Thunder and Roses

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “Robin, you’re crazy. You could have—”

  “No, Peg,” said Warfield gently. “Don’t try to make him regret it. Robin … you won’t mind if I call you Robin … what led you to design the rotors so that they phase over and under the twentieth-of-a-second sight persistence level, so that the eye is drawn to it and then the mind has to concentrate on it?”

  “I remember Zeitner’s paper about that at the Society for Mental Sciences,” said Peg in an awed tone. “ ‘A brilliant application of optics to psychology.’ ”

  “It wasn’t brilliant,” said Robin impatiently. “I didn’t even know that that was what it was doing. I just messed with it until I liked it.”

  A look passed between Warfield and Peg. It said, “What would he accomplish if he ever really tried?”

  Warfield shook his head and perched on the edge of a table. “Now listen to me, Robin,” he said, gently and seriously. “I don’t think Peg’ll mind my telling you this; but it’s important.”

  Peg colored slightly. “I think I know what you’re going to say. But go ahead.”

  “When she first told me about you, and what she wanted to try, I was dead set against it. You see, we know infinitely more about the ductless glands nowadays than we did—well, even this time last year. But at the same time, their interaction is so complex, and their functions so subtle that there are dozens of unexplored mysteries. We’re getting to them, one by one, as fast as they show themselves and as fast as we can compile data. The more I learn the less I like to take chances. When Peg just told me about you as a talented young man whose life history was a perfect example of hyper-thymus—infantilism, I think was the word she used—”

  “Da! Also goo!” laughed Robin. “She might have been kind enough to call it, say, a static precocity.”

  “Please don’t tease me about it, Robin.”

  “Oh. Sorry. Go on, Mel.” Peg smiled at Warfield’s slight start. She had done the same thing, for the same reason, the first time Robin called her “Peg.”

  “Anyhow, I certainly had no great desire to follow her suggestion—shoot you full of hormones and sterones to help you reorganize your metabolism and your psychology. After all, interesting as these cases are, a doctor has to ration his efforts. There are plenty of odd glandular situations walking around in the guise of a human beings. In addition, I had no personal interest in you. I have too much work to do to indulge a Messiah complex.

  “But Peg was persistent. Peg can be very persistent. She kept bringing me late developments. I didn’t know whether you were a hobby or an inverted phobia of hers. With some effort I managed to remain uninterested until she brought me those blood analyses.”

  “I’ll never get over my disappointment about what she did with those blood specimens,” said Robin soberly.

  “Disappointment? Why?”

  “I had hoped she was a vampire.”

  “Go on, Mel. Don’t try to keep up with him.”

  “It wasn’t until I found out that you wrote ‘The Cellophane Chalice’—and mind you, I never did like poetry, but that was different—and that you also”—he ticked them off on his fingers—“wrote the original continuity for that pornographic horror of a comic strip ‘Gertie and the Wolves,’ did the pipe-cleaner figurines that were photographed to illustrate ‘The Tiny Hans Anderson,’ dropped a sackful of pine oil into the fountain at Radio City purely because you wanted to see thirty thousand gallons of bubbles, got thrown in the pen for it and while there saved the lives of two prisoners and a guard by slugging it out with a homicidal maniac in the bull pen; composed ‘The Lullaby Tree’ … by the way, how was it Rollo Vincente got all the credit—and the money—for that song? It was Number One on the hit list for sixteen weeks.”

  “He did a swell job,” said Robin. “He wrote it down for me.”

  “Robin can’t read music,” Peg said tiredly.

  “Oh Lord,” said Warfield reverently. “I also learned that you invented that disgusting advertising disease ‘Stoplight Acne’ and gave it for free to an advertising copywriter—”

  “Who is now making twenty thousand a year,” said Peg.

  “That guy was desperate,” said Robin. “Besides, he gave me my gold trumpet.”

  “Which is in hock,” said Peg.

  “Oh, why go on?” said Warfield. “Most important, I learned that you didn’t eat regularly, that you suffered from recurrent eviction, that you continually gave away your possessions, including your overcoats, with such bland illogic that once you spent four months in the hospital with pneumonia and complications—”

  “Four winter months, I might point out,” said Robin. “So help me, I don’t know how I’d have gotten through that winter otherwise. That was well worth the price of an overcoat.”

