Microcosmic God

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “Who?”

  “A girl! She—Oh, skip it, Miriam. I guess I imagined that, too. Come on.”

  We started to climb again, and something possessed us both to look back. At any rate, when I looked, it was over Miriam’s head, and she was staring at the transparent woman, who was crossing back again from wall to wall across the landing. This time she walked backward, and the blood ran into her ears. It was infinitely more horrible than the first time, and yet, after the first shock of it, I was comforted. For the first time Tommy had laid it on too thick. That reversed action was too cinematic to get over, I thought. And that’s what it must have been—a film projected from somewhere, perhaps out from under one of the steps, run forward and then backward. That would easily account for the transparency of the girl’s figure, since it was projected directly against the wall. But—damn it, how did he ever achieve that astonishing three-dimensional effect?

  “That,” Miriam was saying brokenly, “is something that I just am not going to believe! Bill—for Heaven’s sake, what sort of place is this?”

  “Regular haunt, isn’t it?” I said cheerfully. I was feeling better now that I’d figured out one of the ghosts to my satisfaction. “Come on—we’ll make our round and get out of here. The sooner the quicker, y’know!”

  Her gait and her carriage and her expression, all I could catch in the sweeping beams of our torches, were almost meek. I suddenly felt overwhelmingly like a heel. This was a lousy thing to do to such a swell girl.

  “Miriam,” I said softly, catching her arms, “I—”

  But just then the laughter reached a cold crescendo, and from downstairs came the most blood-freezing, ululating scream that it’s ever been my sorrow to hear. It was the kind of sound to clamp a man’s jaws so tight in terror that his gums bleed, and his skin goose-fleshes out like a woodrasp. The scream seemed to stop the laughter, for the stillness after it devoted itself to the scream’s echoes; and we stopped breathing so that the sound of our breath would not keep the echoes alive. That scream didn’t belong on this earth. Somewhere in hell is a damned soul which has been there long enough to be miserable enough and still stay strong enough to scream like that.

  We pushed away from each other merely because it was the only movement we could make to thrust the remembrance of that sound from us a little. The desire to complete our tour of the chalet was something fevered and senseless and quite irresistible by now. We hurried to get it done—we made no slightest move to leave it partly finished. I couldn’t have done it without my knowledge that no matter how extreme these horrors became, they were but the creations of Tommy’s strange genius for handling electrical circuits. Miriam had her own iron nerve and the fact that so far I hadn’t broken into a hysterical retreat.

  The third floor wasn’t bad—there was nothing there but odds and ends of old furniture, dust, and creaking floorboards. When we started downstairs we knew we were all but on our way out, and we grew almost cheerful. Almost. Not quite, because that noise began again—that creeping, tear-filled laughter. It went on and on and on, until we couldn’t stand it anymore, and it passed that point and still went on. We walked down steps and trotted down corridors and broke and ran in and out of rooms, playing childishly at being casual, while the laughter grew, not louder, but more and more clear; and we couldn’t tell whether it was following us or whether it was simply everywhere. It was so all-enveloping that we lost consciousness of the fact that it was in the house. It was all around us, more than a sound—it was something we breathed, something which pressed our clothing to our shrinking bodies with its pulsings. It filled the whole world and there would never, never be an end to it, and we couldn’t escape it by fleeing the house. We couldn’t ever get away from it. It was part of us now, in our blood, in our bones. Rounding a corner on the first floor, Miriam crashed into a door and reeled back into my arms. I turned my light on her face. Part of the sound—some of it, all of it, I don’t know—was coming from her!

  “Miriam!” I screamed, and slapped her face twice, and clamped my hand over her writhing mouth. The laughter receded into the upper part of the house, and she sank tremblingly closer to me. “Miriam—Why did I—Darling, come out of it. Listen to me! Mir—”

  “Oh, Bill! Bill, I’m scared! I’m scared, Bill!” She said it quietly, in a small, very surprised voice; and then she began to cry, and I’ll bet my eyeballs that it was the first time in her life she’d cried, because those tears came hard.

