Selections

by Theodore Sturgeon

  SPECIES

  GROUP

  SELF

  Seeing Jud’s eyes on it, I explained, “The three levels of survival. They’re in all of us. You can judge a man by the way he lines them up. The ones who have them in that order are the best. It’s a good thought for Outbounders to take away with them.” I watched his face. “Particularly since it’s always the third item that brings ’em this far.”

  Jud smiled slowly. “Along with all that bumbling you carry a sting, don’t you?”

  “Mine is a peculiar job,” I grinned back. “Come on in.”

  I put my palm on the key-plate. It tingled for a brief, moment and then the shining doors slid back. I rolled through, stopping just inside the launching court at Judson’s startled yelp.

  “Well, come on,” I said.

  He stood just inside the doors, straining mightily against nothing at all. “Wh—wh—?” His arms were spread and his feet slipped as if he were trying to force his way through a steel wall.

  Actually he was working on something a good deal stronger than that. “That’s the answer to why uncertified people don’t go Out,” I told him. “The plate outside scanned the whorls and lines of my hand.

  The door opened and that Gillis-Menton field you’re muscling passed me through. It’ll pass anyone who’s certified, too, but no one else. Now stop pushing or you’ll suddenly fall on your face.”

  I stepped to the left bulkhead and palmed the plate there, then beckoned to Judson. He approached the invisible barrier timidly. It wasn’t there. He came all the way through, and I took my hand off the scanner.

  “That second plate,” I explained, “works for me and certified people only. There’s no way for an uncertified person to get into the launching court unless I bring him in personally. It’s as simple as that.

  When the certified are good and ready, they go. If they want to go Out with a banquet and a parade beforehand, they can. If they want to roll out of bed some night and slip Out quietly, they can. Most of ’em do it quietly. Come on and have a look at the ships.”

  We crossed the court to the row of low doorways along the far wall. I opened one at random and we stepped into the ship.

  “It’s just a room!”

  “They all say that,” I chuckled. “I suppose you expected a planet-type space job, only more elaborate.”

  “I thought they’d at least look like ships. This is a double room out of some luxury hotel.”

  “It’s that, and then some.” I showed him around—the capacious food lockers, the automatic air re-circulators, and, most comforting of all, the synthesizer, which meant food, fuel, tools and materials converted directly from energy to matter.

  “Curbstone’s more than a space station, Jud. It’s a factory, for one thing. When you decide to go on your way, you’ll flip that lever by the door. (You’ll be catapulted out—you won’t feel it, because of the stasis generator and artificial gravity.) As soon as you’re gone, another ship will come up from below into this slot. By the time you’re clear of Curbstone’s gravitic field and slip into hyper-drive, the new ship’ll be waiting for passengers.”

  “And that will be going on for six thousand years?”

  “More or less.”

  “That’s a powerful lot of ships.”

  “As long as Outbounders keep the quota, it is indeed. Nine hundred thousand—including forty-six per cent failure.”

  “Failure,” said Jud. He looked at me and I held his gaze.

  “Yes,” I said. “The forty-six per cent who are not expected to get where they are going. The ones who materialize inside solid matter. The ones who go into the space-time nexus and never come out. The ones who reach their assigned synaptic junction and wait, and wait, and wait until they die of old age because no one gets to them soon enough. The ones who go mad and kill themselves or their shipmates.”

  I spread my hands. “The forty-six per cent.”

  “You can convince a man of danger,” said Judson evenly, “but nobody ever believed he was really and truly going to die. Death is something that happens to other people. I won’t be one of the forty-six per cent.”

  That was Judson. I wish he was still here.

  I let the remark lie there on the thick carpet and went on with my guided tour. I showed him the casing of the intricate beam-power apparatus that contained the whole reason for the project, and gave him a preliminary look at the astrogational and manual maneuvering equipment and controls. “But don’t bother your pretty little head about it just now,” I added. “It’ll all be crammed into you before you get certified.”

  We went back to the court, closing the door of the ship behind us.

