Bright Segment Read online

  Theodore Sturgeon with his third wife, Marion Sturgeon. Halloween, 1961 or 1962, in the Streibel House, Woodstock, New York.

  Copyright © 2002 the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust. Previously published materials copyright © 1954, 1955 by Theodore Sturgeon and the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without written permission of the publisher.

  Published by

  North Atlantic Books

  P.O. Box 12327

  Berkeley, California 94712

  Bright Segment is sponsored by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences, a nonprofit educational corporation whose goals are to develop an educational and cross-cultural perspective linking various scientific, social, and artistic fields; to nurture a holistic view of arts, sciences, humanities, and healing; and to publish and distribute literature on the relationship of mind, body, and nature.

  North Atlantic Books’ publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call 800-733-3000.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Sturgeon, Theodore.

  Bright segment / Theodore Sturgeon; edited by Paul Williams; foreword by William Tenn.

  p. cm. — (The complete stories of Theodore Sturgeon; v. 8)

  eISBN: 978-1-58394-752-4

  1. Science fiction, American. I. Williams, Paul, 1948– II. Title.

  PS3569.T875 A6 2002 vol.8

  813′.54—dc21

  2002005447

  v3.1

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  THEODORE HAMILTON STURGEON was born February 26, 1918, and died May 8, 1985. This is the eighth of a series of volumes that will collect all of his short fiction of all types and all lengths shorter than a novel. The volumes and the stories within the volumes are organized chronologically by order of composition (insofar as it can be determined). This eighth volume contains stories written in 1953, 1954, and 1955. The last two (short-short) stories were written in 1946 and 1947, and are out of chronological sequence because copies of them have only recently been found.

  Preparation of each of these volumes would not be possible without the hard work and invaluable participation of Noël Sturgeon, Debbie Notkin, and our publishers, Lindy Hough and Richard Grossinger. I would also like to thank, for their significant assistance with this volume, William F. Seabrook, Phil Klass, the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust, Marion Sturgeon, Jayne Williams, Ralph Vicinanza, Jennifer Privateer, Paula Morrison, Alan Bostick, Eric Weeks, Robin Sturgeon, Kim Charnovsky, Cindy Lee Berryhill, T. V. Reed, and all of you who have expressed your interest and support.

  BOOKS BY THEODORE STURGEON

  Without Sorcery (1948)

  The Dreaming Jewels [aka The Synthetic Man] (1950)

  More Than Human (1953)

  E Pluribus Unicorn (1953)

  Caviar (1955)

  A Way Home (1955)

  The King and Four Queens (1956)

  I, Libertine (1956)

  A Touch of Strange (1958)

  The Cosmic Rape [aka To Marry Medusa] (1958)

  Aliens 4 (1959)

  Venus Plus X (1960)

  Beyond (1960)

  Some of Your Blood (1961)

  Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961)

  The Player on the Other Side (1963)

  Sturgeon in Orbit (1964)

  Starshine (1966)

  The Rare Breed (1966)

  Sturgeon Is Alive and Well … (1971)

  The Worlds of Theodore Sturgeon (1972)

  Sturgeon’s West (with Don Ward) (1973)

  Case and the Dreamer (1974)

  Visions and Venturers (1978)

  Maturity (1979)

  The Stars Are the Styx (1979)

  The Golden Helix (1979)

  Alien Cargo (1984)

  Godbody (1986)

  A Touch of Sturgeon (1987)

  The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff (1989)

  Argyll (1993)

  Star Trek, The Joy Machine (with James Gunn) (1996)

