Slow Sculpture

by Theodore Sturgeon

  Again Karl proceeded without looking around, leaving go, no-go as a matter for Wheeler to decide. Wheeler followed. Karl heard his footsteps behind him and noticed with pleasure and something like admiration that when the heavy blocks whooshed down and seated themselves solidly behind them, Wheeler may have looked over his shoulder but did not pause.

  “You’ve noticed we’re alongside the furnace,” Karl said, like a guided-tour bus driver. “And now, behind it.”

  He stood aside to let Wheeler pass him and see the small room.

  It was just large enough for the tracks which protruded from the back of the furnace and a little standing space on each side. On the far side was a small table with a black suitcase standing on it. On the track stood the coffin, its corners carboned, its top and sides wet and slightly steaming.

  “Sorry to have to close that stone gate that way,” Karl said matter-of-factly. “I don’t expect anyone down here at all, but I wouldn’t want to explain any of this to persons other than yourself.”

  Wheeler was staring at the coffin. He seemed perfectly composed, but it was a seeming. Karl was quite aware of what it was costing him.

  Wheeler said, “I wish you’d explain it to me.” And he laughed. It was the first time Karl had ever seen this man do anything badly.

  “I will. I am.” He clicked open the suitcase and laid it open and flat on the little table. There was a glisten of chrome and steel and small vials in little pockets. The first tool he removed was a screwdriver. “No need to use screws when you’re cremating ’em,” he said cheerfully and placed the tip under one corner of the lid. He struck the handle smartly with the heel of one hand and the lid popped loose. “Stand this up against the wall behind you, will you?”

  Silently Cleveland Wheeler did as he was told. It gave him something to do with his muscles; it gave him the chance to turn his head away for a moment; it gave him a chance to think—and it gave Karl the opportunity for a quick glance at his steady countenance.

  He’s a mensch, Karl thought. He really is.…

  Wheeler set up the lid neatly and carefully and they stood, one on each side, looking down into the coffin.

  “He—got a lot older,” Wheeler said at last.

  “You haven’t seen him recently.”

  “Here and in there,” said the executive. “I’ve spent more time in the same room with him during the past month than I have in the last eight, nine years. Still, it was a matter of minutes, each time.”

  Karl nodded understandingly. “I’d heard that. Phone calls, any time of the day or night, and then those long silences two days, three, not calling out, not having anyone in—”

  “Are you going to tell me about the phony oven?”

  “Oven? Furnace? It’s not a phony at all. When we’ve finished here it’ll do the job, all right.”

  “Then why the theatricals?”

  “That was for the M.E. Those papers he signed are in sort of a never-never country just now. When we slide this back in and turn on the heat they’ll become as legal as he thinks they are.”

  “Then why—”

  “Because there are some things you have to know.” Karl reached into the coffin and unfolded the gnarled hands. They came apart reluctantly and he pressed them down at the sides of the body. He unbuttoned the jacket, laid it back, unbuttoned the shirt, unzipped the trousers. When he had finished with this, he looked up and found Wheeler’s sharp gaze, not on the old man’s corpse, but on him.

  “I have the feeling,” said Cleveland Wheeler, “that I have never seen you before.”

  Silently Karl Trilling responded: But you do now. And, Thanks, Joey. You were dead right. Joe had known the answer to that one plaguing question, How should I act?

  Talk just the way he talks, Joe had said. Be what he is, the whole time.…

  Be what he is. A man without illusions (they don’t work) and without hope (who needs it?) who has the unbreakable habit of succeeding. And who can say it’s a nice day in such a way that everyone around snaps to attention and says: Yes, SIR!

  “You’ve been busy,” Karl responded shortly. He took off his jacket, folded it and put it on the table beside the kit. He put on surgeon’s gloves and slipped the sterile sleeve off a new scalpel. “Some people scream and faint the first time they watch a dissection.”

  Wheeler smiled thinly. “I don’t scream and faint.” But it was not lost on Karl Trilling that only then, at the last possible moment, did Wheeler actually view the old man’s body. When he did he neither screamed nor fainted; he uttered an astonished grunt.

  “Thought that would surprise you,” Karl said easily. “In case you were wondering, though, he really was a male. The species seems to be oviparous. Mammals too, but it has to be oviparous. I’d sure like a look at a female. That isn’t a vagina. It’s a cloaca.”

  “Until this moment,” said Wheeler in a hypnotized voice, “I thought that ‘not human’ remark of yours was a figure of speech.”

  “No, you didn’t,” Karl responded shortly.

  Leaving the words to hang in the air, as words will if a speaker has the wit to isolate them with wedges of silence, he deftly slit the corpse from the sternum to the pubic symphysis. For the first-time viewer this was always the difficult moment. It’s hard not to realize viscerally that the cadaver does not feel anything and will not protest. Nerve-alive to Wheeler, Karl looked for a gasp or a shudder; Wheeler merely held his breath.

