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  TO MARRY MEDUSA

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1987 by The Estate of Theodore Sturgeon

  The two parts of this book were originally published as follows: To Marry Medusa, © 1958 by Theodore Sturgeon; “Killdozer,” Astounding Science Fiction, © 1944 by Street & Smith Publications.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Book

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  260 Fifth Avenue

  New York, N.Y. 10001

  First printing, December 1987

  ISBN: 0-671-65370-9

  Cover art by Armand Cabrera

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by SIMON & SCHUSTER 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y. 10020

  TO MARRY MEDUSA

  CHAPTER 1

  “I’ll bus’ your face, Al,” said Gurlick. “I gon’ break your back. I gon’ blow up your place, an’ you with it, an’ all your rotgut likker, who wants it? You hear me, Al?”

  Al didn’t hear him. Al was back of the bar in his saloon, three blocks away, probably still indignantly red, still twitching his long bald head at the empty doorway through which Gurlick had fled, still repeating what all his customers had just witnessed: Gurlick cringing in from the slick raw night, fawning at Al, stretching his stubble in a ragged brown grin, tilting his head, half-closing his sick-green, muddy-whited eyes. “Walkin’ in here,” Al would be reporting for the fourth time in nine minutes, “all full of good-ol’-Al this an’ hiya-buddy that, an’ you-know-me-Al, and how’s about a little, you-know’; an all I says is I know you all right, Gurlick, shuck on out o’ here, I wouldn’t give you sand if I met you on the beach; an’ him spittin’ like that, right on the bar, an’ runnin’ out, an’ stickin’ his head back in an’ callin’ me a—” Sanctimoniously, Al would not sully his lips with the word. And the rye-and-ginger by the door would be nodding wisely and saying, “Man shouldn’t mention a feller’s mother, whatever,” while the long-term would be clasping his glass, warm as pablum and headless as Ann Boleyn, and intoning, “You was right, Al, dead right.”

  Gurlick, four blocks away now, glanced back over his shoulder and saw no pursuit. He slowed his scamper to a trot and then a soggy shuffle, hunching his shoulders against the blowing mist. He kept on cursing Al, and the beer, and the rye-and-ginger, announcing that he could take ‘em one at a time or all together one-handed.

  He could do nothing of the kind, of course. It wasn’t in him. It would have been success of a sort, and it was too late in life for Gurlick, unassisted, to start anything as new and different as success. His very first breath had been ill-timed and poorly done, and from then on he had done nothing right. He begged badly and stole when it was absolutely safe, which was seldom, and he rolled drunks providing they were totally blacked out, alone, and concealed. He slept in warehouses, box-cars, parked trucks. He worked only in the most extreme circumstances, and had yet to last through the second week. “I’ll cut ‘em,” he muttered. “Smash their face for them, I’ll ...”

  He sidled into an alley and felt along the wall to a garbage can he knew about. It was a restaurant garbage can and sometimes ... He lifted the lid, and as he did so saw something pale slide away and fell to the ground. It looked like a bun, and he snatched at it and missed. He stooped for it, and part of the misted wall beside him seemed to detach itself and become solid and hairy; it scrabbled past his legs. He gasped in terror and kicked out, a vicious, ratlike motion, a hysterical spasm.

  His foot connected solidly and the creature rose in the air and fell heavily at the base of the fence, in the dim wet light from the street. It was a small white dog, three-quarters starved. It yipped twice, faintly, tried to rise and could not.

  When Gurlick saw it was helpless he laughed aloud and ran to it and kicked it and stamped on it until it was dead, and with each blow his vengeance became more mighty. There went Al, and there the two barflies and one for the cops, and one for all judges and jailers, and a good one for everyone in the world who owned anything, and to top it, one for the rain. He was a pretty big man by the time he was finished.

  Out of breath, he wheezed back to the garbage can and felt around until he found the bun. It was sodden and slippery, but it was half a hamburger which some profligate had tossed into the alley, and that was all that mattered. He wiped it on his sleeve, which made no appreciable difference to sleeve or bun, and crammed the doughy, greasy mass into his mouth.

  He stepped out into the light and looked up through the mist at the square shoulders of the buildings that stood around to watch him. He was a man who had fought for, killed for what was rightfully his. “Don’t mess with me,” he growled at the city.

