Slow Sculpture

by Theodore Sturgeon

  First it was part of the garden, with its colonnaded terrace, and then, with its rock walls (too big to be called fieldstone) part of the mountain. It was on and in the hillside, and its roofs paralleled the skylines, front and sides, and part of it was backed against an out-jutting cliff face. The door, beamed and studded and with two archers’ slits, was opened for them (but there was no one there) and when it closed it was silent, a far more solid exclusion of things outside than any click or clang of latch or bolt. She stood with her back against it watching him cross what seemed to be the central well of the house, or at least this part of it. It was a kind of small court in the center of which was an atrium, glazed on all of its five sides and open to the sky at the top. In it was a tree, a cypress or juniper, gnarled and twisted and with the turned-back, paralleled, sculptured appearance of what the Japanese call bonsai.

  “Aren’t you coming?” he called, holding open a door behind the atrium.

  “Bonsai just aren’t fifteen feet tall,” she said.

  “This one is.”

  She came by it slowly, looking. “How long have you had it?”

  His tone of voice said he was immensely pleased. It is a clumsiness to ask the owner of a bonsai how old it is; you are then demanding to know if it is his work or if he has acquired and continued the concept of another; you are tempting him to claim for his own the concept and the meticulous labor of someone else, and it becomes rude to tell a man he is being tested. Hence “How long have you had it?” is polite, forebearing, profoundly courteous. He answered, “Half my life.” She looked at the tree. Trees can be found, sometimes, not quite discarded, not quite forgotten, potted in rusty gallon cans in not quite successful nurseries, unsold because they are shaped oddly or have dead branches here and there, or because they have grown too slowly in whole or part. These are the ones which develop interesting trunks and a resistance to misfortune that makes them flourish if given the least excuse for living. This one was far older than half this man’s life, or all of it. Looking at it, she was terrified by the unbidden thought that a fire, a family of squirrels, some subterranean worm or termite could end this beauty—something working outside any concept of rightness or justice or … or respect. She looked at the tree. She looked at the man.

  “Coming?”

  “Yes,” she said and went with him into his laboratory. “Sit down over there and relax,” he told her. “This might take a little while.”

  “Over there” was a big leather chair by the bookcase. The books were right across the spectrum—reference works in medicine and engineering, nuclear physics, chemistry, biology, psychiatry. Also tennis, gymnastics, chess, the oriental war game Go, and golf. And then drama, the techniques of fiction, Modern English Usage, The American Language and supplement, Wood’s and Walker’s rhyming dictionaries and an array of other dictionaries and encyclopedias. A whole long shelf of biographies. “You have quite a library.”

  He answered her rather shortly: clearly he did not want to talk just now, for he was very busy. He said only, “Yes I have—perhaps you’ll see it some time,” which left her to pick away at his words to find out what on earth he meant by them. He could only have meant, she decided, that the books beside her chair were what he kept handy for his work—that his real library was elsewhere. She looked at him with a certain awe.

  And she watched him. She liked the way he moved—swiftly, decisively. Clearly he knew what he was doing. He used some equipment that she recognized—a glass still, titration equipment, a centrifuge. There were two refrigerators, one of which was not a refrigerator at all, for she could see the large indicator on the door: it stood at 70°F. It came to her that a modern refrigerator is perfectly adaptable to the demand for controlled environment, even a warm one.

  But all that, and the equipment she did not recognize, was only furniture. It was the man who was worth watching, the man who kept her occupied so that not once in all the long time she sat there was she tempted toward the bookshelves.

  At last he finished a long sequence at the bench, threw some switches, picked up a tall stool and came over to her. He perched on the stool, hung his heels on the cross-spoke, and lay a pair of long brown hands over his knees. “Scared?”

  “I s’pose I am.”

  “You don’t have to stay.”

  “Considering the alternative,” she began bravely, but the courage-sound somehow oozed out, “it can’t matter much.”

  “Very sound,” he said, almost cheerfully. “I remember when I was a kid there was a fire scare in the apartment house where we lived. It was a wild scramble to get out, and my ten-year-old brother found himself outside in the street with an alarm clock in his hand. It was an old one and it didn’t work—but of all the things in the place he might have snatched up at a time like that, it turned out to be the clock. He’s never been able to figure out why.”

  “Have you?”

  “Not why he picked that particular thing, no. But I think I know why he did something obviously irrational. You see, panic is a very special state. Like fear and flight, or fury and attack, it’s a pretty primitive reaction to extreme danger. It’s one of the expressions of the will to survive. What makes it so special is that it’s irrational. Now, why would the abandonment of reason be a survival mechanism?”

  She thought about this seriously. There was that about this man which made serious thought imperative. “I can’t imagine,” she said finally. “Unless it’s because, in some situations, reason just doesn’t work.”

  “You can imagine,” he said, again radiating that huge approval, making her glow. “And you just did. If you are in danger and you try reason, and reason doesn’t work, you abandon it. You can’t say it’s unintelligent to abandon what doesn’t work, right? So then you are in panic; then you start to perform random acts. Most of them—far and away most will be useless; some might even be dangerous, but that doesn’t matter—you’re in danger already. Where the survival factor comes in is that away down deep you know that one chance in a million is better than no chance at all. So—here you sit—you’re scared and you could run; something says you should run; but you won’t.”