  “There’s a lot of stuff piled into those ships,” I observed, “but the one thing that can’t be packed in sardine-size is the hyper-drive. I suppose you know that.”

  “I’ve heard something about it. The initial kick into second-order space comes from the station here, doesn’t it? But how is the ship returned to normal space on arrival?”

  “That’s technology so refined it sounds like mysticism,” I answered. “I don’t begin to understand it. I can give you an analogy, though. It takes a power source, a compression device, and valving to fill a pneumatic tire. It takes a plain nail to let the air out again. See what I mean?”

  “Vaguely. Anyway, the important thing is that Outbound is strictly one way. Those ships never come back. Right?”

  “So right.”

  One of the doors behind us opened, and a girl stepped out of a ship. “Oh… I didn’t know there was anyone here!” she said, and came toward us with a long, easy stride. “Am I in the way?”

  “YOU—in the way, Tween?” I answered. “Not a chance.” I was very fond of Tween. To these jaded old eyes she was one of the loveliest things that ever happened. Two centuries ago, before variation limits were as rigidly set as they are now, Eugenics dreamed up her kind—olive-skinned true-breeds with the silver hair and deep ruby eyes of an albino. It was an experiment they should never have stopped.

  Albinoism wasn’t dominant, but in Tween it had come out strongly. She wore her hair long—really long; she could tuck the ends of it under her toes and stand up straight when it was loose. Now it was braided in two ingenious halves of a coronet that looked like real silver. Around her throat and streaming behind her as she walked was a single length of flame-colored material.

  “This is Judson, Tween,” I said. “We were friends back on Earth. What are you up to?”

  She laughed, a captivating, self-conscious laugh. “I was sitting in a ship pretending that it was Outside.

  We’d looked at each other one day and suddenly said, ‘Let’s!’ and off we’d gone.” Her face was luminous. “It was lovely. And that’s just what we’re going to do one of these days. You’ll see.”

  “‘We’? Oh—you mean Wold.”

  “Wold,” she breathed, and I wished, briefly and sharply, that someone, somewhere, someday would speak my name like that. And on the heels of that reaction came the mental picture of Wold as I had seen him an hour before, slick and smooth, watching the shuttle passengers with his dark hunting eyes. There was nothing I could say, though. My duties have their limits. If Wold didn’t know a good thing when he saw it, that was his hard luck.

  But looking at that shining face, I knew it would be her hard luck. “You’re certified?” Judson asked, awed.

  “Oh, yes,” she smiled, and I said, “Sure is, Jud. But she had her troubles, didn’t you, Tween?”

  We started for the gate. “I did indeed,” said Tween. (I loved hearing her talk. There was a comforting, restful quality to her speech like silence when an unnoticed, irritating noise disappears.) “I just didn’t have the logical aptitudes when I first came. Some things just wouldn’t stick in my head, even in hypnopedia. All the facts in the universe won’t help if you don’t know how to put them together.” She grinned. “I used to hate you.”

  “Don’t blame you a bit.” I nudged Judson. “I turned
down her certification eight times. She used to come to my office to get the bad news, and she’d stand there after I’d told her and shuffle her feet and gulp a little bit. And the first thing she said then was always, ‘Well, when can I start retraining?’”

  She flushed, laughing. “You’re telling secrets!”

  Judson touched her. “It’s all right. I don’t think less of you for any of his maunderings… You must have wanted that certificate very much.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Very much.”

  “Could—could I ask why?”

  She looked at him, in him, through him, past him. “All our lives,” she said quietly, “are safe and sure and small. This— ” she waved back towards the ships—“is the only thing in our experience that’s none of those things. I could give you fifty reasons for going Out. But I think they all come down to that one.”

  We were silent for a moment, and then I said, “I’ll put that in my notebook, Tween. You couldn’t be more right. Modern life gives us infinite variety in everything except the magnitude of the things we do.

  And that stays pretty tiny.” And, I thought, big, fat, superannuated station officials, rejected by one world and unqualified for the next. A small chore for a small mind.

