Bright Segment

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “I really don’t want—”

  “Right away, darling.” Two out of five times when I say darling, I roar at her. She set the tray down on the coffee table and fairly scurried out. I laughed. “Wonderful, wonderful. She doesn’t exactly hide the liquor, but she sure tidies it away. Now, by God, she’ll bring it to me.”

  I could actually hear the soft sound at the corners of Henry’s mouth as his smile stretched it.

  Loretta came back and I took the bottle. “No chaser; we’re men in here. Okay darling, you can leave the dishes here for the night.”

  She wouldn’t back to the door and she wouldn’t—maybe she was frightened just then—she wouldn’t take her eyes off me, so she got out sidewise, not forgetting to flip the crumpled fragment of a hostess’s smile to Henry.

  Henry was saying, “Well, thank you very much. Mrs.—” but by the time he got it all stammered out, I had the door closed.

  I went to the settee, rubbing my hands. “Bring the bottle, Henry.”

  He brought it, and sat down by me, and we ate. It was very good, which is the least a man can expect. I toyed with the idea of yelling for some tabasco, but I’d had enough fun with Loretta for the time being. Enveloping that food, my stomach felt well pleased with itself. Silent, unsmiling and intent, Henry absorbed what was on his plate.

  I poured a slug for Henry, knowing I could afford to be generous, and one for myself. I leaned back and enjoyed a belch, which made Henry jump, threw down the bourbon, poured another and went to the desk.

  On my desk is a typewriter, and under the typewriter is a sound-absorbing mat, and in the mat I keep a sewing-machine needle, the best toothpick Man ever made. It’s strong and it’s sharp and it has a base you can get a grip on without snapping it. I sat in the swivel chair and leaned my elbows on the typewriter and picked my teeth and watched Henry mopping the honey off his dessert plate with a piece of bread.

  “That was—your wife certainly can—”

  “Like I said, Henry, nothing but the best. Sit down over here. Bring your drink.”

  He hesitated, then brought it over and put it on the desk where I could reach it. He sat down on the edge of the easy chair. He looked like a worrisome kitten making its first try at sitting on a fence. I laughed in his face and he smiled right back at me.

  “What I am going to do, Henry,” I told him, I told average, stupid, fearful, dogface Henry, “I’m going to let you in on some things that no human being on Earth knows. I’m going to tell you at the same time that these things are known to a number of people. Not a large number, but—a number. Could both those statements be true?”

  “Well, I—” he said. Then he blushed.

  “You’re sort of slow, so I’ll keep it simple and easy for you. I just got off a paradox. But it isn’t a paradox. Don’t sit there and smile and shake your head at me. Just listen. You’ll catch on. Now you and I—are we different from each other?”

  “Oh, yes,” he breathed.

  “Right.” At the same time, all human beings are alike. And you know what? No paradox there, either.”

  “No?”

  “No. And here’s why. You’re like my wife and the bartender and my city editor and all the billions of creepers and crawlers on Earth who call themselves human beings. And as you just so perceptively pointed out, I’m not like you. And for your information, I’m not like Loretta or Steve or the city editor. Now do you see why there’s no paradox?”

  Henry shifted unhappily. He absolutely astonished me. How could a guy like that, without bluff, without deftness, without, as far as I could see, even the ability to lie a little—how could he live three consecutive days in a world like this? Look at him, worrying away at my question, wanting so much to get the right answer.

  It came like an abject apology: “No, I don’t see. No I don’t.” His eyes flickered, the embarrassed heat stirring and waning. “Unless what you mean is you’re not a human being.” He snickered weakly and again made that odd warding-off, half-ducking motion.

  Leaning back, I beamed at him. “Now isn’t it a relief to know you’re not so dumb, after all?”

  “Is that really what you mean? You’re not … but I thought everybody was a human being!” he cried pathetically.

  “Don’t get all churned up,” I told him gently.

  I leaned forward very suddenly to startle him, and I did, too. I stuck my finger in my whiskey, lifted the glass with the other hand, and drew a wet circle on the desk-top, about eight inches in diameter.

