Selected Stories

by Theodore Sturgeon

  He found the foreman with an enormous wrench in his hand, tightening up the new track adjustment bolt they had installed in the Seven.

  “Hey, Chub! Glad you turned up. Let’s get a piece of pipe over the end of this thing and really bear down.” Chub went for the pipe, and they fitted it over the handle of the four-foot wrench and hauled until the sweat ran down their backs, Tom checking the track clearance occasionally with a crowbar. He finally called it good enough and they stood there in the sun gasping for breath.

  “Tom,” panted Chub, “did you kill that Puerto Rican?”

  Tom’s head came up as if someone had burned the back of his neck with a cigarette.

  “Because,” said Chub, “if you did you can’t go on runnin’ this job.”

  Tom said, “That’s a lousy thing to kid about.”

  “You know I ain’t kiddin’. Well, did you?”

  “No!” Tom sat down on a keg, wiped his face with a bandanna. “What’s got into you?”

  “I just wanted to know. Some of the boys are worried about it.”

  Tom’s eyes narrowed. “Some of the boys, huh? I think I get it. Listen to me, Chub. Rivera was killed by that thing there.” He thumbed over his shoulder at the Seven, which was standing ready now, awaiting only the building of a broken cutting corner on the blade. Peebles was winding up the welding machine as he spoke. “If you mean, did I put him up on the machine before he was thrown, the answer is yes. That much I killed him, and don’t think I don’t feel it. I had a hunch something was wrong up there, but I couldn’t put my finger on it and I certainly didn’t think anybody was going to get hurt.”

  “Well, what was wrong?”

  “I still don’t know.” Tom stood up. “I’m tired of beatin’ around the bush, Chub, and I don’t much care any more what anybody thinks. There’s somethin’ wrong with that Seven, something that wasn’t built into her. They don’t make tractors better’n that one, but whatever it was happened up there on the mesa has queered this one. Now go ahead and think what you like, and dream up any story you want to tell the boys. In the meantime you can pass the word—nobody runs that machine but me, understand? Nobody!”

  “Tom—”

  Tom’s patience broke. “That’s all I’m going to say about it! If anybody else gets hurt, it’s going to be me, understand? What more do you want?”

  He strode off, boiling. Chub stared after him, and after a long moment reached up and took the cigar from his lips. Only then did he realize that he had bitten it in two; half the butt was still inside his mouth. He spat and stood there shaking his head.

  “How’s she going, Peeby?”

  Peebles looked up from the welding machine. “Hi, Chub, have her ready for you in twenty minutes.” He gauged the distance between the welding machine and the big tractor. “I should have forty feet of cable,” he said, looking at the festoons of arc and ground cables that hung from the storage hooks in the back of the welder. “Don’t want to get a tractor over here to move the thing, and don’t feel like cranking up the Seven just to get it close enough.” He separated the arc cable and threw it aside, walked to the tractor, paying the ground cable off his arms. He threw out the last of his slack and grasped the ground clamp when he was eight feet from the machine. Taking it in his left hand, he pulled hard, reaching out with his right to grasp the moldboard of the Seven, trying to get it far enough to clamp on to the machine.

  Chub stood there watching him, chewing on the cigar, absent-mindedly diddling with the controls on the arc-welder. He pressed the starter-button, and the six-cylinder motor responded with a purr. He spun the work-selector dials idly, threw the arc generator switch—

  A bolt of incredible energy, thin, searing, blue-white, left the rod holder at his feet, stretched itself fifty feet across to Peebles, whose fingers had just touched the moldboard of the tractor. Peebles’ head and shoulders were surrounded for a second by a violet nimbus, and then he folded over and dropped. A circuit breaker clacked behind the control board of the welder, but too late. The Seven rolled slowly backward, without firing, on level ground, until it brought up against the road-roller.

