Bright Segment

by Theodore Sturgeon

  Editor’s blurb above the title in the original magazine appearance: IT WAS BAD ENOUGH BEING TREATED LIKE A FREAK—NOW THERE WAS THE HORROR OF WHAT I HAD DONE TO …

  “Bright Segment”: first published in Caviar, an anthology of short stories by Theodore Sturgeon published by Ballantine Books in October 1955.

  In his 1984 collection Alien Cargo, Sturgeon said of “Bright Segment”: Surely one of the most powerful stories I have ever written. This was made into a 58-minute TV film in France, with Gert (Goldfinger) Frobe cast as the old man, and doing an extraordinary piece of acting. Further, the French shot it almost exactly the way I wrote it, and I wrote it despairing that it could not be filmed; American TV could never (1955) handle that much blood and that much skin. I wish you could see it. I own the only print in North America, but can’t use it for admission or release it to net or cable. I can, however, use it as a lecture resource: a three-hour performance during which I read the story up to but not including the ending; challenge the students (creative writing, scripting, directing, cinematography, what have you) to suggest what they would include or change or eliminate if this were their film; then I show the film, read my ending, and launch a Q&A. It takes about three hours, and it costs, but I understand it’s worth the nut. The French director is Christian de Chalonge; he’s unavailable at this writing, but he seems to be, so far, the only one in the industry anywhere who really understands what I am all about. He’s also unavailable at this writing. ‘Sway, as Lady Jayne says; it means, “That’s the way things are.” There is, by the way, no important language difficulty; you will see as you read it that it’s about 92% visual—virtually without dialogue, by its very nature.

  The film was first aired on French television in 1974, under the title Parcelle Brillante.

  David Pringle in A Touch of Sturgeon (1987) calls “Bright Segment” “a disturbing variant on the Esmeralda and Quasimodo story [in Victor Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame].”

  The similarity between the basic situation of this story and the way Wolf Reger and his wife met in “Extrapolation” suggests that when Sturgeon was asked to write a new piece of fiction for inclusion in his forthcoming Ballantine collection, he took the opportunity to explore a story-idea that had been with him since he wrote “Extrapolation,” but that he hadn’t pursued until now because it wasn’t science fiction or fantasy and so none of the magazine markets he’d been selling to would be able to use it. It is interesting to note that although there is no science fiction element here, the form of the story arises from one of the premises that are most often used in developing a science fiction plot: What would happen if …? Certainly the powerful portrait of the pathos of the human need to be needed that results is unmistakably a “Sturgeon story,” regardless of what other genre it can or cannot be placed in.

  “So Near the Darkness”: first published in Fantastic Universe, November 1955. Editor’s blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance: BROKAW’S GUILT AND FEAR SEEMED MORE THAN HUMAN FLESH COULD ENDURE. BUT TINA COULD SEE THE UGLY BRIDGE-WORK BEHIND THE DARK ONE’S FANGS. The second editorial note read: “It was Theodore Sturgeon’s genius for combining fantasy with science fiction, in a blend of enchantment rare in our age, which won him an International Fantasy Committee Award in a year which saw an unprecedented display of competitive brilliance on library shelves. We doubt, indeed, if there is another writer of quite his stature in both genres. And now, for the second time, he appears in our pages with a tale as darkly terrifying and as fraught with Novembral direfulness as midnight’s frightful liaison with a demon moon.”

  Tina’s “colorful little shop” where this story begins is located in the same neighborhood as the store in Sturgeon’s 1940 story “Shottle Bop”—Manhattan between the Chelsea District and Greenwich Village, where Sturgeon lived in 1940 and 1946.

  The possible existence of powerful “psychic creatures” who are nourished by human souls and emotions and experiences is a recurrent Sturgeon theme (cf. “The Perfect Host,” 1948; “The Dark Room,” 1953; “Ghost of a Chance,” 1943).

  “Clockwise”: first published in Calling All Boys, August-September 1946. Calling All Boys was a monthly magazine published by the publishers of Parents’ Magazine. It included color comics along with articles and stories. “Clockwise” ran on one page of the magazine, illustrated by a drawing captioned, “Jemmy stood there, sweat pouring off him, still turning the first screw.” The editorial blurb atop the story read: WHICH WAY DOES A CLOCK HAND TURN? JEMMY DIDN’T KNOW. BACK IN THE HILLS HERE HE LIVED, THERE WERE NO CLOCKS.

  Sturgeon had lived in Jamaica in 1941 and in the next few years did construction work for airbases in the West Indies.

  “Smoke!”: first published in Calling All Boys, December-January 1947.

  For more than seven years your editor and other Sturgeon appreciators have been searching the Library of Congress and university library collections for copies of Calling All Boys magazine that might contain these two “missing” Sturgeon stories. They have finally been found and are included here thanks to the tireless efforts of Sturgeon scholar William F. Seabrook.

  Editorial blurb atop the story: “BAIL OUT! DON’T BE CRAZY!” AN INNER VOICE KEPT SHOUTING AT HANK CORSON AS THE MONOPLANE FILLED WITH DENSE SMOKE.

