Bright Segment

by Theodore Sturgeon

  He walked slowly back to the bench and sat down, and that was where he had his big idea.

  “Whoever is that?” The thin old voice was edgy.

  “Me. Roan,” he said from the court.

  The top panel of a door slid back and the voice floated to him, gentle now, and firm. “You know you’re welcome here, son, but you also know you’re to call first. Just spin that dial and clear out of here for an hour. Then you can come and stay as long as you like.”

  “Petals to that. I haven’t got an hour. Come on out here or I’m coming in.”

  “Don’t you use that language on me, you leak-brained snipe, or I’ll lift your hair with a blunt nailfile!”

  The instant she began to shout, he began to roar, “Decent or not, just get on out here. If you’d shut off your low-fidelity mouth for twelve lousy seconds, you’d stop wasting your own time!”

  They stopped yelling together and the silence was deafening. Suddenly, Granny laughed, “Boy, where’d you learn that type language?”

  “For years, I’ve been hearing you talk, Great Mam,” he said diffidently. “It only just now occurred to me that I never really listened. And about being decent—if you’re comfortable, come as you are.”

  “Damfidon’t!” She came out of the room and kicked the door closed with a flip of her heel. She wore an immense wrapper of an agonizing blue and seemed to be barefooted. Her hair, instead of lying sleekly away from the center part in two controlled wings, flew free like a May’s. Roan had one frozen moment, and then she tossed the hair back on one side with an angry twitch of her head. “Well?” she blazed. There seemed to be nothing left of the gentle talc-on-ivory quality in her voice.

  Slowly, he smiled. “Damfidon’t like you better the way you are.”

  She sniffed, but she was pleased. “All you can do to keep your eyes from rolling out onto the carpet. Ah, well, you’ve found my secret. Reckon I’m old enough to have just one eccentricity?” she demanded challengingly.

  “You’ve lived long enough to earn your privileges.”

  “Come on in here,” she said, starting down the court. “Most folks don’t or can’t realize I’ve spent the least part of my life in that cone-in-cone getup. Everybody else around’s practically born in it. I just don’t like it. Chest-padding the men so they won’t look different from women!” she snorted. “I wasn’t brought up that way.” She opened the manual door in the corner. “Here we are.”

  It was an odd-shaped room, an isosceles triangle. He had never seen it before. “What happened to your voice, Granny? You feeling all right?”

  In the familiar wind-in-the-distance tones, she said, “You mean you miss this little gasp?” Then, stridently, “Something I picked up for company. Had to. Nobody’d take me seriously when I talked natural. They cast me as a frail little pillar of respectability and, by the Lord, I was stuck with it. It’s hot in here.”

  He missed the hint, waited for her to sit down, and then joined her. “Know why I’m here?”

  She regarded him closely. “Sleeping well?”

  “That wasn’t a dream.”

  “No? What then?”

  “I came to find out what it was. Where it is.”

  She fluttered the lapel of the wrapper. “You got this part of my secret life out of me, but that don’t guarantee you all of it. What makes you so sure it wasn’t a dream?”

  “You just don’t go to bed healthy and sleep for two days! Besides, there’s Valerie. I saw her there, right at the very last second.”

  She grunted. “ ‘Fraid of that. No one was sure.” She laughed. “Must’ve been a picnic when you two got your heads together. You come here to kill me?”

  “What?”

  “Outraged brother and all that?”

  “Valerie’s happier than she’s ever been in her life and so much in love, she can’t see straight. I’m just as happy for her as she is for herself.”

  “Well!” she smiled. “This changes things. So you want to take your sister and go live out your lives in a dreamland.”

  “It’s more than that,” he said. “I need one of your telekinesis operators. I mean now.”

  “The best I can do for you is a little girl who can knock down a balancing straight-edge at any distance under fifteen feet.”

  He made no attempt to conceal his scorn.

  She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “How’d you mix me up in this, anyway?”

