Killdozer! Read online

  Theodore Sturgeon, New York City, March 1945.

  “No, This isn’t the office boy cutting up after the boss left for lunch. This is Teddy as Copy Director of the Hudson-American Corporation for two glorious weeks.

  Isn’t he cute with his little blue pencil?” (written on the back of the photo by THS, to his sister-in-law)

  Copyright © 1996 the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust. Previously published materials copyright © 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1946, 1947, 1948, 1963 by Theodore Sturgeon and the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust. Foreword copyright © 1996 by Robert Silverberg. Afterword copyright © 1986 by Robert A. Heinlein. 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 the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

  Published

  North Atlantic Books

  P.O. Box 12327

  Berkeley, California 94712

  Cover art by Paul Orban

  Cover design by Paula Morrison

  Killdozer! 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 crosscultural 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.

  Killdozer! : the complete stories of Theodore Sturgeon / edited by Paul Williams : foreword by Robert Silverberg, Afterword by Robert A. Heinlein.

  p. cm

  Contents: v. 3 1941–1946

  eISBN: 978-1-58394-747-0

  I. Williams, Paul. II. Title

  PS3569.T875U44 1994

  813′.54—dc20 94–38047

  v3.1

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  THEODORE HAMILTON STURGEON was born February 26, 1918, and died May 8, 1985. This is the third 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 third volume contains stories believed to have been written between 1941 and 1946. Four are being published here for the first time; and two others have never before appeared in a Sturgeon collection.

  For invaluable assistance in the preparation of this volume, I would like to thank Noël Sturgeon and the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust, Marion Sturgeon, Jayne Williams, Debbie Notkin, Robert Silverberg, Virginia Heinlein, Ralph Vicinanza, Lindy Hough, Richard Grossinger, Tom Whitmore, Frank Robinson, Kyle McAbee, Matt Austern, Donya White, Sue Armitage, Bob Greene, Dixon Chandler, David G. Hartwell, T. V. Reed, Cindy Lee Berryhill, Sam Moskowitz, 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 Robert Silverberg

  Blabbermouth

  Medusa

  Ghost of a Chance

  The Bones

  The Hag Séleen

  Killdozer!

  Abreaction

  Poor Yorick

  Crossfire

  Noon Gun

  Bulldozer Is a Noun

  August Sixth, 1945

  The Chromium Helmet

  Memorial

  Mewhu’s Jet

  Story Notes by Paul Williams (including the original ending of Killdozer! and the unpublished alternate ending of Mewhu’s Jet)

  Afterword by Robert A. Heinlein

  Foreword

  by Robert Silverberg

  THE STORIES IN this volume are the work of a writer in transition, a writer on the threshold of greatness who has already found his important themes but has not yet—quite—attained his full measure of artistic breadth and technical assurance. The familiar Sturgeon warmth and compassion are there, the concern with the inner workings of the human soul, the narrative ingenuity. What we don’t yet have is the soaring poetry, the visionary beauty, of Sturgeon’s writing in the great period of his maturity that began about 1950 with the novel The Dreaming Jewels and reached its apogee with the 1953 novel More Than Human and the myriad short stories and novellas of 1952–1962. But we can see harbingers of it.

  The present group of stories come from two very different periods in Sturgeon’s life. “Blabbermouth,” “Medusa,” “The Hag Séleen,” “Ghost of a Chance” and “The Bones” were written by 1941, when he was 23 years old. They represent the last outburst of the precocious first phase of his career, the 1939–41 period when he carved a place for himself among the heroes of editor John W. Campbell’s Golden Age period with such tales as “Microcosmic God,” “It,” “Shottle Bop,” and “Yesterday Was Monday” in Campbell’s magazines Astounding Science-Fiction and Unknown. The remaining stories in the book were written between the spring of 1944 and the early months of 1946, after three years of silence. That three-year gap is a significant one, and not only because three years is a long time in the development of a prolific writer who is still in his twenties. Those particular three years were the years of World War II, which worked an immense transformation on Ted Sturgeon and on the world in which he lived. They were a time of challenge and maturity for him; the author of “Memorial” was a very differ
ent man from the author of “Medusa,” and the problems of 1946 were very different from those of 1941.