  Chub’s cigar was gone, and he didn’t notice it. He had the knuckles of his right hand in his mouth, and his teeth sunk into the pudgy flesh. His eyes protruded; he crouched there and quivered, literally frightened out of his mind. For old Peebles was burned almost in two.

  They buried him next to Rivera. There wasn’t much talk afterwards; the old man had been a lot closer to all of them than they had realized until now. Harris, for once in his rum-dumb, lightheaded life, was quiet and serious, and Kelly’s walk seemed to lose some of its litheness. Hour after hour Dennis’ flabby mouth worked, and he bit at his lower lip until it was swollen and tender. Al Knowles seemed more or less unaffected, as was to be expected from a man who had something less than the brains of a chicken. Chub Horton had snapped out of it after a couple of hours and was very nearly himself again. And in Tom Jaeger swirled a black, furious anger at this unknowable curse that had struck the camp.

  And they kept working. There was nothing else to do. The shovel kept up its rhythmic swing and dig, swing and dump, and the Dumptors screamed back and forth between it and the little that was left of the swamp. The upper end of the runway was grassed off; Chub and Tom set grade stakes and Dennis began the long job of cutting and filling the humpy surface with his pan. Harris manned the other and followed him, a cut behind. The shape of the runway emerged from the land, and then that of the paralleling taxiway; and three days went by. The horror of Peebles’ death wore off enough so that they could talk about it, and very little of the talk helped anybody. Tom took his spells at everything, changing over with Kelly to give him a rest from the shovel, making a few rounds with a pan, putting in hours on a Dumptor. His arm was healing slowly but clean, and he worked grimly in spite of it, taking a perverse sort of pleasure from the pain of it. Every man on the job watched his machine with the solicitude of a mother with her first-born; a serious break-down would have been disastrous without a highly skilled mechanic.

  The only concession that Tom allowed himself in regard to Peebles’ death was to corner Kelly one afternoon and ask him about the welding machine. Part of Kelly’s rather patchy past had been spent in a technical college, where he had studied electrical engineering and women. He had learned a little of the former and enough of the latter to get him thrown out on his ear. So, on the off-chance that he might know something about the freak arc, Tom put it to him.

  Kelly pulled off his high-gauntlet gloves and batted sandflies with them. “What sort of an arc was that? Boy, you got me there. Did you ever hear of a welding machine doing like that before?”

  “I did not. A welding machine just don’t have that sort o’ push. I saw a man get a full jolt from a 400-amp welder once, an’ although it sat him down it didn’t hurt him any.”

  “It’s not amperage that kills people,” said Kelly, “it’s voltage. Voltage is the pressure behind a current, you know. Take an amount of water, call it amperage. If I throw it in your face, it won’t hurt you. If I put it through a small hose you’ll feel it. But if I pump it through them tiny holes on a Diesel injector nozzle at about twelve hundred pounds, it’ll draw blood. But a welding arc generator just is not wound to build up that kind of voltage. I can’t see where any short circuit anywhere through the armature or field windings could do such a thing.”

  “From what Chub said, he had been foolin’ around with the work selector. I don’t think anyone touched the dials after it happened. The selector dial was run all the way over to the low current application segment, and the current control was around the halfway mark. That’s not enough juice to get you a good bead with a quarter-inch rod, let alone kill somebody—or roll a tractor back thirty feet on level ground.”

  “Or jump fifty feet,” said Kelly. “It would take thousands of volts to generate an arc like that.”

  “Is it possible that something in the Seven could have pulled that
arc? I mean, suppose the arc wasn’t driven over, but was drawn over? I tell you, she was hot for four hours after that.”

  Kelly shook his head. “Never heard of any such thing. Look, just to have something to call them, we call direct current terminals positive and negative, and just because it works in theory we say that current flows from negative to positive. There couldn’t be any more positive attraction in one electrode than there is negative drive in the other; see what I mean?”

