Selections

by Theodore Sturgeon

  The muscles of Guinn’s jaw crackled audibly. He became conscious of a long-forgotten fact—that his automatic was in his right hand. He raised it, took the barrel in his left, held it while he released the cramped right fingers and flexed them until he felt they could be trusted. Then he grasped the molded grip again, got his index finger under the guard.

  The big man was moving now, holding the twitching bodies downward. Dark blood was spouting, and with it he was sprinkling the roots of the tree. As Guinn brought his gun hand up, the man disappeared around the tree.

  The huge shadow of the tree moved opposite the light source, sweeping across the clearing like a monstrous hand brushing away flies. And at its touch the animals scattered like flies, an approaching, passing, receding wave of squeaks and squawks, whimpers, growls, hoots and rustlings. Behind the passing shadow the tree-limbs moved and their leaves fluttered, and the underbrush whipped and thrashed. Before it, the forest was spangled with the gleaming of their fixed eyes.

  Then the big man rounded the trunk, still holding the carcasses. Their blood dripped now instead of spurting, and he held them close to the roots and moved slowly.

  When his circuit was completed he stopped, dropped the rabbits, and turned toward Lynn, who stood watching him tensely, her lips parted, her head up. And Guinn brought up his gun and fired. He aimed over the man’s left shoulder, purposely high.

  The man’s hand came up in unison with Guinn’s. Just behind the crash of Guinn’s gun came a distinct thunk!

  And Guinn found himself gaping down at that laughing dark face—laughing so that the leaves shivered—and following the movement of the small object being tossed in the huge hand.

  The giant had caught Guinn’s bullet not only in his hand, but between his thumb and forefinger.

  You’re acting like a rube, he snarled at himself. The hand is quicker than the eye—even the private eye. He tightened his grip on himself, on his gun. “Sorry to interrupt,” he said into the echoing silence that followed the giant’s laughter, “But the lady was with me.”

  “You interrupted nothing,” said the giant pleasantly. “We were quite finished.”

  “Who are you?” Guinn snapped.

  The man looked at him thoughtfully. “You know who I am.”

  “I do?”

  “You do. When you admit that you do, you’ll seek me out. Until then…” He made a courtly gesture, a sort of casual salute. Then the light—went out.

  Guinn bit his tongue and cursed. The darkness had hit his eyeballs like a physical blow, and he literally sagged under the impact. He stood in the blackness, shaking, sweating, waiting.

  Gradually there was a leaf-torn sky again, the dim presence of tree trunks. Somewhere a mouse squeaked. Overhead he heard the tiny, unlubricated sound of a bat. A breath of wind passed, and the forest seemed to exhale quietly.

  “Lynn…”

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “Is he—”

  “He’s gone.” He heard her feet as she left the mossy carpet and crossed dead leaves. She was climbing toward him. He put out his hand. It touched her body; soft, warm, unafraid. His throat was dry and burning and his flesh was cold and clammy. He found her hand and said again, “Are you all right?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Where is he?” he whispered. “He must be standing down there.”

  “He isn’t,” she said positively. “He’s gone.”

  He peered down into the blackness, and abruptly there was a sort of flow, a warm radiation of comfort and relaxation. There was proportion and reality in the world again. “Yes,” he said, surprising himself. “He’s gone.”

  Hand in hand they followed the glow, the mechanical hum of the hospital, which was now visible. “Lynn, what happened?”

  “I saw the light,” she said quietly. “I went to see. I think I was afraid at first. I thought if I knew what the light was I wouldn’t be afraid anymore, so I went to look. He was…”

  She fell behind as they passed between close-set trees, then caught up and took his hand again. “He was—waiting for me. It was as if I knew him, knew what to do…You saw, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. Lynn, what was it for? Who is he?”

  She was silent as they worked their way through the blackness. She was quiet for so long that he squeezed her hand and said, “Well?”