  “Let’s say, that anywhere in this circle—” I moved the glass around inside the mark—“this glass is what you call human. When it’s here or here or a little bit forward, it’s still human; it’s just not the same human—the same kind of human. You’re different from Steve the bartender because everything he is is here, and everything you are is over on the other side, here. You’re different because you’re placed differently in the circle, but you’re the same because you’re both inside it. Presto—no paradox.” I moved the glass far enough to empty it and set it aside and put my hand in the circle. The wet wood was bleaching slowly, which was okay; Loretta would polish it up in the morning.

  “Inside the circle,” I said, “a man can be smart or stupid, musical, aggressive, tall, effeminate, mechanically apt, Yugoslavian, a mathematical genius or a strudel baker—but he’s still human. Now by what Earthly conceit do we conclude that a man just has to live within that circle? What about a guy who’s born out here, on the outside edge? Why can’t he be here, right on the line? Who’s to say he can’t live way out here?” And I banged my hand down a foot away from the circle.

  Henry said, “I—”

  “Shut up. Answer: there are people outside this border. Not many, but some. And if you’re going to call the ones inside ‘human,’ the ones outside have to be—something else.”

  “Is that what you are?” Henry whispered.

  “That’s me.”

  “Is that what they call a moot … mute …”

  “Mutation? No! Well, damn it, yes; that’s a good a name as any. But not in the way you ever thought of. No atom-dust, no cosmic rays, nothing like that. Just normal everyday variation. Look, you have to go farther from one side of this circle to the other than from just inside to just outside—right? Yet the distance across is within the permissable variation; the difference between human beings which leaves them still human beings together. But one small variation this way—” I slid my finger outside the circle—“and you have something quite new.”

  “How—new?”

  I shrugged. “Any one of a zillion ways. Take any species. Take kittens from the same litter. You’ll find one has sharper claws, another has sharper eyes. Which is the best kitten?”

  “Well, I guess the one with the—”

  “No, you mumbling Neanderthal.” That made him smile. “Neither one is best. They’re just different, each in a way that makes him hunt a bit better. Now say another of the litter has functional gills and another has mat-scales like an armadillo. There’s your …”

  “Supercat?” he beamed.

  “Just call it ‘uncat.’ ”

  “You—you’re uh, un—”

  “Unhuman.” I nodded.

  “But you look—”

  “Yeah, a cat with sweat-glands in its skin would look like a cat, too—most of the time. I’m different, Henry. I’ve always known I was different.” I poked my finger toward him and he curled from its imaginary touch. “You, for example—you have, like nobody else I ever met, that stuff called ‘empathy.’ ”

  “I have?”

  “You’re always feeling with other people’s fingertips, seeing through other people’s eyes. Laugh with ’em, cry with ’em. Empathy.”

  “Oh. Yes, I guess—”

  “Now me, I have as much of that as my armadillo-cat has fur. It’s just not in me. I have other things instead. Do you know I was never angry in my life? That’s why I have so much fun. That’s why I can push people around. I can
make anybody do anything, just because I always have myself under control. I can roar like a lion and beat my fists on the wall and put up a hell of a show, yet always know exactly what I’m doing. You knew me when, Henry. You’ve read my stuff. You’ve seen me operate. You going to call a man like me human?”

  He wet his lips, clasped his hands together, blankly made the knuckles crack. Poor Henry! A brand-new idea and it was splitting his skull-seams.

  “Couldn’t you be,” he ventured at last, “just sort of—talented, not really different at all?”

  “Ah! Now we come to the point. Now we get the big proof. Speaking of proof, where’s the bottle? Oh, here.” I poured. “See I’m a real modest boy, Henry. When I figured this all out, I didn’t do the human thing—conclude that I was the only super—uh, unhuman in captivity. There’s just too many people born, too much variation this way and that. Law of averages. There just has to be more like me.”

  “You mean just like—”

  “No! I mean more unhumans—all kinds, any kind. So, because I can think like an unhuman, I thought my way after others of my kind.”

