A Way Home

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “But I—but we—but the—”

  “Where do you come from?”

  “Masolo, but what’s that to—”

  “What did your mother and all the kids call you when you were a space-struck teener?”

  “Scampy. They’re all—Scampy?”

  “That’s right.”

  You cover your face. “By God. By God. I can remember now—thinking back in detail over my life—but it started in the bus that day I passed the entrance exams. What is it? Please—what is it?”

  “Well, if you want me to be technical they call it Dell’s hypothesis. It was promulgated ‘way back’ in the 1960’s by a lay analyst named Dudley Dell, who was, as I remember, the editor of a love-story magazine. He—”

  “Please, Colonel,” you say. You’re in trouble.

  “Okay, okay,” he says soothingly. “Well, up to that time psychologists, particularly analysts, were banging their heads against a stone wall in certain cases, and sometimes banging up the patient in the process. These were cases where infantile behavior, or infantile impulses, were running counter to adult environment and conditioning. Some of these primitive head-shrinkers got close to the real difficulty when they tried to have the patient act out this childish stuff. If a patient had eight-year-old wishes, the doc would say, ‘All right, say it—or do it—as if you were eight. This was—”

  “Are you, sir, Colonel sir, going to tell me please the hell what’s with me?”

  “I am,” he says calmly. “This was worse than useless in most cases because the ‘as if’ idea made the patient disbelieve in this active eight-year-old within him—a very viable, hard-fighting eight-year-old it was, too. So when behavior got more infantile, the doc would pull his beard, or his chin, and say, ‘Hm-hm, schizophrenia,’ thereby scaring the liverwurst out of the patient. Dell stopped all that.”

  “Dell stopped all that,” you say, suffering.

  “It was a little thing, little like E=MC2 or Newton’s apple, but oh, my, what happened!”

  “Oh, my,” you say. “What happened?”

  “Dell began directing his therapy to the infantile segment, treating it as a living, conscious organism. It responded excellently; it changed the face of psychoanalysis. Those who suffered from childish acts had the child who was acting that way contacted and controlled. Now, in your case—you’re not going to interrupt? Good. In your case, an extension of Dell’s hypothesis was used. The sum total of your life up until you took your entrance examinations for Service training was arrested at age fifteen. A hypnotic barrier was erected so that you could have no access to any of this. You—all you cadets—literally start a new life here, with no references whatever to an earlier one. Your technical education has no referral factor to anything but itself. It-makes you learn quickly and with uncluttered minds. You never miss your past because you carry a powerful hypnotic command not to think of it.

  “When this was first tried, our men were left with memories including only their training, and permitted to go on indefinitely. Well, it didn’t work. They were inhuman and un-sane. The conditioning of infants is far too important to the total human being to be wiped out that way. So we developed this new system, which has been used on you.

  “But we discovered a peculiar thing. Even untrained adults—as opposed to the sharp division of pre-and post-entrance that you have—even untrained adults suffer to greater or less degree from an internal strife between childhood acceptances and the adult matrix. An exaggerated example would be a child’s implicit belief in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, existing at the same time with the adult’s total discrediting of the legends. The child (according to Dell, and to me) still exists and will fight like the very devil for survival, beliefs and all.

  “The schism between you and Scampy was extreme; you were, in effect, born on different planets. To be a complete human being, you had to be rejoined; but to be rejoined successfully, you and Scampy had to make peace with one another. For Scampy it was not difficult—you, even in injustice and cruelty—were a real live hero-image. But you had a rather more stony path. But somewhere within yourself, somehow, you found an element of tolerance and empathy, and used it to bridge the gap. I may say,” the colonel adds severely, “that it takes a particularly fine kind of person to negotiate this difficult merger. You are not usual, Cadet; not usual at all.”

  “Scampy,” you murmur. Impulsively you pull your shirt away from your chest and look down as if there were something hiding there. You look up. “But he—talked to me! Don’t tell me you’ve quietly invented a telepathic converter with band-pass filters.”

