A Way Home

by Theodore Sturgeon

  She said, “He’s been...talking to me, you know. You do know that, don’t you? I’m not guessing, Alec—Mum.”

  “I believe you, chicken,” her mother said softly. “What are you trying to say?”

  “I got it in concepts. It isn’t a thing you can repeat, really. But the idea is that he couldn’t give us any thing. His ship is completely functional, and there isn’t anything he can exchange for what he wants us to do. But he has given us something of great value...” Her voice trailed off; she seemed to listen to something for a moment. “Of value in several ways. A new science, a new approach to attack the science. New tools, new mathematics.”

  “But what is it? What can it do? And how is it going to help us pay for the casting?” asked Mrs. Forsythe.

  “It can’t, immediately,” said Alistair decisively. “It’s too big. We don’t even know what it is. Why are you arguing? Can’t you understand that he can’t give us any gadgetry? That we haven’t his techniques, materials, and tools, and so we couldn’t make any actual machine he suggested? He’s done the only thing he can; he’s given us a new science, and tools to take it apart.”

  “That I know,” said Alec gravely. “Well, indeed. I felt that. And I—I trust him. Do you, ma’am?”

  “Yes, of course. I think he’s—people. I think he has a sense of humor and a sense of justice,” said Mrs. Forsythe firmly. “Let’s get our heads together. We ought to be able to scrape it up some way. And why shouldn’t we? Haven’t we three got something to talk about for the rest of our lives?”

  And their heads went together.

  This is the letter that arrived two months later in St. Croix.

  Honey-lamb,

  Hold on to your seat. It’s all over.

  The casting arrived. I missed you more than ever, but when you have to go—and you know I’m glad you went! Anyway, I did as you indicated, through Tiny, before you left. The men who rented me the boat and ran it for me thought I was crazy, and said so. Do you know that once we were out on the river with the casting, and Tiny started whuffing and whimpering to tell me we were on the right spot, and I told the men to tip the casting over the side, they had the colossal nerve to insist on opening the crate? Got quite nasty about it. Didn’t want to be a party to any dirty work. It was against my principles, but I let them, just to expedite matters. They were certain there was a body in the box! When they saw what it was, I was going to bend my umbrelly over their silly heads, but they looked so funny I couldn’t do a thing but roar with laughter. That was when the man said I was crazy.

  Anyhow, over the side it went, into the river. Made a lovely splash. About a minute later I got the loveliest feeling—I wish I could describe it to you. I was sort of overwhelmed by a feeling of utter satisfaction, and gratitude, and, oh, I don’t know. I just felt good, all over. I looked at Tiny, and he was trembling. I think he felt it, too. I’d call it a thank you, on a grand psychic scale. I think you can rest assured that Tiny’s monster got what it wanted.

  But that wasn’t the end of it. I paid off the boatmen and started up the bank. Something made me stop and wait, and then go back to the water’s edge.

  It was early evening, and very still. I was under some sort of compulsion, not an unpleasant thing, but an unbreakable one. I sat down on the river wall and watched the water. There was no one around—the boat had left—except one of those snazzy Sunlounge cruisers anchored a few yards out. I remember how still it was, because there was a little girl playing on the deck of the yacht, and I could hear her footsteps as she ran about.

  Suddenly I noticed something in the water. I suppose I should have been frightened, but somehow I wasn’t at all. Whatever the thing was, it was big and gray and slimy and quite shapeless. And somehow, it seemed to be the source of this aura of well-being and protectiveness that I felt. It was staring at me. I knew it was before I saw that it had an eye—a big one, with something whirling inside of it. I don’t know. I wish I could write. I wish I had the power to tell you what it was like. I know that by human standards it was infinitely revolting. If this was Tiny’s monster, I could understand its being sensitive to the revulsion it might cause. And wrongly, for I felt to the core that the creature was good.

  It winked at me. I don’t mean blinked. It winked. And then everything happened at once.

  The creature was gone, and in seconds there was a disturbance in the water by the yacht. Something gray and wet reached up out of the river, and I saw it was going for that little girl. Only a tyke—about three, she was. Red hair just like yours. And it thumped that child in the small of the back just enough to knock her over into the river.