  Trying to heave up out of my chair, I quit and slumped back. “Damn it. You know, I’m hungry as a … Imagine, a dinner like that. Why can’t she cook up something that sticks to a man’s ribs? I swear I’m as empty as a paper sack. Henry, check that door for me, see that it’s locked.”

  He went to the door and tried it. It was locked. As he came back, I picked up the brass key. “This will open your eyes, Henry, old boy, old boy,” I said.

  I unlocked the file drawer. It got heavier all the time, I thought. Well, if you’re going to have fun, you’ve got to take care of the details.

  I lifted out the “Justice” file and banged it down beside the typewriter. “So I found me another unhuman. Takes one to catch one. Just you listen now and tell me what human being would even start this line of thinking, let alone carry it through.” I opened the file.

  “This all started,” I said, “when I did a piece on unsolved murders. You know that no city releases figures on unsolved murders; well, not easily, anyway. You should see ’em—69 per cent in one city, 73 in another. Some bring it down to 40—our town got it to 38 per cent one year. But that’s a whole lot of scot-free murderers, hm? All over the country. Imagine!

  “So what I did—for the feature story, you know—I dug up everything I could find on a whole drawerful of these cases. What I wanted was an angle. What’s the most obvious? Whodunit, that’s what. So throw that out. What next? Who could have done it, but didn’t. Throw that out, too.

  “So then it occurred to me to see if there wasn’t some sort of lowest common denominator to them—here a second-string advertising man with no enemies, there a teen-age hood with a knife in him, yonder a rich boy found floating next to his yacht—all kinds of people get murdered, you know.

  “Mind you, I’m still just looking for an angle.

  “Next, I threw out all the cases where people had a lot of enemies, and all the cases where a lot of people had an opportunity as well as a motive. This left a pretty strange stack. All of them were, apparently, reasonless, purposeless murders, all done differently at different places.

  “Well, I phoned and I legged and I sat and thought, and I interviewed God knows how many people. Couple of times, I came pretty close to finding new stuff, too, but who cares whodunit? Not me. I wasn’t looking for crimes with a reason behind them. I was looking for killings with no motive. Any time the scent got hot, I threw that case out. By this time, I had a feature shaping up—I’d call it ‘Murder for What?’ Good for a couple spreads—maybe even a series.”

  I thumped the file. “I guess I had the answer for weeks before I even knew it. Then, one night, I sat here and read everything through. And what do you know: in each and every one of these cases, someone was happy because of the murder! Or, anyway, happier. And I’m not talking about people who inherited the victims’ loot, or poor persecuted wives and children who would no longer have to put up with the old man’s payday drunks. Reach me the bottle, Henry.

  “Now not a single one of this final stack showed motive or opportunity for the—let’s say ‘beneficiary’ of these murders. Like this one, where the old woman, her with a constitution like a buffalo, she’d been lying in bed for eight months pretending to be sick so her daughter wouldn’t marry. The girl was nine miles away when someone cut the old biddy’s throat.

  “And this one here, an engineering student and a good one, working his own way through school and then had to quit and come home because his old man had doubled the size of the ancestral hardware store for no reason but that it had been small enough to handle by himself. So one warm Sunday, the kid is, no fooling, in church in front of eighty witnesses while, down the road, somebody parts the old man’s head with a tire iron. They never did find out who.

  “And this one, this is particularly the best of all: a little old guy for years ran a flea circus, gluing costumes on ’em and making ’em turn little merry-go-rounds and all that kind of thing. Used to feed ’em off his arm. One fine day, someone swipes one of his pets and replaces it with pulex cheopis—a rat flea, to you—loaded to the eyeballs, or cephalothorax, as the case may be, with bubonic plague. First and only case of black plague in these parts in a hundred and eighty years.” I laughed.

  “Somebody was happier?” Henry asked wonderingly.

  “Well, the other fleas were. And besides, the old guy used to get a large charge out of cracking fleas in his tweezers right under the noses of the most squeamish women in the audience. You know how they go—blip!”

  Henry grinned. “Blip,” he half-whispered.

