Thunder and Roses Read online

  I took a look at Ted’s outline—his original outline, typos and all—and liked the idea. “The Joy Machine,” after all, was a variation on the theme of 1962 novel, The Joy Makers, and I was still fascinated by the interplay between happiness and aspiration, between pleasure and struggle. In his outline, Ted saw pleasure, easily obtained and totally satisfying, as a threat to human existence, and I saw ways of building on Ted’s situation to say some other things about happiness and the human condition. I agreed to write the novel. The result [Star Trek, The Joy Machine, a novel by James Gunn, based on the story by Theodore Sturgeon] was published in 1996.

  My first contact with Ted Sturgeon came when Ted was asked to shorten my story. My last came when I was asked to lengthen his story. There must be a meaning in there somewhere.

  James Gunn

  Lawrence, Kansas

  Maturity

  DR. MARGARETTA WENZELL, she of the smooth face and wise eyes and flowing dark hair, and the raft of letters after her name in the medical “Who’s Who,” allowed herself to be called “Peg” only by her equals, of whom there were few. Her superiors did not, and her inferiors dared not. And yet Dr. Wenzell was not a forbidding person in any way. She had fourteen months to go to get to her thirtieth birthday; her figure hadn’t changed since she was seventeen; her face, while hardly suited to a magazine cover, was designed rather for a salon study. She maintained her careful distance from most people for two reasons. One was that, as an endocrinologist, she had to make a fetish of objectivity; and the other was the fact that only by a consistent attitude of impersonality could she keep her personal charm from being a drawback to her work. Her work meant more to her than anything else in life, and she saw to it that her life stayed that way.

  And yet the boy striding beside her called her “Peg.” He had since he met her. He was neither her superior nor her inferior, and he was certainly not her equal. These subconscious divisions of Dr. Wenzell’s had nothing to do with age or social position. Her standards were her own, and since Robin English could not be judged by any of them—or by anyone else’s standards, for that matter—she had made no protest beyond a lift of the eyebrow. It couldn’t be important.

  He held her arm as they crossed the rainy street. He always did that, and he was one of the half-dozen men she had met in her life who did it unconsciously and invariably.

  “There’s a taxi!” she said.

  He grinned. “So it is. Let’s take the subway.”

  “Oh, Robin!”

  “It’s only temporary. Why, I’ve almost finished that operetta, and any day now I’ll get the patent on that power brake of mine, and—” He smiled down at her. His face was round and ruddy, and it hadn’t quite enough chin, and Peg thought it was a delightful face. She wondered if it knew how to look angry or—purposeful.

  “I know,” she said. “I know. And you’ll suddenly have bushels of money, and you won’t have to worry about taxis—”

  “I don’t worry about ’em anyhow. Maybe such things’ll bother me when your boy friend gets through with me.”

  “They will, and don’t call him my boy friend.”

  “Sorry,” he said casually.

  They went down the steps at the subway terminal. Sorry. Robin could always dismiss things with that laconic expression. And he could. Whether he was sorry or not, wasn’t important, somehow; it was the way he said it. It reduced the thing he was sorry for to so little value that it wasn’t worth being sorry about.

  Peg stood watching him as he swung up to the change booth. He walked easily, with an incredible grace. As graceful as a cat, but not at all like a cat. It was like the way he thought—as well as a human being, but not like a human being. She watched the way the light fell on his strange, planeless, open face, and his tousled head of sandy horsehair. He annoyed her ever so much, and she thought that it was probably because she liked him.

  He stood aside to let her through the turnstile, smiling at her and whistling a snatch of a Bach fugue through his teeth. That was another thing. Robin played competent piano and absolutely knocked-out trumpet; but he never played the classics. He never whistled anything else.

  There was no train in. They strolled up the platform slowly. Peg couldn’t keep her eyes off Robin’s face. His sensitive nostrils dilated, and she had the odd idea that he was smelling a sound—the echoing shuffle of feet and machinery in the quiet where there should be no quiet. As they passed the massive beam-and-coil-spring bumper at the end of the track, Robin paused, his eyes flickering over it, gauging its strength, judging its materials. It had never occurred to her to look at such a thing before. “What does that matter to you, Robin?”

