talked about, if indeed they had talked much at all. He was prepared to forget the episode, or at least to put it neatly in the Trivia: Misc.: Closed file in his compartmented mind, when, a week later, old Sam tossed him a stack of papers and told him to read them through and come and ask questions if he thought he had to. The only question which came to mind when he had read them was, “Are you sure you want to go through with this?” and that was not the kind of question one asked old Sam. So he thought it over very carefully and came up with “Why me?” and old Sam looked him up and down and growled, “She likes you, that’s why.”

  And so it was that Keogh and the girl lived together in a cotton mill town in the South for a year. Keogh worked in the company store. The girl worked in the mill; twelve-year-old girls worked in cotton mills in the South in those days, and had three hours’ school in the afternoons. Up until ten o’clock on Saturday nights they watched the dancing from the sidelines. On Sundays they went to the Baptist church. Their name while they were there was Harris. Keogh used to worry frantically when she was out of his sight, but one day when she was crossing the catwalk over the water-circulating sump, a sort of oversized well beside the mill, the catwalk broke and pitched her into the water. Before she could so much as draw a breath a Negro stoker appeared out of nowhere—actually, out of the top of the coal chute—and leapt in and had her and handed her up to the sudden crowd. Keogh came galloping up from the company store as they were pulling the stoker out, and after seeing that girl was all right, knelt beside the man, whose leg was broken.

  “I’m Mr. Harris, h
er father. You’ll get a reward for this. What’s your name?”

  The man beckoned him close, and as he bent down, the stoker, in spite of his pain, grinned and winked. “You don’ owe me a thang, Mr. Keogh,” he murmured. In later times, Keogh would be filled with rage at such a confidence, would fire the man out of hand: this first time he was filled with wonder and relief. After that, things were easier on him, as he realized that the child was surrounded by Wyke’s special employees, working on Wyke land in a Wyke mill and paying rent in a Wyke row-house.

  In due time the year was up. Someone else took over, and the girl, now named Kevin and with a complete new background in case anyone should ask, went off for two years to a very exclusive Swiss finishing school, where she dutifully wrote letters to a Mr. and Mrs. Kevin who held large acreage in the Pennsylvania mountains, and who just as dutifully answered her.

  Keogh returned to his own work, which he found in apple-pie order, with every one of the year’s transactions beautifully abstracted for him, and an extra amount, over and above his astronomical salary, tucked away in one of his accounts—an amount that startled even Keogh. He missed her at first, which he expected. But he missed her every single day for two solid years, a disturbance he could not explain, did not examine, and discussed with no one.

  All the Wykes, old Sam once grunted to him, did something of the sort. He, Sam, had been a logger in Oregon and a year and a half as utility man, then ordinary seaman on a coastwise tanker.

  Perhaps some deep buried part of Keogh’s mind thought that when she returned from Switzerland, they would go for catfish in an old flat-bottomed boat again, or that she would sit on his lap while he suffered on the hard benches of the once-a-month picture show. The instant he saw her on her return from Switzerland, he knew that would never be. He knew he was entering some new phase; it troubled and distressed him and he put it away in the dark inside himself; he could do that; he was strong enough. And she—well, she flung her arms around him and kissed him; but when she talked with this new vocabulary, this deft school finish, she was strange and awesome to him, like an angel. Even a loving angel is strange and awesome …

  They were together again then for a long while, but there were no more hugs. He became a Mr. Stark in the Cleveland office of a brokerage house and she boarded with an elderly couple, went to the local high school and had a part-time job filing in his office. This was when she learned the ins and outs of the business, the size of it. It would be hers. It became hers while they were in Cleveland: old Sam died very suddenly. They slipped away to the funeral but were back at work on Monday. They stayed there for another eight months; she had a great deal to learn. In the fall she entered a small private college and Keogh saw nothing of her for a year.

  “Shhh,” he breathed to her, crying, and sssh! said the buzzer.

  “Go take a bath,” he said. He pushed her.

  She half-turned under his hand, faced him again blazing. “No!”

  “You can’t go in there, you know,” he said, going for the door. She glared at him, but her lower lip trembled.

  Keogh opened the door. “In the bedroom.”

  “Who—” then the doctor saw the girl, her hands knotted together, her face twisted, and had his answer. He was a tall man, gray, with quick hands, a quick step, swift words. He went straight through foyer, hall and rooms and into the bedroom. He closed the door behind him. There had been no discussion, no request and refusal; Dr. Rathburn had simply, quickly, quietly shut them out.

  “Go take a bath.”

  “No.”

  “Come on.” He took her wrist and led her to the bathroom. He reached into the shower stall and turned on the side jets. There were four at each corner; the second from the top was scented. Apple blossom. “Go on.”

  He moved toward the door. She stood where he had let go of her wrist, pulling at her hands. “Go on,” he said again. “Just a quick one. Do you good.” He waited. “Or do you want me to douse you myself? I bet I still can.”