  She said, “If you’re around somebody a whole lot—your brother or someone you go to school with or something—do you suddenly stop and say ‘What’s your name?’ It was sort of like that. No, I never saw him before. I never did those things before. But it didn’t occur to me to ask any questions.”

  He said, because he wanted to know, “He didn’t touch you?”

  “Oh, no!”

  “I believe,” said Guinn, “that two things and two things get you four things. I believe that every effect has a cause, and every reaction is there because of some action.” He paused, and then said almost plaintively, “I’ve got to believe that, Lynn!”

  She chuckled. She was certainly not laughing at him. She reached her other hand over and patted his wrist. “Hard guy,” she said.

  They reached the hedge. Guinn fumbled along it for an opening. He stopped suddenly. “I plumb forgot.” He reached inside his jacket and got the nurse’s uniform, shook it out. “This won’t look like Fifth Avenue,” he said apologetically.

  “What is—Oh! A dress! Thank you…” She shrugged into it, and as she buttoned the belt, she said, “I didn’t feel naked until you handed me that.”

  In an obscure way, he felt like apologizing. He didn’t. He said, “I didn’t feel you were.” He turned to the hedge, added, “You suppose I’m getting old?”

  “Do you suppose I’m getting brazen?”

  It was the right answer. Something was going on here—some shift in perspective, some new element in the atmosphere. “Come on.”

  They broke through and emerged into the highway some hundred yards below the parked station wagon. They walked silently, each deeply immersed in thought. Lynn spoke once: “Is Garry—”

  “He’s going to be all right.”

  “I knew that,” she said wonderingly. “I seem to’ve known that all along. Remember when I got into the car, when he was lying on the seat? I didn’t do anything for him. I barely even looked at him. I didn’t have to; I knew he was all right.”

  Then they reached the car, got in. Guinn found his keys, started the car. They pulled into the highway and moved off toward the town. It wasn’t easy to talk against the roar of the unmuffled exhaust, and they didn’t try too hard. Lynn gave him her address, and when they reached the town he found it without trouble. He pulled up in front of it. It was frame house with a vine-covered porch and a picket fence. There was a sign on a post in the lawn that said:

  ROOMS

  TRANSIENT

  PERMANENT

  Lynn got out. Guinn leaned across the seat and looked up at her. “I owe you an outfit.”

  “You do not. I owe you a whole lot more.”

  “A clout on the neck?”

  “I got hit much harder than that,” she twinkled. “Shall I come to your office tomorrow?”

  “Call me,” he said. Her face seemed to fall a trifle. He said, “I meant what I said about that, Lynn. Square yourself with your boss at the cafe.”

  “Thanks. Oh, thanks so much.”

  “I’m ahead.” He waved his hand and started the car. He had to turn it around, and he sped past her place again she was still on the porch, tiptoe on her bare feet, waving.

  Guinn parked the car in front of his building and sagged for a moment. He felt as if he had earned the luxury of letting his back bend for a few seconds. He thought.

  He thought about Lynn, and about the extraordinary scene in the wood, about the man in the convertible who shot at girls and flayed off the skin on people’s faces, strip by strip. He thought back and back through his day’s work until he got to lunch time, where it started. The Morgan girl and her vagueness and her
fantastic expense money. He took out his wallet.

  In it were five one-hundred-dollar bills.

  He sat very quietly, with his eyes closed.

  She’d given him five centuries. He’d put three in the drawer before he left. At the hospital he’d found he had five left, not two. He’d given two hundred to Cheryl. Now he had five left instead of three.

  He thought, there are two kinds of things going on around here. One is the kind of thing I understand, and the other is the kind of thing I don’t understand.

  Is that simple enough? he asked himself.

  It should be.

  I understand about guys who make rough passes at girls. I understand about guys who torture people to get information from them. I even understand about girls who have guts enough to dive out of a moving car over the railing of a forty-foot cliff.

  But I don’t understand about men who can coax rabbits out to have their throats cut, and can pluck a .32 slug out of the air. I don’t understand a guy who makes a chanting and somehow controls a girl’s voice to synchronize with it like that. And I especially don’t understand about this money.