  And can you believe it? I just sat there watching and said never a word. It didn’t seem right to me that that baby could be struggling in the water. But it didn’t seem wrong, either!

  Well, before I could get my wits together. Tiny was off the wall like a hairy bullet and streaking through the water. I have often wondered why his feet are so big; I never will again. The hound is built like the lower half of a paddle wheel! In two shakes he had the baby by the scruff of the neck and was bringing her back to me. No one had seen that child get pushed, Alistair! No one but me. But there was a man on the yacht who must have seen her fall. He was all over the deck, roaring orders and getting in the way of things, and by the time he had his wherry in the water, Tiny had reached me with the little girl. She wasn’t frightened, either, she thought it was a grand joke! Wonderful youngster.

  So the man came ashore, all gratitude and tears, and wanted to gold-plate Tiny or something. Then he saw me. “That your dog?” I said it was my daughter’s. She was in St. Croix on her honeymoon. Before I could stop him, he had a checkbook out and was scratching away at it. He said he knew my kind. Said he knew I’d never accept a thing for myself, but wouldn’t refuse something for my daughter. I enclose the check. Why he picked a sum like thirteen thousand I’ll never know. Anyhow, I know it’ll be a help to you, and since the money really comes from Tiny’s monster, I’m sure you’ll use it. I suppose I can confess now. The idea that letting Alec put up the money—even though he had to clean out his savings and mortgage his estate—would be all right if he were one of the family, because then he’d have you to help him make it all back again—well, that was all my inspiration. Sometimes, though, watching you, I wonder if I really had to work so all-fired hard to get you two married to each other.

  Well, I imagine that closes the business of Tiny’s monster. There are a lot of things we’ll probably never know. I can guess some things, though. It could communicate with a dog but not with a human, unless it half killed it-self trying. Apparently a dog is telepathic with humans to a degree, though it probably doesn’t understand a lot of what it gets. I don’t speak French, but I could probably transcribe French phonetically well enough so a Frenchman could read it. Tiny was transcribing that way. The monster could “send” through him and control him completely. It no doubt indoctrinated the dog—if I can use the term—the day old Debbil took him up the waterline. And when the monster caught, through Tiny, the mental picture of you when Dr. Schwellenbach mentioned you, it went to work through the dog to get you working on its problem. Mental pictures—that’s probably what the monster used. That’s how Tiny could tell one book from another without being able to read. You visualize everything you think about. What do you think? I think that mine’s as good a guess as any.

  You might be amused to learn that last night all the compasses in this neighborhood pointed west for a couple of hours! ‘By, now, chillun. Keep on being happy.

  Love and love, and a kiss for Alec,

  Mum

  P.S. Is St. Croix really a nice place to honeymoon? Jack—he’s the fellow who signed the check—is getting very sentimental. He’s very like your father. A widower, and—oh, I don’t know. Says fate, or something, brought us together. Said he hadn’t planned to take a trip upriver with his granddaughter, but something drove him to it. He can’t imagine why he anchored just there. See
med a good idea at the time. Maybe it was fate. He is very sweet. I wish I could forget that wink I saw in the water.

  A WAY HOME

  WHEN PAUL RAN AWAY FROM HOME, he met no one and saw nothing all the way to the highway. The highway swept sudden and wide from the turn by Keeper’s Rise, past the blunt end of the Township Road, and narrowed off to a distant pinpoint pricking at the horizon. After a time Paul could see the car.

  It was new and long and it threw down its snout a little as the driver braked, and when it stopped beside him it seesawed easily, once, on its big soft springs.

  The driver was a large man, large and costly, with a gray Stetson and a dove-colored topcoat made of something that did not crease in the bend of his arms but rolled and folded instead. The woman beside him had a broad brow and a pointed chin. Her skin had peach shadings, but was deeply tanned, and her hair was the red gold called “straw color” by a smith as he watches his forge. She smiled at the man and she smiled at Paul almost the same way.

  “Hi, son,” the man said. “This is old Township Road?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Paul, “it sure is.”

  “Figured it was,” said the man. “A feller don’t forget.”

  “Reckon you don’t,” said Paul.