  I picked her up in my arms and carried her into a room we hadn’t yet visited. There was a monstrous old red plush and mahogany divan there, and I put her down on it. She put her arms around my neck and all of a sudden was a very little girl afraid of the dark. I bent over her, all choked up, and for all I know, I cried, too.

  The laughter approached again.

  “Bill!” she wailed. “Make it stop! Oh, please, please, make it stop!”

  I couldn’t keep up that pretense any longer. “Stick around, bud,” I gritted; and, jamming one of the torches in an angle of the divan’s rococo, I headed for the door.

  Miriam sat up and screamed for me. I went back, put my arms around her and kissed her. She was so surprised when I let her go that she just sat there with her hand to her mouth, wordless, while I tore out and along the corridor to the steps that led down into the cellar.

  Tommy’s carried this thing too damn far, I gritted to myself as I cut into the littered cellar room where he had hidden his controls. There was such a thing as doing a job too well, and I was about to tell a radio engineer that, complete with fireworks. I fumbled along the wooden partition until I found a knothole he had used for a doorknob. I jammed a finger into it, whipped the door open, stabbed a ray of light inside. There wasn’t anyone there. There just wasn’t anyone in there at all!

  “Tommy?” I sagged up against the partition, gasping. “Tommy!” Nobody in there. No one working those lights, that switchboard, phonograph, no—“Tommy!” I quavered.

  The laughter kept on. On and on. I looked at the phonograph. It was there, all right, with its crystal pick-up and the wires running to the speaker in the old furnace. But it wasn’t operating. I crept up to it and put out my hand and turned it over with a crash, and the laughter wouldn’t stop.

  Tommy! The goon, where’d he get to? Maybe he’d been here up until a minute or so ago. Maybe he was hiding in the cellar somewhere. I went to the door and called him. No answer. I came back, ran my hand over the bulb-studded board. That sob-laughing was still sounding all around me. I wasn’t doing it, was I? I shook my head to clear it and tried to think. Could that foggy fellow have forgotten to show up? Hadn’t he been here at all?

  Tuesday. Tuesday night. This was Tuesday night. Wasn’t Tommy supposed to show up for the haunt tonight? That’s what I thought. A vague memory flashed across my mind—Tommy telling me what night he wanted to pull his trick. He had gone, “Wuh-Wuh-Wuh-Wuh-Wuh—” for about thirty seconds before he got it out. But a guy doesn’t make that noise when he’s trying to say “Tuesday.” He does it when he’s trying to say “Wednesday.” Oh, but that was too damn silly! Whatever in the world made me think it was Tuesday? I knew he’d said something about Tue—Oh, yes! “C-contact your snow queen on Tuesday so you’ll be sure to have her at the house on Wuh-Wuh-Wuh—” That was it!

  I punched myself in the mouth, I was so sore. Well, it didn’t matter—some son of a gun had been monkeying with these controls for the last hour or so, and I didn’t care who it was! I rushed the beam over the wiring, located the power line and tore it away from the switchboard. That would do it.

  That didn’t do it. First I heard that laughter, and then I heard Miriam scream. I bolted for the door—straight for the door, even though it meant plowing through all of Tommy’s electrical equipment. I hit the cellar room amid a shower of coils and broken bulbs and rheostats and headed for the stairs. As I reached them, another thought wound itself around my heart and tried to stop it. Miriam was in the first floor back room—the roo
m into which I had carried her—the room where four people had been inexplicably but thoroughly strangled!

  I really made time. I was running too fast to get through the door clean, and I left a piece of my shoulder on the doorpost and kept running. This was it. This was our little haunt. That house didn’t need Tommy!

  Miriam was lying on the divan with her head twisted crazily and blue marks on her throat.

  I screamed and whirled and ran out. A doctor—a policeman—I had to get someone! Miriam—I’d done this to Miriam! If she was dead, then I killed her!