  THE COMPLETE STORIES SERIES

  1. The Ultimate Egoist (1994)

  2. Microcosmic God (1995)

  3. Killdozer! (1996)

  4. Thunder and Roses (1997)

  5. The Perfect Host (1998)

  6. Baby Is Three (1999)

  7. A Saucer of Loneliness (2000)

  8. Bright Segment (2002)

  9. And Now the News … (2003)

  10. The Man Who Lost the Sea (2005)

  11. The Nail and the Oracle (2007)

  12. Slow Sculpture (2009)

  13. Case and the Dreamer (2010)

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Editor’s Note

  Other Books by This Author

  Foreword by William Tenn

  Cactus Dance

  The Golden Helix

  Extrapolation

  Granny Won’t Knit

  To Here and the Easel

  When You’re Smiling

  Bulkhead

  The Riddle of Ragnarok

  Twink

  Bright Segment

  So Near the Darkness

  Story Notes by Paul Williams

  Clockwise

  Smoke!

  FOREWORD

  Sturgeon, The Improbable Man

  By Philip Klass (William Tenn)

  I first met Ted Sturgeon in 1939 in an all-night cafeteria in New York City. The place was on West 57th Street between Eighth Avenue and Broadway, and around 2 A.M. served as a hangout for what might be called the midtown Bohemians. These were indigent writers and artists and actors and students, as well as many of the orators from Columbus Circle. The Circle, in its very close proximity to Central Park, was then pretty much the American version of the London’s debaters’ heaven, Hyde Park.

  I met his slightly older brother, Peter, at the same time. I called Peter, who had just returned, utterly disillusioned and spent, from fighting on the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War, I called Peter “the real Sturgeon.” I called Ted “the improbable Sturgeon,” why I didn’t know right then. But as I got to know him, I realized my original instinct had been exactly right.

  My friend Rouben Samberg brought me over to meet him. Rouben was a very, very indigent painter who was just then about to give up the easel for the camera and was thereby to find enormous riches in advertising. He knew I was trying to write science fiction.

  “Listen, Phil,” he said, grabbing my arm and pointing me at a table in the rear of the cafeteria. “Your ambition is very clear and simple: You aspire to starve for art in the pulps. I want you to meet someone who’s already made it. This is Ted Sturgeon, a successful, selling pulp writer. He’s starving.”

  I shook hands with Ted and his brother, Peter, sitting beside him. Peter was thin and gloomy, prematurely slightly bald and slightly gray. Ted was thin and vibrant, with dancing eyes under a head of surprisingly curly hair.

  Both of them had half-filled cups of coffee in front of them, cups which they raised to their mouths from time to time but from which they were careful not to drink. (The deal was simple: If you had some coffee left in the cup, you were still a customer who was finishing his meal and the management would not ask you to leave the steam-heated cafeteria and go outside into the ice and snow of 57th Street. Therefore I had carried my own half-filled cup of coffee over to the Sturgeon table, and—as I sat down—I carefully put it in front of me as a token of cafeteria respectability.)

  While Peter sp
oke gloomily and bitterly of his experiences in Spain (he had gone there to fight the fascist Franco on behalf of the Spanish Republic, had become a POUMist, and therefore had been treated with careful viciousness by the Stalinist-dominated Loyalists), Ted lifted the neck of a nonexistent guitar with his left hand and began fingering its chords. After a while, he picked up an imaginary pick with the other hand and carefully and intently played the imaginary guitar. And then, as Peter spoke of specific battles and intricate left-wing Spanish politics, Ted, still strumming the imaginary guitar, began singing in a very low voice, providing an unmistakable musical background to Peter’s what-should-I-call-it?—to Peter’s documentary.

  He sang “Los Quatros Generales,” the original Spanish version of a song much sung in those days by intellectuals who saw themselves as on the side of the hard-pressed Loyalist government of Spain, the government fighting for its very existence against Francisco Franco and the powers of fascism. I had only heard it up to then in its English version, “The Four Insurgent Generals.”

  When Ted had finished singing—still in a very, very low voice, for why irritate the management or the busboys of the cafeteria?—and Peter had paused in his tale of a bloody night along the Ebro, I asked Ted with a bit of a chuckle why he didn’t get himself a real guitar.