  “We could spend hours—weeks I imagine, going into the details,” Karl said, deftly making a transverse incision in the ensiform area, almost around to the trapezoid on each side, “but this is the thing I wanted you to see.” Grasping the flesh at the juncture of the cross he had cut, on the left side, he pulled upward and to the left. The cutaneous layers came away easily, with the fat under them. They were not pinkish, but an off-white lavender shade. Now the muscular striations over the ribs were in view. “If you’d palpated the old man’s chest,” he said, demonstrating on the right side, “you’d have felt what seemed to be normal human ribs. But look at this.”

  With a few deft strokes he separated the muscle fibers from the bone on a mid-costal area about four inches square, and scraped. A rib emerged and, as he widened the area and scraped between it and the next one, it became clear that the ribs were joined by a thin flexible layer of bone or chitin.

  “It’s like baleen—whalebone,” said Karl. “See this?” He sectioned out a piece, flexed it.

  “My God.”

  III

  “Now look at this.” Karl took surgical shears from the kit, snapped through the sternum right up to the clavicle and then across the lower margin of the ribs. Slipping his fingers under them, he pulled upward. With a dull snap the entire ribcage opened like a door, exposing the lung.

  The lung was not pink, nor the liverish-brownish-black of a smoker, but yellow—the clear bright yellow of pure sulfur.

  “His metabolism,” Karl said, straightening up at last and flexing the tension out of his shoulders, “is fantastic. Or was. He lived on oxygen, same as us, but he broke it out of carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and trioxide, and carbon dioxide mostly. I’m not saying he could—I mean he had to. When he was forced to breathe what we call clean air, he could take just so much of it and then had to duck out and find a few breaths of his own atmosphere. When he was younger he could take it for hours at a time, but as the years went by he had to spend more and more time in the kind of smog he could breathe. Those long disappearances of his, and that reclusiveness—they weren’t as kinky as people supposed.”

  Wheeler made a gesture toward the corpse. “But—what is he? Where—”

  “I can’t tell you. Except for a good deal of medical and biochemical details, you now know as much as I do. Somehow, somewhere, he arrived. He came, he saw, he began to make his moves. Look at this.”

  He opened the other side of the chest and then broke the sternum up and away. He pointed. The lung tissue was not in two discreet parts, but extended acro
ss the median line. “One lung, all the way across, though it has these two lobes. The kidneys and gonads show the same right-left fusion.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” said Wheeler a little hoarsely. “Damn it, what is it?”

  “A featherless biped, as Plato once described homo sap. I don’t know what it is. I just know that it is—and I thought you ought to know. That’s all.”

  “But you’ve seen one before. That’s obvious.”

  “Sure. Epstein.”

  “Epstein?”

  “Sure. The old man had to have a go-between—someone who could, without suspicion, spend long hours with him and hours away. The old man could do a lot over the phone, but not everything. Epstein was, you might say, a right arm that could hold its breath a little longer than he could. It got to him in the end, though, and he died of it.”

  “Why didn’t you say something long before this?”

  “First of all, I value my own skin. I could say reputation, but skin is the word. I signed a contract as his personal physician because he needed a personal physician—another bit of window-dressing. But I did precious little doctoring—except over the phone—and nine-tenths of that was, I realized quite recently, purely diversionary. Even a doctor, I suppose, can be a trusting soul. One or the other would call and give a set of symptoms and I’d cautiously suggest and prescribe. Then I’d get another call that the patient was improving and that was that. Why, I even got specimens—blood, urine, stools—and did the pathology on them and never realized that they were from the same source as what the medical examiner checked out and signed for.”

  “What do you mean, same source?”

  Karl shrugged. “He could get anything he wanted—anything.”

  “Then—what the M.E. examined wasn’t—” he waved a hand at the casket.

  “Of course not. That’s why the crematorium has a back door. There’s a little pocket sleight-of-hand trick you can buy for fifty cents that operates the same way. This body here was inside the furnace. The ringer—a look-alike that came from God knows where; I swear to you I don’t—was lying out there waiting for the M.E. When the button was pushed the fires started up and that coffin slid in—pushing this one out and at the same time drenching it with water as it came through. While we’ve been in here, the human body is turning to ashes. My personal private secret instructions, both for Epstein and for the boss, were to wait until I was certain I was alone and then come in here after an hour and push the second button, which would slide this one back into the fire. I was to do no investigations, ask no questions, make no reports. It came through as logical but not reasonable, like so many of his orders.” He laughed suddenly. “Do you know why the old man—and Epstein too, for that matter, in case you never noticed—wouldn’t shake hands with anyone?”

  “I presumed it was because he had an obsession with germs.”

  “It was because his normal body temperature was a hundred and seven.”

  Wheeler touched one of his own hands with the other and said nothing.

  When Karl felt that the wedge of silence was thick enough he asked lightly, “Well, boss, where do we go from here?”

  Cleveland Wheeler turned away from the corpse and to Karl slowly, as if diverting his mind with an effort.

  “What did you call me?”

  “Figure of speech,” said Karl and smiled. “Actually, I’m working for the company—and that’s you. I’m under orders, which have been finally and completely discharged when I push that button—I have no others. So it really is up to you.”

  Wheeler’s eyes fell again to the corpse. “You mean about him? This? What we should do?”