  She nodded.

  He went on: “You found a lump. You went to a doctor and he made some tests and gave you the bad news. Maybe you went to another doctor and he confirmed it. You then did some research and found out what was to happen next—the exploratory, the radical, the questionable recovery, the whole long agonizing procedure of being what they call a terminal case. You then flipped out. Did some things you hope I won’t ask you about. Took a trip somewhere, anywhere, wound up in my orchard for no reason.” He spread the good hands and let them go back to their kind of sleep. “Panic. The reason for little boys in their pajamas standing at midnight with a broken alarm clock in their arms, and for the existence of quacks.” Something chimed over on the bench and he gave her a quick smile and went back to work, saying over his shoulder: “I’m not a quack, by the way. To qualify as a quack you have to claim to be a doctor. I don’t.”

  She watched him switch off, switch on, stir, measure and calculate. A little orchestra of equipment chorused and soloed around him as he conducted, whirring, hissing, clicking, flickering. She wanted to laugh, to cry, and to scream. She did no one of these things for fear of not stopping, ever.

  When he came over again, the conflict was not raging within her, but exerting steady and opposed tensions; the result was a terrible stasis, and all she could do when she saw the instrument in his hand was to widen her eyes. She quite forgot to breathe.

  “Yes, it’s a needle,” he said, his tone almost bantering. “A long shiny sharp needle. Don’t tell me you are one of those needle-shy people.” He flipped the long power-cord which trailed from the black housing around the hypodermic, to get some slack, and straddled the stool. “Want something to steady your nerves?”

  She was afraid to speak; the membrane containing her sane self was very thin, stretched very tight.

  He said, “I�
�d rather you didn’t, because this pharmaceutical stew is complex enough as it is. But if you need it.…”

  She managed to shake her head a little, and again she felt the wave of approval from him. There were a thousand questions she wanted to ask—had meant to ask—needed to ask: What was in the needle? How many treatments must she have? What would they be like? How long must she stay, and where? And most of all— Oh, could she live, could she live?

  He seemed concerned with the answer to only one of these.

  “It’s mostly built around an isotope of potassium. If I told you all I know about it and how I came on it in the first place, it would take—well, more time than we’ve got. But here’s the general idea: Theoretically, every atom is electrically balanced (never mind ordinary exceptions). Likewise all electrical charges in the molecule are supposed to be balanced—so much plus, so much minus, total zero. I happened on the fact that the balance of charges in a wild cell is not zero—not quite. It’s as if there was a submicroscopic thunderstorm going on at the molecular level, with little lightning bolts flashing back and forth and changing the signs. Interfering with communications—static—and that,” he said, gesturing with the shielded hypo in his hand, “is what this is all about. When something interferes with communications—especially the RNA mechanism, which says, Read this blueprint and build accordingly, and stop when it’s done—when that message gets garbled, lopsided things get built, off-balance things, things which do almost what they should, do it almost right: they’re wild cells, and the messages they pass on are even worse.

  “Okay: Whether these thunderstorms are caused by viruses or chemicals or radiation or physical trauma or even anxiety—and don’t think anxiety can’t do it—that’s secondary. The important thing is to fix it so the thunderstorm can’t happen. If you can do that, the cells have plenty of ability all by themselves to repair and replace what’s gone wrong. And biological systems aren’t like ping-pong balls with static charges waiting for the charge to leak away or to discharge into a grounded wire. They have a kind of resilience—I call it forgiveness—which enables them to take on a little more charge, or a little less, and do all right. Well then: Say a certain clump of cells is wild and say it carries an aggregate of a hundred units extra on the positive side. Cells immediately around it are affected, but not the next layer or the next.

  “If they could be opened to the extra charge, if they could help to drain it off, they would, well, cure the wild cells of the surplus, you see what I mean? And they would be able to handle that little overage themselves, or pass it on to other cells and still others who could deal with it. In other words, if I can flood your body with some medium which can drain off and distribute a concentration of this unbalanced charge, the ordinary bodily processes will be free to move in and clear up the wild-cell damage. And that’s what I have here.”

  He held the shielded needle between his knees and from a side pocket of his lab coat he took a plastic box, opened it and drew out an alcohol swab. Still cheerfully talking, he took her terror-numbed arm and scrubbed at the inside of her elbow. “I am not for one second implying that nuclear charges in the atom are the same thing as static electricity. They’re in a different league altogether. But the analogy holds. I could use another analogy. I could liken the charge on the wild cells to accumulations of fat, and this gunk of mine to a detergent, which would break it up and spread it so far it couldn’t be detected any more. But I’m led to the static analogy by an odd side effect—organisms injected with this stuff do build up one hell of a static charge. It’s a by-product, and for reasons I can only theorize about at the moment, it seems to be keyed to the audio spectrum. Tuning forks and the like. That’s what I was playing with when I met you. That tree is drenched with this stuff. It used to have a whorl of wild-cell growth. It hasn’t any more.” He gave her the quick surprising smile and let it click away as he held the needle point upward and squirted it. With his other hand wrapped around her left biceps, he squeezed gently and firmly. The needle was lowered and placed and slid into the big vein so deftly that she gasped—not because it hurt, but because it did not. Attentively he watched the bit of glass barrel protruding from a black housing as he withdrew the plunger a fraction and saw the puff of red into the colorless fluid inside, and then he bore steadily on the plunger again.

