The Nail and the Oracle

by Theodore Sturgeon

  All the same I keep looking, I really don’t know why. I look very hard and I don’t like it. I mean it’s like I don’t want to find out even once that anyone would really and truly take care of someone else without he got something out of it. It’s like I’m scared to find it out, like my whole world would get shook upside down if I ever did, but I keep looking.

  The first thing happened when we left the Ramble Inn was Joey pulled away from us and run straight out into the street. There was cars coming and a truck and a bus and Joey just did not seem to give a damn. There was a lot of honking and screeching and cussing right away and Dwight, he was still rocking from that powerhouse punch, but all the same he dove out into that traffic and got to Joey and throwed both arms around him and rassled him to the dotted line between lanes and held him there until the traffic opened up and he could shove him back to the sidewalk. He was cussing him out too, and he meant it. Joey just laughed. Dwight told him to get the hell home before somebody killed him, and I think he really meant himself, him, Dwight, was the somebody. Joey just said Nope. He still did not pay any attention to me.

  Dwight turned the little guy loose and he started to amble down the street, and Dwight walked slow behind him. He kept his eyes on him almost every second. He said to me well, thanks for what you done in there, it was like good-bye, beat it. But I walked along with him. So after a while Dwight said he could handle things all right. He said, “He gets like this every once in a while, wants to go out and drink. It is not too hard as long as you keep your eye on him and head him off from the big ones.” I don’t think he meant big guys, I think he meant big trouble.

  I said if he didn’t mind me asking, when a guy is so eager to get his self killed, why not just let him do it? because he sure is asking for it. And Dwight said “No he’s not.” He said that positive, I mean like he knew.

  So there was Joey walking along in the middle of the night like he wasn’t going no place in particular and didn’t much care, and the two of us following along a little way behind watching him and talking a little once in a while. When I kept on sticking around, Dwight quit saying thanks-and-goodnight things. I found out they were not related, they did not come from the same town, they did not live together or work in the same company or even in the same line. Dwight was a shop foreman, I think in some kind of printing place, he was a pretty educated guy, I mean you got the idea he could go a lot farther if something wasn’t holding him back. Joey was a sheet metal man in an auto body place. Also they were not queer. The more I found out about them the more worried I got that here was somebody who was ready to lay it on the line for somebody else without any payoff, none at all. I mean, I don’t think they even liked each other.

  So I finally asked him right out, why? and all he said was, “There’s some things you just got to do.” Then Joey began to run.

  You wouldn’t believe a spindly little guy like that could take off that way, one second ambling along looking into store windows, the next scooting like a squirted apple seed. I heard that same tired O God from Dwight, and then voom he’s off after the little guy. I thought well hell, and went after them.

  Joey went straight for three blocks widening the gap all the way. I right away dug that Dwight was not in good shape at all because when I passed him in the first half-block he was already wheezing for breath. So I did not bother with him but made it my business to round up that Joey and nail him down good. It was not easy.

  He turned right into an alley and if I had not really been pushing myself I would not of seen him turn right again into a dead-end loading area behind a big warehouse. It was dark in there but not altogether. All the same I could not see him any place.

  I backed away looking every place until I was in the alley again so Dwight would see me when he come by, and he did. He was so pooped and tuckered and winded out he could not talk at all, and when I told him which way Joey had went he just nodded his head and hung on to a brick wall gasping and coughing a little once in a while until he was put together again. Then he said, “We got to stop him now. He got something wrong with his heart muscle, he shouldn’t run like that. He knows that but he does it every once in a while anyway the dirty rotten little son of a bitch.” So now I knew it wasn’t just not liking each other, Dwight, he hated that little guy.

  He went back into the loading area and looked all around.

  Somebody told me once that if you ever want to hide, don’t go down or behind, go up. Guys looking for something will always look down or under or behind things, never up unless something attracts them. I remembered that and so started looking up, and sure enough.