  This story is a retelling of “Watch My Smoke,” one of Sturgeon’s first published stories, circulated by the McLure Syndicate in March 1939. See the story notes in the first volume of this series for Sturgeon’s recollections of being very impressed by the bush pilots of the Canadian lake country when he visited there at age sixteen.

  The previous two stories are included out of chronological sequence (of composition) in this series because no copies of them could be found when the 1946 volume (Thunder and Roses) was being prepared.

  If this series were in perfect chronological sequence (not possible for a variety of reasons), Sturgeon’s short novel “The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff” would appear in this present volume just before or after “When You’re Smiling,” as it was apparently written in autumn 1954 (based on comments by Sturgeon in a letter sent to Anthony Boucher on May 11, 1955 when he submitted the short novel to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which published it in two parts in its November and December 1955 issues). The story could not be included in this book for length reasons, but appears in Slow Sculpture, Volume XII of The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon.

  Clockwise

  “THIS IS A GOOD JOB if I say so myself,” said Sam Cobb, holding up the carburetor float he had just soldered. He and his sidekick Jack Delaney were working on Sam’s jalopy.

  “Looks okay,” said Jack, straightening up from his valve grinding. “Say, isn’t that your brother Henry coming up the drive?”

  “Yep! Oh boy! I’m glad you’re going to get the chance to meet him, Jack. He’s a swell guy.” He went to the garage doors and waved, and watched his brother approach. Henry Cobb was a stocky man, a construction engineer, just returned from an airbase job in the West Indies.

  “How’s with the puddle-jumper?” he asked.

  “Fine. Come on in, Henry.” They went into the garage, and after introductions, spent a slightly greasy half-hour going over the battered old car. Then Henry wiped his hands with a gas-soaked rag.

  “Does me good to see you kids doing a job like this, “he said. “I don’t think there’s anywhere else in the world where you’ll see youngsters your age doing this kind of thing.” He laughed. “I remember a kid I ran into in Jamaica. Name of Jemmy. Came from back in the bush, up in the hills where bananas grow wild and the houses are made of packed-earth and palm leaves. He was a waterboy, and wanted to be a mechanic the worst way.

  “Well, I gave him a break, finally—he wore me down. I had a plywood facing I wanted screwed on to a wooden soldering table. I drilled his guide-holes for him and gave him a screwdriver and some screws, and told him to go ahead. Half kiddingly, I said, ‘You know which way to turn screws, don’t y
ou? Same way a clock goes.’ He said, ‘Yas, bahss,’ and started for the bench.

  “I came back in about twenty minutes—and there he was, sweat pouring off him, still working away at the first screw! I watched him for a minute, and do you know what he was doing? Turning the screw back and forth in the hole—half a turn in, half a turn out! I asked him what in blazes he was doing. He replied in that peculiar Jamaican dialect, ‘Ah, bahss, him cyan’t go in, sah. Ah turn lak yo’say, sah, but him cyan’t go in!’ He looked as if he’d burst into tears. Well, I questioned him, and it turned out he couldn’t read or write—or tell time. He’d only seen a clock a couple times before—didn’t know which way the hands went. But he had seen a clock taken apart once, and inside there was a little thing that went back and forth, back and forth; and for him, that was the way a clock went!”

  The boys roared with laughter. Sam said, “Gosh! Those people sure must be dumb down there.”

  “Now wait a minute,” said Henry quietly. Sam saw that the smile had disappeared from his face. “Did you say dumb? Think a minute. What’s the main difference between you and Jemmy? Hm? You’re American, white, and educated. He was Jamaican, black, and illiterate. Now, be fair. Under the same circumstances, would you be as smart as he was? Sure, I thought it was funny; but I didn’t think he was dumb. I saw right away that he was using his eyes and his brains—and carrying out orders the best way he knew how.

  “No, Sam; the big difference between you and Jemmy is the difference in opportunity—that and no more. You have had it, and Jemmy never had it. If it weren’t for that opportunity, we’d never have turned out thousands of pilots and radio men and mechanics to win the kind of war we had to fight. And we’d probably be asking some Gestapo guy for our daily bread, instead of overhauling a swell old tomato-can like this one.”

  “Gosh, Henry, I never thought of it like that.” Sam thought for a moment. “How did Jemmy make out?”

  “I hired him. Know what he did with his opportunity? He was foreman of that shop by the time I left the island!”

  Smoke!

  HANK CORSON’S NARROW NOSTRILS had been twitching for some minutes before he realized that it was smoke he was smelling. The tiny cockpit was filling with a dense, acrid smoke. And that was bad!

  Hank knew his ship. He should—he and his brother Jim had built it. It was strictly backyard stuff—a high-wing monoplane, doped fabric over spruce spars and a venerable, in-line four cylinder gasper that dragged it over the sky. But it flew. And its aluminum floats made a runway of any fair-sized puddle in the Canadian lake country. The plane wasn’t much to look at, but it moved small freight often enough and fast enough to make a business. Some day he and Jim would be running swift, sleek flying boxcars, and scheduled feeder flights. Lodestars, maybe, or DC-3’s.