  “Haven’t seen the old town in twenty years,” said the man. “I guess it ain’t changed much.”

  “These old places don’t change much,” said Paul with scorn.

  “Oh, they ain’t so bad to come back to,” said the man. “Hate to get chained down in one all my life, though.”

  “Me too,” agreed Paul. “You from around here?”

  “Why sure,” said the man. “My name’s Roudenbush. Any more Roudenbushes around here that you know of, boy?”

  “Place is full of ’em,” said Paul. “Hey, you’re not the Roudenbush kid that ran away twenty years ago?”

  “The very one,” said the man. “What happened after I left?”

  “Why, they talk about you to this day,” said Paul. “Your mother sickened and died, and your pa got up in meetin’ a month after you left an’ asked forgiveness for treatin’ you so mean.”

  “Poor old feller,” said the man. “I guess it was a little rough of me to run out like that. But he asked for it.”

  “I bet he did.”

  “This is my wife,” said the man.

  The woman smiled at Paul again. She did not speak. Paul could not think up what kind of a voice she might have. She leaned forward and opened up the glove compartment. It-was cram-full of chocolate-covered cherries.

  “Been crazy about these ever since I was a kid” said the man. “Help yourself. I got ten pounds of them in the back.” He leaned into the leather cushions, took out a silver cigar case, put a cigar between his teeth, and applied a lighter that flamed up like a little bonfire in his hand. “Yes, sir,” said the man. “I got two more cars back in the city, and a tuxedo suit with shiny lapels I made a killing in the stock market, and now I’m president of a railroad. I’ll be getting back there this evening, after I give the folks in the old town a treat.”

  Paul had a handful of chocolate-covered cherries. “Gee,” he said. After that he walked on down the highway. The cherries disappeared and the man and the lady and the car all disappeared but that didn’t matter. “It’ll be like that,” said young Paul Roudenbush. “It’ll be just like that.” Then, “I wonder what the lady’s name’ll be.”

  A quarter of a mile down the pike was the turn-off to the school, and there was the railroad crossing with its big X on a pole that he always read RAIL CROSSING ROAD. The forenoon freight was bowling down the grade, screaming two longs, a short, and a long. When he was a kid, two years or so back, Paul used to think it saluted him: Paul...Roud...n’Bush-h-h...with the final sibilant made visible in the plume of steam on the engine’s iron shoulder. Paul trotted up to the crossing and stood just where the first splintered plank met the road surface. Engine, tender, Pennsylvania, Nickel Plate, T. & N. O., Southern, Southern, Pennsylvania, Père Marquette, Canadian Pacific. Cars from all over: hot places, cold places, far places. Automobiles, automobiles, cattle, tank. Tank tank cattle. Refrigerator, refrigerator, automobiles, caboose. Caboose with a red flag flying, and a glimpse at the window of a bull-necked trainman shaving, suds on his jowls like a mad dog. Then the train was a dwindling rectangle on the track, and on its top was the silhouette of a brakeman, leaning easily into wind and velocity, walking on top of the boxcars.

  With the train in one ear and dust in the other, Paul faced the highway. A man stood at the other side of the tracks. Paul gaped at him.

  He was wearing ‘an old brown jacket with a gray sheepskin collar, and blue dungarees. These he was dusting off with long weather-beaten hands, one of which—the right—looked like a claw. There was no ring finger or little finger, and a third of the palm’s breadth was gone. From the side of the middle finger to the side of the wrist, the hand was neatly sealed with a type of flexible silvery scar-tissue.

  He looked up from his dusting at Paul. “Hi, bub.” Either he had a beard or he badly needed a shave. Paul could see the cleft in his square chin, though. The man had eyes as pale as the color of water poured into a glass after the milk had been drunk.

  Paul said, “Hi,” still looking at the hand. The man asked him what that town was over there in the hollow, and Paul told him. He knew now what the man was—one of those fabulous characters who ride on freight trains from place to place. Ride the rods. Catch a fast freight out of Casey, which was K.C., which was Kansas City. They had been everywhere and done everything, these men, and they had a language all their own. Handouts and line bulls, Chi and mulligan and grab a rattler to Nollins.

