Baby Is Three

by Theodore Sturgeon

  It was easier for me to do than it had been for Lone.

  Straightening up, I got away from Stern. He looked sick and frightened.

  “It’s all right,” I said.

  “What did you do to me?”

  “I needed some words. Come on, come on. Get professional.”

  I had to admire him. He put his pipe in his pocket and gouged the tips of his fingers hard against his forehead and cheeks. Then he sat up and he was okay again.

  “I know,” I said. “That’s how Miss Kew felt when Lone did it to her.”

  “What are you?”

  “I’ll tell you. I’m the central ganglion of a complex organism which is composed of Baby, a computer; Bonnie and Beanie, teleports; Jane, telekineticist; and myself, telepath and central control. There isn’t a single thing about any of us that hasn’t been documented: the teleportation of the Yogi, the telekinetics of some gamblers, the idiot savant mathematicians, and most of all, the so-called poltergeist, the moving about of household goods through the instrumentation of a young girl. Only in this case every one of my parts delivers at peak performance.

  “Lone organized it, or it formed around him; it doesn’t matter which. I replaced Lone, but I was too underdeveloped when he died, and on top of that I got an occlusion from that blast from Miss Kew. To that extent you were right when you said the blast made me subconsciously afraid to discover what was in it. But there was another good reason for my not being able to get in under that ‘Baby is three’ barrier.

  “We ran into the problem of what it was I valued more than the security Miss Kew gave us. Can’t you see now what it was? My gestalt organism was at the point of death from that security. I figured she had to be killed or it—I—would be. Oh, the parts would live on: two little colored girls with a speech impediment, one introspective girl with an artistic bent, one mongoloid idiot, and me—ninety per cent short-circuited potentials and ten per cent juvenile delinquent.” I laughed. “Sure, she had to be killed. It was self-preservation for the gestalt.”

  Stern bobbled around with his mouth and finally got out: “I don’t—”

  “You don’t need to,” I laughed. “This is wonderful. You’re fine, hey, fine. Now I want to tell you this, because you can appreciate a fine point in your specialty. You talk about occlusions! I couldn’t get past the ‘Baby is three’ thing because in it lay the clues to what I really am. I couldn’t find that out because I was afraid to remember that I had failed in the thing I had to do to save the gestalt. Ain’t that purty?”

  “Failed? Failed how?”

  “Look. I came to love Miss Kew, and I’d never loved anything before. Yet I had reason to kill her. She had to be killed; I couldn’t kill her. What does a human mind do when presented with imperative, mutually exclusive alternatives?”

  “It—it might simply quit. As you phrased it earlier, it might blow a fuse, retreat, refuse to function in that area.”

  “Well, I didn’t do that. What else?”

  “It might slip into a delusion that it had already taken one of the courses of action.”

  I nodded happily. “I didn’t kill her. I decided I must; I got up, got dressed—and the next thing I knew I was outside, wandering, very confused. I got my money—and I understand now, with super-empathy, how I can win anyone’s prize contest—and I went looking for a head-shrinker. I found a good one.”

  “Thanks,” he said dazedly. He looked at me with a strangeness in his eyes. “And now that you know, what’s solved? What are you going to do?”

  “Go back home,” I said happily. “Reactivate the superorganism, exercise it secretly in ways that won’t make Miss Kew unhappy, and we’ll stay with her as long as we know it pleases her. And we’ll please her. She’ll be happy in ways she’s never dreamed about until now. She rates it, bless her strait-laced, hungry heart.”

  “And she can’t kill your—gestalt organism?”

  “Not a chance. Not now.”

  “How do you know it isn’t dead already?”

  “How?” I echoed. “How does your head know your arm works?”

  He wet his lips. “You’re going home to make a spinster happy. And after that?”

  I shrugged. “After that?” I mocked. “Did the Peking man look at Homo Sap walking erect and say, ‘What will he do after that?’ We’ll live, that’s all, like a man, like a tree, like anything else that lives. We’ll feed and grow and experiment and breed. We’ll defend ourselves.” I spread my hands. “We’ll just do what comes naturally.”

  “But what can you do?”