  She flashed him a look; indignation passed instantly as she understood what he was trying to do. The rare spark of mischief appeared in her eyes and, in perfect imitation of a mill-row redneck, she said, “Y’all try it an Ah’ll tall th’ shurff Ah ain’t rightly yo’ chile.” But the effort cost her too much, and she cried again. He stepped out and softly closed the door.

  He was waiting by the bedroom when Rathburn slid out and quickly shut the door on the grunt, the gasp.

  “What is it?” asked Keogh.

  “Wait a minute.” Rathburn strode to the phone. Keogh said, “I sent for Weber.”

  Rathburn came almost ludicrously to a halt. “Wow,” he said. “Not bad diagnosing, for a layman. Is there anything you can’t do?”

  “I can’t understand what you’re talking about,” said Keogh testily.

  “Oh—I thought you knew. Yes, I’m afraid it’s in Weber’s field. What made you guess?”

  Keogh shuddered. “I saw a mill hand take a low blow once. I know he wasn’t hit. What exactly is it?”

  Rathburn darted a look around. “Where is she?” Keogh indicated the bathroom. “I told her to take a shower.”

  “Good,” said the doctor. He lowered his voice. “Naturally I can’t tell without further examination and lab—”

  “What is it?” Keogh demanded, not loud, but with such violence that Rathburn stepped back a pace.

  “It could be choriocarcinoma.”

  Tiredly, Keogh wagged his head. “Me diagnose that? I can’t even spell it. What is it?” He caught himself up, as if he had retrieved the word from thin air and run it past him again. “I know what the last part of it means.”

  “One of the—” Rathburn swallowed, and tried again. “One of the more vicious forms of cancer. And it …” He lowered his voice again. “It doesn’t always hit this hard.”

  “Just how serious is it?”

  Rathburn raised his hands and let them fall.

  “Bad, eh? Doc—how bad?”

  “Maybe some day we can …” Rathburn’s lowered voice at last disappeared. They hung there, each on the other’s pained gaze. “How much time?”

  “Maybe six weeks.”

  “Six weeks!”

  “Shh,” said Rathburn nervously.

  “Weber—”

  “Weber knows more about internal physiology than anybody. But I don’t know if that will help. It’s a little like … your, uh, house is struck by lightning, flattened, burned to the ground. You can examine it and the weather reports and, uh, know exactly what happened. Maybe some day we can …” he said again, but he said it so hopelessly that Keogh, through the rolling mists of his own terror, pitied him and half-instinctively put out a hand. He touched the doctor’s sleeve and stood awkwardly.

  “What are you going to do?”

  Rathburn looked at the closed bedroom door. “What I did.” He made a gesture with a thumb and two fingers. “Morphine.”

  “And that’s all?”

  “Look, I’m a G.P. Ask Weber, will you?”

  Keogh realized that he had pushed the man as far as he could in his search for a crumb of hope; if there was none, there was no point in trying to squeeze it out. He asked, “Is there anyone working on it? Anything new? Can you find out?”

  “Oh, I will, l will. But Weber can tell you off the top of his head more than I could find out in six mon … in a long time.”

  A door opened. She came out, hollow-eyed, but pink and glowing in a long white terry-cloth robe. “Dr. Rathburn—”

  “He’s asleep.”

  “Thank God. Does it—”

  “There’s no pain.”

  “What is it? What happened to him?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t like to say for sure … we’re waiting for Dr.

  Weber. He’ll know.”

  “But—but is he—”

  “He’ll sleep the clock around.”

  “Can I …” The timidity, the caution, Keogh realized was so unlike her. “Can I see him?”r />
  “He’s fast asleep!”

  “I don’t care. I’ll be quiet. I won’t—touch him or anything.”

  “Go ahead,” said Rathburn. She opened the bedroom door and eagerly, silently slipped inside.

  “You’d think she was trying to make sure he was there.”

  Keogh, who knew her so very well, said, “She is.”

  But a biography of Guy Gibbon is really hard to come by. For he was no exceptional executive, who for all his guarded anonymity wielded so much power that he must be traceable by those who knew where to look and what to look for, and cared enough to process detail like a mass spectroscope. Neither was Guy Gibbon born heir to countless millions, the direct successor to a procession of giants.

  He came from wherever it is most of us come from, the middle or the upper-middle, or the upper-lower middle or the lower-upper middle, or some other indefinable speck in the mid-range of the interflowing striations of society (the more they are studied, the less they mean). He belonged to the Wyke entity for only eight and a half weeks, after all. Oh, the bare details might not be too hard to come by (birth date, school record), and certain main facts (father’s occupation, mother’s maiden name), as well, perhaps as a highlight or two (divorce, perhaps, or a death in the family); but a biography, a real biography, which does more than describe, which explains the man—and few do—now, this is an undertaking.

  Science, it is fair to assume, can do what all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not do, and totally restore a smashed egg. Given equipment enough, and time enough … but isn’t this a way of saying, “given money enough?” For money can be not only means, but motive. So if enough money went into the project, perhaps the last unknown, the last vestige of anonymity could be removed from a man’s life story, even a young man from (as the snobs say) nowhere, no matter how briefly—though intimately—known.