Thunder and Roses

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “He has done many things recently he never did in his life. I tell you, Peg, the responsibility I feel in this matter is a far greater one than anything that could happen to Robin English. If I’m right in all this, I have been instrumental in loosing something rather terrible in the world. And if I’m right and he’s tackling Voisier by playing the man’s own game, the odds are pretty strong that Voisier’s too big for him. In which case—good riddance.” He lowered his voice. “I’m sorry, Peg. Truly I am. I’ve been going round and round in smaller and smaller circles over this thing, and I’ve had enough.”

  Peg was feeling absolutely bewildered. “But I have only just told you about Voisier and this—”

  “I’ve known about it for weeks, Peg. Let the thing take its course.”

  She rose, trembling. “You’re wrong, Mel,” she whispered. “You’ve got to be wrong.”

  “I’m afraid not,” he said sadly. “I sincerely wish I were.”

  “I’ve got to see him.”

  “No, Peg! He might … he … can’t you see that he’s turned into a man who takes what he wants?”

  “Does that make a difference?” Peg asked in a strange voice. “I can’t let this happen to him. I’m going to find out where he is and see him. I’m responsible for this whole horrible thing and so are you. But through your stupid mulish jealousy you’ve argued yourself into blaming him!”

  Warfield went white. “Responsible? He had the seed of this in him all along. He simply never had the courage to do an honestly evil thing until we so generously matured him. Maturity is a strange thing, Peg. Like other riches, it is dangerous in unskilled hands. It isn’t something that can be achieved all in a lump. We gave him a kind of maturity which gathered all the loose threads of his personality into something monolinear—something productive. But we didn’t give him the power to use the years of experience he had had before we got to him. He’s a bulldozer with a skilled idiot at the controls. But he is no longer a glandular case. If you want me to change my attitude at all, prove to me that he is still suffering from imbalance of any kind. That’s in my field. That I can handle.”

  “I’ll have to see him.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “Nobody does. But I’ll find him.”

  “I know where he is. But I will certainly not tell you.”

  “You know?”

  “He came to see me four months ago.” Warfield wet his lips. “He—had a word or two to say about you. He was apparently suffering from some sort of a delusion. He explained carefully to me that he had no use for you, that there was no longer any reason for me to want to … to kill him, and … you don’t seem surprised.”

  “He told me about that the last time I saw him,” she said, shaken.

  “You knew about that?”

  “Did you try to kill him, Mel?”

  “It was an accident, Peg. Really it was. And he compensated for it. Splendidly. I don’t know how he found out about it—the man’s incredibly sharp.”

  Peg felt turned to ice, and her voice was ice as she said, “It was the post-pituitrin excess, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, but that couldn’t have anything to do with this Voisier business. I tell you it was an accident. I didn’t realize that I’d made a mistake in the solutions until after he’d left the office that particular day. It didn’t affect his progress, except temporarily; and when he stopped his treatments, he was practically normal.” He stopped and wet his lips again, and then suddenly ran to her. “Peg! Peg, what’s the matter?” For she had suddenly turned white, and was rocking on her feet. He put an arm about her shoulders and led her back to her chair. She slumped down, shook herself, and looked up at him with a swift, scornful glance that was almost a physical force.

  “How do you dare to call yourself a doctor?” she breathed. She opened her handbag with shaking fingers and took out the photograph Voisier had given her. She handed it to him without glancing at it. “Look at that and tell me he’s not still glandular,” she said.

  He looked, and then stared. “It’s Robin, all right,” he said, and then, with a ghost of his old grin, “Getting to be quite a glamour boy in his old age, hm-m-m?”

  “He is? Have you noticed why?”

  “What am I supposed to look for?”

  “Look at his jaw.”

  “Nice jaw.”

  “You don’t remember Robin. You don’t remember that round baby face.”

  “I wasn’t in love with the man,” Warfield said nastily.

  “He didn’t have much jaw,” she said, her voice quivering. “Can’t you see what’s happening? That used to be Robin, with the charming, chinless face!”