  “The only reason most of us do puny things and think puny thoughts,” Judson was saying, “is that Earth has too few jobs like his in these efficient times.”

  “Too few men like him for jobs like his,” Tween corrected.

  I blinked at them both. It was me they were talking about. I don’t think I changed expression much, but I felt as warm as the color of Tween’s eyes.

  We passed through the gates, Tween first with never a thought for the barrier which did not exist for her, then Judson, waiting cautiously for my go-ahead after the inside scanning plate had examined the whorls and lines of my hand. I followed, and the great gates closed behind us.

  “Want to come up to the office?” I asked Tween when we reached Central Corridor.

  “Thanks, no,” she said. “I’m going to find Wold.” She turned to Judson. “You’ll be certified quickly,” she told him. “I just know. But, Judson—”

  “Say it, whatever it is,” said Jud, sensing her hesitation.

  “I was going to say get certified first. Don’t try to decide anything else before that. You’ll have to take my word for it, but nothing that ever happened to you is quite like the knowledge that you’re free to go through those gates any time you feel like it.”

  Judson’s face assumed a slightly puzzled, slightly stubborn expression. It disappeared, and I knew it was a conscious effort for him to do it. Then he put out his hand and touched her heavy silver hair.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  She strode off, the carriage of her head telling us that her face was eager as she went to Wold. At the turn of the corridor she waved and was gone.

  “I’m going to miss that girl,” I said, and turned back to Judson. The puzzled, stubborn look was back, full force. “What’s the matter?”

  “What did she mean by that sisterly advice about getting certified first? What else would I have to decide about right now?”

  I swatted his shoulder. “Don’t let it bother you, Jud. She sees something in you that you can’t see yourself, yet.”

  That didn’t satisfy him at all. “Like what?” When I didn’t answer, he asked, “You see it, too, don’t you?”

  We started up the ramp to my office. “I like you,” I said. “I liked you the minute I laid eyes on you, years ago, when you were just a sprout.”

  “You’ve changed the subject.”

  “Hell I have. Now let me save my wind for the ramp.” This was only slightly a stall. As the years went by, that ramp seemed to get steeper and steeper. Twice Coordination had offered to power it for me and I’d refused haughtily. I could see the time coming when I was going to be too heavy for my high-horse.

  All the same, I was glad for the chance to stall my answer to Judson’s question. The answer lay in my liking him; I knew that instinctively. But it needed thinking through. We’ve conditioned ourselves too much to analyze our dislikes and to take our likes for granted.

  The outer door opened as we approached. There was a man waiting in the appointment foyer, a big fellow with a gray cape and a golden circlet around his blue-black hair. “Clinton!” I said. “How are you, son? Waiting for me?”

  The inner door opened for me and I went into my office, Clinton behind me. I fell down in my specially molded chair and waved him to a relaxer. At the door Judson cleared his throat. “Shall I—uh…”

  Clinton looked up swiftly, an annoyed, tense motion. He raked a blazing blue gaze across Jud, and his expression changed. “Come in, for God’s sake. Newcomer, hm? Sit down. Listen. You can’t learn enough about this project. Or these people. Or the kind of flat spin an Outbounder can get himself into.”

  “Clint, this’s Judson,” I said. “Jud, Clint’s about the itchy-footedest Outbounder of them all. What is on your mind, son?”

  Clinton wet his lips. “How’s about me heading Out— alone? ”

  I said, “Your privilege, if you think you’ll enjoy it.”

  He smacked a heavy fist into his palm. “Good, then.”

  “Of course,” I said, looking at the overhead, “the ships are built for two. I’d personally be a bit troubled about the prospect of spending—uh—however long it might be, staring at that empty bunk across the way. Specially,” I added, loudly, to interrupt what he was going to say, “if I had to spend some hours or weeks or maybe a decade with the knowledge that I was alone because I took off with a mad on.”