  “That, yes. Whether to burn it up and forget it—or call in top management and an echelon of scientists. Or scare the living hell out of everyone on Earth by phoning the papers. Sure, that has to be decided, but I was thinking on a much wider spectrum than that.”

  “Such as—”

  Karl gestured toward the box with his head. “What was he doing here, anyway? What has he done? What was he trying to do?”

  “You’d better go on,” said Wheeler; and for the very first time said something in a way that suggested diffidence. “You’ve had a while to think about all this. I—” and almost helplessly, he spread his hands.

  “I can understand that,” Karl said gently. “Up to now I’ve been coming on like a hired lecturer and I know it. I’m not going to embarrass you with personalities except to say that you’ve absorbed all this with less buckling of the knees than anyone in the world I could think of.”

  “I’ll buckle when I have time for it. Just now I’m looking for a way to think this out.”

  “Right. Well, there’s a simple technique you learn in elementary algebra. It has to do with the construction of graphs. You place a dot on the graph where known data put it. You get more data, you put down another dot and then a third. With just three dots—of course, the more the better, but it can be done with three—you can connect them and establish a curve. This curve has certain characteristics and it’s fair to extend the curve a little farther with the assumption that later data will bear you out.”

  “Extrapolation.”

  “Extrapolation. X-axis, the fortunes of our late boss. Y-axis, time. The curve is his fortunes—that is to say, his influence.”

  “Pretty tall graph.”

  “Over thirty years.”

  “Still pretty tall.”

  “All right,” said Karl. “Now, over the same thirty years, another curve: change in the environment.” He held up a hand. “I’m not going to read you a treatise on ecology. Let’s be more objective than that. Let’s just say changes. Okay: a measurable rise in the mean temperature because of CO2 and the greenhouse effect. Draw the curve. Incidence of heavy metals, mercury and lithium, in organic tissue. Draw a curve. Likewise chlorinated hydrocarbons, hypertrophy of algae due to phosphates, incidence of coronaries … All right, let’s superimpose all these curves on the same graph.”

  “I see what you’re getting at. But you have to be careful with that kind of statistics game. Like, the increase of traffic fatalities coincides with the increased use of aluminum cans and plastic-tipped baby pins.”

  “Right. I don’t think I’m falling into that trap. I just want to find reasonable answers to a couple of otherwise unreasonable situations. One is this: if the changes occurring in our planet are the result of mere carelessness—a more or less random thing, carelessness—then how come nobody is being careless in a way that benefits the environment? Strike that. I promised, no ecology lessons. Rephrase: how come all these carelessnesses promote a change and not a preservation?

  “Next question: What is the direction of the change? You’ve seen speculative writing about ‘terraforming’—altering other planets to make them habitable by humans. Suppose an effort were being made to change this planet to suit someone else? Suppose they wanted more water and were willing to melt the polar caps by the greenhouse effect? Increase the oxides of sulfur, eliminate certain marine forms from plankton to whales? Reduce the population by increases in lung cancer, emphysema, heart attacks and even war?”

  Both men found themselves looking down at the sleeping face in the coffin. Karl said softly. “Look what he was into—petrochemicals, fossil fuels, food processing, advertising, all the things that made the changes or helped the changers—”

  “You’re not blaming him for all of it.”

  “Certainly not. He found willing helpers by the million.”

  “You don’t think he was trying to change a whole planet just so he could be comfortable in it.”

  “No, I don’t think so—and that’s the central point I have to make. I don’t know if there are any more around like him and Epstein, but I can suppose this: if the changes now going on keep on—and accelerate—then we can expect them.”

  Wheeler said, “So what would you like to do? Mobilize the world against the invader?”

  “Nothing like that. I think I’d slo
wly and quietly reverse the changes. If this planet is normally unsuitable to them, then I’d keep it so. I don’t think they’d have to be driven back. I think they just wouldn’t come.”

  “Or they’d try some other way.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Karl. “Because they tried this one. If they thought they could do it with fleets of spaceships and super-zap guns, they’d be doing it. No—this is their way and if it doesn’t work, they can try somewhere else.”

  Wheeler began pulling thoughtfully at his lip. Karl said softly, “All it would take is someone who knew what he was doing, who could command enough clout and who had the wit to make it pay. They might even arrange a man’s life—to get the kind of man they need.”

  And before Wheeler could answer, Karl took up his scalpel.

  “I want you to do something for me,” he said sharply in a new, commanding tone—actually Wheeler’s own. “I want you to do it because I’ve done it and I’ll be damned if I want to be the only man in the world who has.”

  Leaning over the head of the casket, he made an incision along the hairline from temple to temple. Then, bracing his elbows against the edge of the box and steadying one hand with the other, he drew the scalpel straight down the center of the forehead and down on to the nose, splitting it exactly in two. Down he went through the upper lip and then the lower, around the point of the chin and under it to the throat. Then be stood up.

  “Put your hands on his cheeks,” he ordered. Wheeler frowned briefly (how long had it been since anyone had spoken to him that way?), hesitated, then did as he was told.