Thunder and Roses

by Theodore Sturgeon

  He lay back almost drowsily, soaking in Lois’s presence as if she were the sun and from her he were gradually acquiring a sort of tan.

  Then they were alone in the room, when Beverly went to the kitchen, and then Beverly was wailing something about ice, oh dear, but the Johnsons in nine will have some, no don’t bother I’ll be right back; the screen door in the kitchen slammed and Beverly’s quick feet went bam bam bam down the back steps, and ceased to exist as they encountered pine needles; all this in a brace of moments, and he was alone with Lois.

  He rose and went to the couch and sat where its corner touched the arm of the easy chair. It seemed to take all the energy he had; he wanted a cigarette, he wanted to speak. He could do nothing.

  After a silent time he felt Lois’s gaze on him. He turned to her quickly and she dropped her eyes. He was glad, because their heads were so close, and he had never examined her this way, slowly. He wet his lips. He said, “Only ten days.”

  She made an interrogative syllable.

  “Knowing you,” he said. He rose suddenly and crossed in front of her. He put one knee on the broad arm of her chair so that his foot was by the back. He sat back on his heel, his other foot steadying him on the floor. She stayed just as she was, looking down at her long brown hands. “I want to tell you something, Lois.”

  A small frown appeared and disappeared on her smooth forehead. She did not raise her eyes.

  “It’s something I’ve never told even to … never told anyone.”

  Lois moved a little. She did not raise her face, but now he had a three-quarter view of her profile. She waited, still as a dewdrop.

  “The night when we arrived. You made coffee and I sat at the table. You came up behind me to put something down.

  “You touched me.”

  He closed his eyes, and put his arm across his chest and his hand high on his own shoulder. “Something … happened,” he said, with an unaccountable difficulty.

  Yancey was, in a small way, an engineer. He began abruptly to explain, in didactic tones, “It wasn’t static electricity. It couldn’t have been. It was pouring rain outside and the air was humid, not dry. You were on the bare floor in your bare feet; it wasn’t one of those deep-pile-rug phenomena. So it wasn’t anything …” He opened his eyes, swallowed. “Static, or anything like that,” he managed. Then he was quiet, watching her.

  Her face, the flexible mask, was breaking up like an ice floe in a sudden warm strong current. Her brow was like a snowbank with the marks of a kitten’s claws on it. There was a tear drop on her left cheek, and the streak of a tear on her right, and her teeth were driving into her lower lip. The corners of her mouth were turned upward, precisely as they would be in a smile, and there was a delicate pucker in the flesh of her chin. She made not a sound. She rose, her eyes seizing his and holding them as she backed to the door. There she turned and ran out into the dark.

  When Beverly came back he was still half-crouched, balancing on the arm of the chair. “Why—where’s Lois?”

  “She left,” he said heavily.

  Beverly looked at him. She looked at his eyes, quickly at his hairline, his mouth, and again at his eyes. Then she went into the kitchen and he heard the ice she was carrying fall explosively into the sink. She called out, “Is anything the matter, Yancey?”

  “Nothing’s the matter,” he said, getting up.

  She said, “Oh.” They cleared up the glasses and ashtrays and went to bed. Lois was not mentioned. Nothing was mentioned. They went about the ritual of retiring in silence. When the lights were out he said, “I’ve had enough of this place. Let’s go home in the morning. Early.”

  She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “If you want to.”

  He thought she slept badly. He did not sleep at all.

  In the morning he drove furiously. For the first twenty miles he could not understand what he felt; then he began to understand that it was anger. For another fifty miles he could find no direction for the anger; none of the people involved had, after all, done anything, so how could there be anger?

  Occasionally he glanced at Beverly. Ordinarily she sat back, looking forward at the sky, sideways to scenery, or inward to whatever it was she communed with during those silent times they spent together. This morning, however, she sat straight and kept her eyes on the road ahead, which made him aware that he was driving too fast and which annoyed him beyond description. Childishly, he increased both his speed and his anger.

  And at last, with a feeling that approached relief, he found something to be angry at.

  Beverly.

  Why wouldn’t she say, “Slow down!” Why had she agreed to let Lois come to their cabin? Why had she gone on blandly being herself this whole time, while he was tearing himself apart inside? Why hadn’t she even questioned him when he decided so abruptly to leave? “If you want to,” she’d said. “If you want to.” What kind of self-respect is that?

  Or—maybe she just didn’t care.

  If you want to … for the first time he realized that this was her code, her basic philosophy of life. They had red curtains in the living-room. They had always had red curtains in the living-room. Well, he liked red curtains. He’d said so. She had put up red curtains.

  He glanced at her. She was watching the road tautly. He squeezed down a bit more on the accelerator.

  The place they lived in, the job he kept; the food they ate and probably the clothes she wore; were they really chosen because they were what he wanted?

  Were they what he wanted?

  Should he have what he wanted?

  Why not? Beverly had.

