Bright Segment

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “We can walk,” said the bald man gently. “It’s only just over the block. That man, by the way, is dead.”

  Tina and Eddy looked at each other. Eddy shrugged. “You’re the doctor,” he said to the bald man.

  They went to the police station. There were a very friendly desk sergeant and three very sour policemen and a triply sour matron. They went to work on Tina with a great deal of efficiency. They took her fingerprints, but not Eddy’s. They just asked Eddy questions about himself.

  Finally they were told to sit there and wait. They sat. Tina got as close to Eddy as she could without unseating him and asked, “We murdered someone called Sykes?”

  He patted her shoulder. “No, darling. It’ll all come out all right. Shall I tell you a story?”

  “Tell me a story.”

  “Once there was a big lug who liked a girl who got into some fantastic trouble. So while she went on into her trouble, he swiped her keys and went on a pilgrimage.”

  “Tell it straight,” begged Tina.

  “Okay. Well, maybe I’m just incapable of jumping to as many conclusions as you. I don’t know. Anyway, Brokaw’s photocell beam stunt bothered me. I kept thinking about it until I suddenly hit it. I bought a flashlight and went to your shop. I turned on the rig. I found that anyone who wants to look for the cell can see it, and the light-cowl across the doorway, too, for that matter.

  “Now, if you want to pass a photocell without interrupting the light that goes into it, you shine a light into it, step through the beam, and take away your light. The poor photocell doesn’t know the difference. Not a simple rig like what I built, anyway.”

  “I’ll be darned.”

  “Then I don’t know what you’ll be when I tell you the rest of this. Here.”

  Eddy pulled something out of his pocket and dropped it into her palm. It was a ring of transparent plastic, slightly warped and sticky on one face. Around the edges were little curls of what looked like fused movie film.

  “This little treasure,” he said, “was stuck to the bulb of your gooseneck lamp. Unless I am quite mistaken, it had a disc cut from a color photo transparency mounted in it. It was aimed at the black blotter. When you came in, you switched on the light, diddled around a minute and then sat down. The black blotter did not show anything up. The white one acted as a screen on which was projected a nice clear picture of your friend’s pretty face—until the heat of the bulb ruined it. I found jimmy-marks on the alley window.”

  “But, why on earth should he—”

  “Ask questions later. Listen. That projection deal woke me right up. I didn’t even have to go to your place. That show you threw—did you hit the face that was floating in your room?”

  Tina nodded. “Right between the eyes.”

  “Then what happened to the shoe?”

  “It went straight out the win—oh!”

  “Yes, oh. The face wasn’t in the room. It was on that tight meshlace curtain you have tacked over the lower pane.” He shrugged. “So, I went looking for some sort of a projector that could do a job like that. I went just down the street to the Mello Club. I got hold of Shaw, the manager. He’s a slimy little scut. I told him I had something hot on Lee Brokaw, but I’d have to check his dressing room to be sure.”

  “Shaw didn’t like the idea much, but he’s so crazy to get a line on Brokaw that he’d give away his mother’s left leg if he had to. He showed me the place. He crabbed about the lock on the door. Brokaw had had it put on. It was quite a place. You should see those mannequin heads that Lee made. I went through the drawers, and found what I was after. I swiped it. Here.”

  Out of the same capacious jacket came a specially built five-cell electric torch. Around the lens was a spring clip. “Here’s a whole set of slides. Colored ones, and this.” He handed her the glass disc. It was black, except for a spot in the center, which, when held up to the light, held a miniature transparency of Lee Brokaw’s almost beautiful face.

  “They clip right on here like this,” and Eddy snapped a black glass over the lens. “Brokaw just aimed that thing at your window, and then, probably, tossed a pebble or something at the glass. He held it until he saw your light go on. After that he could probably see you.”

  She blushed. “He probably could.”

  “Shaw told me something else. He’s a low little scruff, as I said before. I just stood there looking thoughtful, and he volunteered the information that he actually had a periscope—can you imagine it?—from his office next door, so that he could keep a dirty eye on whoever was in the dressing room. And he found out something really choice about our friend, Lee Brokaw.”

  “What?”

