Bright Segment

by Theodore Sturgeon

  The kid’s very quiet for a while. Then he says, “One time my mother sent me to the market and something was a special. I forget what. But anyway I had forty cents’ change and I forgot about it. I found it in my pants in school the next day and bought a star-ship magazine with it, and never told her about it. I used to get every issue that way after that. She never missed it. Or maybe she did but didn’t say anything. We were pretty hard up.”

  You understand that the kid is trying to give you something, because you apologized to him. You don’t say anything more about that. Right here a wonder starts to grow. You don’t know what it is but you know that stand-off-and-watch part of your mind is working on it. you say, “Where is this Masolo?”

  “Upstate. Not far from the Base. Ever since I was a baby the axi-tugs were shaking the house when they took off. There’s a big tree outside the house and all the leaves shiver, with the tugs, you know. I used to climb out a limb and get on the roof and lie down on my back. Sometimes you could see the star ships orbiting. Just after the sun goes down, sometimes you can …” He swallows; you can hear it plainly. “I used to put out my hand. It was like a firefly, up there.”

  “Some firefly,” you say.

  “Yeah. Some firefly.”

  Inside you the wonder is turning to a large and luminous astonishment. It’s still inexpressible so you leave it alone.

  The kid is saying, “I was with two other kids out by the high school one time. I was just a kid, eleven I think. Well, some gorillas from the high school, they chased us. We ran and they caught up with us. The other kids started to fight them. I got over to one side and when I had a chance I ran. I ran all the way home. I wish I’d stayed there with those other two kids. They got the tar kicked out of them and I guess it hurt, but I guess it stopped hurting after some teacher came along and broke up the fight. But I get hurt every time I think about it, running away like that. Boy, did those two give me a razzing when they saw me next day. Boy. So what I wanted to ask you, you don’t think a kid who would run away like that could be a cadet.” He ends it like that, flat. No question.

  You think about it. You’ve been in some fine brawls as a cadet. You’re in a bar and someone cracks wise, and your blood bubbles up, and you wade in, feeling fine. But maybe that’s just because of the corps, the business of belonging. You say carefully, “I think if I was in a fight I’d rather have a guy on my side who knew what cowardice felt like. I think it would be like having two guys on my side, instead of one. One of the guys wouldn’t care if he got hurt and the other guy would never want to be hurt that way again. I think a fellow like that would be a pretty good cadet.”

  “Well, all right,” says the kid, in that funny whisper.

  Suddenly the inner astonishment bursts into sight and you recognize what it is about this kid. At first you were scared of him, but even when that went away you didn’t like him. There was no question of liking him or not liking him; he was a different species of being that you couldn’t have anything to do with. And the more you talked with him the more you began to feel that you didn’t have to set yourself apart from him, that he had a whole lot you didn’t have and that you could use it. The way he talked, honest and unabashed, you don’t know how to do that. You nearly choked to death apologizing to him.

  Suddenly it’s very important to get along with this kid. It isn’t because the kid is important; it’s because if you can get along with somebody so weak, so wet behind the ears, and yet in his particular way so rich, why, you can get along with anybody, even your own lousy self. You realize that this thing of getting along with him has extension after extension. Somehow, if you can find more ways to get along with this kid, if you can see more things the way he sees them with no intolerance and no altitude, you’ll tap something in yourself that’s been dried up a long time now.

  You find all this pretty amazing, and you settle down and talk to the kid. You don’t eke it out. You know he’ll last all the way back to the Base and have plenty left over. You know, too, that by the time you get there this kid will know a cadet can be a louse too. You can give him that much. The way you treated him, he was hurt, but you know, he wasn’t mad? He doesn’t think he’s good enough to get mad at a cadet. Well, we’re going to fix that.

  The time goes by and the time comes; the acceleration tug reaches out and grabs you high up, so after all that manual-control drill you don’t have a thing to do but sit there and ride it down. The tug hovers over the compound right near the administration building, which disappears in a cloud of yellow dust. You sink down and down in the dust cloud until you think they must be lowering you into a hole in the ground; then at last there’s a slight thump and an inhuman amount of racket as the tug blasts away free. After that there’s only the faint whisper of the air circulator, the settling dust, and a profoundly unpleasant feeling in calves and buttocks as the blood gets used to circulating in a 1-G environment.

  “Now don’t you forget, Skampi,” you say. You find it difficult to talk; you’ve got a wide grin plastered across your face and you can’t cast it adrift. “Just as soon as ever they’re through with you, you come looking for me, hear? I’ll buy you a soda.”

  You lean back in your G-chair and hold the button. “I can drink beer,” he says manfully.

  “We’ll compromise. We’ll make your soda with beer. Listen, kid. I can’t promise, but I know they’re fooling with the idea of a two-man crew for starships. How’d you like to go with me, one trip anyhow? Course, you’ll have to be conditioned six ways from the middle, double-time, and it’ll be real tough. But—what do you say?”

  And you know, he doesn’t say anything?

  He laughs, though.

  Now here comes Provost, the big brass of Psychodynamics, and a young M.P. That’s all the welcoming committee you’ll get. The compound’s walled and locked, and no windows look out on it. They must have unloaded some pretty sorry objects from these cans from time to time.