  A kind of intoxication flooded him. He felt the way he did at the beginning of that dream he was always having, where he would walk down a dirt path beside a lake, feeling good, feeling strong and expectant, knowing he was about to come to the pile of clothes on the bank. He wasn’t having the dream just then, he knew; he was too cold and too wet, but he squared his shoulders anyway. He began to walk, looking up. He told the world to look out. He said he was going to shake it up and dump it and stamp on its fat face. “You going to know Dan Gurlick passed this way,” he said.

  He was perfectly right this time, because it was in him now. It had been in the hamburger and before that in the horse from which most of the hamburger had been made, and before that in two birds, one after the other, which had mistaken it for a berry. Before that ... it’s hard to say. It had fallen into a field, that’s all. It was patient, and quite content to wait. When the first bird ate it, it sensed it was in the wrong place, and did nothing, and the same thing with the second. When the horse’s blunt club of a tongue scooped it up with a clutch of meadow-grass, it had hopes for a while. It straightened itself out after the horse’s teeth flattened it, and left the digestive tract early, to shoulder its way between cells and fibers until it rested in a ganglion. There it sensed another disappointment, and high time too— once it penetrated into the neurone-chains, its nature would be irreversibly changed, and it would have been with the horse for the rest of its life. As, in feet, it was. But after the butcher s blade missed it, and the meat-grinder wrung it, pinched it, stretched it (but in no way separated any part of it from any other), it could still go on about its job when the time came. Eight months in the deepfreeze affected it not at all, nor did hot fat. It was sold from a pushcart with a bag full of other hamburgers, and wound up in the bottom of the bag. The boy who bit into this particular hamburger was the only human being who ever saw it. It looked like a boiled raisin, or worse. The boy had had enough by then, anyway. He threw it into the alley.

  The rain began in earnest. Gurlick’s exaltation faded, his shoulders hunched, his head went down. He slogged through the wet, and soon sank to his usual level of feral misery. And there he stayed for a while.

  CHAPTER 2

  This girl’s name was Charlotte Dunsay and she worked in Accounting. She was open and sunny and she was a dish. She had rich brown hair with ruby lights in it, and the kind of topaz eyes that usually belong to a special kind of blonde. She had a figure that Paul Sanders, who was in Pharmaceuticals, considered a waste on an office job, and an outright deprivation when viewed in the light of the information that her husband was a Merchant Marine officer on the Australia run. It was a matter of hours after she caught the attention of the entire plant (which was a matter of minutes after she got there) that news went around of her cheerful but unshakable “Thanks, but no thanks.”

&nbsp
; Paul considered this an outright challenge, but he kept his distance and bided his time. When the water-cooler reported that her husband’s ship had come off second best in a bout with the Great Barrier Reef, and had limped to Hobart, Tasmania, for repairs, Paul decided that the day was upon him. He stated as much in the locker room and got good odds—11 to 2—and somebody to hold the money. It was, as a matter of fact, one of the suckers who gave him the cue for the single strategic detail which so far escaped him. He had the time (Saturday night), the place (obviously her apartment, since she wouldn’t go out) and the girl. All he had to figure out was how to put himself on the scene, and when one of the suckers said, “Nobody gets into that place but a for-real husband or a sick kitten,” he had the answer. This girl had cried when one of the boss’s tropical fish was found belly-up one morning. She had rescued a praying mantis from an accountant who was flailing it against the window with the morning Times, and after she let the little green monster out, she had then rescued the accountant’s opinion of himself with a comforting word and a smile that put dazzle-spots all over his work for the rest of the afternoon. Let her be sorry for you, and ...

  So on Saturday night, late enough so he would meet few people in the halls, but early enough so she wouldn’t be in bed yet, Paul Sanders stopped for a moment by a mirror in the hallway of her apartment house, regarded his rather startling appearance approvingly, winked at it, and then went to her door ana began rapping softly and excitedly. He heard soft hurrying footsteps behind the door and began to breathe noisily, like someone trying not to sob. “Who is it? What’s the matter?”

  “Please,” he moaned against the panel, “please, please, Mrs. Dunsay, help me!”