  I hit on Dwight’s arm and pointed. There was a fire escape that went clear up to the roof and about sixty feet up there was a black blob kind of weaving back and forth. If you looked real careful you could see it was Joey, and after a while you could see he was on one of the landings of the steel stairway, and when your eyes got really used to it you could see he was at the end of the landing on the wrong side of the railing, hanging on to it and standing on one leg and pivoting back and forth, hanging out over nothing at all.

  “O God. I got to get him. He gets dizzy spells.” Dwight started to run for the bottom of the ladder. I got to him in two jumps. It was easy, he did not have his breath back even yet. I said how the hell did he think he was going to get to the ladder?

  It was one of those swing-down ladders that if you are on the fire escape coming down you get on it and it comes down, otherwise it stays up on the second floor level so burglars can’t get to use it. Somebody must of tied it down and Joey found it like that, he sure did not leave it like that. You would have to be a bird or a polevaulter to get to it now. And up there Joey was swinging like a monkey, I heard him laugh.

  Dwight got right under the ladder and jumped. It was pathetic. He jumped and jumped, I think he was more than half out of his mind. “We got to get to him,” I think he was saying over and over in between those little tired useless jumps—you could not tell he was so out of breath.

  There was a smooth six-inch pipe at the corner of the building running from the ground up to the third floor, I don’t know why. It passed about four feet away from that second-floor landing of the fire escape where the swing-down ladder was. From the ground it looked like a long way up and a hell of a way from the landing, and a smooth six-inch pipe is not the easiest thing to get hold of but what the hell. I started up it hand over hand. There wasn’t nothing feet could do so I just let them hang there and come along for the ride. Down below me Dwight was trying to follow me, he could not even get off the ground.

  When I got above the landing I stopped for a couple seconds to get my breath because a couple of seconds was all my hands had left in them. I flipped my feet up and out to get a swing, swung back and then forward and let go, trying to shove at the same time. It was a nice idea but it did not altogether work. I did not get both hands on the guard-rail as I figured; I got one hand on the flat floor-bars. It hurt a whole lot but I could hang on until I stopped swinging and was able to climb to the landing. I had to lay down for quite a time before I was ready to move on.

  I guess I could of pushed the ladder down then and let Dwight take over but tell you the truth I never thought of it. I started up after that crazy Joey.

  I heard him laughing again.

  I went up kind of on all fours. I think he thought it was Dwight, not me. Anyway when I got to the sixth landing he started to scream at me, “You ain’t Dwight, you get the hell out of here, you mind your own goddamn business, it’s old Dwight’ll take care of me.” I did not say nothing but kept on coming. He was still over the rail leaning back against his grip. All he had to do was open his fingers and that was it. I came on slow.

  Maybe it was all fun for him up to then, I don’t know.

  Maybe it was getting mad at me like that, that made some difference inside his crazy head. But as I come close I could see in the little bit of stray light his eyes go funny. I mean he stopped screaming and he st
opping swinging and his eyes went white, I guess they rolled right on up out of sight. And his knees started to buckle.

  I jumped. I reached for him with my right hand because I am right-handed and because I did not have no time to think. It was the same hand I caught myself with when I swung off the pipe and it was bloody and skinned. It hurt a whole lot but that was all right—it just wouldn’t work very good. It landed into his armpit as he fell, which is a hell of a way to catch anybody, and got hold of a bunch of shirt and skin. I fell down and slid forward and he would of pulled me right off after him but I arched my back and caught the underside of the rail with my heels. As long as I could keep my knees bent my heels made a sort of half-ass hook that at least stopped the sliding. I got my other hand on him. He was no help, he was dead weight, he was out cold. I remember thinking to myself for just one second, oh the hell with it, I’ve done enough. But I did not listen to that and I hung on, and after a minute I found the strength to pull him up high enough to bend his chest onto the deck bars and press back and fall full length on them and pull him all the way in.

  Way down below in the dark Dwight was yelling and yelling something. He was yelling, “Don’t hit him. For God’s sake don’t hit him.”

