A Saucer of Loneliness

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “Is your hand all right?” Hartog asked. “I’m real sorry about that.”

  Killilea noticed he had removed the ring. “I told you last night to forget it. Uh—while people are apologizing, I just remembered I belted out of that bar sort of suddenly last night. Did I pay or not?”

  “Yes, it’s all right,” said the other. His fierce brows drew together. “I sort of had the idea you went after that funny little girl I was telling you about.”

  “You did?”

  “Well, I don’t want to pry,” said Hartog mildly. “Just wondered how you made out, that’s all.”

  Killilea let the subject lie unnoticed until it went away. He finished his ale and waved the bottle at the waiter.

  “Women are trouble,” Hartog mumbled.

  “I heard,” said Killilea.

  “I like to know where I stand,” Hartog said reflectively. “Like if I have a girl, I like to know is she my girl or not.”

  “When you say your girl,” asked Killilea, “what do you mean?”

  “Well, you know. She’s not playing around.”

  “Do you talk about women all the time?” Killilea demanded with some irritation.

  Hartog answered mildly, in his uninsulted way, “I guess I do. Does it make you mad, your girl two-timing you? I mean,” he added quickly and apologetically, “say you have a girl and she does play around.”

  “It wouldn’t happen,” Killilea said bluntly. “Not to me.”

  “You mean any woman does that to you, you’ll throw her out?”

  “That’s not what I mean,” said Killilea. He pushed back a little and let the waiter set out the steak and the two bottles of ale.

  “Fidelity,” said Hartog. “What about fidelity? You don’t think it’s a good thing?”

  “I think it’s a bad thing,” said Killilea.

  “Oh,” said Hartog.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Hartog, in two senses, addressed his steak. With his mouth full, he said, “I had you figured as a man would stick by a woman, whatever.”

  “You figured right.”

  “But you just said—”

  “Look,” said Killilea, “I don’t know what the word ‘fidelity’ was supposed to mean when people first began to use it, but it’s come to mean being faithful, not to a person, but to a set of regulations. It’s a kind of obedience. A woman that brags about fidelity to her husband, or a man that’s puffed up because he’s faithful to his wife—these people are doing what one or two zebras, a few fleas, and millions of dogs do—obey. Point is, they have to be trained to do it. They have to develop a special set of muscles to stay obedient. It’s a—a task. I think it’s a bad thing.”

  “Yeah, but you—”

  “Me,” said Killilea. “If what I have with someone needs no extra set of muscles—if I don’t and couldn’t want anyone else—then I’ll stick with it. Not because I’m obedient. But because I couldn’t do anything else. I’d have to have the extra set of muscles to break away.”

  “Yeah,” said Hartog, “but suppose your girl don’t feel the same way?”

  “Then we wouldn’t have anything. See what I’m driving at? If you have to work at it, it isn’t worth it.”

  “So when you don’t have that kind of a life with someone, what do you do—play the field, I guess, huh?”

  “No,” said Killilea. “I have that kind of a life, or none at all.”

  “Sounds like a lazy man’s way to me,” said Hartog, the timidity of his eyes taking the sting out of the statement.

  Killilea smiled again. “I said I wouldn’t work at it,” he said softly. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t work for it.”

  “So you wait for the one woman you can live like that with,” said Hartog, “and unless you find that one, you pass ’em all up, and if you do find her, you pass up all the others. Right?”

  “Right.”

  Hartog said, “Those regulations you talked about, don’t they call for just that kind of living?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Then what’s the difference?”

  “I guess,” said Killilea, “it’s in the way you feel when you do it because you want to and not because you’re told to.”

  “Oh.”

  “You know, you sound downright disappointed.”

  Hartog met his eyes. “Do I? Well, maybe … I had a chick I thought maybe you should meet. You are alone, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Killilea, and thought of Prue with a pang. Then his eyes narrowed. “You were going on like this last night too. Are you sure you’re in the refrigerator business?”