  “Of course not. When the barrier was erected between you and Scampy, Scampy was conditioned to speak subvocally—that is back in the throat and virtually without lip movement. You have a subminiature transmitter deposited surgically in your pharynx. The button on your bulkhead induced it to turn on. There had to be a button, you see; we couldn’t have you two speaking at the same time, as people in the same room invariably do.”

  “I can’t get used to it. I can’t. I practically saw the boy! Listen, Colonel, can I keep my transmitter where it is, and have the same rig on my star ship?

  “Who said you’re getting a star ship?” growls the colonel.

  “Well, I thought—”

  “Of course you’re getting a ship.” He smiles, although I think it hurts his face. “You really want that transceiver set-up?”

  “He’s a good kid.”

  “Very well, Cadet. Commander. Dismissed.” He marches away. You look after him, shaking your head. Then you duck into the space can. You look at the bulkhead and at the button and at the scoring on the plate where you came that close to filling your hydrazine supply. You shudder.

  “Hey,” you call softly. “Scamp!”

  You push the button. You hear the carrier, then “I’m thirsty,” says Scampy.

  You cut out of there and go down to the rec area and into the short-order bar. “A beer,” you say. “And put a lump of vanilla ice-cream in it. And straws.”

  “You crazy?” says the man.

  “No,” you say. “Oh, no.”

  TINY AND THE MONSTER

  SHE HAD TO FIND OUT ABOUT TINY—everything about Tiny.

  They were bound to call him Tiny. The name was good for a laugh when he was a pup, and many times afterward.

  He was a Great Dane, unfashionable with his long tail, smooth and glossy in the brown coat which fit so snugly over his heavily muscled shoulders and chest. His eyes were big and brown and his feet were big and black; he had a voice like thunder and a heart ten times his own great size.

  He was born in the Virgin Islands, on St. Croix, which is a land of palm trees and sugar, of soft winds and luxuriant undergrowth whispering with the stealthy passage of pheasant and mongoose. There were rats in the ruins of the ancient estate houses that’ stood among the foothills—ruins with slave-built walls forty inches thick and great arches of weathered stone. There was pasture land where the field mice ran, and brooks asparkle with gaudy blue minnows.

  But where in St. Croix had he learned to be so strange?

  When Tiny was a puppy, all feet and ears, he learned many things. Most of these things were kinds of respect. He learned to respect that swift, vengeful piece of utter engineering called a scorpion when one of them whipped its barbed tail into his inquiring nose. He learned to respect the heavy deadness of the air about him that preceded a hurricane, for he knew that it meant hurry and hammering and utmost obedience from every creature on the estate. He learned to respect the justice of sharing, for he was pulled from the teat and from the trough when he crowded the others of his litter. He was the largest.

  These things, all of them, he learned as respects. He was never struck, and although he learned caution he never learned fear. The pain he suffered from the scorpion—it happened only once—the strong but gentle hands which curbed his greed, the frightful violence of the hurricane that followed the tense preparations—all these things an
d many more taught him the justice of respect. He half understood a basic ethic: namely, that he would never be asked to do something, or to refrain from doing something, unless there was a good reason for it. His obedience, then, was a thing implicit, for it was half reasoned; and since it was not based on fear, but on justice, it could not interfere with his resourcefulness.

  All of which, along with his blood, explained why he was such a splendid animal. It did not explain how he learned to read. It did not explain why Alec was compelled to sell him—not only to sell him but to search out Alistair Forsythe and sell him to her.

  She had to find out. The whole thing was crazy. She hadn’t wanted a dog. If she had wanted a dog, it wouldn’t have been a Great Dane. And if it had been a Great Dane, it wouldn’t have been Tiny, for he was a Crucian dog and had to be shipped all the way to Scarsdale, New York, by air.

  The series of letters she sent, to Alec were as full of wondering persuasion «as his had been when he sold her the dog. It was through these letters that she learned about the scorpion and the hurricane, about Tiny’s puppyhood and’ the way Alec brought up his dogs. If she learned something about Alec as well, that was understandable. Alec and Alistair Forsythe had never met, but through Tiny they shared a greater secret than many people who have grown up together.

