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  No copyright 2011 by Jerry eBooks

  No rights reserved. All parts of this book may be reproduced in any form and by any means for any purpose without any prior written consent of anyone.

  ABOUT THE EBOOK

  THAT LOW

  THE MAN WHO LOST THE SEA

  ETHER BREATHER

  POKER FACE

  THE OTHER CELIA

  KILLDOZER

  NEVER UNDERESTIMATE

  EXCALIBUR AND THE ATOM

  SHOTTLE BOP

  SLOW SCULPTURE

  THE GIRL HAD GUTS

  BIANCA’S HANDS

  THE PROFESSOR’S TEDDY BEAR

  THE SKILLS OF XANADU

  THUNDER AND ROSES

  THE SEX OPPOSITE

  MICROCOSMIC GOD

  THE STARS ARE IN THE STYX

  THE PERFECT HOST

  THERE IS NO DEFENSE

  SOME OF YOUR BLOOD

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  NOTABLE AUTHORS INFLUENCED BY STURGEON

  BRIAN ALDISS

  JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG

  JAMES GUNN

  ARTICLES ON THEODORE STURGEON

  THE FIRST MOON LANDING

  EROS IN THE AGE OF MACHINES

  The Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award

  ABOUT THE EBOOK

  ____________________

  All the stories I selected for this anthology were either scans of books I own or were in digital format---pdf or HTML 1.0 files. I converted, cleaned-up and re-formatted all the stories contained in this eBook to better suit an eBook reader.

  I “test” my final epubs on a Nook Color and an iPad2 to ensure the best possible reading experience; however, not all eReaders are the same and don’t always display epubs in the same way as others. This is especially true when it comes to the Table of Contents (ToC), images within the epub and the display of the book cover.

  I adhered as much as possible to the original punctuation, spelling and sentence structure in each story. Many of these stories were written with a very specific structure and style that may seem odd when presented in an electronic format. I found this especially true in the way many characters’ dialogue was written.

  Please understand, in an effort to preserve the authors’ text, some words, structures etc. may seem like errors that I missed while creating this eBook for you. No words or text of the authors’ original works were omitted or altered; each story is word-for-word as presented in the original source file.

  If you find errors, or run into any difficulty with this eBook please feel free to contact me through Bolt.

  Finally, it is my sincerest wish that you have the best possible reading experience with this eBook.

  Flyboy707

  October, 2011

  THAT LOW

  First appeared in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, October 1948

  There was a "psychic" operating on Vince Street. Fowler went to see her. Not that he had any faith in mumbo jumbo: far from it. He had been told that this Mrs. Hallowell worked along strictly logical lines. That's why he went. He liked the sound of that, being what he was. He went to her and asked her about killing himself. She said he couldn't do it. Not "You won't" or "shouldn't".

  She said, "You can't."

  This Fowler was a failure specialist, in the sense that a man is a carburetor specialist or a drainage specialist or a nerve specialist. You don't get to be that kind of specialist without spending a lot of time with carburetors or sewers or nerves. You don't stay nice and objective about it either. You get in it up to the elbows, up to the eyeballs. Fowler was a man who knew all that one man could know about failure. He knew all of the techniques, from the small social failure of letting his language forget what room of the house his mouth was in, through his declaration of war on the clock and the calendar (in all but style he was the latest), to the crowning stupidity of regarding his opinions as right purely because they were his opinions. So be had fallen and floundered through life, never following through, jumping when he should have crept, and lying down at sprinting time.

  He could have written a book on the subject of failure, except for the fact that if be bad, it might have been a success . . . and be bated failure. Well, you don't have to love your specialty to be a specialist. You just have to live with it. It was understandable, therefore, that he should be impressed by Mrs. Hallowell's reputation for clarity and logic, for be truly believed that here was a kindred spirit. He brought his large features and his flaccid handshake to her and her office, which were cool. The office was Swedish modem and blond. Mrs. Hallowell was dark, and said, "Sit down. Your name?"

  "Maxwell Fowler."

  "Occupation?"

  "Engineer."

  She glanced up. She had aluminum eyes. "Not a graduate engineer." It was not a question.

  "I would have been," said Fowler, "except for a penny-ante political situation in the school. There was a fellow--" "Yes," she said. "Married?"

  "I was. You know, the kind that'll kick a man when he's down. She was a--"

  "Now, Mr. Fowler. What was it you wanted here?"

  "I hear you can foretell the future."

  "I'm not interested in gossip," she said, and it was the only cautionary thing she said in the entire interview. "I know about people, that's all."

  He said, "Ever since I could walk and talk, people have been against me. I can whip one or two or sometimes half a dozen or more, but by and large I'm outnumbered. I'm tired. Sometimes I think I'll check out."

  "Are you going to ask me if you should?"

  "No. If I will. You see, I think about it all the time. Sometimes I--"

  "All right," she said. "As long as you understand that I don't give advice. I just tell about what's going to happen."

  "What's going to happen?"

  "Give me a check."

  "What?"