  “Aw, don’t get salty,” said Hartog. “It’s just I hate to see anybody lonesome when he don’t have to be.”

  “You’re very kind,” said Killilea sourly. “I wish you hadn’t gone to the trouble.”

  “Shucks,” said Hartog. “You’re mad. You shouldn’t get mad. Just wanted to do what I could, and only found out it was wrong by doing it.”

  Killilea laughed, relenting.

  “Killy.…”

  He leapt to his feet. Prue had come in so quietly he had not seen her. But then, she always moved like that.

  “Hello,” said Hartog.

  “I’ll come back later,” said Prue to Killilea.

  With that, Hartog forked in a lump of steak as big as his two thumbs, and rose. “I got to go anyhow,” he said slushily around it. He looked at Killilea, fumbled toward his pocket.

  “Forget it,” said Killilea. “I’ll pick up the tab.”

  “Thanks,” said Hartog. “Thanks a lot. So long.”

  “Good-by,” said Killilea.

  “ ’By,” said Hartog to Prue.

  Prue turned to Killilea. “I hadn’t hoped to see you so early today.”

  Hartog hesitated embarrassedly, then went out through the arch “What’s the matter, Prue?”

  “I don’t like him,” she said in a low voice.

  Killilea remembered, belatedly, Hartog’s account of his fruitIess efforts to get somewhere with the funny little girl with one ear lobe. He had a moment of fury, and quickly molded it into laughter by application of some objectivity.

  “He’s harmless,” he said. “Forget him, Prue. Sit down. Have you had lunch?”

  “I’d like an apple,” she said. “And some toast.”

  He ordered them, deeply pleased in some strange way because it was unnecessary to suggest anything else to her. It was good to know her so well. Soft and strange and so very sure … Prue … he felt a surge of longing that almost blinded him, and he all but put out his arms hungrily to her. But with the impulse came the thought, I know so well that an apple and some toast is her lunch, the only lunch she wants; and I know just as well that she was just that sure when she said she wouldn’t come home.

  He took her hands and put his face close to hers so she could see how serious he was. “Prue, I need help. You’ll help me, won’t you, Prue?”

  “Oh yes.…”

  “I’ll have to talk about ‘important’ things.”

  “I don’t know if I can help with those,” she half-smiled.

  “I’ll have to talk about chemistry.”

  “I won’t understand.”

  “I’ll have to talk about Koala and the others.…”

  “Oh.…”

  “You’ll help me, won’t you?”

  “Killy, I’ll try.”

  “Thank you, Prue.”

  “Why don’t you ever call me ‘darling’ and ‘sweetheart’?”

  “Because ‘Prue’ means all those things and says them better.”

  Prue nodded gravely at his explanation, not flattered, not amused, having asked and received information. She waited.

  “I have a lot of pieces, but not enough,” he began. “I can put some together, but not enough. They make some sense, but not enough.” He lifted his glass and stared at the fine lacework of foam that clung to the inside surface. With one finger he wiped away a little semicircle of it, and then a
nother, until he had the words he needed.

  “Chemistry is a strange country where sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, if you put the right parts on top. When one reaction finishes with blue, and another reaction finishes with hot, and you put the end products together and the result is bluer and hotter than the blue one and the hot one before, that’s synergy.”

  “Synergy,” Prue repeated dutifully.

  “The thing that made me leave chemistry was something so fascinating that I followed it too far, and so complicated that it would take me most of the day to explain it to somebody who knew my branch as well as I do. It’s up a broad highway and sharp left down a little road that no one knows is there, and across a sticky place to a pathway, and then out where no one’s ever been before.

  “That’s an analogy, and so was what I was doing. I was trying to understand what happens chemically throughout the whole sexual process. That’s an orchestration, you know, with more pieces in its music than any conductor ever used. There are subtle and tiny parts to be played by finely made and exquisitely measured chemicals—so much from the strings, so much from the brasses. And there are cues to be followed, so that the flutes are silent until they can pick up the theme the horns give them.