  The mail squinched up his eyes at the town, as if he were trying to drive his gaze through the hill and see more. “The old place hasn’t growed none,” he said, and spat.

  Paul spat too. “Never will,” he said.

  “You from there?”

  “Yup.”

  “Me too,” said the man surprisingly.

  “Gosh,” said Paul. “You don’t look like you came from around here.”

  The man crossed the single track to Paul’s side. “I guess I don’t. I been a lot of places since I left here.”

  “Where you been?” asked Paul.

  The man looked into Paul’s open eyes, and through them to Paul’s open credulousness. “All over the world,” he said. “All over this country on freights, and all over the oceans on ships.” He bared his right forearm. “Look there.” And sure enough he had a tattoo.

  “Women,” said the man, flexing his claw so that the tattoo writhed. “That’s what I like.” He closed one pale eye, pushed his mouth sidewise under it, and clucked a rapid chick-chick from his pale cheek.

  Paul wet his lips, spat again, and said, “Yeah. Oh, boy.”

  The man laughed. He had bad teeth. “You’re like I was. Wasn’t room enough in that town for me.”

  “Me either,” said Paul. “I ain’t going back there no more.”

  “Oh, you’ll go back. You’ll want to look it over, and ask a few questions around, and find out what happened to your old gals, and see how dead everything is, so’s you can go away again knowin’ you done right to leave in the first place. This here’s my second trip back. Seems like every time I go through this part o’ the world I just got to drop by here and let the old burg give me a couple laughs.” He turned his attention right around and looked outward again. “You really are headin’ out, bub?”

  “Headin’ out,” nodded Paul. He liked the sound of that. “Headin’ out,” he said again.

  “Where you bound?”

  “The city,” Paul said, “unless I hit somethin’ I like better ‘fore I get there.”

  The man considered him. “Hey. Got any money?”

  Paul shook his head cautiously. He had two dollars and ninety-two cents. The man seemed to make some decision; he shrugged. “Well, good luck, bub. More places you see, more of a man you’ll be. Woman told me t
hat once in Sacramento.”

  “The—oh!” said Paul. Approaching the grade crossing was a maroon coupe. “It’s Mr. Sherman!’

  “Who’s he?”

  “The sheriff. He’ll be out lookin’ for me!

  “Sheriff! Me for the brush. Don’t tag, you little squirt! Go the other way!” and he dived down the embankment and disappeared into the bushes.

  Frightened by the man’s sudden harshness, confused by the necessity for instant action, Paul shuffled for a moment, almost dancing, and then ran to the other side. Flat on his stomach in a growth of fireweed, he stopped breathing and peered at the road. The coupe slowed, all but stopped. Paul closed his eyes in terror. Then he heard the grate of gears and the rising whine as the car pulled over the tracks in second gear and moaned on up the highway.

  Paul waited five minutes, his fear leaving him exactly as fast as his sweat dried. Then he emerged and hurried along the highway, keeping a sharp watch ahead for the sheriff’s returning car. He saw no sign of the man with the claw. But then, he hadn’t really expected to.

  It could be like that, he thought. Travel this old world over. Gramps used to say that men like that had an itching foot. Paul’s feet itched a little, if he thought about it. Hurt a little, too. He could come back years from now with a tattoo and a mutilated hand. Folk’d really take notice. The stories he could tell! “I run down the bank, see, to haul this tomato out o’ th’ drink. She was yellin’ her blond head off. No sooner got my hooks on her when clomp, a alligator takes off part o’ me hand. I didn’t mind none. Not when I carried this babe up the bank.” He shut one eye, pushed his mouth sideways, and clucked. The sound, somehow, reminded him of chocolate-covered cherries...

  Another half mile, and the country became more open. He flicked his eyes from side to side as he trudged. First sign of that maroon coupe and he’d have to fade. Sheriff! Me for the brush! He felt good. He could keep ahead of the law. Bet your life. Go where you want to go, do what you want to do, come back for a laugh every once in a while. That was better, even, than a big car and a tuxedo suit. Women. A smooth-faced one in the car beside you or, chick-chick, women all over, Sacramento and every place, to tell you what a man you are, because of all the places you’ve been. Yup, that was it.