A Saucer of Loneliness

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “He wasn’t a hero,” I said. “He didn’t know you from Adam and didn’t care until you spilled to him.”

  Klaus stopped his pacing and slowly turned toward me. “Do you believe that?”

  “Why not? That’s what happened.”

  He came and sat beside me, looking at me as if I had turned into a two-headed giraffe. “You know, I’ve told that to six million different people and you’re the first one who ever believed it. What did you say your name was? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “Conway,” I said.

  “I’m glad you came,” he said. For him, that was really something.

  He shoved back so he could lean against the wall and gave me a cigarette. “What do you want to know?”

  “Why you did it.”

  He looked at me angrily, and I added quickly, “Not about the atom secrets. About the spill.”

  The angry look went away, but he didn’t say anything. I pushed a bit. “You never made another mistake. Nobody in history ever operated as quietly and cleverly as you did. No one in the world suspected you, and as far as I’ve been able to discover no one was even about to. So you suddenly find yourself at a party with a C.I.A. man, walk over, and sing. Why?”

  He thought about it. “It was a good party,” he said, after a bit. Then, “I guess I figured the game had gone on long enough, that’s all.”

  I snorted.

  “What’s that for?” he wanted to know.

  “You don’t really believe that.”

  “I don’t?”

  “You don’t,” I said positively. “That’s just something you figured out after it happened. What I want to know is what went on in your head before it happened.”

  “You know a hell of a lot about how I think,” he said sneeringly.

  “Sure I do,” I said, and when he was quiet, I added, “Don’t I?”

  “Yeah,” he growled. “Yeah.” He closed his eyes to think about it, and then said, “You just asked me the one thing I don’t know. One second I was sitting there enjoying myself, and the next I was backing that goonboy into the corner and telling him about my life of sin. It just seemed a good idea at the time.”

  The guard came then to let me out. “Thanks for coming,” Klaus said.

  “That’s all right. You’re sure you can’t tell me?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “Shall I come back? Maybe after you think about it for a while.…”

  He shook his head. “Wouldn’t do no good,” he said positively. “I know, because I haven’t thought about anything else much since it happened. But I’m glad somebody believes it, anyway.”

  “So long. Drop me a note if you figure it out.”

  I don’t know if he ever did. They burned him a few days later. I never got a note.

  I grabbed another name from the list I’d run up. Willy Simms. Song writer.

  I went into a music shop and asked the man if he had a record of Cry for Clara. He looked as if he’d found root beer in a bock bottle. “Still?” he breathed with a sort of weary amazement, and went and got the record.

  “Look,” I told him, “I think this platter is the most awful piece of candy corn that ever rolled out of the Alley.” I don’t often explain myself to people, but I couldn’t have even a total stranger think I liked it.

  He leaned across the counter. “Did you know,” he said in a much friendlier tone of voice, “that Guy Lombardo is cutting it this week?”

  I shared his tired wonder for a long moment, and then got out of there.

  One and three-quarter million copies sold and still moving, and yet Willy Simms still lived in a place with four flights of stairs up to it. I found the door and leaned against the frame for a while, blowing hard. When the spots went away from my eyes, I knocked. A wrinkled little man opened the door.

  “Is Willy Simms here?”

  He looked at me and down at the flat record envelope I held. “What’s that?”

  “Cry for Clara,” I said. He took it out of my hand and asked me how much I paid for it. I told him. He held the door open with his foot, scooped up a handful of change from an otherwise empty bookshelf, and counted out the price into my hand. Then he broke the record in two on his thigh, put the pieces together and broke them again, and slung them into the fireplace at his right. “I’m Willy Simms,” he said. “Come on in.”

  I went in and stood just inside. I didn’t know what this little prune would do next. I said, “My name’s Tom—”

  “Drop your hat there,” he said. He crossed the room.

  “I just dropped in to—”

  “Drink?” he asked.

  Since I never say no to that, and didn’t have to say yes because he was already pouring, I just waited.