  “There couldn’t be some freak condition that would cause a sort of oversize positive field? I mean one that would suck out the negative flow all in a heap, make it smash through under a lot of pressure like the water you were talking about through an injector nozzle?”

  “No, Tom. It just don’t work that way, far as anyone knows. I dunno, though—there are some things about static electricity that nobody understands. All I can say is that what happened couldn’t happen and if it did it couldn’t have killed Peebles. And you know the answer to that.”

  Tom glanced away at the upper end of the runway, where the two graves were. There was bitterness and turbulent anger naked there for a moment, and he turned and walked away without another word. And when he went back to have another look at the welding machine, Daisy Etta was gone.

  Al Knowles and Harris squatted together near the water cooler.

  “Bad,” said Harris.

  “Nevah saw anythin’ like it,” said Al. “Ol’ Tom come back f’m the shop theah just raisin’ Cain. ‘Weah’s ’at Seven gone? Weah’s ’at Seven?’ I never heered sech cah’ins on.”

  “Dennis did take it, huh?”

  “Sho’ did.”

  Harris said. “He came spoutin’ around to me a while back, Dennis did. Chub’d told him Tom said for everybody to stay off that machine. Dennis was mad as a wet hen. Said Tom was carryin’ that kind o’ business too far. Said there was probably somethin’ about the Seven Tom didn’t want us to find out. Might incriminate him. Dennis is ready to say Tom killed the kid.”

  “Reckon he did, Harris?”

  Harris shook his head. “I’ve known Tom too long to think that. If he won’t tell us what really happened up on the mesa, he has a reason for it. How’d Dennis come to take the dozer?”

  “Blew a front tire on his pan. Came back heah to git anothah rig—maybe a Dumptor. Saw th’ Seven standin’ theah ready to go. Stood theah lookin’ at it and cussin’ Tom. Said he was tired of bashin’ his kidneys t’pieces on them othah rigs an’ bedamned if he wouldn’t take suthin’ that rode good fo’ a change. I tol’ him ol’ Tom’d raise th’ roof when he found him on it. He had a couple mo’ things t’say ’bout Tom then.”

  “I didn’t think he had the guts to take the rig.”

  “Aw, he talked hisself blind mad.”

  They looked up as Chub Horton trotted up, panting. “Hey, you guys, come on. We better get up there to Dennis.”

  “What’s wrong?” asked Harris, climbing to his feet.

  “Tom passed me a minute ago lookin’ like the wrath o’ God and hightailin’ it for the swamp fill. I asked him what was the matter and he hollered that Dennis had taken the Seven. Said he was always talkin’ about murder and he’d get his fill of it foolin’ around that machine.” Chub went wall-eyed, licked his lips beside his cigar.

  “Oh-oh,” said Harris quietly. “That’s the wrong kind o’ talk for just now.”

  “You don’t suppose he—”

  “Come on!”

  They saw Tom before they were halfway there. He was walking slowly, with his head down. Harris shouted. Tom raised his face, stopped, stood there waiting with a peculiarly slumped stance.

  “Where’s Dennis?” barked Chub.

  Tom waited until they were almost up to him and then weakly raised an arm and thumbed over his shoulder. His face was green.

  “Tom—is he—”

  Tom nodded, and swayed a little. His granite jaw was slack.

  “Al, stay with him. He’s sick. Harris, let’s go.”

  Tom was sick, then and there. Very. Al stood gaping at him, fascinated.

  Chub and Harris found Dennis. All of twelve square feet of him, ground and churned and rolled out into a torn-up patch of earth. Daisy Etta was gone.

  Back at the outcropping, they sat with Tom while Al Knowles took a Dumptor and roared away to get Kelly.

  “You saw him?” he said dully after a time.

  Harris said, “Yeh.”

  The screaming Dumptor and a mountainous cloud of dust arrived, Kelly driving, Al holding on with a death-grip to the dump-bed guards. Kelly flung himself off, ran to Tom. “Tom—what is all this? Dennis dead? And you … you—”

  Tom’s had came up slowly, the slackness going out of his long face, a light suddenly coming into his eyes. Until this moment it had not crossed his mind what these men might think.