  Warfield’s breath sucked sharply. He walked over to the window and for a long moment stood with his back to her, staring out.

  “What do you diagnose, doctor?” she said acidly.

  “Ac—” he began, and couldn’t make it. He swallowed and coughed. He cleared his throat. He said, “Acromegaly.”

  “Acromegaly,” she echoed sweetly. “His pre-pituitary has gone wild, he’s suffering from hypertrophy of the chin and probably of the hands, and you say he’s not glandular.” Suddenly she was across the room, had spun him about and was clutching his lapels. “What are you going to do? Are you going to let him go on doing whatever crazy thing a glandular imbalance is forcing him to do, so that he’ll be killed by Voisier? Or are you going to stand by while he gets around Voisier some way and then turns into a monster and dies?”

  “I have to think,” said Warfield. “Oh, Peg. Peg—”

  “You can’t think,” she said wildly. “Why do you suppose Voisier stole that book? With what he knows, and with what that book contains, he’ll track Robin down in a matter of hours! Do you really know where he is?”

  “Yes,” Warfield whispered. “A piece of his strange kind of braggadocio. He was defiant, and yet he seemed afraid of me. He promised to keep in touch with me whatever he did, so that if I ever wanted to … kill him I could come and face him with whatever it was. He swore to keep away from you. He has moved four times since he stopped taking the treatments, and each time he has called or written to give me the address. I don’t know why.” Warfield raised his eyes to hers. “I don’t know anything about any of this,” he said brokenly. “It’s all mad. We’re being played like chessmen, Peg, by a lunatic against a devil.”

  “Is he in town?”

  Warfield nodded.

  “Well?”

  Warfield looked at her. She was a statue now, a dark-crowned bloodless figure. “I’ll go with you.”

  “I’ll see him alone.”

  “I’ll go with you all the same, then, and wait.”

  “Very well. Only hurry.”

  Warfield slipped out of his laboratory smock and into a coat without another word. Outside the office he stopped and said, “Peg … please—” but she walked steadily down to the elevators, and he shrugged and followed her.

  They caught a cab almost immediately, and Warfield gave the driver a Riverside address. Peg sat staring blindly ahead of her. Mel slumped in a corner and looked at his wrists, dully.

  Peg broke the silence only once—to ask in a deceptively conversational voice if anything had been learned that she didn’t know about the treatment of acromegaly. Warfield shook his head vaguely. She made a sound, then, like a sob, but when Warfield looked at her she still sat, dry-eyed, staring at the driver’s coat collar.

  They pulled up in front of one of those stately old cell-blocks of apartment houses that perch on the slanted, winding approaches to the Drive. They got out, and a doorman, a bit over life-size, swung open both leaves of a huge plate-glass-and-bronze door to let them into the building.

  “Mr. Wenzell,” said Warfield to a wax-faced desk clerk.

  “What?” said Peg

  “He … it amuses him to use your name,” said Warfield, as if he were speaking out of a mouthful of sal ammoniac.

  “Mr. Wenzell is out,” said the clerk. “Can I t
ake a message?”

  “You can take a message right to Mr. Wenzell, who is not out,” said Warfield. “Tell him his two doctors are here and must see him.”

  “Tell him,” said Peg clearly, “that Margaretta Wenzell is here.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Wenzell,” said the clerk with alacrity.

  “Why must you make this painful as well as unpleasant?” gritted Warfield. Peg smiled with her teeth and said nothing.

  The clerk returned from the phone looking as if he had learned how to pronounce a word he had only seen chalked on fences before. “Fourteen. Suite C. The elevators—”

  “Yes” growled Warfield. He took Peg’s elbow and walked her over to the elevators as if she were a window-dummy.

  “You’re hurting me.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m—a little upset. Do you have to go through with this weird business?”

  She didn’t answer. Instead she said, “Stay down here, Mel.”

  “I will not!”

  She looked at him, and said a thousand words—hot-acid ones—in the sweep of her eyes across his face.