  “It’s hot in here,” I said uncomfortably. “Well, this is the part I was getting to, I mean about thinking unhumanly. I said to myself, now suppose, just for the sake of argument, that there’s this guy, see, a sort of mutant, a slight variation to just outside the circle, and he has this special way of thinking; he goes around killing people who stand in other people’s way. He never kills the same way or the same kind of person or in the same place. So how could anyone ever catch up with him?

  “Right away, I began looking into other deaths—the ‘natural causes’ ones. Why? Well, here, whoever he is, he might do some murders that look like murders, but he’d also do some that looked like natural causes; he’d have to; there’s only just so many ways you can kill people and this busy, busy boy would have to try all of ’em. So I smelled around looking not for a killer, but for happy people, innocent people, who had benefited from these deaths.

  “Whenever I found a situation like that, I checked back on the death. Sometimes it was a perfectly genuine croak, but time and again I found what you might find if you knew what you were looking for … scarlet fever, for instance. People shouldn’t die of scarlet fever, but you know what? Feed somebody just enough belladonna and a doctor will write a scarlet fever certificate for the late lamented, nice as you please, if he has no reason to be suspicious. And in these deaths—my busy boy’s work, I mean—there’s never any reason to be suspicious. Where’s the—you pour it for once, Henry.

  “Hey, Henry! I’m getting tighter’n a ticklish tick with a alum stick, haha …

  “ ’Course, by this time, the feature story was up the spout; I had a better use for the situation than a lousy feature or even a series. Yep. For weeks now, I’ve been following the meat-wagons and morguing around. All I do, I write ’em up when they look funny to me. I keep it to myself; it’s all in the files here, every one of ’em. Oh, man, if the papers or the coroner or somebody got hold of those files, what a hassle! They’d dig up the marble orchards around here like potato patches! They’d find more little old embolisms and post-syncopes!

  “Say, did you know that Acontium Napellus, which is wolfsbane, which is aconite, has a root that grates up into a specially nippy kind of horseradish for them as likes it strong for a few brief seconds? There’s a woman just down the street who curled up and died last Tuesday and the
y called it heart failure; her daughter’s already headed for Hollywood where she won’t make anything but carhop, second class, but anyway it’s what she wanted.

  “Sooner or later, taking the notes I do the way I do at the deaths I investigate, this boy, this busy, busy fellow who is bringing so much sunshine into so many brutalized innocent lives, this boy will come over to me and say, ‘Hi, chum, you looking for somebody?’ ”

  “What will you do,” gasped Henry without the question mark.

  “What do you think?” I prodded.

  “A reward, maybe? Or a big scoop—is that what they call it in newspapers?”

  “Yes, in the movies. Catch it, Hen—hey, thanks. First time I knocked over a bottle in nine years, so help me. Mop up the ol’ ‘Justice’ file—I call it the ‘Justice’ file; you like that, boy? Ooo … ooh. I’m adrift, kid, and you know what? I love it. Pour me another. Do it m’self only I’m not myself if you see what I mmm. Good.

  “So where was I? Oh, yes, you say I’d nab this busy boy and get a reward. Well, there you go thinking like a human being. I, sir Henry, will do no such thing. Now I don’t know exactly why this boy does this bit and I don’t care much, long’s I can get him to do it for me. He wants to knock off obstacles from the path of poor imprisoned souls, I got just the chore for him. Just some justice is all.

  “You see that scared rabbit came in here a while back with the tray, that Loretta? Now that thing with Loretta, it was great while it lasted, and it lasted too long about four months back. All the time around, oh, please don’t drink so much, where have you been, but I was worried … you know the routine, Henry. Now I could handle this myself, but even I can’t think of a way which wouldn’t be either expensive or messy.

  “When you come right down to it, I’d just as soon keep her around.

  “Loretta’s not much trouble. She leaves me alone pretty much and comes in here about the time I’m bottle dippy every night and gets me into bed, talking on bright and cheery as anything, just as if I wasn’t hooked over the desk here, green as a gherkin and just as pickled …