  I flew down the hall, out through the foyer. The outer door stopped me for a moment because it opened inward. I wrestled it open, stood gasping at the top of the steps. This was the way it was, then. This was what had happened to Grandt, and Fortunato had found Grandt as I found Miriam. Fortunato was lucky. He broke his neck running out of the house. I wished my neck was broken, and then I wouldn’t have to worry about killing Miriam. I looked hungrily down the steps. Three other men had died on them the same way—why not one more? The laughter behind me fell away and settled into a low, expectant gurgle. It was going to happen again. Strangle one person, and break another’s neck on the steps. That’s the way it always had been. That’s the—

  “No!” I sobbed, and turned and butted my way back into the house. When I did, the laughter stopped within itself.

  I went blindly back down the long corridor and into the first floor back. Miriam still lay there, and I stood, all tired inside, looking at her. I didn’t want to go near, didn’t want to touch, didn’t want anything. I just looked at her woodenly, the way she was stretched there and twisted, the way her head hung, and the way those blue marks on her long white neck bit in and shifted and bit in again. And then I saw that she hadn’t been strangled at all, for—she was being strangled!

  With a hoarse bark I leaped in, seized her, lifted her. I had to pull against something. I propped her up with one arm, felt around her throat with the other hand. Nothing there! I picked her up and tried to carry her away, and I couldn’t because she was being held by the neck! I clutched her to me and put everything I had into that effort to tear her away, and I couldn’t! Then I felt something give, and her eyes rolled up out of sight. She looked ghastly in the crazy light from the torch that still flung its bright shaft angling upward from where I had jammed it. I knew it hurt her, and I could all but feel her pain. Then everything let go, and by a miracle I stayed on my feet, and I stumbled and bungled and carried her out of the room and out of the house and into the car.

  As soon as we were well away from there I pulled over to the curb. She couldn’t have lived through that—she couldn’t! But why was she moving, then, and whispering something? I pulled her to me, chafed her wrist. She was saying my name. I almost laughed. She began to swear in a deep, husky voice. I did laugh.

  “Oh—boy!” she said, and licked her lips. “Have I been through the mill!” She touched her neck weakly and grinned.

  “Darling, I’m a heel to get you into that place. I don’t know whatever got into me—”

  “Shush,” she said, and lay back.

  She was so quiet for so long that I got frightened. “Miriam—”

  “Apropos of nothing,” she said, and her voice was so strong and normal that it was a shock to me, “there’s a question you asked me that I’ve been dodging. I’ll marry you if you like.”

  I was still feeling like a heel. “What for?” I asked in real amazement. She leaned over against me.

  “Because,” she said softly, “I always wanted to be married to a man who could tell me ghost stories on long winter evenings.”

  There are just two more things to tell. Tommy refused to be our best man because he was sore at me for wrecking his equipment. The other thing is that I bought the chalet on Grove Street and had it razed. We built our house there and we’re very happy in it.

  Completely Automatic

  “WHAT THE DEVIL does he do for a living?” I asked as the petty officer left the mess room.

  “Nothing,” said the second officer. “Nothing at all.”

  “What do you carry him for, then?”

  The second was a man in his middle forties with a very nice grin. He used it now. “We carry him just in case,” he said. “He’s the chemical supervisor. He stands no watches, makes no reports. He reports aboard before we take off and disappears when we make port. For that he knocks down six hundred and forty credits a month.”

  “Six—Holy Kit, that’s a lot of change for doing nothing. I was always under the impression that the crew of a spaceship was streamlined down to practically nothing. Does every ship carry these … these paid passengers?”

  The second nodded as he filled my glass again. “There was a time, four or five hundred years ago, when a ship couldn’t have done without them. They had no automatic machinery to speak of then. The ships were self-powered, and half their capacity was given over to fuel. Half the rest was driving machinery. They had no power beams then; they had to plot their courses and steer them every trip. Now, of course, with the power beams that both guide and drive the vessels, things are different. There are only two or three hundred men in the System that know the theory of astrogation nowadays, and they are either research scientists or doddering scholars. It’s only tradition that keeps a crew aboard any more—that and the fact that the more jobs the Supreme Council can create, the better for everybody. I don’t kid myself—I know damn well that I could be replaced in a minute by two switches and a rheostat on the control panel back on Earth. That goes for everyone else riding these ships, too. Only the passenger ships carry captains, and they are there to impress the passengers. Sort of glorified masters of ceremonies. No, space travel isn’t what it used to be.”