  “I—what?”

  “Al says you killed him.”

  Tom’s eyes flicked at Al Knowles, and Al winced as if the glance had been a quirt.

  Harris said, “What about it, Tom?”

  “Nothing about it. He was killed by that Seven. You saw that for yourself.”

  “I stuck with you all along,” said Harris slowly. “I took everything you said and believed it.”

  “This is too strong for you?” Tom asked.

  Harris nodded. “Too strong, Tom.”

  Tom looked at the grim circle of faces and laughed suddenly. He stood up, put his back against a tall crate. “What do you plan to do about it?”

  There was a silence. “You think I went up there and knocked that windbag off the machine and ran over him?” More silence. “Listen. I went up there and saw what you saw. He was dead before I got there. That’s not good enough either?” He paused and licked his lips. “So after I killed him I got up on the tractor and drove it far enough away so you couldn’t see or hear it when you got there. And then I sprouted wings and flew back so’s I was halfway here when you met me—ten minutes after I spoke to Chub on my way up!”

  Kelly said vaguely, “Tractor?”

  “Well,” said Tom harshly to Harris, “was the tractor there when you and Chub went up and saw Dennis?”

  “No—”

  Chub smacked his thigh suddenly. “You could of drove it into the swamp, Tom.”

  Tom said angrily, “I’m wastin’ my time. You guys got it all figured out. Why ask me anything at all?”

  “Aw, take it easy,” said Kelly. “We just want the facts. Just what did happen? You met Chub and told him that Dennis would get all the murderin’ he could take if he messed around that machine. That right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then the machine murdered him.”

  Chub, with remarkable patience, asked, “What did you mean the day Peebles was killed when you said that something had queered the Seven up there on the mesa?”

  Tom said furiously, “I meant what I said. You guys are set to crucify me for this and I can’t stop you. Well, listen. Something’s got into that Seven. I don’t know what it is and I don’t think I ever will know. I thought that after she smashed herself up that it was finished with. I had an idea that when we had her torn down and helpless we should have left her that way. I was dead right but it’s too late now. She’s killed Rivera and she’s killed Dennis and she sure had something to do with killing Peebles. And my idea is that she won’t stop as long as there’s a human being alive on this island.”

  “Whaddaya know!” said Chub.

  “Sure, Tom, sure,” said Kelly quietly. “That tractor is out to get us. But don’t worry; we’ll catch it and tear it down. Just don’t you worry about it any more; it’ll be all right.”

  “That’s right, Tom,” said Harris. “You just take it easy around camp for a couple of days till you feel better. Chub and the rest of us will handle things for you. You had too much sun.”

  “You’re a swell bunch of fellows,” gritted Tom, with the deepest sarcasm. “You want to li
ve,” he shouted, “git out there and throw that maverick bulldozer!”

  “That maverick bulldozer is at the bottom of the swamp where you put it,” growled Chub. His head lowered and he started to move in. “Sure we want to live. The best way to do that is to put you where you can’t kill anybody else. Get him!”

  He leaped. Tom straightened him with his left and crossed with his right. Chub went down, tripping Harris. Al Knowles scuttled to a toolbox and dipped out a fourteen-inch crescent wrench. He circled around, keeping out of trouble, trying to look useful. Tom loosed a haymaker at Kelly, whose head seemed to withdraw like a turtle’s; it whistled over, throwing Tom badly off balance. Harris, still on his knees, tackled Tom’s legs; Chub hit him in the small of the back with a meaty shoulder, and Tom went flat in his face. Al Knowles, holding the wrench in both hands, swept it up and back like a baseball bat; at the top of its swing Kelly reached over, snatched it out of his hands and tapped Tom delicately behind the ear with it. Tom went limp.