  She immediately opened the door a peering inch. “Oh, thank God,” he breathed and pushed hard. She sprang back with her hands on her mouth and he slid in and closed the door with his back. She was indeed ready for bed, as he had hardly dared to hope. The robe was a little on the sensible side, but what he could see of the gown was fine, just fine. He said hoarsely, “Don’t let them get me. Don’t let them get me!”

  “Mr. Sanders!” Then she came closer, comforting, cheering. “No one’s going to get you. You come on in and sit down until it’s safe for you. Oh,” she cried as he let his coat fall open, to reveal the shaggy rip and the bloodstain, “you’re hurt!”

  He gazed dully at the scarlet stain. Then he flung up his head and set his features in an approximation of those of the Spartan boy who denied all knowledge of a stolen fox while the fox, hidden under his toga, ate his entrails until he dropped dead. He pulled his coat straight and buttoned it and smiled and said, “Just a scratch.” Then he sagged, caught the doorknob behind him, straightened up, and again smiled. It was devastating.

  “Oh, oh, come and sit down,” she cried. He leaned heavily on her but kept his hands decent, and she got him to the sofa. She helped him off with his coat and the shirt. It was indeed only a scratch, laboriously applied with the tips of his nail scissors, but it was real, and she didn’t seem to find the amount of blood too remarkable. A couple of cc’s swiped from the plasma lab goes a long way on a white sport shirt.

  He lay back limp and breathing shallowly while she flew to get scissors and bandages and warm water in a bowl, and averted his face from the light until she considerately turned it out in favor of a dim end-table lamp, and then he started the routine of not telling her his story because it was too bad ... he was not fit to be here ... she shouldn’t know about such things, he’d been such a fool ... and so on until she insisted that he could tell her anything, anything at all if it made him feel better. So he asked her to drink with him before he told her because she surely wouldn’t afterward, and she didn’t have anything but some sherry, and he said that was fine. He emptied a vial from his pocket into his drink and managed to switch glasses with her, and when she tasted it she frowned slightly and looked down into the glass, but by then he was talking a blue streak, a subdued, dark blue, convoluted streak that she must strain to hear and puzzle to follow. In twenty minutes he let it dwindle away to silence. She said nothing, but sat with slightly glazed eyes on her glass, which she held with both hands like a child afraid of spilling. He took it away from her and set it on the end table and took her pulse. He looked at the glass. It wasn’t empty, but she’d had enough. He moved over close to her.

  “How do you feel?”

  She took seconds to answer, and then said slowly, “I feel ...” Her lips opened and closed twice, and she shook her head slightly and was silent, staring out at him from topaz eyes gone all black.

  “Charlotte ... Lottie ... lonely little Lottie. You’re lonesome. You’ve been so alone. You need me, li’l Lottie,” he crooned, watching her carefully. When she did not move or speak, he took the sleeve of her robe in one hand and, moving steadily and slowly, tugged at it until her hand slipped inside. He untied the sash with his free hand and took her arm and drew it out of the robe. “You don’t need this now,” he murmured. “You are warm, so warm ...” He dropped the robe behind her and freed her other hand. She seemed not to understand what he was doing. The gown was nylon tricot, as sheer as they come.

  He drew her slowly into his arms. She raised her hands to his chest as if to push him away but there seemed to be no strength in them. Her hand came forward until her cheek rested softly against his. She spoke into his ear quietly, without any particular force or expression. “I mustn’t do this with you, Paul. Don’t let me. Harry is the ... there’s never been anyone but him, there never must be. I’m ... something’s happened to me. Help me, Paul. Help me. If I do it with you I can’t live any move; I’m going to have to die if you don’t help me now.” She didn’t accuse him in any way. Not once.

  Paul Sanders sat quite still and silent. It wasn’t easy. But sometimes when you rush things they snap out of it, groggy, even sick, but nonetheless out of it, and then that’s all, brother.... After a silent time he felt what he had been waiting for, the slow, subsiding shiver, and the sigh. He waited for it again and it came.

  The blood pounded in his ears. Well, boy, if it isn’t now it never will be.

  CHAPTER 3

  The carcass of the old trunk stood forgotten in the never-visited back edge of a junk-yard. Gurlick didn’t visit it; he lived in it, more often than not. Sometimes the weather was too bitterly cold for it to serve him, and in the hottest part of the summer he stayed away from it for weeks at a time. But most of the time it served him well. It broke the wind and it kept out most of the rain; it was dirty and dark and cost-free, which three items made it pure Gurlick.