  The war years were bleak and gray ones for science fiction readers and writers. The war effort itself was all-encompassing. Most of the top writers were involved, either through actual battlefield experience or in some non-combatant role that absorbed most of their energies. In those years magazine publishers were plagued by skyrocketing expenses and paper shortages; many magazines disappeared altogether and those that survived cut back severely on their frequency of publication and number of pages per issue. Magazines then were the only outlet for publication that an American science-fiction writer had: paperback book publishing in the United States had only barely been born, and the orthodox hardcover publishers had scarcely any interest in science fiction. Only in the pulp magazines—gaudy-looking crudely printed entities with names like Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, and Astounding Science-Fiction—could a science fiction writer find readers, and then only at a rate of pay that even then had to be considered a pittance. $50 to $75 was the going price for short stories; a long work, running to 100 manuscript pages or even more, might fetch $200 or so. The shrinkage of the magazine market during those years eliminated any hope that a writer, even one who had not gone to the war, could earn even a modest living from science fiction.

  It was in the brief pre-war boom of the pulp magazines that the young Ted Sturgeon, unfettered and experimental-minded, launched his writing career. After some uncertain times writing short-short stories for newspaper syndicates, he turned to fantasy and science fiction in 1939 and clicked almost immediately with John Campbell, the pre-eminent science fiction editor of the day. Throughout 1940 and 1941 he sold Campbell virtually everything he wrote.

  Campbell, a ponderous, emotionally awkward man with a background in engineering and gadgetry, found the mercurial, elfin young Sturgeon immensely charming. Isaac Asimov, another of Campbell’s discoveries of that era, wrote more than forty years later of how, “little by little, John gathered a stable of writers and learned the trick of keeping us rubbing our noses against the grindstone. One thing he did, in my case, was to tell me what the other members of his stable were doing.

  “The one he mentioned with the greatest affection was Theodore Sturgeon. I can see him grinning now as he would hint at the manifold pleasures of something upcoming by Ted.

  “How I watched for his stories myself. I remember ‘It’ and ‘Ether Breather’ (his first) and ‘Shottle Bop’ and ‘Yesterday was Monday’ and ‘Killdozer’—and how eagerly I read them and how hopelessly I decided I couldn’t match him. And I never could. He had a delicacy of touch that I couldn’t duplicate if my fingers were feathers.”

  Those early stories of Sturgeon’s stood out like beacons in the pages of Campbell’s two magazines, even against those of Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, A.E. van Vogt, and the rest of Campbell’s galaxy of new stars, because of that magical lightness of touch and the cunning of his narrative strategies, so different from the earnest straightforward storytelling and simple functional prose of most of his contemporaries.

  Consider the insinuating, ingratiating charm of the first words of “Microcosmic God”—“Here is a story about a man who had too much power, and a man who took too much, but don’t worry; I’m not going political on you.” Pulp-magazine writers in 1941 didn’t begin stories that way, unless they were Theodore Sturgeon.

  Consider the tone of the opening, both disarming and compelling, of “Medusa”—“I wasn’t sore at them. I didn’t know what they had done to me, exactly—I knew that some of it wasn’t so nice, and that I’d probably never be the same again.” It is a tone we will hear again in the famous opening lines of The Dreaming Jewels a decade later: “They caught the kid doing something disgusting out under the bleachers at the high school stadium, and he was sent home from the grammar school across the street. He was eight years old then. He’d been doing it for years.”

  Consider the last line of “He Shuttles”—“Perhaps he was never here at all. But this is the story I wrote last night.” Sturgeon speaking to the reader in his own voice: confident of his irresistible appeal, smiling and winking as he pulls us through the convolutions of his plots.

  It was a new and refreshing way to write science fiction, which until then had, by and large, been straitjacketed by pulp-magazine conventions of plot and narrative mode. What it was, actually, was a compounding of Sturgeon’s unique irreverent sensibility and a storytelling manner imported from mainstream fiction, from the broader, more expansive modes common in such magazines as The Saturday Evening Post, modes which such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald had raised in the 1920s from slick commercialism to something approaching art. The slick-magazine stories were primarily people-centered rather than plot-centered or (as in the best science fiction of the day) idea-centered, and their writers allowed themselves considerably more latitude in their narrative methods than pulp editors permitted.