  He laughed, making Beverly start violently. He shook his head at her, which meant either “I won’t tell you” or “Mind your own business.” He had disqualified himself from finding any flaw in this new and breath-taking conclusion and it made him exultant. He enjoyed speed in his exultation, and control. He sent the car howling through a deep cut in the crest of a hill, and around the blind turn on the other side, which is where he collided with the space ship and was killed.

  As it will at times in the wake of a hurricane, the wind died. Less tractable, the sea punished the cliff unabated. The night was as noisy, but the noise was so different it was as shocking as sudden silence. In it, Lois twisted and angrily rammed her cigarette into the ashtray on the night table. With a crisp angry rustle of sheets, she turned her back and then sighed. The sound was only half vocalized, but such a voice propagates more like light than like sound. Beverly came hurtling up out of slumber and flashed free like a leaping fish, only to fall back and swirl near the under surfaces of sleep. She raised her head, turning it as if seeking, but her eyes were closed. “Hm?” she said sleepily. Then her face dropped to Yancey’s chest again and she was still.

  What I should do, thought Yancey wildly, is to sit her up and slap her awake and say, “Look, Bev, you know what? I got killed that morning when we had the accident, I was dead altogether, the late Yancey Bowman, r. i. p., and when they put me back together I was different. For two years now you’ve been living with a man with a mind that never sleeps and never makes mistakes and does … can do … anything it wants. So you can’t expect ordinary conduct from me, Bev, or rational behavior based on any reason you can understand. So if I do anything that … that hurts you, you mustn’t be hurt. Can’t you understand that?”

  Of course she wouldn’t understand.

  Why, he thought desperately, when they put me back together, didn’t they iron out that little human wrinkle which made it possible for Pascal to make that remark about the heart having “reasons which reason does not know”?

  He snorted softly. Heart. Heck of a name for it.

  He lay on his back and watched the motion of surf-scattered moon on the ceiling. He let his mind float into the vague shadows, be one with them away from, above, beyond his insupportable, insoluble problem. And gradually he found himself back there again, two years ago—perhaps because of the momentum of his previous thinking,
perhaps because, in reliving a time when there was Lois (and he could stand it) and a time when there was Lois (and he could not), it was a welcome thing to go into a time where Lois, and Beverly, and for that matter Yancey Bowman, had little significance.

  As the space ship lifted, it retracted its berthing feet; it was one of these which Bowman’s sedan struck. The car continued under the ship, and the edge of the flat berthing foot sliced it down to the belt line, leaving a carmine horror holding the wheel. The ship hovered momentarily, then drifted over to the side of the road where the mangled automobile had come to rest. Directly above the car, it stopped. An opening appeared in the bottom of the ship and dilated like a camera iris. There was a slight swirl of dust and leaves, and then what was left of the car rose from the ground and disappeared into the ship. The ship then slid away to the clearing in the woods where it had lain hidden during its stay on Earth. Here it settled. It camouflaged itself and lay outwardly silent.

  Exactly what was done to him, Yancey could not know. He was made aware of the end results, of course. He knew that what had been injured had been repaired, and that in addition certain changes had been made to improve the original. For example, his jaw hinges had been redesigned to eliminate a tendency to dislocation, and a process was started which would, in time, eliminate the sebaceous cysts which had kept forming and occasionally inflaming ever since he was an adolescent. His vermiform appendix was gone—not excised, but removed in some way which would indicate, in the event of an autopsy, that it had never formed in the first place. His tonsils had been replaced for reasons which he could not understand except that they were good ones. On the other hand such anomalies as his left little toe, which since birth had been bent and lay diagonally across its neighbor, and a right eye which wandered slightly to the right when he was fatigued—these were left as they had originally been. The eye was one of the most interesting items, he thought later; the toe had simply not been improved, but the eye had been restored with its flaw. His teeth, too, were as irregular as before, and contained fillings in the same places, though he knew there had been little enough left of them. In sum, he had been altered only in ways which would not show.

  He did know, however, why these things had been done. There was inside that ship an aura of sympathy mixed with remorse unlike anything he had ever felt. Another component was respect, an all-embracing respect for living things. Somewhere near where he lay in the ship’s laboratory was a small covered shelf containing a cicada, two grasshoppers, four summer moths, and an earthworm, all casualties in his accident. Their cell structure, organic functions, and digestive and reproductive processes were under study as meticulous as that which was being lavished on him. For them restitution was to be made also, and they would be released in as good condition as this unthinkably advanced science could make them. The improvements seemed to be in the nature of a bonus, an implemented apology.

  And, of course, there was no denying that as long as such repayment was made the alien footsteps on Earth were fairly obliterated. Yet Yancey was always certain that this was not a primary motive, and that the aliens, whoever they were, wherever they came from, would have sacrificed anything, themselves included, rather than interfere with terrestrial life.

  He was to find out later that they had done the same things with his car as they had done with him. He had not the slightest doubt that if they had wished they could have rebuilt the old sedan into a gleaming miracle, capable of flight and operable forever on a teacup-full of fuel. He found it looking as it had always looked, even to rust spots and a crinkling around the windshield where moisture had penetrated the laminations of the safety glass. Yet there was a little more pickup, a little more economy; the brakes were no longer grabby in wet weather; and the cigarette lighter heated up in fewer seconds than before.