  “I think I’ll wait and let the sergeant over there tell you. He’s bound to come up with it before he lets us out of here.”

  “How on earth did you get that gadget out of Shaw’s hands?”

  “This searchlight thing? Oh, I just said something about the back room. Those joints always have a back room. He was very nice to me after that.”

  “Eddy! You might have gotten into some serious trouble!”

  He laughed. “That—from you! Well, after that I hightailed it for Bleecker and Commerce, and hid in a nice dark doorway. I don’t know what would have happened if Brokaw had run up the other street. There goes the desk phone. Listen.”

  The sergeant picked up the instrument briskly. “Speaking,” he said. “Yeah, we’ve still got ’em. You don’t say!” Then followed an infuriating series of grunted affirmatives while he wrote. Then, “Okay. Soon’s I write it up. There may be a couple more questions.” He hung up, and began to write.

  “Master mind,” said Tina while they waited, “can you tell me why Lee did all those things?”

  “I can guess,” said Eddy. He leaned back and caught his knee between his palms. “Lee Brokaw, for all his skill and sensitivity, was the victim of a very real delusion—that soul-eater business. You, my child, were a substitute.”

  “Me!”

  “Yes, you. He saw in you courage and humor. He probably felt he had the same. Perhaps he did. But he needed some more things that you had. The—what was it?—the seasonings. Fear, terror, disgust, pity. That’s what he was conditioning you with.”

  “But how could he imagine that the soul-eater would mistake me for him?”

  “For the same reason he thought the law would. He played it very cagily. That murder, now, was apparently a perfectly genuine one. He called up the police and tipped them off that the Sykes murderer would be at Bleecker and Commerce Streets at ten o’clock. I think he figured that the soul-eater, on seeing the surrender, would quickly jump at the first seasoned meat he saw that looked like the right one—rather than break his promise of keeping the murderer clear of the law. I imagine Brokaw was a little surprised to find only one person there—the detective.”

  “Unless that detective is also a soul-eater,” said Tina brightly. “But Eddy, I still don’t understand how he could dream that the soul-eater could make such a mistake.”

  “Sergeant,” called Eddy, “could we be getting out of here soon? I’m supposed to be working.”

  “Oh, I guess so,” said the sergeant cheerfully. “There don’t seem to be much more to figure out now. It all ties up.”

  “Mind telling us why we were delayed?”

  “I s’pose not, young feller. Seems like about two years back, this feller Sykes got married and killed the same night. They never did find the missus, and there wasn’t a fingerprint in the place. It must have happened within an hour after they got to his place, and every fingerprint was wiped clean. Sykes had brought this girl from out of town. No one knew her. It was obvious she done it, but there wasn’t but one clue as to who she was or anything about her. Even her license information was false.”

  “But there was one piece of evidence she didn’t know about, or she’d have gotten to that, like as not. It seems Sykes sent a picture of her to his sister, and in the letter he said she had a great ugly mole on her back shape
d like an angelfish. Well, now we know. She’s been operatin’ here for the past year and a half as an actor, ventriloquist, and dancer under the name of Lee Brokaw.”

  “Lee Brokaw is a girl?”

  “Was, ma’am. Dead now. Coroner says she apparently died of fright when she was nabbed. What we held you for, young lady, is because you are the spit an’ image of Mrs. Sykes, before she cut and dyed her hair according to that picture. If it wasn’t for that mole on Brokaw-Sykes’ back, you’d have a time proving you didn’t do it.”

  “He—he needed a shave!” she said desperately.

  “Phony stubble, ma’am. Got it right here in the report.”

  “Mad, mad, crazy as a loon,” murmured Tina as they went out. “The poor kid. How on earth did she ever dream up this soul-eaters thing?”

  “Paranoid logic, I guess,” said Eddy, who reads books. “A persecution complex and an absolute genius for rationalizing it.”

  They walked in silence for a block. “I’m glad,” she said, “that that soul-eater’s hypothesis is rationalized. That was a pretty convincing—awk!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Someone in that doorway,” she shuddered.

  It was dark there, but there seemed to be something … he pulled out Brokaw’s flashlight and switched it on.