  “What can an electric motor do? It depends on where we apply ourselves.”

  Stern was very pale. “But you’re the only such organism …”

  “Are we? I don’t know. I don’t think so. I’ve told you parts have been around for ages—the telepaths, the poltergeists. What was lacking was the ones to organize, to be heads to the scattered bodies. Lone was one, I’m one; there must be more. We’ll find out as we mature.”

  “You—aren’t mature yet?”

  “Lord, no!” I laughed. “We’re an infant. We’re the equivalent of about a three-year-old-child. So you see, there it is again, and this time I’m not afraid of it; Baby is three.” I looked at my hands. “Baby is three,” I said again, because the realization tasted good. “And when this particular group-baby is five, it might want to be a fireman. At eight, maybe a cowboy or maybe an FBI man. And when it grows up, maybe it’ll build a city, or perhaps it’ll be President.”

  “Oh, God!” he said. “God!”

  I looked down at him. “You’re afraid,” I said. “You’re afraid of Homo Gestalt.”

  He made a wonderful effort and smiled. “That’s bastard terminology.”

  “We’re a bastard breed,” I said. I pointed. “Sit over there.”

  He crossed the quiet room and sat at the desk. I leaned close to him and he went to sleep with his eyes open. I straightened up and looked around the room. Then I got the thermos flask and filled it and put it on the desk. I fixed the corner of the rug and put a clean towel at the head of the couch. I went to the side of the desk and opened it and looked at the tape recorder.

  Like reaching out a hand, I got Beanie. She stood by the desk, wide-eyed.

  “Look here,” I told her. “Look good, now. What I want to do is erase all this tape. Go ask Baby how.”

  She blinked at me and sort of shook herself, and then leaned over the recorder. She was there—and gone—and back, just like that. She pushed past me and turned two knobs, moved a pointer until it clicked twice. The tape raced backward past the head swiftly, whining.

  “All right,” I said, “beat it.”

  She vanished.

  I got my jacket and went to the door. Stern was still sitting at the desk, staring.

  “A good head-shrinker,” I murmured. I felt fine.

  Outside I waited, then turned and went back in again.

  Stern looked up at me. “Sit over there, Sonny.”

  “Gee,” I said. “Sorry, sir. I got in the wrong office.”

  “That’s all right,” he said.

  I went out and closed the door. All the way down to the store to buy Miss Kew some flowers, I was grinning about he’d account for the loss of an afternoon and the gain of a thousand bucks.

  Story Notes

  by Paul Williams

  “Shadow, Shadow on the Wall”: first published in Imagination, February 1951. Apparently written April or May 1950. There is little information available regarding the exact dates of composition of many of the stories in this volume or the sequence in which they were written. In a letter to his mother dated March 21, 1950, Sturgeon fretted: Aside from my TV show and a short I wrote last weekend, I haven’t written an original line since last May. “Last May” was when Theodore Sturgeon began working at Time Inc., writing direct mail copy for Fortune magazine. The Time Inc. job lasted until late in 1951. Sturgeon wrote “The Hurkle Is a Happy Beast” for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fic
tion in late April 1949. (The “TV show” he refers to was a speculative project that never came to fruition).

  On June 19, 1950 TS wrote to J. Francis McComas, one of the editors who’d bought “The Hurkle”: Here’s IT STAYED, the fantasy of which I spoke to you. This story—presumably rejected by F&SF, who didn’t publish their second Sturgeon story until November 1953—is clearly “Shadow, Shadow on the Wall” (“He stayed, he did,” said Bobby. “He stayed!”). “Shadow” could not have been the “short I wrote last weekend,” since TS says he wrote it in 28 days (see below), so if we believe Sturgeon wrote no stories between May 1949 and March 1950, “Shadow” must have been written in April or May 1950.