  Who were they? Where had they come from? What were they doing here and what did they look like?

  He was never to know. He knew precisely as much as they permitted. He even knew why he knew as much as he did. They could restore his crushed head and shoulder, and did. They could make slight improvements, and did. But even they could not predict every situation in which he might find himself in the future. It was deeply important to them, and it would be to him, to conceal the changes which had been made, or the reciprocal impacts between him and his society might greatly affect both. The best concealment would be his full knowledge of what had been done, and a solemn injunction to divulge nothing of it to anyone. That way he could never innocently perform public miracles and then be at a loss to explain.

  What miracles?

  Most miraculous, of course, was the lowered impulse-resistance of his nervous system, including the total brain. He need no longer run over and over a thought sequence, like a wheel making a rut, to establish a synapse and therefore retain knowledge. He had super-fast physical reactions. He had total recall (from the time of his release from the ship) and complete access to his previous memory banks.

  Yet a prime directive among his “surgeons” seemed to have been a safeguarding of what his world called Yancey Bowman. Nothing—nothing at all—was done to change Yancey Bowman into something or someone else. He functioned a little better now, but he functioned as Yancey Bowman, just as the changes in his digestive system were basically improvements rather than replacements. He could get more energy out of less food, even as he could breathe higher concentrations of CO2 than he could before. He could be, and was, Yancey Bowman more efficiently than ever before. Hence nothing was changed … even (or especially) the turmoil which was uppermost in his mind when he died.

  So it was that after death had struck one Friday morning, the same morning hour on Sunday revealed a strange sight (but only to some birds and a frightened chipmunk). Slipping out of earth itself, the ship spread topsoil where it had lain, covered it with a little snow of early-fallen leaves, and shouldered into the sky. It wheeled and for a moment paralleled the deserted highway below. The opening on its belly appeared, and down through the shining air swept an aging two-door sedan, its wheels spinning and its motor humming. When it touched the roadway there was not so much as a puff of dust, so perfectly were wheels and forward motion synchronized.

  The car hurtled through a cut in a hilltop and around the blind turn on the other side, and continued on its way, with Yancey Bowman at the wheel, seething inwardly at the unreachable stupidities of his wife.

  And was there a moment of shock when he found himself alive and on his way unharmed, in his undamaged automobile? Did he turn and crane to see the dwindling speck in which his life had ended and begun again? Did he pull over to the side, mop his brow, and in a cascade of words exult over his new powers? Did Beverly demand to know what had happened, and would she not go out of her mind when she found that Friday was Sunday now, and that for her there had been no Saturday this week?

  No, and no, and no. There was no shock, because he was certain to his marrow that this was the way it would be; that he would say nothing and that he must not look back. As for Beverly, her silence on the matter was proof enough that her convictions would suit the situation as well.

  So he drove too fast and was too quiet, and his anger bubbled away until at length it concentrated into something quieter and rather uglier. As it formed, he drove more sensibly, and Beverly relaxed and leaned back, turning now and again to inspect the shutters or the curtains in a house they passed, watching the sky up ahead while she thought her own thoughts.

  If you could call them thoughts, he reflected.

  The product of his anger was a cold projection, and took the form of an unspoken dictum to Beverly. He found that with his new reflexes he could give the matter his full attention, since now his hands seemed quite able to drive by themselves, and even, it appeared, to read route signs.

  So, echoing noiselessly in his mind, this structure built: This is not the end, Beverly, because the end must have been long since. You are not a woman living her life; you are a half-person living mine. Your ambition
could not push me ahead, your senses could not know when I was in torture, your taste is not your own, and your abilities are limited to a dull search for what might please me and a trial-and-error effort to get it for me. But aside from me you are nothing. You do not and you could not earn your own living. Cast out on your own resources you could not so much as fill a receptionist’s chair, or even run a summer resort. If nothing whatever had happened to me during these three days, what we have could never be called “marriage” again, not by me. I have looked into the sun, Beverly; I have flown; I can never crawl the mud with you again. I was too much for you before; what then am I now?

  So it ran, turning and elaborating itself but always returning to a silent scornful chant, buoyed up by glimpses of freedom and far horizons. After about an hour of this he sensed her gaze, and turned to look at her. She met his eyes and smiled her old smile. “It’s going to be a lovely day, Yance.”

  He turned abruptly back to the road. Something in his throat demanded attention, and he found that he could not swallow it. His eyes stung. He sat, unwillingly examining his feelings, and slowly it came to him that among his other traits, that characteristic called empathy—the slipping on of other people’s shoes, the world seen through the eyes of others—this quality too had suffered a sea-change and was heightened more than was comfortable. What, to Beverly, had happened? Numbly, perhaps, she had been aware that something was amiss at the lake. He seriously doubted if she had identified the something. She’d known it was important because she’d okayed their leaving so abruptly without asking any questions. But what was this “lovely day” business? Did she think that because their backs were turned to the unidentified threat, it had ceased to exist? Why, that must be exactly what she thought!