  “As for why I wrote you, of all people,” Alec wrote in answer to her direct question, “I can’t say I chose you at all. It was Tiny. One of the cruise-boat people mentioned your name at my place, over cocktails one afternoon. It was, as I remember, a Dr. Schwellenbach. Nice old fellow. As soon as your name was mentioned, Tiny’s head came up as if I had called him. He got up from his station by the door and lolloped over to the doctor with his ears up and his nose quivering. I thought for a minute that the old fellow was offering him food, but no—he must have wanted to hear Schwellenbach say your name again. So I asked about you. A day or so later I was telling a couple of friends about it, and when I mentioned the name again, Tiny came snuffing over and shoved his nose into my hand. He was shivering. That got me. I wrote to a friend in New York who got your name and address in the phone book. You know the rest. I just wanted to tell you about it at first, but something made me suggest a sale. Somehow, it didn’t seem right to have something like this going on and not have you meet Tiny. When you wrote that you couldn’t get away from New York, there didn’t seem to be anything else to do but send Tiny to you. And now—I don’t know if I’m too happy about it. Judging from those pages and pages of questions you keep sending me, I get the idea that you are more than a little troubled by this crazy business.”

  She answered, “Please don’t think I’m troubled about this! I’m not. I’m interested, and curious, and more than a little excited; but there is nothing about the situation that frightens me. I can’t stress that enough. There’s something around Tiny—sometimes I have the feeling it’s something outside Tiny—that is infinitely comforting. I feel protected, in a strange way, and it’s a different and greater thing than the protection I could expect from a large and intelligent dog. It’s strange, and it’s mysterious enough; but it isn’t at all frightening.”

  “I have some more questions. Can you remember exactly what it was that Dr. Schwellenbach said the first time he mentioned my name and Tiny acted strangely? Was there ever any time that you can remember when Tiny was under some influence other than your own, something which might have given him these strange traits? What about his diet as a puppy? How many times did he get...” and so on.

  And Alec answered, in part, “It was so long ago now that I can’t remember exactly; but it seems to me Dr. Schwellenbach was talking about his work. As you know, he’s a professor of metallurgy. He mentioned Professor Nowland as the greatest alloy specialist of his time—said Nowland could alloy anything with anything. Then he went on about Nowland’s assistant. Said the assistant was very highly qualified, having been one of these Science Search products and something of a prodigy; in spite of which she was completely feminine and as beautiful a redhead as had ever exchanged heaven for earth. Then he said her name was Alistair Forsythe. (I hope you’re not blushing, Miss Forsythe; you asked for this!) And then it was that Tiny ran over to the doctor in that extraordinary way.

  “The only time I can think of when Tiny was off the estate and possibly under some influence was the day old Debbil disappeared for a whole day with the pup when he was about three months old. Debbil is one of the characters who hang around here. He’s a Crucian about sixty years old, a piratical-looking old gent with one eye and elephantiasis. He shuffles around the grounds running odd errands for anyone who will give him tobacco or a shot of white rum. Well, one morning I sent him over the hill to see if there was a leak in the water line that runs from the reservoir. It would only take a couple of hours, so I told him to take Tiny for a run.