  “This isn’t what you might call a fit of pique,” snapped Clinton. “It’s been years building—first because I had a need and recognised it; second because the need got greater when I started to work toward filling it; third because I found who and what would satisfy it; fourth because I was so wrong on point three.”

  “You are wrong? Or you’re afraid you’re wrong?”

  He looked at me blankly. “I don’t know,” he said, all the snap gone out of his voice. “Not for sure.”

  “Well, then, you’ve no real problem. All you do is ask yourself whether it’s worthwhile to take off alone because of a problem you haven’t solved. If it is, go ahead.”

  He rose and went to the door. “Clinton!” My voice must have crackled; he stopped without turning, and from the corner of my eye I saw Judson sit up abruptly. I said, more quietly, “When Judson here suggested that he go away and leave us alone, why did you tell him to come in? What did you see in him that made you do it?”

  Clinton’s thoughtfully slitted eyes hardly masked their blazing blue as he turned them on Judson, who squirmed like a schoolboy. Clinton said, “I think it’s because he looks as if he can be reached. And trusted. That answer you?”

  “It does.” I waved him out cheerfully. Judson said, “You have an awesome way of operating.”

  “On him?”

  “On both of us. How do you know what you did by turning his problem back on himself? He’s likely to go straight to the launching-court.”

  “He won’t.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure,” I said flatly. “If Clinton hadn’t already decided not to take off alone—not today, anyhow—he wouldn’t have come to see me and get argued out of it.”

  “What’s really bothering him?”

  “I can’t say.” I wouldn’t say. Not to Judson. Not now, at least. Clinton was ripe to leave, and he was the kind to act when ready. He had found what he thought was the perfect human being for him to go with. She wasn’t ready to go. She never in all time and eternity would be ready to go.

  “All right,” said Jud. “What about me? That was very embarrassing.”

  3

  I laughed at him. “Sometimes when you don’t know exactly how to phrase something for yourself, you can shock a stranger into doing it for you. Why did I like you on sight, years ago, and now, too? Why did
Clinton feel you were trustworthy? Why did Tween feel free to pass you some advice—and what prompted the advice? Why did—” No. Don’t mention the most significant one of all.

  Leave her out of it. “—Well, there’s no point in itemizing all afternoon. Clinton said it. You can be reached. Practically anyone meeting you knows— feels, anyhow—that you can be reached…touched… affected. We like feeling that we have an effect on someone.”

  Judson closed his eyes, screwed up his brow. I knew he was digging around in his memory, thinking of close and casual acquaintances… how many of them… how much they had meant to him and he to them. He looked at me. “Should I change?”

  “God, no! Only—don’t let it be too true. I think that’s what Tween was driving at when she said not to jump at any decisions until you’ve reached the comparative serenity of certification.”

  “Serenity… I could use some of that,” he murmured. “Jud.”

  “Mm?”

  “Did you ever try to put into one simple statement just why you came to Curbstone?”

  He looked startled. Like most people, he had been living, and living ardently, without ever wondering particularly what for. And like most people, he had sooner or later had to answer the jackpot question:

  “What am I doing here?”

  “I CAME because—because… no, that wouldn’t be a simple statement.”

  “All right. Run it off, anyway. A simple statement will come out of it if there’s anything really important there. Any basic is simple, Jud. Every basic is important. Complicated matters may be fascinating, frightening, funny, intriguing, worrisome, educational, or what have you; but if they’re complicated, they are, by definition, not important.”

  He leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees. His hands wound tightly around one another, and his head went down.

  “I came here… looking for something. Not because I thought it was here. There was just nowhere else left to look. Earth is under such strict discipline… discipline by comfort; discipline by constructive luxury. Every need is taken care of that you can name, and no one seems to understand that the needs you can’t name are the important ones. And all Earth is in a state of arrested development because of Curbstone. Everything is held in check. The status quo rules because for six thousand years it must and will. Six thousand years of physical and social evolution will be sacrificed for the single tremendous step that Curbstone makes possible. And I couldn’t find a place for myself in the static part of the plan, so the only place for me to go was to the active part.”