Selections

by Theodore Sturgeon

  Guinn said shortly, “Just because this wagon’s a dog doesn’t mean you have to keep it by a hydrant all the time. Let’s go.”

  The car moved forward. Garry said, “Is she—”

  “Take the hill road and turn off at the Spur.”

  Garry nodded. “Will she—”

  “I changed the subject twice,” said Guinn.

  Garry tightened his lips and raised his eyebrows in a facial shrug. Guinn sat silently, his big hands lax on his knees, his eyes on the road.

  After a time he said, “I mean that about the fireplugs.”

  “Well,” said Garry, “I got to have some place to put my feet.”

  “Put ‘em in your pockets.”

  About two miles further on Garry asked, “Now, how am I going to do that and keep my pants on?”

  The two lines at the corners of Guinn’s mouth deepened. Suddenly he straightened. “Slow down.”

  There was a girl on the road, hobbling painfully along toward them. Guinn said, “That kid’s hurt…no; busted a heel off. Stop, Garry.”

  He leaned out. “Something wrong, sister?”

  She made no effort to approach the car. “I’m all right.” She wore a strapless sun-back dress that flared out at the hips. She was a copper blonde with angry green eyes. Her left hand clutched the top hem of the dress; in her right she held a limp handbag made of the same purple linen as her dress.

  “The hell you are,” said Guinn. He peered at her. “Don’t I know you? Your name’s…Lynn.”

  She sighed and crossed the road shoulder. “That’s right. I deal off the arm at Crenley’s Cafeteria. You’re that detective in the Miles Building.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  The slight identification seemed to make a large difference. She came close to the car. She wiped her brow with the back of the hand that held the bag. “It’s real hot,” she said with a small smile, as if apologizing for the weather. “Oh, I just guessed wrong. Day off, fellow says it’s a nice day for a spin, get ‘way out in the country, and suddenly I get an offer. Or walk.” She shrugged, clutched tighter at her neckline. “I walked.”

  “There was some wrestling,” said Guinn.

  “Uh-huh. Tore my dress, the stinker. For that I wiped off his collarbone with his ear.

  “Good.” He looked at his watch. “I don’t have much time to run you back in. Have to spend most of the afternoon up on the Spur. But I should be back in town before seven. You’re welcome to come along.”

  She hesitated, looked down the hot, dusty road toward the town and then at the inviting shade inside the station wagon. Then, “Why not?” she said. “I’m off till tomorrow. Gosh, thanks, Mr. Guinn.”

  He reached back and opened the door and she climbed in. Garry let in the clutch. Lynn said, “That feels good, that breeze.”

  Guinn fumbled in the glove compartment. “There ought to be—yeah—here it is.” His hand closed on a small plastic case which he passed back to the girl. “Sorry I don’t seem to stock your color.”

  “Wh—Oh! A needle and these little rolls of thread. You are a Boy Scout!”

  “Yeah, huh,” muttered Garry.

  Lynn said, “Don’t look around, will you? I’m not…not wearing anything under this, and if I’m going to sew it from the inside I’ll have to pull it right down.”

  “Go ahead,” said Guinn.

  They bowled along in silence through the hot afternoon. The right-hand wheels rumbled on the shoulder, sang again on tarmac. They rumbled again. Guinn looked up sharply to see Garry’s eyes fixed on the rear-view mirror. He reached up and turned it on its swivel and with the same movement snapped his thumbnail so hard on the bridge of Garry’s nose that tears came to the driver’s eyes. Neither man said a word, and Lynn was apparently too busy to notice.

  They turned off on the Spur road and began to climb. At the second hairpin the blacktop ceased. At the fourth there were no more retaining walls. At the seventh the road had yielded up its last cottage driveway and was a two-track meander through neglected hilltop fields. In the middle of one of these Garry stopped the car.

  “More?”

  “Go ahead,” said Guinn.

  “You know,” said Garry resignedly, and inched over the track until the car poked its battered snout into woods. Garry glanced at Guinn, who sat as if in deep thought and gave no orders. The car moved through underbrush and there, abruptly, was the track again, winding through the woods.