  “Well,” he said, “all right. All right. Tell you what. I’ll give you fifteen minutes and then I’m coming up.” He paused. “Why are you looking at me like that? What are you thinking about?”

  “That corny line about the fifteen minutes. I was thinking about how much better Robin would deliver it.”

  “I think I hate you,” said Warfield hoarsely, quietly.

  Peg stepped into the elevator. “That was much better done,” she said, and pushed the button which closed the doors.

  On the fourteenth floor she walked to the door marked “C” and touched the bell. The door swung open instantly.

  “Come in!” grated a voice. There was no one standing in the doorway at all. She hesitated. Then she saw that someone was peering through the crack at the hinge side of the door.

  “Come in, Peg!” said the voice. It was used gently now, though it was still gravelly. She stepped through and into the room. The door closed behind her. Robin was there, with a gun. He put it away and held out both hands to her. “Peg! It’s so good to see you!”

  “Hello, Robin,” she whispered. Just what gesture she was about to make she would never know for she became suddenly conscious of someone else in the room. She wheeled. There was a girl on the chesterfield, who rose as Peg faced her. The girl didn’t look, somehow, like a person. She looked like too many bright colors.

  “Janice,” said Robin. It wasn’t an introduction. Robin just said the one word and moved his head slightly. The girl came slowly across the room toward him, passed him, went to the hall closet and took out a coat and a hat and a handbag with a long strap. She draped the coat over her arm and opened the door; and then she paused and shot Peg a look of such utter hatred that Peg gasped. The door closed and she was alone with Robin English.

  “Is that the best you can do,” she said, without trying to keep the loathing out of her voice.

  “The very best,” said Robin equitably. “Janice is utterly stupid. She has no conversation, particularly when I want none. What she has to recommend her, you can see. She is a great convenience.”

  A silly, colorful little thought crept into Peg’s mind. She looked around the room.

  “You’re looking for a smörgasbord tray,” chuckled Robin, sinking into an easy-chair and regarding her with amusement. “Why won’t you look at me?”

  Finally, she did.

  He was taller, a very little. He was much handsomer. She saw that, and it was as if something festering within her had been lanced. There was pain—but oh the blessed relief of pressure! His face was—Oh yes, said Dr. Wenzell to herself, pre-pituitary. Acromegaly. She said. “Let me see your hands.”

  He raised his eyebrows, and put his hands in his pockets. He shook his head.

  Peg turned on her heel and went to the hall closet. She dipped into the pockets of an overcoat, and then into a topcoat, until she found a pair of gloves. She came back into the room, examining them carefully. Robin got to his feet.

  “As I thought,” she said. She held up the left glove. The seam between the index and second fingers was split. And they were new gloves. She threw them aside.

  “So you know about that. You would, of course.”

  “Robin, I don’t think this would have happened if you had continued your treatments.” He slowly took out his hands and stared at them. They were lumpy, and the fingers were too long, and a little crooked. “A phenomenal hypertrophy of the bony processes, according to the books,” he said. “A development that generally takes years.”

  “There’s nothing normal about this case. There never was,” said Peg, her voice thick with pity. “Why did you let it go like this?”

  “I got interested in what I was doing.” Suddenly he got to his feet and began to stride restlessly about the room. She tried not to look at him, at his altered face, with the heavy, coarse jaw. She strained to catch the remnants of his mellow voice through the harshness she heard now.

  He said, “It was all right during those months when I wrote Too Humorous To Mention and Festoon and invented the back out drills and all that. But everything got too easy. I could do anything I wanted to do. All of the things I had ever dreamed about doing I could do—and so easily! It was awful. I tried harder things, and they came easy too. I couldn’t seem to apply myself on anything that couldn’t be seen or touched, though perhaps, if I had been able to go into higher mathematics or something purely abstract like that, I wouldn’t be—well, what I am now.

  “I began to be afraid. The one thing I couldn’t whip was Mel Warfield. I was afraid of him. He hated me. I don’t think he knew it, but he hated me. I wanted you. There was a time when I could have—but I was afraid of him. He had too much power over me. Too much thumb-pressure on that hypodermic of his, or the addition of some little drop of something in a test tube, and he could do anything he wanted with me. I’d never been afraid for myself before. Maybe it was part of that maturity you were talking about.”