  He came smiling with a glass. He had good teeth.

  “Bourbon,” he said. “A man’s drink. Knew the minute I saw you you were a bourbon man.”

  I very much prefer rye. I said, “Once in a while—”

  “Sure,” he said. “Nothing like Bourbon. Sit down.”

  “Mr. Simms,” I said.

  “Willy. Nobody ever called me mister. Used to be I wasn’t worth a ‘mister.’ Now I’m too good for it.” He salvaged his modesty as he said this with a warm grin. “Maybe you think I shouldn’t of busted your record.”

  “Well,” I smiled, “I thought it a bit strange.”

  “I don’t have a copy here and I won’t let one in. Two reasons,” he barked, making a V with shiny-dry, bony fingers. “First, I don’t like it. What I specially don’t like is the way people try to make me sit and listen to it and tell me how good this part is and that part, and where did I ever get the idea of going from the sub-dominant into an unrelated minor. Yeah, that’s what one of them wanted to know.”

  “I remember that part,” I said. “It’s—”

  “Second,” said Willy Simms, “every time I bust one of those records it reminds me I can afford to do it, and I like to be reminded.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s—”

  “Besides,” he said, “any time I bust one, the party walks out of here and buys another. It ain’t the royalty, you understand. It’s the score I’m running up. They tell me it’ll sell two and a quarter million.”

  “Two and a—”

  “You’ve finished your drink,” he said. He took it out of my hand and filled it again. I wished it was rye, raised it to him and then sipped. “Willy,” I began.

  “I never wrote a song before,” Willy said.

  “Yes,” I answered. “So I—”

  “And I’m going to tell you something I ain’t told nobody else. I’m going to tell it to you, and from now on, I just decided, I’m going to tell everybody.”

  He leaned toward me excitedly. I realized that he was boiled. I knew instinctively that it hadn’t made any difference in him; he was probably this way cold sober too. He was obviously waiting for me to say something, but by this time I didn’t want to spoil anything.

  “So I’ll tell you first, and it’s this: I’m never going to write another song, either.”

  “But you’ve just begun to—”

  “There’s a good reason for it,” he said. “Since you ask me, I’ll tell you. I ain’t going to write another song because I can’t. It ain’t that I don’t read or write music. They say Leadbelly couldn’t read music either. And it ain’t that I don’t want to. I want to, all right. But did you ever hear the old saying lightning never strikes twice in the same place?”

  That I could match. “Sure, and they say it’s always darkest before the dawn, too, but that doesn’t—”

  “The real reason,” said Willy Simms, “is this.” He paused dramatically. “I’m tone deaf. I couldn’t carry a chord in a keyster. Do you see a piano here, or even a harmonica?”

  “Listen,” I said, “no one who was tone deaf could have—”

  “Lightning,” he said gravely. “It struck, that’s all. Way down inside me was one little crumb called Cry for Clara, and
the lightning struck and drove it out. But there was just the one little crumb there, and now there is no more.”

  “Shucks,” I said. “Maybe—”

  “And I could be wrong even about that,” he said morosely. “I don’t really believe even the little crumb was there. What I actually did just can’t be done, not by me, anyway. Like a lobster writing a book. Like a phonograph playing a pizza pie. Like us not having another drink.”

  He demonstrated the impossibility of his last remark. I said, “There are certain things a man can do and certain things—”

  “Like a trip back to one of Beck’s parties,” he said. “Some things just can’t happen.” He glowered at me suddenly. “You don’t happen to be a friend of this Beck? This is the guy made me hate myself.”

  “Me? Why, I—”

  “If you were, I’d throw you right down those stairs out there, big as you are.” He half rose, and for a split second I was genuinely alarmed. He was one of those people who, in speaking of anger, acts it out, pulsing temples, narrowed eyes and all. But he sank back and recovered his disarming smile. “I been doing all the talking. What was it you came to see me about?”