  “So Peg began to make a social issue of it. She said that you were a fountainhead of art, science, and industry and that the dispersal of your talents was a crime against humanity. At this stage I would be inclined to agree with her even if she weren’t Peg.” Warfield looked at the girl, and the way he did it made Robin grin.

  “So now that we have your cooperation, we’ll go ahead, for the greater honor and glory of humanity and creative genius, as Dr. Wenzell here once phrased it. But I want you to understand that although there is every chance of success, there might be no result at all, or … or something worse.”

  “Like what?”

  “How do I know?” said Warfield sharply, and only then did Peg realize what a strain this was to him.

  “You’re the doctor,” said Robin. Suddenly he walked up to Warfield and touched his chest gently. He smiled. He said, “Mel, don’t worry. I’ll be all right.”

  Peg’s emotional pop-valve let go a hysterical giggle. Warfield turned abruptly away and roughly tore a drawer open and pulled out a thin sheaf of documents. “You’ll have to sign these,” he said roughly. “I’m going to get the solutions ready. Come on, Peg.”

  In the laboratory, Peg leaned weakly against the centrifuge. “Don’t worry, Mel,” she quoted mistily.

  “From the time of Hippocrates,” growled Warfield, “it has been the duty and practice of the physician to do everything in his power to engender confidence in the patient. And he—”

  “Made you feel better.”

  After a long pause Warfield said, “Yes, he did.”

  “Mel, I think he’s right. I think he will be all right. I think that what he has can’t be killed. There’s too much of it!”

  She suddenly noticed that Warfield’s busy hands had become still, though he didn’t turn to look at her. He said, “I was afraid of that.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, I—skip it.”

  “Mel, what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing of any importance—especially to you. It’s just the way you talk about Robin … the way your voice sounds—”

  “That’s utterly ridiculous!”

  Warfield chuckled a little. “Not that I can blame you. Really I can’t. That boy has, without exception, the most captivating—”

  “Mel, you’re being offensive. You certainly know me well enough to know that my interest in Robin English is purely professional—even if I have to include the arts among the professions. Personally he doesn’t appeal to me. Why, he’s a child!”

  “A situation which I shall adjust for you.”

  “That was the n-nastiest thing anyone ever said to me!” she blazed.

  “Oh, Peg.” He came to her, wiping his hands on a towel. He threw it away—a most uncharacteristic gesture, for him—and put his hands gently on her shoulders. She would not meet his eyes. “Your lower lip is twice as big as it ought to be,” he said softly. “I am sorry, darling.”

  “Don’t call me darling.”

  “I lost my good sense. May I ask you to marry me again?”

  “M-marry you again?”

  “Thank the powers for that sense of the ridiculous! May I ask you again? It’s about time.”

  “Let’s see—what
is the periodicity?—You ask me every nineteen days, don’t you?”

  “Aloud,” he said gravely.

  “I—” At last she met his eyes. “No. No! Don’t talk about it!”

  He took his hands off her shoulders. “All right, Peg.”

  “Mel, I wish you wouldn’t keep bringing this up. If I ever change my mind, I’ll speak up.”

  “Yes, he said thoughtfully. “I believe you would.”

  “It’s just that you—Oh Mel, everything’s so balanced now! My work is finally going the way I want it to go, and I just don’t need anything else.” She held up a hand, quickly. “If you say anything about ductless glands I’ll walk out of here and never see you again!”

  “I won’t, Peg.”

  There was a strained silence. Finally Peg said, “Are you almost ready?”

  Mel nodded and went back to the bench. “You can bring him in now.”

  Peg went out into the reception office. Something white and swift swished past her face, went rocketing up into the corner of the ceiling, hovered, and then drifted down to the floor in slow spirals. “What in—”

  “Oh—Sorry, Peg,” Robin said, grinning sheepishly. He went and picked up the white object, and held it out to her. “Tandem monoplane,” he explained. “The Langley principle. If Langley had only had a decent power plant, aviation history would have been drastically different. The thing is really airworthy.”

  “Robin, you’re impossible. Mel’s ready. Where’s the thing he asked you to sign?”

  “Hm-m-m? Oh, that—this is it.”

  “You made that airplane out of it?”