  "Give me a check. No--don't write on it. just give it to me.”

  "But--"

  "YOU wouldn't pay me afterward."

  "Now look, my word's as good as--" and then he looked into the eyes. He got out his checkbook.

  She took a pen and wrote on the check. She gave it back to him and he looked at it and said, "That's foolish." "You have it, though."

  "Yes, I have, but--"

  "Sign it then," she said casually, "or go away."

  He signed it.

  "Well?" She hesitated. There was something-- "Well?" she rapped again.

  "What'll I do? I'm tired of all this persecution."

  "I take it you're asking me what you shall do--not what you should or will do."

  "Lawyer's talk, huh."

  "Laws," she said. "Yes." She wet her lips. "You shall live a long and unhappy life." Then she put away the check. Maxwell looked after it, longingly.

  "It can't be unhappier than it is."

  "That may well be."

  "Then I don't want to live a long life."

  "But you shall."

  "Not if I don't want to," he said grimly. "I tell you, I'm tired.”

  She shook her head. "It's gone too far," she said, not unkindly. "You can't change it."

  He got up. "I can. Anytime, I can. Then you'll be wrong, won't you?"

  "I'm not wrong," said Mrs. Hallowell.

  "I'll kill myself," said Maxwell, and that was when she told him he couldn't. He was very angry, but she did not give him back his check.

  By the time he thought of stopping payment on it, it had cleared the bank. He went on living his life. The amount of
money he had paid Mrs. Hallowell dug quite a hole, but for a surprisingly long time be was able to walk around it. However, be did nothing to fill it up, and inevitably he had the choice of facing his creditors or killing himself.

  So he got a piece of rope and made a noose and put it around his neck. He tied the other end to the leg of the radiator and jumped out of the window.

  He was a big man, but the rope held all right. However, the leg broke off the radiator, and he fell six stories. He hit a canvas marquee, tore through it, and fell heavily to the sidewalk.

  There was quite a crowd there, after a while, to listen to the noises he made because of what was broken.

  Fowler took a while to mend, and spent it in careful thought. He took no comfort from his thoughts, for they were honest ones, and he did not care at all for his conclusions, which drafted a portrait no one would admire and an insight no one would want as a bedfellow.

  He got through it though, and put a list of his obligations down on paper and drew up a plan for taking care of things. It was a plan that was within his capabilities and meant chip, chip, chip for a long, long, time before he could ever call himself honestly broke again.

  The first person he tried it out on was the business manager of the hospital, and to his immense surprise it worked: that is, he wouldn't get sued for the bill, and the hospital would go along with him until it was all straightened out.

  Nobody had ever given him that much of a break before; but then, he had never tackled a problem this way before. He got out of the hospital and began chipping.

  Mrs. Hallowell had a bad moment over Fowler. She started up out of her sleep one night, thinking about him. "Oh, how awful," she said. "I made a mistake!"

  She phoned in the morning. Fowler was not there. Mrs. Hallowell phoned and phoned around until she got someone who could tell her about Fowler. The tenant in the apartment next to Fowler's had made a mistake about a gas heater, and had a bad cold, and lit a match, and blew the end of the building out.

  Fowler had been picked up from the wreckage, bleeding.

  The someone said, "Is there any message I could send to him?"

  "No," said Mrs. Hallowell. "No. Not . . . now."

  They saved Fowler that time, too. It was a lot of trouble. They had to take this and that off, and the other out. He was put, finally, in a very short bed with a mass of equipment beside him, humming and clicking. It circulated fluids, and another part of it dripped into a tube, and there was a thing that got emptied a couple of times a day without Fowler's worrying about it.

  That was the trouble with Mrs. Hallowell's talent. It lay in such broad lines. A mistake could cover a lot of territory.

  Fowler gradually became aware of her mistake. It took him about two months.

  People came by and clucked their tongues when they saw him. There was a bright-eyed, dry-faced old lady who put flowers near him every week or so. He didn't have to go on with that chip, chip, pay, pay any more. Everybody was sorry for him, and everybody always would be, as long as be lived, which would be very nearly as long as the equipment could be kept running.

  A long time.

  A long life.

  Mrs. Hallowell had been right, dead right, about the long life. Where she made her mistake was in thinking that he would be unhappy.

  THE MAN WHO LOST THE SEA

  Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1959

  Say you’re a kid, and one dark night you’re running along the cold sand with this helicopter in your hand, saying very fast witch y-witchy-witchy. You pass the sick man and he wants you to shove off with that thing. Maybe he thinks you’re too old to play wit-h toys. So you squat next to him in the sand and tell him it isn’t a toy, it’s a model. You tell him look hers, here’s something most people don’t know about helicopters. You take a blade of the rotor in your fingers and show him how it can move in the hub, up and down a little, back and forth a little, and twist a little, to change pitch. You start to tell him how this flexibility does away with the gyroscopic effect, but he won’t listen. He doesn’t want to think about flying, about helicopters, or about you, and he most especially does not want explanations about anything by anybody. Not now. Now, he wants to think about the sea. So you go away.