  “Oh, how lovely!” said Lynn.

  It was certainly restful; an underwater-green light, sun-spangled in shifting patches of gold.

  “Whoa.”

  There was a glitter of chrome ahead, as offensive as a belch in a theater audience. Garry braked. Guinn stared thoughtfully at the low-slung Town-and-Country convertible which blocked the track a hundred shaded yards ahead, and at the gray rock outcropping beyond it. There was a flash of white; a baby goat curvetted on the rocks, then another and another.

  “Pull ‘way over,” said Guinn. “Far enough so that Chrysler can get out if he wants to. But keep your eye on him.”

  There was a sound from Lynn—a quickly checked almost-syllable. Guinn swung around.

  She was staring at the convertible, sitting bolt-upright, and her green eyes were round. “What is it, Lynn?”

  “I could be wrong, but I think that’s the—the fellow who—”

  “We’ll take care of him.”

  “Oh, please. I don’t want any trouble.”

  Garry turned around and said jovially, “Oh, it won’t be any trouble, miss.”

  He tooled the car between the trees and got it off the road. Guinn watched him narrowly. He’d known that combination of joviality and slitted eyes from ‘way back. “Garry—”

  “I don’t like to see women pushed around,” said Garry. He switched off.

  Guinn got out, closed the door, leaned his elbows on the window ledge. “Lynn…”

  She took her apprehensive eyes from the convertible. “Mmm?”

  “You’ll be all right with Garry. He’s harmless. He likes to look, but he’s afraid to touch.” He thumped Garry’s shoulder. “If anyone shoots at you,” he told him, “try to catch the slug in your head, where it won’t make any difference.”

  Garry laughed with the same ominous cheerfulness. “How soon’ll you be back?”

  “Shortly.” He turned away and struck into the woods at about forty-five degrees away from the road.

  He worked his way carefully, keeping a constant watch on the convertible and on the area between it and the rocks. Nothing moved. There was no one in sight in or around the Chrysler when he drew abreast of it. He made no attempt to get closer, but moved steadily toward the rocks. Once he stopped and listened. He made another fifty feet and stopped again. There was a high, thin cry, faint and close. It sounded like a hoarse-voiced three-year-old child repeating a single vowel sound: Ei-ee! Ei-ee!

  He stepped into the clearing around the rocks. Out of the corner of his eye something dark flashed out of sight around a projection in the gray stone.

  Guinn slid back into the brush and waited. He reached inside his jacket and fingered the butt of his .32.

  The black thing barely showed, disappeared again.

  Hollow, faint, near, insistent came the childlike Ei-ee…ei-ee…ei-ee…

  Guinn lifted his gun, kicked off the safeties, crouched lower.

  Explosively, the black thing leaped out into the open. Guinn’s breath caught in his throat and he quelled the trigger reflex of his right hand by an enormous application of will. A black goat kid pranced into the open, ran and leapt high over some invisible obstacle created in its own fantastically playful imagination, hit the ground with all four feet together, back arched, head down. It gave an infantile snort and raced away, its little hooves making astonishingly soft little sounds on the rocks, like a cat’s feet on parquet flooring.

  “Percival!” Guinn called.

  Ee-ee…ei-ee…

  From the woods came
the sound of a starter. Not the station wagon, for the motor turned over all of four times before it caught, a delay that Garry wouldn’t stand for in anything he drove. Must be the Chrysler.

  Guinn hesitated only a second, recalled that Garry was between the Chrysler and the outside world, then stepped out into the clearing. He heard the convertible grind into reverse, cut into low and then a dwindling second. He shrugged and moved across to the rocks and around them, swiftly and watchfully. Nothing moved. Somewhere a goat bleated, and another answered.

  Then there was a wide cave-mouth.

  “Percival?”

  No answer, except that repetitive, high-pitched cry.

  Guinn ducked into the cave and sprang to one side, feeling for that silhouetted second like a towed artillery target. A sixth sense told him there was nothing human inside. He shut his eyes tight as if to squeeze the residual sunlight out of them like some dazzling juice.