  “I imagine it was.”

  Robin sat down heavily, clasped his hands, stared at them, put them in his pockets again. “I was glad to take the risk, mind you. It wasn’t that. Anything in my condition that was suddenly too much for his skill to cope with—any accident like that couldn’t frighten me. It was knowing that he hated me, and somewhere underneath he wanted me out of the way—preferably dead. Anyway—I got out. I kept him informed as to where I was, because I was ready for him. I was ready to kill him first if he came after me. But no hypodermics. No solutions. So—I went on with my work, and then it all got old, right away. I could do anything I wanted to do. Peg—can you imagine how horrible that can be? Never to know you might fail? To have such a clear conception of what the public wants in a play or a poem or a machine, that you can make it and know from the start that it will be a success? I knew a man once, who had photography for a hobby. He got to be so good that he stopped printing his negatives. He’d know they were perfect. He pulled ’em out of the hypo and dried ’em and filed ’em. Often he sold them without looking at them. It killed his hobby. He took up electronics, which was more his speed. But I’m that way about everything.”

  “You got bored.”

  “Bored. Oh, Peg, if you only knew the things I tried! Finally I dropped out of sight. I got a kick out of the papers then. For a while. Know what I was doing when the whole world thought I was doing something fantastic? I was reading. I was holed up in the back room of my Westchester place with all the books I had ever wanted to read. That’s all. They let me get out of myself—for a while. For a while.” He stopped and wiped sweat off his lip. “But it happened again. It got so that a page or two would tell me an author’s style, a paragraph or two told me his plot. Technical books the same; once I got the basics the whole thing was there. Or maybe I thought it was. Maybe I just lost interest. It was as if I were being pursued by a monster called Understanding. I understood everything I looked at or thought about. T
here was nothing I could see or say or do or read or think about where I couldn’t predict the end result. I didn’t want to give anything any more, either, the way I did with the Whirltoy. Do you know what I wanted? I wanted to fail. I didn’t think I could. I don’t think so now. If I purposely botched a thing up, that would be a success of a sort. So for a long time I did nothing.”

  He fell silent. Peg waited patiently. She had had dozens of questions to ask, and half of them were already answered.

  “Then I began to think about Voisier. You know Voisier?”

  She nodded. “Robin—wait a minute. You hate Voisier. I think you’re trying to ruin him. But you hated Mel Warfield. Why didn’t you try to—”

  “Warfield? By then, he wasn’t big enough. Voisier was the only man I ever met whom I thought could beat me.” He sighed. “Now I think he won’t do it.” And suddenly, Robin smiled. The smile sat badly on that heavy face. “Peg, there’s an alternative to unquenchable, inevitable success. That is to play a game in such a way that you never can know how it ends. That’s what I’m doing.”

  “Voisier’s trying to find you.”

  “Is he now? How do you know?” For the first time Robin’s face and voice showed real animation. All the twisted ravings of the past few minutes had come out of him like toothpaste out of a tube.

  Peg told him about Voisier’s calling the hospital, and what had happened at Lelalo’s, where he had stolen the case history.

  “Good,” said Robin. “Oh, fine. This means that things are shaping up better than I thought. Faster. Uh—excuse me a moment.”

  He went to the desk in the corner, sat down, and began to write rapidly.

  “This maturity thing,” he said, phrasing between the lines he was writing, “I think you and Warfield overlooked something. I’m the patient. Do doctors listen to patients?”

  “They do.”

  “You realize, don’t you, that humans die before they’re fully mature?”

  “You mean in the sense that their bones do not completely ossify?”

  “That’s it. And there’s a psychological factor, too.” He paused, thought a while, wrote for a moment, and then went on. “Puppies and kittens and lion cubs—they’re terribly foolish, in a pretty kind of way. They have their mock battles and they chase their balls of paper and get wound up in milady’s yarn, don’t they?”