  The sick man is buried in the cold sand with only his head and his left arm showing. He is dressed in a pressure suit and looks like a man from Mars. Built into his left sleeve is a combination time-piece and pressure gauge, the gauge with a luminous blue indicator which makes no sense, the clock hands luminous red. He can hear the pounding of surf and the soft swift pulse of his pumps. One time long ago when he was swimming he went too deep and stayed down too long and came up too fast, and when he came to it was like this: they said, “Don’t move, boy. You’ve got the bends. Don’t even try to move.” He had tried anyway. It hurt. So now, this time, he lies in the sand without moving, without trying.

  His head isn’t working right. But he knows clearly that it isn’t working right, which is a strange thing that happens to people in shock sometimes. Say you were that kid, you could say how it was, because once you woke up lying in the gym office in high school and asked what had happened. They explained how you tried something on the parallel bars and fell on your head. You understood exactly, though you couldn’t remember falling. Then a minute later you asked again what had happened and they told you. You understood it. And a minute later…forty-one times they told you, and you understood. It was just that no matter how many times they pushed it into your head, it wouldn’t stick there; but all the while you knew that your head would start working again in time. And in time it did…. Of course, if you were that kid, always explaining things to people and to yourself, you wouldn’t want to bother the sick man with it now.

  Look what you’ve done already, making him send you away with that angry shrug of the mind (which, with the eyes, are the only things which will move just now). The motionless effort t~osts him a wave of nausea. He has felt seasick before but he has never been, seasick, and the formula for that is to keep, your eyes on the horizon and stay busy. Now! Then he’d better get busy-now; for there’s one place especially not to be seasick in, and that’s locked up in a pressure suit. Now!

  So he busies himself as best he can, with the seascape, landscape, sky. He lies on high ground, his head propped on a vertical wall of black rock. There is another such outcrop before him, whip-topped with white sand and with smooth fiat sand. Beyond and down is valley, salt-flat, estuary; he cannot yet be sure. He is sure of the line of footprints, which begin behind him, pass to his left, disappear in the outcrop shadows, and reappear beyond to vanish at last into the shadows of the valley.

  Stretched across the sky is old mourning-cloth, with starlight burning holes in it, and between the holes the black is absolute-wintertime, mountaintop sky-black.

  (Far off on the horizon within himself, he sees the swell and crest of approaching nausea; he counters with an undertow of weakness, which meets and rounds and settles the wave before it can break. Get busier. Now.)

  Burst in on him, then, with the X-15 model. That’ll get him. Hey, how about this for a gimmick? Get too high for the thin air to give you any control, you have these little jets in the wingtips, see? and on the sides of the empennage: bank, roll, yaw, whatever, with squirts of compressed air.

  But the sick man curls his sick lip: oh, git, kid, git, will you?-that has nothing to do with the sea. So you git.

  Out ‘and out the sick man forces his view, etching all he sees with a meticulous intensity, as if it might be his charge, one day, to duplicate all this, To his left is only starlit sea, windless. In front of him across the valley, rounded hills with dim white epaulettes of light. To his right, the jutting corner of the black wall against which his helmet rests. (He thinks the distant moundings of nausea becalmed, but he will not look yet.) ~So he scans the sky, black and bright, calling Sirius, calling Pleiades, Polaris, Ursa Minor, calling that … that … Why, it moves. Wa
tch it: yes, it moves! It is a fleck of light, seeming to be wrinkled, fissured, rather like a chip of boiled cauliflower in the sky. (Of course, he knows better than to trust his own eyes just now.) But that movement…

  As a child he had stood on cold sand in a frosty Cape Cod evening, watching Sputnik’s steady spark rise out of the haze (madly, dawning a little north of west); and after that he had sleeplessly wound special coils for his receiver, risked his life restringing high antennas, all for the brief capture of an unreadable tweetle-eep-tweetle in his earphones from Vanguard, Explorer, Lunik, Discoverer, Mercury. He knew them all (well, some people collect match-covers, stamps) and he knew especially that unmistakable steady sliding in the sky.

  This moving fleck was a satellite, and in a moment, motionless, uninstrumented but for his chronometer and his part-brain, he will know which one. (He is grateful beyond expression-without that sliding chip of light, there were only those footprints, those wandering footprints, to tell a man he was not alone in the world.)

  Say you were a kid, eager and challengeable and more than a little bright, you might in a day or so work out a way to measure the period of a satellite with nothing but a timepiece and a brain; you might eventually see that the shadow in the rocks ahead had been there from the first only because of the light from the rising satellite. Now if you check the time exactly at the moment when the shadow on the sand is equal to the height of the outcrop, and time it again when the light is at the zenith and the shadow gone, you will multiply this number of minutes by 8-think why, now: horizon to zenith is one-fourth of the orbit, give or take a little, and halfway up the sky is half that quarter- and you will then know this satellite’s period. You know all the periods-ninety minutes, two, two-and-a-half hours; with that and the appearance of this bird, you’ll find out which one it is.