  “I have a real guitar,” he said. “But it’s in hock right now. If Campbell buys my new story for Unknown, I’ll get it out. Then you must come and visit me, and I’ll play for you.”

  He phoned me two weeks later and told me the story had sold. He gave me his address and asked me to come to his furnished room that evening. By then I had read his first sale to Astounding, “Ether Breather,” and not thought too much of it. But I was terribly impressed with the fact that he was truly a published writer, and, above all, a published writer in my favorite magazine, Street & Smith’s Astounding.

  He played a lot of wonderful stuff for me, but I’m afraid I was a wee bit snotty about his performance. After all, I told myself, I had recently heard both Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie in the same room, taking turns: Leadbelly on his twelve-string guitar, playing his own “It’s a Bourgeois Town”; Guthrie in his cowboy hat, playing his own “Talking Dust Bowl.”

  This, of course, was years before Sturgeon came back from a disastrous couple of years in the tropics with a quiverful of wonderful songs which I and others would beg him to play again and again at parties and science fiction conventions.

  One of the songs he played that night, as cockroaches marched up and down the walls of his furnished room, was something he had written to a girl he’d just met, celebrating in verse after verse her “deux yeux si bleu.” Then he played her reply, a delightful little piece in which she thanked him for the song but mused over the cruel dommage that her eyes were “brun pas bleu.”

  Very definitely the improbable Sturgeon, I thought.

  No, back then I was not all that impressed with Sturgeon as a guitarist, but when it came to sheer writing, it was a totally different matter.

  He showed me manuscripts on which he was working for John Campbell’s Unknown, the sister magazine of Astounding.

  He showed me early versions and first drafts of “Shottle Bop” and “Yesterday Was Monday” and “It.” I read them and grew more and more impressed.

  He told me what he had been living on before selling work to Campbell and after having been beached as a seaman: short-short stories to the McClure daily newspaper syndicate for which the pay was five dollars (five dollars!) … on publication. (True, money went a lot farther then, but after he had paid his room rent of four dollars a week, indeed there was not very far at all left to go.)

  Then he asked me what kind of ideas I had been trying to develop into science fiction or fantasy stories. He listened, and broke my plots down into their constituent elements, discussing them first in terms of craft, then in terms of art. “You must always begin with craft,” he cautioned, “but you must always move to art. Else why bother?”

  It is no overstatement to say that my lips were dry with awe by the time I left.

  Then there were three and a half years of war for me, and marriage and a family and a stint in construction work in the tropics for Ted. We lost touch with each other until I read a published letter by him that gave his current address on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. By that time I had read his “Killdozer,” and—to me, even more important—his “Microcosmic God.” I looked him up, determined not to show the enormous admiration which I was beginning to feel for him as a writer.

  He was delighted to learn that I had just sold my first story to John Campbell. He read the manuscript in carbon, approved it (which even then I felt was too nice of him), and asked what I was working on. I showed him my latest and as yet unsold story, “Child’s Play.”

  “It’s good, Phil,” he said. “Quite good. Listen, I’m also operating as a literary agent these days. Would you like me to represent you?”

  I told him I could think of nothing I’d like more. And so I became his client, along with other struggling unknowns like James Blish, and Damon Knight, and Judith Merril.

  He was a very good agent, selling each of us to many more markets than we’d ever have thought of for ourselves.

  But more important, far more important than his agenting were his critiques. The hours he spent discussing a character, a plot twist, a goddam single sentence! I never had an agent like that afterwards, and I’ve had many, ranging from quite poor to moderately superb. Ted, Ted was pure gold.

  He was a most rare, most improbable combination. He was a true artist and poet who had an extraordinary amount of market savvy, unsurpassed in any commercial writer or literary agent I’ve encountered since. Except for a very brief period in his life when he wrote directly and only for John Campbell of Astounding, he was incapable of doing more than five consecutive sentences that were not literature—yet he was almost indecently proud of the medium, pulp science fiction, in which he worked and the statements which he felt only it could make.