  I think if he had not passed out like that I would of hit him. Like I said I know a lot of tricks but there are some I know I never got to try yet and I would of liked to try some of them out. But there wasn’t any need, and after I rested I hung him on my shoulder and walked down the fire escape with him. The swinging ladder went down without no trouble and I got to the ground and it swung up again with a clang and I put Joey down on the ground.

  Dwight jumped on him and felt him all over and put his ear on Joey’s mouth and lit a match and rolled back an eyelid and then he hunkered down and pulled a deep sigh. “He’s going to be all right.”

  I said that was a damn shame.

  Dwight said he would lay like this for a half hour or so and then come to, and he would take him home. He said then he probably would not pull anything like this again for two, three weeks.

  I think I got a little bit mad then and I called him a number of names all meaning Stupid. I said to waste his time looking out for a crazy ugly little fart like that Joey, he should have his head candled.

  He hunkered there by Joey and looked up at me and let me run down and then he said well, he guessed I had the right to hear the whole story.

  He said there’s always one kid in any crowd that is the goat for everybody—the little fat boy. Or sometimes the little skinny boy or the one boy with curly hair. He said the more everybody jumps on that one kid the more you get to hate him, and sometimes it does you good to get him alone and beat the hell out of him just because he is there to beat the hell out of. So Joey was that kid, see, and one day Dwight got him alone and beat the hell out of him, and Joey got up off the ground and hit him. Maybe it was just he was not ready, but he went over like tall timber and banged his head into some broken bottles and was knocked out and cut some, and when he came to in a minute or so Joey was trying to wipe away the blood off his head. Somehow that made him like crazy, and he jumped up and beat Joey and knocked him down and tromped him till he was tired. Then he went home. When they found Joey they thought he was dead and for months in the hospital they thought he was not going to make it. But he made it kind of.

  He had something wrong with his spleen and his central nervous system that made him walk a little funny and in his head where the skull fracture had squeezed his brains. Also a broken rib done something to his heart. And according to the state law, a death resulting from an assault was murder even if it happened a long time after. With all that, any punch or fall was liable to take Joey right off. Dwight knew that and Joey knew that. If ever they found Joey dead the chances were that whatever killed him would not of killed him without he was so messed up, and any coroner would be able to tell. So all Dwight could do was try to see to it that Joey did not get into trouble.

  “Every once in a while he gets to brooding about he will never get married or go to college or be like other people, and he goes out and drinks and tries to get himself clobbered so maybe I will wind up in the chair, and also he likes to see me doing all I have to do to take care of him.” He looked down at Joey for a long time and then up at me. “He moved from home to Philadelphia and then to Macon and Cleveland, Ohio and now here, and I had to go along too.” He looked down at Joey again and said, “I never went to college either and I never got to marry anybody or have kids, I guess I never will. It’s twenty-two years now.”

  I said, “Well, you have just made me feel one hell of a lot better.” I said, “I been looking all my life for somebody who does things for other people without he gets anything for it and if I ever found one I believe it would blow my mind.” I said, “All the dogs eating all the dogs, I can understand that and I can see how the whole thing works, but if ever you show me one guy who will do big things for other people just because they need doing, I will freak out.” And I said, “What the hell are you laughing at?”

  He said, “You’re one.”

  I said, “No I ain’t.” I ran away saying, No I ain’t. I don’t want to be like that, I don’t want anyone to be like that, if anyone was like that, I wouldn’t understand how things work.