  I opened my mouth, and hesitated. To my amazement, he waited. “I just dropped up to sort of.…” I paused. He nodded encouragingly. “To find out about—” I began, then stopped.

  “I see everybody,” he confided. “Some people, now, they pick and choose who comes in. Not me.”

  I was at the door with my hat, which I’d picked up on the way. “Thanks for the dr—”

  “Well, don’t rush off.”

  I searched valiantly for the one word which might serve me, and found it. “Goodbye,” I said, and whipped through the door. I could hear Willy Simms’ muffled voice through the panel: “All right, I’ll finish your drink if you’re in such a damn hurry.”

  All the way down the stairs I could hear him, though I could no longer distinguish his words. Once he laughed. I got to the sidewalk and turned left. There was a man standing by a tree a few yards down the street, curbing a dog. “Hey,” I said.

  He turned toward me, raising his eyebrows. “Who—me?”

  I tapped his shoulder with my left index finger. “New York would have the largest telephone book in the world,” I said, “if they didn’t have to break it into five sections.”

  He said, “Huh?”

  “Don’t mind me,” I told him, “I just wanted to see if I could say a whole sentence all the way through.” I tipped my hat and walked on. At the corner I looked back. He was still standing there, staring at me. When he saw me turn he called, “Whaddaya—wise?” I just waved at him and went home.

  “Beck,” I said into the phone, “I want to see you.” “Sure,” he said. “You’re coming over Saturday, aren’t you?”

  “Uh … yes. But I want to see you before that.”

  “It’ll wait,” he said easily.

  “No, it won’t,” I said. There must have been something special in my voice because he asked me if anything was the matter.

  “I don’t know, Beck,” I said honestly. “I mean, something is, but I don’t know what.” I had an idea suddenly. “Beck, can I bring someone to the party?”

  “You know you can, Tom. Anyone you like.”

  “My brother-in-law Hank.”

  There was a long silence at the other end. Then, in a slightly strained voice, Beck said, “Why him?”

  “Why not?”

  The silence again. Then, as if he had had a brainwave, Beck said easily, “No reason. If he wants to come, bring him.”

  “Thanks. Now, about seeing you before. How about tonight?”

  “Tom, I’d love to, but I’m tied up. It’ll wait till Saturday, won’t it?”

  “No,” I said. “Tomorrow?”

  “I’m out of town tomorrow. I’m really very sorry, Tom.”

  Abruptly, I said, “It’s about the lowest common denominator.”

  “What?”

  “Your parties,” I said patiently. “The people who go to them.”

  He laughed suddenly. “The one thing they have in common is that they have nothing in common.”

  “That I know,” I said. “I meant the people who used to go to your parties and don’t any more.”

  The silence, but much shorter this time. “I’m looking at my book,” he said. “Maybe I could squeeze in a few minutes with you tomorrow.”

  “What time?” I said, keeping the humorless grin out of my voice.

  “Two o’clock. Kelly’s all right?”

  “At the bar. I’ll be there, Beck, and thanks.”

  I hung up and scratched my chin. Lowest common denominator?

  Hank’s phrase, that was. Hank. The guy who’d put me on to this weird business. The guy who’d told me that if things happened to you at Beck’s parties, you didn’t go back. The guy who said he was never going back.

  And wouldn’t say why.

  Well, if I had anything to do with it he’d be back.

  Opie, Lila Falsehaven, Klaus, Willy Simms, Hank. Each had done something they shouldn’t—maybe couldn’t was the word—have done. Each would not—could not?—go back. Sometimes the thing was just silly, like Lila Falsehaven’s dirty story. Sometimes it was deadly, like Klaus’s crazy break.

  Well, I told myself, keep plugging at it. Get enough case histories and a basic law will show itself. Avogadro worked up a fine theory about the behavior of gas molecules because he had enough molecules to work with. Sociologists struggle toward theories without enough numbers to work with, and they make some sort of progress. If I worked hard enough and lived long enough, maybe I could pile up a couple hundred million case histories of people who didn’t go to Beck’s parties any more, and come out with an answer.