  “… getting worse,” muttered Hank, sneezing as the smoke filled his nostrils. He wiped his eyes and squinted at the board. Manifold pressure, oil pressure, okay. Charging, fuel, fine. Altitude three thousand. The motor thrummed on, smooth as ever. No, if there was a fire, it was back here somewhere, and not in the engine compartment.

  The cargo?

  He squirmed around and peered back into the fuselage. Those diesel injectors wouldn’t be burning. The V-belts for the Horne Mines’ wood shop? No they were rubberoid and the smoke didn’t smell like rubber. Could the heating pipes have set fire to something? He frowned. He had no time for detective work. He had to get out of here in a hurry.

  He sneezed again and slipped one arm, then the other, through the shoulder straps of his chute, brought the rest of the harness up from between his legs, and clipped them all together at his chest with the snaffle hook. Now he was ready to jump.

  A touch on stick and pedal, and he was in a steep bank, circling, peering over the coaming at the country below. Foothills—burned-over land, a leafless forest of blackened trunks and ravelled, riotous undergrowth. It was maybe fifty-five miles by air back to Kiskeard, and the back-country lake where he based his crate. About forty to Lac du Chat Noir, where his cargo was consigned. Nothing between the two but scrub and rocks. Nothing to eat unless he could knock out a rabbit or a chipmunk. A long haul.

  He shrugged. That was better than what this smoke promised him. He’d have to jump!

  A sunbeam slanted into and through the cockpit as he circled. In it was the ghost of a fern-frond, curled and feathery, all made of blue smoke. He stared at it while it dispersed, and then swore bitterly. This was fine. This was just dandy. Nothing insured but the cargo. They’d just spent their last dollar on war-surplus radio equipment, stuff they would still be using when they got the Lodestars … Now there wouldn’t be any Lodestars, no Corson Brothers Air Freight. They couldn’t finance another plane. They had a swell radio. They’d have to sit and listen to orders from the mines all through this district, and hear other charter airlines getting the jobs. No plane, no business!

  Hank growled and punched viciously at the controls, snapping the fragile plane back on the Lac du Chat Noir course. The smoke seemed to be increasing slowly … If only he knew where it was coming from. What was burning?

  Once when he was a kid he had helped his father burn out wasps from their nests under the eaves. They had waved a burning rag on the end of a long stick under the nests, and the wasps flew into the ragged yellow flame. There would be a little puff of fire as their wing caught, and then they would drop. This would be the same. The seaplane would explode into flame all at once, all over.

  Maybe that would be good. Maybe that would be better than what he would see in Jim’s eyes when he trudged up out of the bush, late tomorrow. Jim would be glad to see him alive all right. Yeah, and then they could go back to working for someone else, scrabbling for pennies to start up again, while their competitors clinched all the business.

  Breath rasped in Hank’s throat. He coughed and tried to spit, but his mouth was too dry. It was getting tough to see the controls. Get out! Get out! something screamed inside his head. In the war, you could bail out of a burning ship and they’d hand you another one …

  In a desperate surge he yanked the little extinguisher from its clips under the board, turned the handle and pumped it, aiming back into the empennage. Nothing happened. The air got worse, and the smoke got even thicker, that was all.

  The thing in his head screamed at him again, “Get out!” He opened his eyes. He was flying with a wing down. He straightened her up, and the effort made him realize that his mind was wandering. He shook himself, leaned over and peered down.

  A lake!

  He throttled down and pressed the stick away from him. If he could … but that lake! That lake! He recognized it—Bouche du Diable, the Canucks called it. Shaped like a smiling mouth, fanged with sharp, white, pyritic quartz, shallow, narrow, and surrounded by wooded hills. No one had ever set a plane down on Bouche du Diable.

  “Get out!” … This was foolish. He could jump. So he lost the business. That was better than losing his life!

  But knowing he should jump did not keep him from slipping down toward the little lake. It would be crosswind. He’d tear the floats off her. He’d tangle with the trees. He’d—

  When the left float clipped a treetop, ever so swiftly and gently, he knew he had lost his chance to jump. Too low! He snarled like an animal and snatched his arms out of the chute harness. He wanted to call himself something, but he couldn’t think of a name for a man as dumb as he was. He could have jumped! And now—

  Well, now he was too busy to think. He cut his gun, fishtailing wildly, snapped on the ignition again just before the motor stopped, to rev up, haul up her nose, stall in. The plane screamed and fluttered down to the water, one float low, to splash and sit like a tired duck, while every frame and member yelled for help. She yawed and dipped a wingtip, but she came back. And before she had stopped moving, Hank had swept aside the cowling and was out on the float, leaning back to scrabble around in the cockpit behind the seat.

  He found it, flaming now, and he hauled it
up and out of the seat and dropped it into the lake. And then he clung there, croaking, his big shoulders shaking. Not crying. Laughing.

  He hadn’t jumped. And there it was, blackened and bubbling, sinking through the clear water—the thing that had been burning all along—his parachute!