  “We’re wasting time,” he said. “But if you must know, it was your hints to me last time I was here—the transplat obsolete, people appearing in any room anywhere, communication without phones. I’d already seen telekinesis twice, when you told me that. And since then …” he shrugged. “You had to be in it. Maybe you’d like to tell me why I’m mixed up in it.”

  “Hadn’t planned to for a while. Maybe we’ll step up the schedule. Now what’s the all-fired rush?”

  “I have an appointment in—” he checked—“less than two hours that is going to put me under the ground unless I can get help.” He told her, rapidly, about the lost time and his father’s threat.

  “You’re dead right,” she said after a moment. “He’s afraid of you. I don’t know why he should be that afraid. He’s just like his father, the potbellied old—” She stopped, shocked, as a large hand closed over her wrist.

  “I can’t listen to that.”

  “All right,” she said with surprising swiftness. “I’m sorry. Given one of my TKs, what would you do?”

  He leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees, bringing his gloved hands into plain sight.

  “Do? I’m going to take this wrinkle-free civilization and turn it out into the woods. I’m going to clutter up the Family Rooms with the family’s own children. I’m going to turn Stasis itself upside down and shake it till the blood runs into its head and it finds out how to sweat again.”

  Granny’s eyes brightened. “Why?”

  “I could tell you it was for the good of all the people—because you’re Great Mam and lived through it all and had a chance to think about things like that. But I’m not going to say anything like that to you. No—I’ll do it because I want to live that way myself, head of a family of hard-handed, barefoot, axe-swinging people who are glad to get up in the morning.

  “I thought of finding the dream-people again. I even thought of going out into the wilderness between cities and living that way myself. But if I did, I’d always be afraid that some day a resources survey crew might find me, scoop me up and bring me back. Stasis wouldn’t let people live like that, so let’s make Stasis live our way.”

  He took a deep breath. “Now Stasis is built around the transplat. There can’t ever be a better machine. But if I go in there today and claim I’ve spent years secretly developing one—if I get one of your people to start transmitting things all over his office and claim I have a new machine to do it with—why, the Private’s got to listen. I’ll save my job and spot your people through and through the whole culture till it falls apart. And one day maybe I’ll be the Private at Walsh & Co.—and, Stasis, look out!”

  “You know,” she said. “I like you.”

  “Help me,” he said bluntly. “I’ll like you, too.”

  She rose and punched his arm with sharp knuckles. “I’ll have to think. You know, if you can fast-talk your way out of this, you’ll only stall things a little. The old—your father—wouldn’t buy any parlor tricks. He’d want to see that machine.”

  “Then let’s stall. Can you fix me up with a telekin—telekineticist? That what you call them?”

  “TK,” she said absently. “I’ve got something a heap better than any TK. How’d you like a stationless transplat—a matter transmitter that will lift anything from anywhere to anywhere without centrals or depots?”

  “There’s no such thing, Granny.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “All my life I’ve been a transplat man, that’s why. There’s a limiting factor on matter transmission. It must have a planet
ary field; it must have a directing central; it must have platforms built of untransmissible material and—”

  “Don’t tell me how a transplat works,” she snapped. “Suppose a machine was designed on totally different principles. A force-pump instead of a suction pump. Or an Archimedes screw.”

  “There isn’t any other principle! Don’t you think I know?”

  “I’ll show you the damn machine!” She marched to the angled wall of the little room and bumped a scuff-plate near the floor. The entire wall slid upward into the ceiling, swift and silent. Lights blazed.

  It was quite a laboratory. Much of its equipment he had thought existed only in factories. Most was incomprehensible to him.

  Granny walked briskly down an aisle and stopped at the far wall. Ranged against it was a glittering cluster of equipment beneath a desk-sized control panel. The desk surface seemed to be a vision screen, though it was hinged at the top. At the side, he saw what looked like manipulator controls of the kind used in radiation laboratories.