  It gave a peculiar, dim light. Standing in the doorway was a mild-looking little man, almost bald. He was looking at them and rubbing his hands.

  His fringe of hair glowed a ghostly green.

  “On your way, I see,” said the little detective happily. “A most unpleasant experience.” He came closer. Tina shrunk away from him.

  “Mind if I ask you,” said Eddy faintly. “D-do you use vaseline in your hair?”

  The man touched it. “Why yes. Why?”

  “Ha ha, good stuff, hey?” said Eddy, and, scooping up Tina, he all but galloped away.

  “It’s all right, Tina,” he said as they hurried. “It’s perfectly all right. I still had that black disc on the flashlight. It’s an ultra-violet filter. Vaseline fluoresces just fine under ultra-violet.”

  What he did not tell her, and what he sincerely hoped she would never find out, was that vaseline fluoresces blue, not green.

  Story Notes

  by Paul Williams

  “Cactus Dance”: first published in Luke Short’s Western, October 1954. Written sometime before June 1953, when Sturgeon sent a copy of the finished manuscript to fanzine editor Redd Boggs. In the essay “Why So Much Syzygy?” which Boggs published that year, Sturgeon described the different components of love, sexual and asexual as he’d written about them in different stories. In “Cactus Dance” (upcoming in Zane Grey’s Western), he wrote, it is non-physical, perhaps even non-substitute physical love, as represented in several symbiotic relationships between humans and yucca plants.

  This was the third “western” story by TS; the first two appeared in Zane Grey’s Western Magazine in 1949. This is the only one that can be considered to have a fantasy or science fiction element.

  The portrayal in this story of the peyotl cactus as a conscious being that can somehow inhabit or share consciousness with a human child is similar to Carlos Castaneda’s account in his 1968 book The Teachings of Don Juan of being told by his Yaqui Indian mentor that the dog that played with him after he ingested peyote was actually Mescalito (peyote) itself playing with him. Professor Grantham’s account in “Cactus Dance” of a trial where witnesses testified about how peyotl-eaters quit drinking, went back to their wives, and began to work hard is an interesting precursor of defenses of psychedelic drugs frequently articulated in America in the 1960s. In 1965 Sturgeon went through intensive LSD therapy sessions under the supervision of a psychotherapist. As far as I know, that was his only experience with psychedelic drugs.

  The paragraphs near the end of the story in which Grantham talks about a man who went away to a river island to carve statues were apparently omitted from “Cactus Dance” in its original magazine appearance and so have not been included in this story when previously published in Sturgeon collections (Aliens 4 and Sturgeon’s West). They are in the original manuscript found among Sturgeon’s papers, and have been restored here by my choice. The restored paragraphs begin I said nothing and end I understood that, and had nothing to say.

  “The Golden Helix”: first published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, Summer 1954. Written in autumn 1953, when Sturgeon apparently submitted it to Astounding Science Fiction, edited by John W. Campbell, Jr. On Nov. 23, 1953, Campbell wrote in a letter to Sturgeon: “Dear Ted—No can use, I’m afraid. The thesis has point, but the thing won’t work this way. The Golden Helix is perfectly valid—but you see the counter-current of the helix exists simultaneously with the direct current. Your helix is actually a Moebian [sic] strip, which has only one side, and only one edge, and feeds on itself. There is both increasing complexity and increasing simplicity, and the two currents progress simultaneously. The trouble with Viridis is that it causes the a retrogression of both currents. That’s not the way to do it. We can live only by going back to simplicity, and starting again—but it’s done via the ovum and the sperm. And while the physical form is very simple, the philosophical formulation of the fertile ovum is far more complex than that of the adult human being! … The Golden Helix is valid—but not in quite the form you’ve got it here.”