  At the beginning of his career in the late 1930s, Sturgeon had had little luck selling the stories that he aimed at such magazines. The best of them, “Bianca’s Hands,” had to wait until 1947 to see print, and others remained unpublished until collected in the first of these present volumes, The Ultimate Egoist. But his application of slick-magazine techniques to a pulp-magazine market made an immediate impact. John Campbell, then engaged in an all-out challenge of science fiction’s established modes, which ran heavily to rarefied tales of science on the one hand and slam-bang adventure on the other, welcomed Sturgeon’s material eagerly and only occasionally rejected any of it. (“Blabbermouth,” one of the weaker Sturgeon stories of the period, probably was intended for Unknown, but went unpublished for six years.

  His stories still relied heavily on mechanical plot contrivances, and his style was freighted with colloquialisms that now seem archaic; but, thanks to Campbell, Sturgeon quickly found himself selling regularly and developing the self-confidence a professional writer needs.

  He was now the head of a family, though, with a host of new responsibilities, and the writing income available to even a successful science-fiction writer in pre-war America was proving insufficient. Sturgeon found a job managing a resort hotel in the British West Indies in June of 1941 and hoped to go on writing on the side. But the coming of the war brought a swift close to this period of Sturgeon’s literary career. Married and the father of a small child, he was safe from the military draft, but the outbreak of war meant the end of his resort job and soon he was serving as assistant chief steward for the U.S. Army at Fort Simonds, where he ran a tractor lubrication center and learned to handle earth-moving machinery. The following year saw him in Puerto Rico at Ensenada Honda, an airfield, drydock, and shipyard, where he had further experience with bulldozers and other heavy-duty equipment, until the end of 1943. After some months doing clerical work for the Navy, he and his family moved to St. Croix in the American Virgin Islands. From the summer of 1941 to the spring of 1944 he wrote no fiction at all. The end of his military employment forced him back to writing in April 1944, and for the first story of this new period he drew on all the considerable knowledge that he had acquired during the war about earth-moving machinery, an unlikely subject, perhaps, for science fiction, but one which brought forth gripping results. In nine days Sturgeon wrote the 31,000–word novella “Killdozer!,” his longest and probably most successful work up until then, in which he imbued a fantastic notion with rock-solid specificity of detail to create great conviction and enormous suspense. Campbell, who had been struggling to keep Astounding filled with good material during the wartime absence of most of his best contributors, was overjoyed, and rushed the powerful story into print within a few months, in the November, 1944 issue. The magazine’s readers responded enthusiastically.

  The sale of “Killdozer!” brought Sturgeon a bonus rate of $542.50, the most he had ever received for a story—something like $10,000, or even more, in modern purchasing power. The end of the war seemed in sight, here
in mid-1944, and the story’s success awakened in him the possibility of reviving his dormant writing career. It was at this time that he wrote “Abreaction,” another bulldozer story but this one a psychological fantasy, which perhaps might have sold to Campbell’s off-trail magazine Unknown; but Unknown had vanished in 1943, a victim of wartime paper shortages, and the story went unpublished until the venerable Weird Tales, a magazine market of the most marginal kind, printed it in 1948. Once again he attempted an entry into mainstream fiction, too, with “Noon Gun,” probably written late in 1944 or early in 1945. But it was a mediocre story at best, and found no takers. (Slightly refurbished, it sold to Playboy in 1962, most likely on the strength of Sturgeon’s science fiction accomplishments in the intervening years.)

  Despite these unpromising early results, Sturgeon persisted in his plans for returning to writing as a profession. A clause in his government contract enabled him to wangle plane fare from St. Croix back to the American mainland, where he attempted to make arrangements for finding a job or a new literary agent and moving his family to New York. But nothing worked out. The literary agents of the era had no use for writers who proposed to earn a living writing stories at a cent or two a word for a single specialized market that consisted only of John Campbell’s remaining magazine and five or six low-paying quasi-juvenile competitors. Sturgeon drifted into a period of confusion and despair; what had been intended as a ten-day trip stretched into a futile eight months, during which time he received word from his wife in the Virgin Islands that she wanted a divorce. By late 1945 he found himself alone in New York, penniless, bewildered, and wholly unable to write.

  It was Campbell, once again, who rescued him. In December of 1945, Sturgeon was staying as a house guest in Campbell’s New Jersey home, and Campbell sat him before a typewriter in his gadget-crowded basement. Out came the story “The Chromium Helmet,” which Campbell read as it emerged and accepted instantly. It was the first substantial fiction Sturgeon had managed to write in a year and a half.