  Theodore Sturgeon told interviewer Paul Sammon in 1977 [in response to a question about his writing habits]: Another time when I wrote a story I had a bad writer’s block. I was working for Time Inc., and felt I really wanted to write something. But I’d come home from work and try to write and find that I couldn’t. So I finally decided to turn the coin over, and create a situation where I would not be trying hard to write, but trying hard not to write. This is what I did: I decided I would double-space the typewriter and write to the bottom of the page. One page every day. And if I stopped in the middle of the word, with a hyphen, I would not write another word on another page. This created a situation where I’d get to the bottom of my page and say, “This is crazy! At least let me finish this sentence!” But I wouldn’t let myself do it. So in twenty-eight days I wrote a story that ran twenty-eight pages, and it came out beautifully. I’ve become one of the world’s great experts at breaking writer’s blocks. In almost any case, I can break anyone’s block. In another 1977 interview, with D. Scott Apel, TS described the same incident and specifically identifies the 28-day story as “Shadow, Shadow on the Wall.” He added, jokingly: That technique was so successful that I never used it again.

  Sturgeon’s introduction to “Shadow, Shadow on the Wall” in his 1984 collection Alien Cargo: Good old wicked stepmother; this isn’t the first, and certainly not the last of them to supply us with entertainment. Somebody once made a short film of this; the little boy was just great, the rest misunderstood, so it was never seen. There’s one line in here I’m really proud of: the fury of the woman who, having banished the child to the bedroom, finds him happy as a little clam. “Don’t you know you’re being punished?” she shouts. Very heavy, that. Nobody can punish you if you can achieve the mindset that says whatever they’re doing to you isn’t punishment.

  TS’s own childhood experiences with a seemingly sadistic stepparent are recounted in his 1965 memoir Argyll (published posthumously).

  “The Stars Are the Styx”: first published in the first issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, October 1950. Probably written in summer 1950. It is noteworthy that Theodore Sturgeon contributed stories to the debut issues of both of the magazines that would transform the character of science fiction in the 1950s and beyond: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Galaxy, monthly short story magazines that immediately established themselves as the equals of John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science-Fiction in terms of reader popularity and of editorial influence on how authors wrote and what they wrote about and what they considered “science fiction” to be. In both cases, the editors were eager to have a Sturgeon story in their debut issues not only because of his popularity with the genre’s readers but because in different ways the editors of both magazines saw the Sturgeon name as symbolic of the type of science fiction they hoped and intended to offer in their ambitious new publications. And indeed, this turned out to be true. Theodore Sturgeon, already beloved by science fiction readers and other sf writers for the stories he wrote for Astounding and its sister magazine Unknown in 1939-1947, was in many ways the prototypical science fiction (and fantasy) short story writer of the 1950s (the decade in which he would do his very best work).

  “The Stars Are the Styx” was adapted (apparently with scripts by Sturgeon) as a radio drama twice, for “Tales of Tomorrow” (aired Jan. 29, 1953) and for “X Minus One” (aired July 27, 1956). (Sturgeon, whose Star Trek scripts are favorites among aficionados, did his first paying television writing in September 1951 when he adapted Robert Heinlein’s short story “Ordeal in Space” for CBS Stage 14.)

  In 1979 Dell Books published a collection of stories by TS called The Stars Are the Styx, with a cover by Rowena Morrell depicting Sturgeon as Charon. In his introduction to the title story, TS wrote:

  I’ve written elsewhere about the strange way things that I write about seem to happen about fifteen years later. It’s a small thing, but in writing this in 1950 I had no idea in the world that in fifteen years couples would be dancing separately, each more or less doing their own thing. In ’65 they began doing just that. Nor did I dream that this, of all the stories I was writing at the time, would one day be the title story of a collection like this.

  When the narrator in “Stars” asks Judson for a simple statement because complicated matters are not important, he is echoing a codification articulated by other Sturgeon characters in “Quietly” and “What Dead Men Tell” (see Story Notes in Volume V.). And when he guesses people are attracted to Jud because he gives them the feeling he can be reached … touched … affected … We like feeling that we have an effect on someone, it seems likely that the author is examining the happy and mysterious response of strangers when they meet Theodore Sturgeon.

  The line “Modesty is not so simple a virtue as honesty,” one of the old books says turns up in an essay by Sturgeon called “The Naked I” (the manuscript is in the Sturgeon papers; date and place of publication uncertain), which begins:

  Modesty is not so simple a virtue as honesty.