  “They were gone for the whole day. I was short-handed and busy as a squirrel in a nuthouse and didn’t have a chance to send anyone after him. But he drifted in toward evening. I bawled him out thoroughly. It was no use asking him where he had been; he’s only about quarter-witted anyway. He just claimed he couldn’t remember, which is pretty usual for him. But for the next three days I was busy with Tiny. He wouldn’t eat, and he hardly slept at all. He just kept staring out over the cane fields at the hill. He didn’t seem to want to go there at all. I went out to have a look. There’s nothing out that way but the reservoir and the old ruins of the governor’s palace, which have been rotting there in the sun for the last century and a half. Nothing left now but an overgrown mound and a couple of arches, but it’s supposed to be haunted. I forgot about it after that because Tiny got back to normal. As a matter of fact, he seemed to be better than ever, although, from then on, he would sometimes freeze and “watch the hill as if he were listening to something. I haven’t attached much importance to it until now. I still don’t. Maybe he got chased by some mongoose’s mother. Maybe he chewed up some ganja-weed—marijuana to you. But I doubt that it has anything to do with the way he acts now, any more than that business of the compasses that pointed west might have something to do with it. Did you hear about that, by the way? Craziest thing I ever heard of. It was right after I shipped Tiny off to you last fall, as I remember. Every ship and boat and plane from here to Sandy Hook reported that its compass began to indicate due west instead of a magnetic north! Fortunately the effect only lasted a couple of hours so there were no serious difficulties. One cruise steamer ran aground, and there were a couple of Miami fishing-boat mishaps. I only bring it up to remind both of us that Tiny’s behavior may be odd, but not exclusively so in a world where such things as the crazy compasses occur.”

  And in her next, she wrote. “You’re quite the philosopher, aren’t you? Be careful of that Fortean attitude, my tropical friend. It tends to accept the idea of the unexplainable to an extent where explaining, or even investigating, begins to look useless. As far as that crazy compass episode is concerned, I remember it very well indeed. My boss, Dr. Nowland—yes, it’s true, he can alloy anything with anything!—has been up to his ears in that fantastic happenstance. So have most of his colleagues in half a dozen sciences. They’re able to explain it quite satisfactorily, too. It was simply the presence of some quite quasimagnetic phenomenon that created a resultant field at right angles to the earth’s own magnetic influence. That solution sent the pure theorists home happy. Of course, the practical ones—Nowland and his associates in metallurgy, for example—only have to figure out what caused the field. Science is a wonderful thing.

  “By the way, you will notice my change of address. I have wanted for a long time to have a little house of my own, and I was lucky enough to get this one from a friend. It’s up the Hudson from New York, quite countrified, but convenient enough to the city to be practical. I’m bringing Mother here from Upstate. She’ll love it. And besides—as if you didn’t know the most important reason when you saw it—it gives Tiny a place to run. He’s no city dog....I’d tell you that he found the h
ouse for me, too, if I didn’t think that, these days, I’m crediting him with even more than his remarkable powers. Gregg and Marie Weems, the couple who had the cottage before, began to be haunted. So they said, anyway. Some indescribably horrible monster that both of them caught glimpses of. inside the house and out of it. Marie finally got the screaming meemies about it and insisted on Gregg’s selling the place, housing shortage or no. They came straight to me. Why? Because they—Marie, any-way; she’s a mystic little thing—had the idea that someone with a large dog would be safe in that house. The odd part of that was that neither of them knew I had recently acquired a Great Dane. As soon as they saw Tiny they threw themselves on my neck and begged me to take the place. Marie couldn’t explain the feeling she had; what she and Gregg came to my place for was to ask, me to buy a big dog and take the house. Why me? Well, she just felt I would like it, that was all. It seemed the right kind of place for me. And my having the dog clinched it. Anyway, you can put that down in your notebook of unexplainables.”

  So it went for the better part of a year. The letters were long and frequent, and, as sometimes happens, Alec and Alistair grew very close indeed. Almost by accident they found themselves writing letters that did not mention Tiny at all, although there were others that concerned nothing else. And, of course, Tiny was not always in the role of canis superior. He was a dog—all dog—and acted accordingly. His strangeness came out only at particular intervals. At first it had been at times when Alistair was most susceptible to being astonished by it—in other words, when it was least expected. Later, he would perform his odd feats when she was ready for him to do it, and under exactly the right circumstances. Later still, he became the superdog only when she asked him to....

  The cottage was on a hillside, such a very steep hillside that the view of the river skipped over the railroad, and the trains were a secret rumble and never a sight at all. There was a wild and clean air about the place—a perpetual tingle of expectancy, as though someone coming into New York for the very first time on one of the trains had thrown his joyous anticipation high in the air and the cottage had caught it and breathed it and kept it forever.