  At last he could see. Book rack. A hard mattress on the scrupulously leveled and swept clay floor. Goatskins. And back in the corner, something small and white that wept and wept.

  He crossed, knelt beside it. It was a newborn goat kid, a day or so old, its wobbly and beseeching head stretched toward the light.

  He patted its neck and it slapped his wrist with a tongue as rough as a finishing rasp. Then he flicked his gaze over the cave again. He ran his hand over the books, glanced at their titles. Krishnamurti, Malory, Tennyson, Gibrahn, Swedenborg. White’s The Sword in the Stone, C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength. Theosophy, anthropology, Ancient British Landmarks.

  “Busy boy,” he muttered. He turned to the mattress, touched it.

  It was wet.

  He could detect, as he bent over it, the acrid not unpleasant odor of fresh clean perspiration. He threw off the shaggy goatskin. Under it the mattress was sopping. But this wasn’t perspiration.

  It was blood.

  “Ei-ee…” mourned the kid.

  “Hold tight, baby,” he soothed. He knelt and scrutinized the floor carefully in the band of sunlight which streamed in through the cave-mouth.

  “Um-hm!” Blood again; a spot, a starred droplet, a smear. Once he had seen them it was easy enough to follow them outside (“I’ll be back, baby,” he told the kid), across the clearing, through a band of woodland (where, on a flat rock, there was a full scarlet handprint) and into the meadow behind the outcropping.

  The goats were there, massed together like a bed of flowers, their heads all turned toward him, their eyes like shining seeds. He stopped, and here a head fell, and there, and one by one they began to graze absently. But none of them wandered far from the still figure on the grass.

  He went to it and the goats fell back before him, warily and attentive.

  Percival lay face downward on the grass. Guinn knew it was Percival because of the single length of white linen wrapped around his waist, and because of the tumbled gray shoulder-length hair. The hair had blood on it.

  He turned the body over, and Percival moaned. He wasn’t dead, and that, under the circumstances, was a pity.

  Guinn took out his carefully folded display handkerchief, shook it open, and wiped out the blood-filled eyes. “It’s Hadley Guinn,” he said softly. “You’ll be all right now.”

  “Mo,” whispered Percival. No one could have made an ‘n’ sound from a mouth and tongue in that condition.

  “Who did it?”

  Percival breathed deeply, twice, and his eyes began to glaze. Guinn shook him, almost roughly. “You’ve got to tell me who did this to you.” He turned the handkerchief, dabbed very gently at the tattered mouth.

  Slowly the eyes regained some life. “Gwim?”

  “Guinn, yes; Hadley Guinn. I’ll help you, Percival. Who did this to you?”

  “Gwim…goo’ boy, Gwim.” He coughed. Guinn caught the blood. “Who…fent…oo?”

  Guinn closed his eyes and ran over forty possibilities. Then, “Who sent me? Never mind that, Percival, man. Tell me, you’ve got to tell me—”

  Percival tossed his head impatiently. “Who? Who?”

  “All right. It was a dame called Morgan.”

  The painful distortion of the wrecked mouth might have been a smile. Percival nodded. “Gh-h-issen…”

  Guinn translated this as listen…”I’m listening, Percival,” he said softly.

  Percival’s gnarled hand came up, pointed. The sharp old index ringer dug into his knee to punctuate the crippled, halting speech. “…Hynd guh ghuid umgh-ozhiush…”

  Watching those tortured eyes, Guinn felt grief and panic mount. He tried. He tried desperately hard. “Wait: you say hy…hie…fi…find…guh…duh…the? The. Find the. Find the what, Percival?”

  “Ghuid…Dhuid…”

  “Doo-id? D…Druid?” Is it Druid, Percival?”

  Percival nodded weakly, rapidly. His hand patted Guinn’s knee as if in vast approval. “Urn…amghozhiush.”

  “Amgh…Amgrozihi-ess…”

  Percival spread his hand in a helpless gesture. Guinn said, “Was that close? Is that almost it, Percival? Amghrozhiess? “

  Percival nodded weakly. Guinn could all but see his soul leaving his body. “Who did it? Who, Percival—who?”