  Meanwhile, I’d better talk to Hank.

  This time I went to his office and closed the door. He picked up the phone and said, “Sue, don’t ring this thing until I tell you.… I know, I know. I don’t care. Tell him to wait.” Then he just lounged back and looked at me.

  “Hank,” I said, “about this assignment. How much are you willing to help me?”

  “All the way.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Saturday night you have a date.”

  “I have? Where?”

  “Beck’s.”

  He sat upright, his eyes still on my face. “No.”

  “That’s what you mean by ‘all the way’?” I asked quietly.

  “I said I’d help you. Me going there—that wouldn’t help anything. Besides, Beck wouldn’t hold still for it.”

  “Beck told me to bring you.”

  “The hell he did!”

  “Look, Hank, when I tell you—”

  “Okay, okay, cool down, will you? I’m not calling you a liar.” He pulled at his lip. “Tell me exactly what you said about it and what he said. As near as you can remember it.”

  I thought back. “I asked him if I could bring someone and he said sure. Then I mentioned your name and he—well, sort of hesitated. So I wanted to know why not, and he came off it right away. Said ‘If he wants to come, bring him.’ ”

  “The foxy little louse!” Hank said from between clenched teeth.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Hank got up, smacked his fist into his palm. “He meant exactly what he said, Tom. Bring me—if I want to come. Conversely, if I don’t want to come, don’t bring me. I don’t want to, Tom.”

  “Not even in the process of ‘going all the way’ to help me?” I asked sarcastically.

  He said tightly. “That’s right.” I must have looked pretty grim, because he tried to explain. “If I could be sure it would break the case, Tom, I’d do it no matter what. If you can convince me that that one single act on my part is all you need, why, I’m your boy. Can you do that?”

  “No,” I said in all honesty. “It might help like crazy, though. All right,” I conceded reluctantly. “If you don’t want to go, you won’t, and that’s that. Now—short of that, will you help?”
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  “Absolutely,” he said relievedly.

  Then I aimed a forefinger at him and barked “Okay. Then you’ll tell me what happened to you there, and why you won’t go back. You’ll tell me now, and you won’t even try to wriggle out of it.”

  It got real quiet in the office then. Hank’s eyes half-closed, and I had seen that sleepy look before. Every time I had, somebody had gotten himself rather badly hurt.

  “I should have known better,” he said after a while, “than to put a real reporter on something that concerned me. You really want that information?”

  I nodded.

  “Tom,” he said, and his voice was almost a lazy yawn, “I’m going to punch you right in the middle of your big fat mouth.”

  “For asking you a businesslike question that you made my business?”

  “Not exactly,” Hank said. “I’m going to tell you, and you’re going to laugh, and when you laugh I’m going to let you have it.”

  “I haven’t laughed at any of this yet,” I said.

  “And you still want to know.”

  I just waited.

  “All right,” he said. He came around his desk, balled up his fist, and eyed my face carefully. “I went to one of Beck’s parties, and right in the middle of the proceedings I wet my pants.”

  I bit down hard on the insides of my cheeks, but I couldn’t hold it. I let out a joyful whoop. Then I caromed off the water cooler, slid eight feet on the side of my head, and brought up against the wall. A great cloud of luminous fog rolled in, swirled, then gradually began to clear. I sat up. There was blood on my mouth and chin. Hank was standing over me, looking very sad. He dropped a clean handkerchief where I could reach it. I used it, then got my feet under me.

  “Damn it, Tom, I’m sorry,” he said. The way he said it I believed him. “But you shouldn’t’ve laughed. I told you you shouldn’t.”

  I went to the desk-side chair and sat down. Hank drew me some water and brought it over. “Dip the handkerchief,” he ordered. “Tom, this’ll make more sense to you when you have a chance to think it over. Why don’t you cut out?”

  “I don’t have to, I guess,” I said with difficulty. “I guess if a thing like that happened to.…”