  They open the hatch from the outside and you immediately start coughing like hell. Your eyes say the dust has settled but your lungs say no. By the time you have your eyes wiped the M.P. is inside, and squatting on the deck, crossed-legged. He says cheerfully, “Hi-kay dee. This here’s a stun gun and if you so much as look wall-eyed at me or the colonel you get flaked out like a heaving-line.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” you say from behind that silly grin. “I got no quarrel with anybody and I like it here. Good morning, Colonel.”

  “Look out for this one,” said the M.P. “Likes it here. He’s sick.”

  “Shat up, wheelhead,” says the colonel cheerfully. He has his gray crewcut and barrel torso shoved into the hatch and it’s real crowded in that little cabin. “Well, Cadet, how are we?”

  “We’re fine,” you say. The M.P. cocks his head a little to one side and gets bright-eyed; he thinks you’re sassing the colonel, but you’re not; when you say “we” you mean you and your shipmate.

  “Anything special happen?”

  The answer to that is a big fat yes, but it would take forever to tell. It’s all recorded anyway; PD doesn’t miss a trick. But that’s from then till now, and done with. I’m concerned with from now on. “Colonel, sir, I want to talk to you, right now. It’s about my shipmate.”

  The colonel leans a little further in and slaps the M.P.’s gun hand. He’s in front of the guy so I can’t see his face. “Beat it, wheelhead.”

  The M.P. clears out. You stagger up out of the G-seat and climb through the hatch. The colonel catches your biceps as you stagger. After a long time in free fall your knees won’t lock as you walk; you have to stiffen each one as your weight comes on it, and you have to concentrate. So you concentrate but that doesn’t stop you from talking. You skim over the whole business, from your long solo to being reduced to meeting the shipmate, and the fight you had with yourself over that, and then this thing that happened with the kid—weeks of it, and here you feel you’ve only just begun. “You can pick ’em, sir,” you pant
as you hobble along. “Do you always use a little know-nothing kid? Where do you find ’em? Does it always work this well?

  “We get a commander on every ship,” he says.

  “Hey, that’s great, sir.”

  “We don’t have very many ships,” he says, just as cheerfully.

  “Oh,” you say. Suddenly you stop. “Wait, sir, what about Skampi? He’s still locked in his side.”

  “You first,” says the colonel. We go on into the PD lab.

  “Up you go,” he says, waving. You look at the big chair with its straps and electrodes and big metal hood. “You know, they used chairs like these in the French Revolution,” you say, showing off. You’re just busting with cheerfulness today. You never felt like this. You sit in the big chair. “Look, sir, I want to get started on a project right away. This kid, now, I tell you he’s got a lot on the ball. He’s space man right to the marrow-bones. He comes right from around here, that little place up the pike, Masolo. You know. He got shook out of his bassinet by the axi-tugs; he spent his childhood lying on his back on the roof looking for the star ships in orbit. He’s—”

  “You talk all the time,” says the colonel mildly. “Sum up, will you? You made out with your shipmate. You think you could do it again in a star ship. That it?”

  “Think we can try it? Hey, really? Look, can I be the one to tell him, Colonel?”

  “Shut your mouth and sit still.”

  Those are orders. You sit still. The colonel gets you strapped in and connected up. He puts his hand on the switch. “Where did you say you came from?”

  You didn’t say, and you don’t, because the hood swings down and you’re surrounded by a sudden dissonant chord of audio at tremendous amplitude. If you had been allowed to say, though, you wouldn’t have known. The colonel doesn’t even give you time to be surprised at this. You sink into blackness.

  It gets light again. You have no idea how much time has passed, but it must be a good deal, because the sunlight from outside has a different color and slants a different way through the venetian blinds. On a bench nearby is a stack of minicans with your case number painted on each one—that’s the tape record of your Long Haul. There’s some stuff in there you’re not proud of but you wouldn’t swap the whole story for anything. “Hello, Colonel.”

  “You with us again? Good.” He looks at an enlarged film strip and back at me. He shows me. It’s a picture of the bulkhead with the triangular score in it. “Magnetostriction vibrator, with a diamond bearing for a drill bit, hm? Not bad. You guys scare me. You really do. I’d have sworn that bulkhead couldn’t be cut and that there was nothing in the ship that could cut it. You must’ve been real eager.”

  “I wanted to kill him. You know that now,” you say happily.

  “You damn near did.”

  “Aw, now, Colonel, I wouldn’t have gone through with it.”

  “Come on,” he says, opening the buckles.

  “Where, sir?”

  “To your space can. Wouldn’t you like to have a look at it from the outside?”

  “Cadets aren’t permitted—”

  “You qualify,” says the old man shortly.

  So out you go to the compound. The can still stands where it was landed. “Where’s Skampi?”

  The colonel just passes you an odd look and walks on. You follow him up to the can. “Here, around the front.”

  You walk around to the bow and look up at it. It’s just the shape it ought to be from the way it looked from inside, except it looks a little like a picture of a whale caught winking at you … Winking? One-eyed!

  “Do you mean to tell me you had that kid in a blind compartment, without so much as a viewport?” you rage.

  The colonel pushes you. He does it again. “Sit. Over there. On the hatch. You returning heroes and your manic moods … siddown!”

  You sit on the edge of the open hatch. “Sometimes they fall down when I tell ’em,” he says gruffly. “Now, what was bothering you?”

  “Locking that kid up in a dark—”

  “There isn’t a kid. There isn’t a dark cabin. There’s no viewport on that side of the can because it’s a hydrazine tank.”

  “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, 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 p
lanets. 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 heroimage. 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 star 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.