  “M-m-m…”

  “Please, please…try.”

  “Mugh-gug.”

  “Mur…murdered. Murdered. Yes, Percival—who did it?”

  “M-m-m…”

  Guinn put the great head down softly and stood up. He hurt. He hurt away down inside where his roiling anger lived—way under anything he could control.

  He hurt enough to measure his wonderment when as a kid with a dog he had run into Percival and his goats; when he used to sit in the cave and hear that great rolling voice tell tales of ancient times, and the gods men worshipped when the world was younger, when faith had the place that knowledge has now. There were great tales of the future, too, when the reverence now given knowledge will be replaced by understanding.

  He hurt enough to measure his delight when Percival would gravely give him his choice of goat’s milk or turnip juice to drink, and when the hermit gave him a great white ram’s skin for his own. (It lay over the foot of his bed to this day.)

  He hurt enough to measure his shame when as an enlightened teenager he had been part of a gang that went up to jeer and throw mud at the “nekkid looney.” (For Percival lived naked in the warm weather and in goat-skins in the cold, always courteously donning his strip of linen when anyone came by.) They’d taken pictures and had themselves a hell of a laugh over it; and Guinn couldn’t live with it and went up to apologize, and the hermit greeted him as a friend.

  Percival was part of the mountain—part of the world. He was part of a very real world of rocks and flowers, wind and winter and eternal wildness—a world on which chrome and neon and nuclear energy and power politics grew like acne on a great calm face. He had never done harm to a living soul. He had never sought a human being out nor turned one away. He was on the mountain when Guinn was born and he should have been there when Guinn died, because he was part of the eternity that every man should have, somewhere, to turn to when he needs it.

  Something died and was born in Guinn as he stood looking down at the great torn face. “Take care of him,” he said to the goats. “I’ll send somebody up…”

  From the cave the kid cried and cried.

  “Oh, yes, baby. You’ve got it just right.”

  He scooped up a startled nanny and headed for the cave. As he reached the entrance he heard a shot from the woods.

  “Sorry, lady,” he said. He flung the nanny through the cave-mouth with one fluid sweep of his two arms, hoping against hope that she and the kid would get together, and sprinted for his car.

  As he passed the place where the Chrysler had been parked there was another shot, and the moan of the Town-and-Country’s motor. He pounded up to the station wagon just in time to see the convertible break through the underbrush and disappear into the meadow.

  Lynn was gone. Ga
rry lay beside the car. There was a hole in the side of his head and another at the back, and he was very bloody.

  Guinn was around at all largely because he had the knack of selecting priorities among simultaneous emergencies, and because, having been born with the knack, he’d spent most of his life developing it.

  When he knelt beside Garry’s body he knew he had feelings about it, but he filed them away for later. The priority he noticed immediately was a smell and a sound; a steady trickle of liquid on dead leaves, and the acrid fumes of gasoline.

  He dropped to his belly and looked under the car. A stream of gas the size of a pencil lead was flowing out of the tank. He pulled himself up by a doorhandle, opening the door as he moved, scooped up the rear seat and got a folding bucket from under it, and ran around to shove it under the tank. He felt the hole, a jagged oval rip cut by a .32 or something larger.

  “Don’t go away,” he said to Garry.

  He opened the right rear door, pulled at the scarred upholstery. It came off its snap-fasteners with a sound like teeth going into peanut brittle. In the shallow space between upholstery and the outer panel were row on row of parts, neatly clipped with spring clamps. There were spark plugs, three spare distributor caps, ignition wire and a number of other things that it’s better to have and not need than need and not have.

  Guinn’s hands were a blur. He found what he was looking for: spider-expansion bolts and washers, and a screwdriver. He dove under the car, slipped the bolt through the washer and a gasket, and forced the bolt into the hole in the tank. He spun it with the screwdriver with a palm-on-palm technique he had learned in his wartime stretch in an aircraft factory, until the spider inside spread and the washer seated tightly over the hole. The he wrenched off the tank cap and slopped in the fuel which had been caught in the bucket.