  Introducing this story in his 1979 collection The Golden Helix, Sturgeon wrote: Far more remarkable, to me, than any other aspect of the intricate plot of this story is the fact that it was written in 1953, a good span of years before the double spiral of the DNA molecule was discovered, with its astonishing role in evolutionary structures. This makes the story a sort of quasi-mystical precognition—something I was not and could not be aware of when I wrote it. This is by no means the only time this has happened. Well after the fact, readers have unearthed in my work devices, events, or phenomena that I couldn’t possibly have known of at the time I wrote them: Velcro, illuminated watch-dials, certain breakthroughs in cancer research, automobile smog devices, and a good many other things. The average gap between these appearances in my typewriter and the emergence of them in the real world seems to be about fifteen years. I claim no special superiority for this, and admit to a good deal of humility. There are times when I feel like no more than a length of pipe, through which Something pours these things into my manuscripts.

  As it happens, Watson and Crick first published their double helix theory of DNA in 1953. It’s fair to assume that the notion came to TS independently and almost simultaneously … and that he wasn’t aware of their work when he wrote this story.

  In section IV, when Tod recalls an old, old tale … from the ancient Amerenglish, by Hynlen (Henlyne, was it? no matter), the story he’s referring to is “Goldfish Bowl” by Robert A. Heinlein, which appeared in Astounding Science-Fiction in 1941.

  Later in section IV, They called the moons Wynken, Blynken, and Nod is a reference to Eugene Field’s well-known late-19th-century children’s poem, “Dutch Lullaby”: “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night sailed off in a wooden shoe … All night long their nets they threw to the stars in the twinkling foam; then down from the skies came the wooden shoe, bringing the fishermen home.”

  David Pringle wrote in his introduction to the 1987 collection A Touch of Sturgeon: “What are the ‘obsessive’ themes that make this author’s stories so interesting? The most frequently remarked is the theme of union—of meeting, melding, and becoming one. This takes various forms: love-and-togetherness, human-and-alien syzygy, the ‘bleshing’ of a gestalt consciousness (as in ‘Baby Is Three’) or a racial hive-mind (as in ‘To Marry Medusa’). Such unions are usually portrayed as highly desirable events, kinds of salvation, like the cosmic vision which concludes ‘The Golden Helix.’ ”

  When this story with its many births and children and children-of-children was written, Theodore Sturgeon’s son Robin was a year old and his wife Marion was pregnant with their second child, Ta
ndy.

  “Extrapolation”: first published in Fantastic Stories, April 1954, under the title “Beware the Fury.” Editor’s blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance: MEET WOLF REGER—TRAITOR. COMPARED TO HIM BENEDICT ARNOLD WAS A NATIONAL HERO AND JUDAS ISCARIOT A PARAGON OF VIRTUE. AT LEAST THAT’S THE WAY IT SHOWED IN THE MAJOR’S NOTES … BUT TRAITORS AREN’T BORN THAT WAY. SOMETHING HAS TO HAPPEN TO THEM LONG BEFORE THEY TURN AGAINST SOCIETY. THAT’S WHY, WHEN YOU DIG DEEP ENOUGH, YOU MAY FIND THAT THE WORD TRAITOR CAN BE ONE HELL OF A MISNOMER …

  When Sturgeon included this story in his 1964 collection Sturgeon in Orbit, he called it “Extrapolation,” apparently his original (manuscript) title. The story-introductions TS wrote for that collection have as their theme the magazine editors who first published the stories and his relationship with them. In his introduction to “Extrapolation,” he wrote: This might be called a “forgotten” story in the sense that it has, through the years, been overlooked by anthologists and yet (I have it on good authority) is one of my major works. I know that when I unearthed it for this volume and read it, I put it down with (incredibly) real tears in my eyes. I let Groff Conklin (now there’s a good editor) see it, and he confessed it had him weeping aloud. It was Howard Browne who bought this story, and I suddenly recall the circumstances, because it was the only time such a thing ever happened to me. I came in with it and said, “Look, Howard, I’d appreciate it if you could let me know on this sort of soon because—” He interrupted me: “You in a bind? Wait a minute.” He reached for the phone and said “Accounting Department?” Then to me,” How long is it?” I told him. Howard looked up at the ceiling for a moment, calculating, and then said into the phone, “Send up a check for Theodore Sturgeon for a story called Extrapolation for (he named a figure).” “But Howard!” I cried, “you haven’t read it yet!” He shrugged his Kodiak-bear shoulders. “I don’t need to and you know it.” They don’t hardly make ’em like that no more.