  “And that’s an analogy of an analogy, the music that sweeps on to its climax and is scored from beginning to end. But there are even chemical motifs that aren’t scored, for they happen before the music and after it, in silence. In a man’s head, nestled deep down below and between the halves of his brain, lies a little nubbin which has a strange and wonderful power, for it can take a thought, or the very shadow of a thought, and with it sound an A that can send the whole orchestra rustling and trembling, tuning up. And there are chemical workers who let the curtain down, send the musicians away to do other work—they’re all very talented and can do many things—and pack away the chairs and music stands.

  “In my chemical analogy I made a working model of that process; if the real thing was music, mine was poetry that strove to create the same feelings; if the real thing was the course of a hunting swallow, mine was the trajectory of a hungry stingray.

  “I did it, and it worked, and I should have left it alone. Because through it I found a substance which did to the music what you do when you turn off your phono-amplifier. This substance killed, and it did it just at that great final resolving crescendo. I isolated it because it made the experiment fail and it had to be removed. The experiment then succeeded—but I had found this terrible substance.… I left chemistry.”

  His hands, twined together, crackled suddenly. She touched them to cool them. “Killy, that was just an analogy, though. It wouldn’t work on a person.”

  He looked away from the hands to her face. “The analogy was too clear, too close. Anyone who understood it could follow it through, and apply it. You don’t need a Manhattan Project to make any but the first bomb. All you need after that is a factory. You don’t need scientists—engineers will do. And when they’re done with it, all you need is mechanics.

  “Prue, Prue … it’s synergy, you see? All the products of all the ductless glands, tempered and measured to build the climax, and then the tiny triggering, and the synergistic reaction flooding into the medulla, where a marvelous being lives, telling the heart when to beat, the lungs to expand, even instructing the microscopic fingers of the cilia which nudge the nutrients through the yards of digestive tract. The medulla simply stops, and everything stops. Yes, yes, heart failure,” he almost sobbed.

  “But Killy … you didn’t make any of it!”

  “No, I didn’t. But I found out how, and I want no part of it.”

  “A dream,” she said. “A horror. But—it’s something in a museum. It can’t get out. Poison in a locked cabinet—a guillotine in a picture book—they can’t get out to hurt people, Killy.”

  “You’re my true Prue because you could never in a thousand years see how this could get out and hurt people,” he said thickly. “Because you have your world and you live in it your way, and it doesn’t touch this other, where three billions teem and plan and ferment evil. Let me tell you the ugly thing then.” He wet his lips. “Do you know what would happen with this substance in a world where men can soberly plan the use of such a thing as an H-bomb? I’ll tell you. It would be snatched up. It would be synthesized by the bucket, by the thousand-gallon tank. It would be sprayed out as a mist over human beings and their cities and their land. And then the ghastly thing that has happened to you three times already would happen to thousands, to millions of women. Leibestod—love-death.”

  Her face was chalky. “It was me, then. It’s been done to me.…”

  “No!” he roared. Heads turned all over the restaurant, and that was a blessing, because it brought him into the present where he had to remember appearances and modes and manners, and, remembering, relieve the awful pressure of what he was saying. “This synergy is purely a complex of male functions. The synergic factor would be absorbed painlessly and without warning, through the lungs, through any tiny break in the skin. Then it would lie in wait until just the proper impulse of just the mixture of hormones and enzymes, and all their fractions, set it free. And that is.…”

  “Liebestod,” she whispered.