  Guinn sat up a little straighter: He knew he would be better off if he forgot the things he couldn’t understand. He also knew that he couldn’t. What he could do was seal them up in the back of his mind. Maybe he’d find the bridge between the known and the unknown; maybe some silly little piece of evidence would show up that would be the missing link. Until then, he wasn’t going to beat his brains out.

  He swung the door open, pulled out the ignition key, dropped it in his pocket and climbed out. He stretched. He felt tired. He kicked the car door closed and went into the building.

  Old George, the night elevator man, was asleep on a battered rung chair, his Adam’s apple still pretending it was a chin, and chewing. Guinn walked up the two flights. He was glad to be back. He thumbed out his door key and let himself into the dark waiting room, crossed to the inner office, turned on the light.

  “Hello,” somebody said gravely.

  He stood dangling his key stupidly. He was stiff with shock. Shock was a vise on his abdomen, a clamp on his heart, a quick-freeze on his lungs. He didn’t show it.

  “Please shut it. There’s a draft,” said the girl called Morgan.

  Guinn tossed the key, caught it, put it away. He crossed the office and got behind the desk and sat down. He glowered at her. She sat where she had been before. Her legs were crossed and her hair gleamed and she still had the most exquisite mouth he had ever seen. Her skin was still young and her eyes ancient. Instead of the caped dress, she now wore a lime-colored number with a demure little white collar buttoned under her chin. There was another button an inch above her waistline. Between the two buttons the material separated, no wider than a finger, all the way down. This was a garment with something to say, and it made its points.

  “I’d like a progress report,” she said.

  He snorted and reached for the phone, dialed. While he waited for the connection, he glared at her. If she had grinned at him he would have thrown the phone at her. She didn’t grin. She watched him levelly, and waited.

  “Sam,” Guinn said into the phone. “Yeah, I know it’s late. Look, I want you climb into your jalopy and take a trip. No—not tomorrow; now! Don’t say that, chum. You know I wouldn’t call you if it wasn’t important. Okay, then…That’s better.

  “I want you to get up to Percival’s cave. Yeah. No, he won’t. Somebody knocked him off today. Damn you, would I kid about a thing like that? All right then. Sorry, I knew him a long time. Anyway, the wagon’s come and gone by now, but his goats are still up there. I want you to round ‘em up and take care of them. Yeah. And don’t forget to milk the nannies. They’ve missed one milking already, maybe two, and that’s no good. It hurts ‘em.

  “Right. All right, Sam. You’re okay, you short-tempered old scut. Stay with ‘em; I’ll be up in the morning. Sam—thanks.”

  He put the phone down, took out his wallet, got out the five bills, dropped them on the desk, and pushed them across the desk with a pencil eraser. “Here.”

  She lowered her lids to look at the money. Her lashes almost touched her cheeks. When she was asleep they probably did. “What’s that for?”

  “It’s your money. I don’t want it. I don’t want your case, either.”

  She nodded, almost placidly.

  She picked up the money, opened the chartreuse and black handbag she carried, and dropped the money into it. “That’s not all the money you’ve gotten from me, is it?”

  “I gave you five.”

  Her gaze dropped to the desk. He cursed suddenly, viciously, ripped the drawer open and got the telephone bill. The old envelope tore in two as he pulled the banknotes out of it.

  Three bank notes. C-notes.

  He looked up at her, his face frozen. “The hand,” he said, “is quicker than the—” He stopped, because he remembered saying, or thinking, the same thing just recently. This afternoon, or was it—

  She took the money and put it away in her purse. She asked, without smiling, without frowning either: “Why don’t you want the case?”