  “Well, I wanted to see if I could do it without tearing the paper. I did, too.” He disassembled the craft busily, and smoothed the papers. “They’re all right, see?”

  “I ought to make you stand in the corner,” she said, half angrily. She looked at him and suddenly, violently, resented Mel for what he had intimated. “Come on, Robin,” she said. She took his hand and led him into the laboratory.

  “Sit down, Robin,” said Warfield without looking up.

  “Per–dition!” said Robin, wide-eyed. “You’ve got more glassware here than the Biltmore Bar. As the hot, cross Bunsen said to the evaporator, ‘Be still, my love.’ ”

  Peg moaned. Warfield said, “And what did the evaporator say to that?”

  “ ‘Thank you very much.’ You see,” said Robin solemnly, “It was a retort courteous.”

  “Do you think,” gasped Peg, “that we’ll be able to put a stop to that kind of thing with these treatments?”

  “Here,” said Warfield, handing him a glass. “Bottoms up.”

  Robin rose, accepted the glass, bowed from the waist, and said, “Well, here’s to champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends. Exit wastrel.” And he drained the glass.

  “Now if you’ll rope him and throw him,” said Warfield, approaching with a hypodermic. Robin sat on the examining table, quite relaxed, as the needle sank into his arm.

  “Never felt a thing,” he said briskly, and then collapsed. Peg caught his head before it could strike the pillow and lowered it gently. She took his wrist. His pulse felt as if it had lost its flywheel.

  “Post-pituitary syncope,” said Warfield. “I half expected that. He’ll be all right. It’s compensated for. There just isn’t any way of slowing down neopituitrin. Watch what happens when the pineal starts kicking up.”

  Peg suddenly clutched at the limp wrist. “He’s … he’s—Oh Mel, it’s stopped.”

  “Hang on, Peg. Just a few more seconds, and it should—”

  Under Peg’s desperate fingers, the pulse beat came in full and strong, as suddenly as if it had been push button turned. With it, Peg began to breathe again. She saw Warfield wipe his eyes. Sweat, probably.

  Robin’s eyes opened slowly, and an utterly beatific expression crossed his face. He sighed luxuriously. “Beautiful,” he said clearly.

  “What is it, Robin?”

  “Did you see it? I never thought of that before. It’s the most perfectly functional, aesthetically balanced thing produced by the mind of man.” Sheer wonder suffused his face. “I saw one!”

  “What was it?”

  “A baseball bat!”

  Warfield’s chin came up. “Well I’ll be … Peg, don’t laugh.” Peg was hardly likely to. “You know, he’s about right?”

  “I’ll think about aesthetics later,” said Peg with some heat. “Is he going to be all right?”

  “That’s all of the immediate reactions that I suspected. There’ll be some accelerated mental states—melancholia and exuberance alternating pretty rapidly and pretty drastically. He’ll have to have some outlet for stepped-up muscular energy. Then he’ll sleep.”

  “I’m glad it’s over.”

  “Over?” said Warfield, and went out. She called after him, but he went straight out through the office.

  Robin sat up and shook his head violently. “How did—”

  Peg took his upper arm. “Sit up, Robin. Up and go.” She raised him, but instead of merely sitting up, he rose and pulled away from her. He paced rapidly down the laboratory, turned and came back. His face held that pitiable, puzzled look, with the deep crease between his brows. He walked past her, his eyes distant; then he whirled suddenly on her. His smile was brilliant. “Peg!” he shouted. “I didn’t expect to see you here!” His eyes drifted past her face, gazed over her shoulder, and he turned and looked around the walls. “Where, incidentally, is ‘here’?”

  “Dr. Warfield’s laboratory.”

  “Mel. Oh … Mel. Yes, of course. I must be getting old.”

  “Perhaps you are.”

  He put his hand on his chest, just below his throat. “What would my thymus be doing about now? Trying to think of something quotable to say as its last words?”

  “It may be some time,” she smiled. “But I imagine it’s on its way out. Get your coat on. I’ll go home with you.”

  “What on earth for?”

  She considered, and then decided to tell him the truth. “You’re full of sterones and hormones and synthetic albuminoids, you know. It isn’t dangerous, but glandular balance is a strange thing, and from the treatment you just got you’re liable to do anything but levitate—and knowing you,” she added, “even that wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “Gosh. I didn’t realize that I might be a nuisance to people.”