  It was in this truck, two days after his encounter with the dog and the hamburger, that he was awakened from a deep sleep by ... call it the Medusa.

  He had not been having his dream of the pile of clothes by the bank of the pool, and of how he would sit by them and wait, and then of how she would appear out there in the water, splashing and humming and not knowing he was there. Yet. This morning there seemed not to be room in his head for the dream nor for anything else, including its usual contents. He made some grunts and a moan, and ground his stubby yellow teeth together, and rolled up to a sitting position and tried to squeeze his pressured head back into shape from the outside. It didn’t seem to help. He bent double and used his knees against his temples to squeeze even harder, and that didn’t help either.

  The head didn’t hurt exactly. And it wasn’t what Gurlick occasionally called a “crazy” head. On the contrary, it seemed to contain a spacious, frigid, and meticulous balance, a thing lying like a metrical lesion on the inner surface of his mind. He felt himself capable of looking at the thing, but, for all that it was in his head, it existed in a frightening direction, and at first he couldn’t bring himself to look that way. But then the thing began to spread and grow, and in a few rocking, groaning moments there wasn’t anything in his head but the new illumination, this opening casement which looked out upon two galaxies and part of a third, through the eyes and minds of countless billions of
individuals, cultures, hives, gaggles, prides, bevies, braces, herds, races, flocks and other kinds and quantities of sets and groupings, complexes, systems and pairings for which the language has as yet no terms; living in states liquid, solid, gaseous and a good many others with combinations and permutations among and between: swimming, flying, crawling, burrowing, pelagic, rooted, awash; and variously belegged, ciliated and bewinged; with consciousness which could be called the skulk-mind, the crash-mind, the paddle-, exaltation-, spring-, or murmuration-mind, and other minds too numerous, too difficult or too outrageous to mention. And over all, the central consciousness of the creature itself (though “central” is misleading; the hive-mind is permeative)—the Medusa, the galactic man o’ war, the superconscious of the illimitable beast, of which the people of a planet were here a nerve and there an organ, where entire cultures were specialized ganglia; the creature of which Gurlick was now a member and a part, for all he was a minor atom in a simple molecule of a primitive cell—this mighty consciousness became aware of Gurlick and he of it. He let himself regard it just long enough to know it was there, and then blanked ten elevenths of his mind away from the very idea. If you set before Gurlick a page of the writings of Immanuel Kant, he would see it; he might even be able to read a number of the words. But he wouldn’t spend any time or effort over it. He would see it and discard it from his attention, and if you left it in front of him, or held it there, he would see without looking and wait for it to go away.

  Now, in its seedings, the Medusa had dropped its wrinkled milt into many a fantastic fossa. And if one of those scattered spores survived at all, it survived in, and linked with, the person and the species in which it found itself. If the host-integer were a fish, then a fish it would remain, acting as a fish, thinking as a fish; and when it became a “person” (which is what biologists call the individual polyps which make up the incredible colonies we call hydromedusae), it would not put away fishly things. On the contrary, it was to the interest of the Medusa that it keep its manifold parts specialized in the media in which they had evolved; the fish not only remained a fish, but in many cases might become much more so. Therefore in inducting Gurlick into itself, he remained—just Gurlick. What Gurlick saw of the Medusa’s environments) he would not look at. What the Medusa sensed was only what Gurlick could sense, and (regrettably for our pride of species) Gurlick himself. It could not, as might be supposed, snatch out every particle of Gurlick’s information and experience, nor could it observe Gurlick’s world in any other way than through the man’s own eye and mind. Answers there might be, in that rotted repository, to the questions the Medusa asked, but they were unavailable until Gurlick himself formulated them. This had always been a slow process with him. He thought verbally, and his constructions were put together at approximately oral speed. The end effect was extraordinary; the irresistible demands came arrowing into him from immensity, crossing light-years with considerably less difficulty than it found in traversing Gurlick’s thin tough layer of subjective soft-focus, of not-caring, not-understanding-not-wanting-to-under-stand. But reach him they did, the mighty union of voice with which the super-creature conveyed ideas ... and were answered in Gurlick’s own time, in his own way, and aloud in his own words.