  “Please don’t move.… I’m sorry; this will take a little time. I have to get quite a lot of this into you. Which is fine, you know,” he said, resuming the tone of his previous remarks about audio spectra, “because side effect or no, it’s consistent. Healthy biosystems develop a strong electrostatic field, unhealthy ones a weak one or none at all. With an instrument as primitive and simple as that little electroscope you can tell if any part of the organism has a community of wild cells, and if so, where it is and how big and how wild.” Deftly he shifted his grip on the encased hypodermic without moving the point or varying the amount of plunger pressure.

  It was beginning to be uncomfortable, an ache turning into a bruise. “And if you’re wondering why this mosquito has a housing on it with a wire attached (although I’ll bet you’re not and that you know as well as I do that I’m doing all this talking just to keep your mind occupied!) I’ll tell you. It’s nothing but a coil carrying a high-frequency alternating current. The alternating field sees to it that the fluid is magnetically and electrostatically neutral right from the start.” He withdrew the needle suddenly and smoothly, bent her arm, and trapped in the inside of her elbow a cotton swab.

  “Nobody ever told me that before or after a treatment,” she said.

  “What?”

  “No charge,” she said.

  Again that wave of approval, this time with words: “I like your style. How do you feel?”

  She cast about for accurate phrases. “Like the owner of a large sleeping hysteria begging someone not to wake it up.”

  He laughed. “In a little while you are going to feel so weird you won’t have time for hysteria.” He got up and returned the needle to the bench, looping up the cable as he went. He turned off the AC field and returned with a large glass bowl and a square of plywood. He inverted the bowl on the floor near her and placed the wood on its broad base.

  “I remember something like that,” she said. “When I was in—in junior high school. They were generating artificial lightning with a … let me see … well, it had a long endless belt running over pulleys and some little wires scraping on it and a big copper ball on top.”

  “Van de Graaf generator.”

  “Right! And they did all sorts of things with it, but what I specially remember is standing on a piece of wood on a bowl like that and they charged me up with the generator, and I didn’t feel much of anything except all my hair stood out from my head. Everyone laughed. I looked like a golliwog. They said I was carrying forty thousand volts.”

  “Good! I’m glad you remember that. This’ll be a little different, though. By roughly another forty thousand.”

  “Oh!”

  “Don’t worry. Long as you’re insulated, and as long as grounded, or comparatively grounded objects—me, for example—stay well away from you, there won’t be any fireworks.”

  “Are you going to use a generator like that?”

  “Not like that, and I already did. You’re the generator.”

  “I’m—oh!” She had raised her hand from the upholstered chair arm and there was a crackle of sparks and the faint smell of ozone.

  “Oh you sure are, and more than I thought, and quicker. Get up!”

  She started up slowly; she finished the maneuver with speed. As her body separated from the chair she was, for a fractional second, seated in a tangle of spitting blue-white threads. They, or she, propelled her a yard and a half away, standing. Literally shocked half out of her wits, she almost fell.

  “Stay on your feet!” he snapped, and she recovered, gasping. He stepped back a pace. “Get up on the board. Quick, now!”

  She did as she was told, leaving, for the
two paces she traveled, two brief footprints of fire. She teetered on the board. Visibly, her hair began to stir. “What’s happening to me?” she cried.

  “You’re getting charged after all,” he said jovially, but at this point she failed to appreciate the extension of even her own witticism. She cried again, “What’s happening to me?”

  “It’s all right,” he said consolingly. He went to the bench and turned on a tone generator. It moaned deep in the one to three hundred cycle range. He increased the volume and turned the pitch control. It howled upward and as it did so her red-gold hair shivered and swept up and out, each hair attempting frantically to get away from all the others. He ran the tone up above ten thousand cycles and all the way back to a belly-bumping inaudible eleven; at the extremes her hair slumped, but at around eleven hundred it stood out in (as she had described it) golliwog style.

  He turned down the gain to a more or less bearable level and picked up the electroscope. He came toward her, smiling. “You are an electroscope, you know that? And a living Van de Graaf generator as well. And a golliwog.”

  “Let me down,” was all she could say.

  “Not yet. Please hang tight. The differential between you and everything else here is so high that if you got near any of it you’d discharge into it. It wouldn’t harm you—it isn’t current electricity—but you might get a burn and a nervous shock out of it.” He held out the electroscope; even at that distance, and in her distress, she could see the gold leaves writhe apart. He circled her, watching the leaves attentively, moving the instrument forward and back and from side to side. Once he went to the tone generator and turned it down some more. “You’re sending such a strong field I can’t pick up the variations,” he explained, and returned to her, closer now.

  “I can’t, much more … I can’t,” she murmured; he did not hear, or he did not care. He moved the electroscope near her abdomen, up and from side to side.