  “You didn’t realize … why, there was a pretty fair list of possibilities of what might happen to you in that release you signed.”

  “There was? I didn’t read it.”

  “Robin English, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with you.”

  “Haven’t you already done it?” he shrugged. “What’s the odds? Mel said I’d have to sign it, and I took his word for it.”

  “I wish,” said Peg fervently, “that I could guarantee the change in your sense of values the way I can the change in your hormone adjustment. You’re going to have to be educated! And let this be the first lesson—never sign anything without reading it first! What are you laughing at, you idiot?”

  “I was just thinking how I would stall things if I go to work for some big outfit and have to sign a payroll,” he chuckled.

  “Get your coat,” said Peg, smiling. “And stop your nonsense.”

  They took a taxi, after all. In spite of Robin’s protests, Peg wouldn’t chance anything else after Robin:

  Nearly fainted on the street from a sudden hunger, and when taken to a restaurant got petulant to the point of abusiveness when he found there was no Tabasco in the place, advancing a brilliant argument with the management to the effect that they should supply same to those who desired it even if what the customer had ordered was four pieces of seven-layer cake.

  Ran half a block to give a small boy with a runny nose his very expensive embroidered silk handkerchief.

  Bumped into a lamp-post, lost his temper and swung at it, fracturing slightly his middle phalanx annularis.


  Indulged in a slightly less than admirable remorseful jag in which he recounted a series of petty sins—and some not too petty at that—and cast wistful eyes at the huge wheels of an approaching tractor-trailer.

  Went into gales of helpless laughter over Peg’s use of the phrase “Signs of the times” and gaspingly explained to her that he was suffering from sinus of the thymus.

  And the payoff—the instantaneous composition of eleven verses of an original song concerning one “Stella with the Springy Spine,” which was of far too questionable a nature for him to carol at the top of his voice the way he did. She employed a firmness just short of physical force and at last managed to bundle him into a cab, in which he could horrify no one but the driver, who gave Peg a knowing wink which infuriated her.

  After getting in his rooms—a feat which required the assistance of Landlady Gridget’s passkey, since he had lost his, and the sufferance of a glance of deep suspicion from the good lady—Robin, who had been unnaturally silent for all of eight minutes, shucked off his coat and headed for the studio couch in one continuous movement. He rolled off his feet and onto the couch with his head buried in the cushions.

  “Robin—are you all right?”

  “Mm-m-m.”

  She looked about her.

  Robin’s two-and-kitchenette was a fantastic place. She had never dreamed that the laws of gravity would permit such a piling-up of miscellany. There were two guitars on an easy-chair, one cracked across the head. A clarinet case with little holes punched in it lay on the floor by the wall. Curious, she bent and lifted the lid. It was lined with newspaper, and in it were two desiccated bananas and a live tarantula. She squeaked and dropped the cover.

  Leaning against the far wall was a six-foot-square canvas, unfinished, of a dream-scape of rolling hills and pale feathery trees. She looked away, blinked, and looked back. It could have been a mistake. She sincerely hoped that it was; but it seemed to her that the masses of those hills, and the foliage, made a pretty clear picture of a … a—

  “No,” she whispered. “I haven’t got that kind of a mind!”

  There was a beautifully finished clay figurine standing proudly amongst a litter of plasticine, modeling tools, a guitar tuner and a flat glass of beer. It was a nude, in an exquisitely taut pose; a girl with her head flung back and a rapt expression on her face, and she was marsupial. On the bookcase was a four-foot model of a kayak made of whalebone and sealskin. Books overflowed the shelves and every table and chair in the place. There were none in the sink; it was too full of dishes, being sung to by a light cloud of fruit flies. It was more than she could stand. She slipped out of her coat, moved a fishbowl with some baby turtles in it, and an 8 mm projector, off the drainboard and went to work. After she had done all the dishes and reorganized the china closet, where ivy was growing, she rummaged a bit and found a spray gun, with which she attacked the fruit flies. It seemed to be a fairly efficient insecticide, although it smelled like banana oil and coagulated all over the sink. It wasn’t until the next day that she identified the distinctive odor of it. It was pastel fixatif.