  “There’s a servo-robot this size on a hill about forty miles from here,” said Granny.

  She turned a switch, sat down over the screen and began to spin two control wheels.

  “Tell you what it does,” she said abstractedly as she worked, “though this ain’t really the way it does it. Plot a straight line out from this machine and a line from the other. Where they intersect, that’s your transmission point. Now draw two more lines from the equipment and where they cross, that’s the arrival point. When they’re set up, you haul on this snivvy and what was here is now there. The stuff doesn’t travel any more than it does with a transplat. It ceases to exist at one point and conservation of matter makes it appear at another.

  “But you’ve created just the strain in space which makes it show up.”

  “Show me.”

  “All right. Call it.”

  “My old wallet. Top drawer, left side in the office. Drawer’s locked, by the way,” he said.

  “What’s the matrix?”

  He reeled off the address coordinates. She tapped them on a keyboard and bent over the screen. It showed a Stasis unit. She spun a wheel and the buildings rushed closer. Her hand dropped back to a vernier and the view slowed, seemed to press through the roof and hover over a desk.

  “Right?”

  “Go on,” he said. “Pretty fair spy-ray you have there.”

  “You don’t know!” She reached, and from a speaker came the quiet bustle of the office. She went back to the controls and the view sank into the desktop. Suddenly, the contents of the drawer were there. With the manipulators, she deftly hooked the wallet, raised it a fraction. Then the scene disappeared as she shifted to another set of controls.

  “Receiver location,” she murmured. The garbled picture cleared, became a mass of girders and then a bird’s-eye view of the room they stood in, so clear that Roan looked up with a start. He could see nothing. “Stick out your stupid hand,” said Granny.

  He obeyed and she brought the scene down to it until its image hung in the center of the picture. Roan wiggled his fingers. Granny cut back to the other view, checked it, then threw over the “snivvy” she had shown him earlier.

  The wallet dropped into his hand.

  She switched off, turned and looked up at him. “Well?”

  He said, “Why play around like this?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This thing doesn’t do what you say it does. I got the wallet, sure, but not with that thing.”

  “Do tell. All right, how did you get the wallet?”

  He considered the instrument carefully. “It’s a sort of amplifier—yes, and range-finder, too. It just gets a fix for your TK man. Right?”

  “You really think I’ve got a high-powered psychic hiding around here who does the work after I get to it with the finder?”

  “You’re the TK!”

  She slumped resignedly at the controls. “If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. Old Roman saying. If that’s what you say it is, boy, then that’s what it is.”

  “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?” he grumbled, looking at his watch. “So now what do we do?”

  “Wait a minute—I’ve got to get used to something.” She hung over the console and then glanced up brightly. “I’ll break out the pilot model. You can’t tote this thing under your arm.”

  She went to a storage wall and dragged out a bin. In it was a long box. Roan helped her open it and lift out the spindly collection of coils and bars, setting it on a bench.

  “I’ll check you through this.” She flung off her wrapper and advanced on the machine. “Just turn it on its side for me,” she said. “what are you gawping at? Oh!” She looked down at her shorts and halter, and laughed. “I told you it was too hot in here.”

  It was not that age had left no marks on her compact body, but certainly not two centuries’ worth. Holding a light-duty soldering iron near her cheek, she slapped herself on the bare midriff.

  “One thing you might keep in mind about women as you get to know ’em, Roany—the parts that the decent people expose are exactly the ones that get old first. This face of mine was gone at 75, but the tummy’s good for another hundred yet.” She bent over the device. “Maybe it’s better that way, maybe not—who’s to say? Hand me the millivoltmeter there.”

  After a time, her work with the machine took precedence over everything else in Roan’s cosmos. “You sure can get around in there,” he said, awed, as he held the light for her.

  “Think so?” she grunted, and went on working steadily.