  When he asked Ray Bradbury to write an introduction to his first collection of short stories, Without Sorcery, and Bradbury came up with a piece praising Sturgeon’s work, but full of apologies about the cheapness and absurdity of most science fiction, Ted sent the intro back together with a letter that must have taken at least a quarter of an inch of skin off the full length of Bradbury’s body. This letter, please remember, was to a contemporary whose work Ted respected more than anyone else’s in the science fiction of that period. Bradbury returned a totally new introduction (note that in the publishing economy of that day, he correctly had no expectation of being paid a thin dime for either piece!) along with a beautifully written mea culpa. One of the word-pictures Bradbury painted in that second introduction was a view of Ted Sturgeon banging away at his typewriter as he sat under a gigantic toadstool around which other, nontyping, elves and various strange small creatures were romping merrily.

  (And surely I will be pardoned for pointing out that today, individual hardbound copies of Without Sorcery bring many times more dollars than Ted got for his total advance and all his royalties on the book.)

  All this, of course, was before Ted gave up his rather sizable agency, presenting it to Scott Meredith for nothing but zilch and good will. He always tended to be at his most improbable where his own finances were concerned. It was before the brief spell that he worked at a huge salary in the Time-Life publications circulation division, where he left behind him dozens of hilarious, coruscating anecdotes about his tenure and his contributions. And it was before …

  It was before he at last found a comfortable literary home in Horace Gold’s Galaxy and Tony Boucher’s Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction—thus, before he was able to write stories that pleased him completely (“The [Widget], the [Wadget] and Boff,” for example) and that he felt were utterly his all the way through; it was before the novels like More Than Human and The Dreaming Jewels, where he could roam freely through his improbable mind and flex his impr
obable literary muscles.

  And it was before—speaking of unlikely, improbable beauty—it was before he met and married Marion and had his second set of offspring, the first three of which were Robin, Tandy, and Noël (my wife, Fruma, when asked at that time about his children, used to reply, “He has one of each”).

  It was also long, long before I broke up with a woman after a two-year relationship, and left my low-rent-despite-the-housing-shortage apartment to her, as a gentleman should. And Ted, hearing of this and knowing that I had barely the price of a single day’s hotel room in my pocket, insisted on turning over his just-acquired and newly decorated East Village flat to me. (“But Ted, where will you sleep?” “Oh, I have friends. Here and there.”)

  Also, and finally, it was before we quarreled—over some inconsequential matter like politics or life and death—and didn’t see each other for far, far too many years.

  My improbable friend, Theodore Hamilton Sturgeon, died in 1985. We, the world, were left with nothing but genuine probability and damn grim reality.

  It is so much less than we had had.

  Cactus Dance

  THE BOOK, THEY DECIDED, would bring Fortley Grantham back East if nothing else would, and at first I’d agreed with them. Later, I didn’t know. Later still, I hardly cared, for it grew heavy in my pack. Once, somewhere in the desert between Picacho and Vekol, two prospectors found me squatted on the scorching sand, heat-mad, dreaming out loud. It wouldn’t do for them to explain to me about the puncture in my canteen; I insisted that the book had soaked up my water as I walked, and I could get it back by wringing it out. I still have the book, and on it still are my tooth-marks.

  By train and stage and horse and mule I went, and, when I had to, on foot. I cursed the Territories in general and Arizona in particular. I cursed Prescott and Phoenix and Maricopa; Sacaton on the Gila River Reservation and Snowflake on Silver Creek. At Brownell in the Quijotas I learned that William Howard Taft had signed the enabling act that would make a state of that hellish country, and thereafter I cursed him too. From time to time I even cursed myself and the stubborn streak which ran counter to comfort and career and intelligence itself—it would have been so simple, so wise, to go back to the green lawns of the Institute, the tinkle of teacups, to soft polite laughter and the coolth of ivied libraries.