  I wish I’d said that. Matter of fact, I did and I do and most probably I will, because it’s one of those thoughts you can take home and chew over and find the flavor increasing. The man I got it from, however, is one Bernard Rudofsky, in a long out-of-print book called Are Clothes Modern?—which in itself is another such thought.

  I am naked. I am naked now as I sit here writing this. I wear clothes as seldom as possible because I am more comfortable that way. I wear clothes a) when I must and b) when I want to, and at no other time.

  Amongst the Sturgeon papers are several notes in which TS attempts to plot a sequel to “The Stars Are the Styx.” For example:

  Charon decides to go Out. When he gets there he finds that in the first place none of the Outbounders are wanted; second, that the great synapse is equally unwanted and useless to a really hidebound Earth. He goes back to Curbstone and finds ancient papers which describe the whole scheme as a riddance for neurotics and potential rebels.

  Lucy Menger in her 1981 book Theodore Sturgeon points out that: “The idea that misfits can contribute to society is central to ‘The Stars Are the Styx.’ In this story, Sturgeon capsulizes his thoughts on misfits when his narrator muses: ‘When you come right down to it, misfits are that way either because they lack something or because they have something extra.’ ”

  Editor’s blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance: ON CURBSTONE, GOING OUT MEANT A 6,000 YEAR DATE!

  “Rule of Three”: first published in Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1951. Written October 1950. Among the papers belonging to Sturgeon’s estate is a letter on Time letterhead dated Oct. 11. The year must be 1950 (because TS wasn’t writing for Horace Gold’s Galaxy in Oct. ’49 and didn’t sell him a story in fall ’51). There is no salutation; the person he’s writing to could be either his estranged wife Mary Mair or the young woman who would become his third wife the following year, Marion McGahan. The letter is signed and not a carbon, so presumably was not delivered (anyway, it was still among Sturgeon’s papers when he died three decades later). The letter is relevant here because I am certain the story TS has just shown to Horace and is planning to rewrite all day tomorrow is “Rule of Three.” (See notes on “Make Room for Me” for info about “the other one.”) So here is the entire text of a note writte
n by TS in the midst of working on “Rule of Three” (which I regard as one of his major works and arguably as important a message-in-a-bottle-from-outer-space as we humans may ever receive):

  I haven’t seen you in so long … [ellipses in original] I was half out of my mind with exhaustion when I spoke to you the other night—about 4 hours sleep in 48. I can’t take too much of that, but I had to.

  Horace liked the story but wants a rewrite. He’s right, damn him. He’s also very impressed with the other one I told you about—the one I wrote with someone else—particularly since it has a new year’s eve sequence and is ideal for his December issue. So I’ve got to rewrite that one too. The way I hope to handle it is this: Tomorrow I’ll stay home and work all day, finishing the 9000-worder. (Tonight, by the way, I’m lecturing at CCNY.) Friday evening I’ve got a dianetic emergency to handle—his third session, which I think will straighten him out. Saturday I’ll work on the 13,000-word one. After that I hope to be able to see you, if I can’t snatch a couple of hours between times.

  Hold tight, darling, and be careful of the door.

  (The letter is signed, Love, Ted.)

  Sturgeon’s 1979 introduction to “Rule of Three”: My preoccupation for some time has been with the nature of marriage, and whether or not we haven’t gotten ourselves off on the wrong foot. Divorce statistics would seem to indicate that there is nothing more destructive of marriage than monogamy. “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment,” wrote Elizabeth Barrett (a monogamist if there ever was one), but she had a point there. Although the person who wrote “Rule of Three” clearly regarded the desirability of monogamy as axiomatic, the astute reader—another term for postgame quarterbacking—might find in it the seeds of later ideation. One tends to work out one’s own convictions in writing fiction—especially in science fiction—and to test them against possibilities, however untimely or unformed or wishful or improbable. Anyway, in this story (1951) one may find what is possibly the first suggestion in science fiction that love may not after all be confined to gender or to monogamy. Here are the seeds of later work like More Than Human, and the growing concept that perhaps, after all, the greatest advance we can make is to accept what we are, and then to grok, to blesh, to meld, to join. Real science fiction talk, that, ain’t it?