  VIII

  At 1451, Roan Walsh arrived at the Walsh Building. His head spun with its lopsided weight of advice, technical data and strategy. His arrival was in the warehouse, not in the office, for he brought a long wooden box on casters. He pushed the box himself up the long corridor to the office wing.

  “Oh, Roan Walsh, can I help?”

  “No, Corsonmay. Wait—Yes, come in.” He put his hands on the end of the box and nodded at the dithering secretary. “Grab hold here.”

  She came close, tittered and let the tips of her gloves show for an instant before she slipped them clumsily under the end of the box.

  Not that end up, you addlehead.

  Roan yelped and let go. Corsonmay, now bearing most of the not inconsiderable weight, began to mew rapidly. Roan, sitting flat on the floor, gasped, “Who said that?”

  “Ewp!” squeaked Corsonmay. “It’s heavy!”

  “Let it down. My God, Corsonmay, you’re as strong as a horse!”

  “That’s the nicest thing you ever said to me,” she beamed without sarcasm.

  He turned to her, found himself face to face with her withered ardency. “What did you say about lifting up the wrong end, Corsonmay?”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  I did.

  “Byemay,” he said, and forestalling her, added, “Really—nothing more. Byemay.”

  She left and he whirled, hunting futilely in midair. “Granny! Where are you?”

  Briefly, just at eye-level, the business end of a needle-focus audio beam projector appeared. Roan patted it happily and it disappeared. Bless her, she’d be watching everything through her big machine, her audio aimed for his inner ear every second.

  At 1559.5, the ceiling said, “Roan Walsh, you may step in now.”

  “Coming, Private.” He all but started at the sound of his own voice. How was it that, though he seemed increasingly able to cope with anyone or anything, his father’s voice still turned him to mush?

  But that could wait. He stepped just inside the room.

  “Come, come—stand close. I intend to do one of several things, but biting is not one of them.”

  Roan stayed where he was. “May I have the Private’s permission to bring a piece of equipment in?”

  “You have my permission to bring those cards in, revised or not. Nothing more.”

  “The Private deprives me of the use of evidence he
himself assigned me to bring,” Roan said stiffly.

  “Do I now?” The beard, its lower end invisible under the privacy hood, was pulled thoughtfully. “Very well. But I should warn you—you have no leeway, young man. None!”

  Roan wheeled the box through the doorway. He was shaking with apprehension, but Granny’s voice pleaded inaudibly, Trust me.

  Even in front of his father, he nearly smiled. He locked the casters and, with a tremendous effort, heaved the box up on end. The right end, this time.

  “What the devil’s that?” demanded the beard.

  “My evidence, Private.” Outwardly calm, inwardly aquiver, he drew out the top section of the box with its two knobs and their two sets of horns. Each horn was hollow and had a light inside. Roan turned them on.

  “I asked you a question,” rumbled the Private.

  “Your patience,” Roan responded.

  What patience? Granny’s chuckle did more good for Roan than a week’s delay.

  “Ready now, Private. May I have the use of some small object—your stylus, perhaps, or a small book?”

  “You have taken my money and you are taking my time. Is it now your intention to take my property?”

  Whyncha spit in his eye?

  Roan threw up a glance of such extreme annoyance that the inaudible voice apologized.

  Sorry. It’s just that I’m on your side, honey.

  Honey! He had tasted his very first honey is his “dream.” That was a nice thing to call someone. He wondered if anyone had ever thought of it before. To the Private, he said, “If I use my own property, there could be some suspicion of previous preparation.”

  “I suspect the previous preparation with which you are cluttering up my office already,” growled the old man. “Here’s the old paperweight. It dates from the time when buildings had sliding panels opening to the outside air. If anything happens to it—”

  “It will do,” said Roan levelly, taking it without thanks. The Private’s eyebrow ridges moved briefly. “Would you kindly point out a spot on the floor?”

  With an expression of saintly patience, the Private drew out his stylus and threw it. It fell near the far wall. Roan placed the paperweight near the point of the stylus, on the carpet.