  “That may be true,” I said, “but at least you do something for a living. You stand a regular watch and supervise the stowage and the passenger lists and keep the log and give the passengers the idea that the ship is in competent hands—but what about that chem super? False front is false front, but it’s usually attached to something solid. That guy hasn’t even an excuse for being aboard.”

  “You don’t think so? Granted, his work is taken care of entirely by automatic machinery that hasn’t broken down once in the last three hundred years, but that isn’t the point. Remember—I told you that he is here just in case.”

  “In case of what?”

  “Certain eventualities. Got an hour or so? I’ll tell you a story about a chemical supervisor that might interest you.”

  “Go ahead,” I said. “I’ve got three weeks with nothing to do, let alone an hour. Start spinning.”

  The second officer unzipped his collar, flipped a lever on his chair to tilt it back a little, and began.

  The reason I think you in particular would be interested in this yarn is that it has to do with what happened when they did exactly what you say they should do—get rid of some hundred-odd thousand pieces of deadwood in the way of chem supers and their apprentices. Yeah, they did, about twenty-eight years ago. There was a great deal of noise about it at the time, because most of the old conservatives didn’t like the idea of breaking an old space tradition that way. They said that spaceships should no more take off without chem supers than they should without lifeboats. The fact that no one within the memory of living man had ever used a lifeboat for anything but joy-riding didn’t faze them.

  The machinery was foolproof, rigidly inspected every trip, and all of it either one hundred percent automatic or remote control. Supers simply were not needed. The boys that held down the jobs were, with a few exceptions, friends of somebody who had a friend in the office. Their qualifications were courtesy ones; a couple of oral questions were examination enough for them. Many skippers carried their relatives with them as supers. A lot of fellows grabbed the jobs because they were sincerely interested in space travel and that way they could have a good look around the ship to see how they liked it and what kind of work would suit them best. It was a set-up
—harmless enough, to be sure, except for the fact that the supers got paid a high wage, and that made the rest of the crew a little sore because they had to work for a living.

  This was before the days of the Functionalist government, when many of the space lines were privately owned and the big boys at the top were anxious to cut costs and increase profits without regard to the number of men they threw out of work. I don’t have to tell you that space transportation is as big an industry as they come; to get rid of a chem super and his apprentice on every single ship in the System that ever left any atmosphere was a big jolt. A few hundred thousand men thrown out of work all at once played hell with the economic balance, close as it was. Besides, most of those supers were absolutely worthless—bums, parasites, drifters, trouble-makers.

  It was a foolish move, and the Council knew it; but the pressure put on by the profit-drunk “efficiency” experts of the space companies was too strong. They bounced them out—every last one of them. It’s interesting to know that it was that group of worthless exsupers who, by the noise they made, were ultimately responsible for the new set-up, where men are hired and paid for jobs that could be done away with—my job, for instance. It’s better that way. No one loses anything; the companies don’t gain so much, that’s all. They can afford it. And it has completely done away with unemployment.

  But to get back to the supers. I know all about what happened because it happened aboard the Maggie Northern, my first ship—my first job on these cans. It was a first for the ship too—her first trip without a super.

  I came aboard her—I was a teenage kid at the time—with a suitcase with a busted handle under my arm and more ignorance than sense under my hat. I got in a lot of people’s way and was finally shunted into the rocket man’s fo’c’sle. I stood in the middle of the floor feeling shy. I hadn’t known a spaceship would be like this. Like every kid my age, I had filled myself full of stories about the trade, and thought it would be cramped and stuffy with tiered bunks and lacking every facility a he-man would sneer at. But this, one of the poorest-equipped freighters in the Great Northern ore fleet, had three men to a room, each with a bed with innerspring mattress, hot and cold running water—the works. Some bright soul had painted a garden scene on the windowless bulkhead and had rigged it up with a window frame, glass and curtains. There was a kid a couple of years older than me sitting on a bench looking sad. He looked up at me.