  “You still don’t realize how devilish this is. Being you, you can’t. You see, it would do more than kill men and put their women through the hell you already know. It would throw a city, a whole nation, a culture, into an unthinkable madness. You know the number of pitiful sicknesses that are traced to frustration. Who would dare to relieve frustration with a ghostly killer like that loose in the land? What of the conflicts within each man, once the thing was defined for him? (And defined it must be, because the people must be warned!) Do you know of the old psychology-class joke, ‘Don’t think of a white horse’? What else could a man think of? He’d be afraid to read, he’d be afraid to sleep, he’d be afraid to be alone, and he’d be afraid to be with others. In a week there would be suicides and mutilations; in two they would start to murder their women to get them out of sight. And all the while no man would truly know whether the sleeping devil lay within him or not. He’d feel it stir and murmur whether it was there or not.

  “And their women would watch this, and slowly understand it. And the little children would watch, and they would never understand it, and perhaps that is the worst thing of all.

  “And this is my accomplishment.”

  Nothing, nothing at all could be said at that time. But she could be with him. She could sit there and let him know she was close, while he lost himself for a long moment in the terrible pictures that flashed and burned across the inner surface of his closed eyelids.…

  At last he could see again. He tried to smile at her, the kind of tortured effort that a woman remembers all her life. “So you can come home with me,” he said shakily.

  “No, Killy.”

  All he did was to close his eyes again.

  “Don’t, Killy, please don’t,” she wept. “Listen to me. Understand me. You didn’t make the factor—but someone has. You say there’s no way of knowing whether it’s within you or not. Well, it was there in three men who died, and it may be in you.”

  “And it may not,” said Killilea hoarsely. “If not—good. And if it is—do you think I’ve wanted to live, this last year and a half?”

  “It doesn’t matter what you want!” she snapped. “Think of me. Think of me, think of yourself dying that way, with me … and each time might be the last, and it would all be a hell where every love-word was a threat.… No, Killy!”

  “What, then? What else?”

  “You have to stop it. There’s got to be a way to stop it. You have a clue—Landey and Karl and Koala. Think, Killy! What had they in common?”

  “You,” he said cruelly.

  Any other woman on earth would have killed him for that. But not Prue. She didn’t even notice it, except as part of the subject in hand. “Yes,” she said eagerly. “Why, the
n? Why me?”

  “I wouldn’t know that.” Almost in spite of himself, his brain began to search, to piece, to discard and rematch. “They were all scientists. Well, not Karl Monck. I don’t know—maybe he was a sort of thought-scientist. A human engineer.”

  “They were all—good,” she said. “Gentle and thoughtful. They truly cared about people.”

  “They were all members of the Ethical Science Board. Pretorio founded it. It’s going to die without them, too.”

  “What was it supposed to do?”

  “Synthesize. Make people understand science—not what it is, but what it’s for. Make scientists in one branch understand scientists in another—keep them working toward the same ends, with the same sense of responsibility. A wonderful thing, but there’s no one left who has both science and ethics to such a degree that the Board can be anything but a social club.”

  Her eyes glowed. This was a thing she could really understand. “Killy, would anyone want to stop work like that?”

  “Only a madman. Why, such a Board could—”

  “I think I know what it could do. What kind of a madman, Killy?”

  He thought about it. “Perhaps the old-time ‘robber-baron’—the international munitions-maker, if he still existed, which he doesn’t, since governments took over the munitions trade.”

  “Or someone who might try to sell it to the highest bidder?”

  “I wouldn’t think so, Prue. A man can get terribly twisted, but I can’t believe a mind capable of reasoning a series of reactions as complex as this one could fail to see consequences. And one very likely consequence is the end of an environment where his riches would mean anything.”

  “Every pathway has a big ‘NO’ sign,” she murmured.

  “That’s what I’ve been living with,” he said bitterly.

  They were silent until Prue said, “They were all like you.”

  “What? Oh—those three … whatever do you mean, Prue? Karl with his deep socio-political insights, me with nothing but bewilderment in the everyday world. Landey, that philosophy of his … oh, Prue! He was a scholar and a humorist; that isn’t me! And Pretorio, your koala—him and his ENIAC brain! No, you couldn’t be more wrong.”