  Story Notes

  By Paul Williams

  The stories collected in this volume were written between 1957 and 1970. Sturgeon’s writing output during this period began to decrease, and he turned to writing for TV and movies for income. During the period from 1965 to 1966, while his relationship with his third wife, Marion, was unraveling, he traveled back and forth between Woodstock, NY and Los Angeles. On the West Coast, he worked with the creators and writers involved in the first Star Trek TV series. The first episode of Star Trek, “The Man-Trap,” which aired on September 8, 1966, mentions him obliquely. In his honor, the first crewman killed by the “salt monster” of the story was satirically named “Sturgeon.” Sturgeon’s first Star Trek episode, “Shore Leave,” aired in December 1966, and the second one, “Amok Time,” aired in September 1967. This last episode is well-known in Star Trek lore for its introduction of the Vulcan hand salute, Spock’s sex life, and elements of Vulcan culture.

  In the spring of 1966, Sturgeon began to make Los Angeles his permanent home, first living for a period with the writer Harlan Ellison, and then in Sherman Oaks. In the spring of 1969, he met and began living with his fourth long-term companion, Wina. They moved to a house in Echo Park and in January 1970, they had a son, Andros.

  “Ride in, Ride Out” by Theodore Sturgeon and Don Ward; first published in Sturgeon’s West, (Doubleday, 1973). Probably written in 1957 (judging from a mention in Sturgeon’s correspondence of stories he was trying unsuccessfully to sell). In 1956, Sturgeon described the process of his collaboration with Ward: Don dreams ’em up and I write ’em my way and submit them without his seeing them. Ward, who was editor of the short story magazine Zane Grey’s Western (ZGW), describes ZGW as “one of the last Western magazines to fall before the rising challenge of the TV horse opera.” “The market for Western short stories vanished,” he reports in his introduction to Sturgeon’s West, reminding us that the existence of genre fiction, including most of Theodore Sturgeon’s opus, depends on the existence of a paying market for such particular types of story.

  The epigram “Beware the fury of a patient man” is also quoted in the story “Extrapolation” in the 1964 anthology Sturgeon in Orbit (first published under the title “Beware the Fury” in Fantastic Stories magazine in 1954).

  “Assault and Little Sister”: first published in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, July 1961. Editor’s blurb from the original magazine appeared as “A TERRIFYING STORY OF SUSPENSE: THE AUTHOR OF THIS UNUSUAL AND CHILLING MYSTERY STORY SHARES WITH RAY BRADBURY THE DISTINCTION OF BEING ONE OF THE TWO OR THREE OUTSTANDING FANTASY WRITERS OF OUR DAY. WE THINK YOU’LL AGREE THAT HE HAS MORE THAN ONE STRING TO HIS BOW.”

  “When You Care, Whe
n You Love”: first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF), September, 1962; probably written in the first months of 1962. This was identified by Sturgeon bibliographers Benson and Stephenson-Payne as the long-awaited first installment of a Sturgeon novel called The Unbegotten Man, which was originally announced in the back pages of the 1950 Greenberg Publishers’ hardcover edition of The Dreaming Jewels. That means that as far back as 1950, Sturgeon was already developing the novel that he ultimately contracted to write in the early 1960s in which “When You Care, When You Love” became the out-of-sequence opening section, as “Baby Is Three” had been in More than Human. As I indicated in the notes to the first volume of this Complete Stories series, Sturgeon’s interest in pursuing this theme began with his story “Accidentally on Porpoise” in 1938.

  The novel-length expansion of “When You Care” that Sturgeon contracted with a publisher to write in the 1960s was to be called The Tulip Tree. A large file folder containing notes for this novel can be found among the papers belonging to the Sturgeon Literary Trust. In an introductory feature of a special Sturgeon issue, Editor Avram Davidson of F&SF wrote, “There is, of course, the new Theodore Sturgeon story, the first of three, which, when finished, will be published as one book; plus Judith Merril’s ‘personality’ article on the Guest of Honor [while the magazine was on sale, Sturgeon was Guest of Honor at the annual World Science Fiction Convention, held in 1962 in Chicago]; plus James Blish’s cameo-like critique of Sturgeon as literary craftsman; plus Sam Moskowitz’s Sturgeon bibliography—and, for lagniappe, a short excursion into extraterrestrial zoology by Robin Sturgeon, penultimate child to Theodore.”