  He said, “I wouldn’t be so foolish as to accuse you of sending me up on the Hill when you did just so old Percival would get what he got. But it figures the same way. I’ll never live so long that I’ll forget this afternoon—or the fact that you had something to do with it.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  He reached behind him and switched on a hot plate. He swizzled the pot that stood on it to see how much water was in it. Satisfied, he turned back to her. “You’ve been asking questions about this stone, this cup, or whatever it is. Some hood figured it was valuable, went after it. Percival got—Miss Morgan, do you know what was done to him?”

  “I can imagine.”

  He snorted. “The hell you can.”

  She considered him in her expressionless way. “I take it you’re going to drop the whole thing, then.”

  “I didn’t say that. I said I didn’t want your case. How far I chase down my own affairs is up to me.”

  Her expression changed, but there was no saying exactly how. It wasn’t in the eyes, the mouth. It was, if anything, something inside. But now she looked pleased.

  He was annoyed. “I gave you the money,” he said pointedly. When she simply sat, watching him, he said, “And tomorrow I change that lock.”

  “Locks mean nothing to me,” she said.

  “They do to me, if they’re mine. Miss Morgan, I think I’m taking up too much of your time.”

  “Oh, no.” She shook her head solemnly.

  He rummaged into his desk, found a jar of instant coffee and some restaurant-style containers. He spooned the powder into a container, switched off the hot plate, and poured steaming water into the coffee. He sat stirring it, looking at her. He didn’t offer her any.

  From his top right-hand drawer he got a handful of pretzel sticks. Dunking one, he stuck the end into his mouth.

  “This is where you came in,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “Damn it!” he exploded. “What are you after?”

  She said, “Wouldn’t it be better with rye?”

  He had the container to his lips as she spoke. His nostrils distended. There’s a distinctive odor to strong black coffee with a dollop of rye in it—and this had it.

  Guinn’s first reaction was to drop it; his second to throw it. His third was to drink it. He did none of these things. He put it down with a consciously controlled rock-steadiness. He selected a pretzel-stick carefully and dunked it. It tasted of rye. He finished it slowly, wiped his hand across his mouth, and took out a cigarette. As he clawed a book of matches up from the desk, the girl raised one hand from her lap and pointed a finger at him. Something like a swift butterfly of flame whisked across from the finger to his cigarette, and was gone. He drew back violently, followed by a faint curl of tobacco smoke. He automatically dragged on the cigarette. It was lit, and the une
xpected gout of smoke made him cough. He thought he smelled ozone.

  “Do something else casual,” said the girl, as quietly and offensively as ever. “I can keep this sort of thing up all night.”

  “Okay,” he said harshly. “What’s your story, Miss Morgan?”

  “Look in your wallet.”

  “I know what’s in the wallet.”

  “You do?”

  A dangerous light came into his eyes. Silently he took out his wallet, opened it, drew out five one-hundred dollar bills and put them and the wallet down side by side on the desk.

  “Very good.” He wet his lips. I guess this means that the two yards I left at the hospital for Garry are phoney—if they’re there at all. I’m beginning to like you, Miss Morgan.”

  “No,” she said quickly. “They’re real. They’re all real.”

  “They come from some place.”

  “They come from people who won’t miss it—or who shouldn’t have it.”

  “How?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.” There was no effrontery in her voice; she was stating a flat fact.

  “I’m a pretty understanding guy,” he said.

  She rose and came close to the desk. She smelled of vanilla, and, faintly, of mignonette. She glanced back at the chair and gestured slightly. It slid across to her. It must have been lifted a fraction of an inch off the floor, because it made no sound. She sat in it and said, “Do you think you’re going crazy?”

  “No,” he said positively. “If that’s what you’re after, you’ve done everything wrong.”

  “How so?”

  He stretched out his legs. “I don’t know that you’ve earned a lecture on the secrets of my success. But I don’t mind telling you that I can be puzzled but not mystified. If I throw that switch, the hotplate lights up. I understand that. If Einstein tells me that light can only go just so fast, I don’t understand it, but I accept it. If another five yards shows up in that wallet I won’t understand it—” His fist came down with a crash—”and damn if I accept it. Now, quit your skylarking around, or—”