  He pointed. “First it knocks the trains pigeontoed. Then she’ll nose into the beam there and the springs behind it will take up the shock. Now why do they use coils?”

  “Why not?”

  “Leaf springs would absorb the collision energy between the leaves, in friction. Coil springs store the energy and throw it right back … oh! I see. They took for granted when they designed it that the brakes would be set. Big as those springs are, they’re not going to shove the whole train back. And then, the play between the car couplings would—”

  “But Robin—what does it matter? To you, I mean. No,” she said quickly as a thick little furrow appeared and disappeared between his eyes. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t be interested. I’m just wondering exactly what it is about such devices that fascinates you so.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “The … the integration, I suppose. The thought that went into it. The importance of the crash barrier to Mrs. Scholtz’s stew and Sadie’s date, and which ferry Tony catches, and all the other happenings that can happen to the cattle and the gods who use the subways.”

  Peg laughed delightedly. “And do you think about all of the meanings to all of the people of all of the things you see?”

  “I don’t have to think of them. They’re there, right in front of me. Surely you can see homemade borscht and a goodnight kiss and thousands of other little, important things, all wrapped up in those big helical springs?”

  “I have to think about it. But I do see them.” She laughed again. “What do you think about when you listen to Bach?”

  He looked at her quickly. “Did I say I listened to Bach?”

  “My gremlins told me.” She looked at him with puzzlement. He wasn’t smiling. “ ‘You whistle it,” she explained.

  “Do I? Well, all right then. What do I think of? Architecture, I think. And the complete polish of it. The way old J. S. burnished every note, and the careful matching of all those harmonic voices. And … and—”

  “And what?”

  He laughed, a burst of it, a compelling radiation which left little pieces of itself as smiles on the faces of the people around them. “And the sweating choirboys who had to pump the organ when he composed. How they must have hated him!”

  A train came groaning into the station and stopped, snicking its doors open. “Watch them,” said Robin, his quick eyes taking inventory of the people who jostled each other out of the train. “Not one in fifty is seeing anything. No one knows how far apart these pillars are, or the way all these rivets are set, or the cracks in the concrete under their feet. They’re all looking at things separated from them in space and time—the offices they have left, the homes they’re going to, the people they will see. Hardly any of them are consciously here, now. They’re all ghosts, and we’re a couple of Peeping Toms.”

  “Robin, Robin, you’re such a child!”

  “To you, of course. You’re older than I am.”

  “Four days.” It was a great joke between them.

  “Four thousand years,” he said soberly. They found a seat. “And I’m not a child. I’m a hyperthymus. You said so yourself.”

  “You won’t be for very much longer,” said Dr. Margaretta Wenzell. “Dr. Warfield and I will see to that.”

  “What are you doing it for?”

  “You’ll find out
when we send the bill.”

  “I know it isn’t that.”

  “Of course not,” she said. Her remark tasted badly in her mouth. “It’s just … Robin, how long have you had that suit?”

  “Uh … suit?” He looked vaguely at the sleeve. “Oh, about three years. It’s a good suit.”

  “Of course it is.” It was, too. She remembered that he had gotten it with prize money from a poetry contest. “How many weeks room rent do you owe?”

  “None!” he said triumphantly. “I rewired all the doorbells in the apartment house and fixed Mrs. Gridget’s vacuum cleaner and composed a song for her daughter’s wedding reception and invented a gadget to hold her cookbook under the kitchen shelf, with a little light that goes on when she swings it out. Next thing I knew she handed me a rent receipt. Wasn’t that swell of her?”

  “Oh,” said Peg weakly. She clutched grimly at the point she was trying to make. “How much are you in debt?”

  “Oh, that,” he said.

  “That.”

  “I guess ten-twelve thousand.” He looked up. “Kcans Yppans. What are you driving at?”

  “What did you say?”

  He waved at the car card opposite. “Snappy Snack. Spelled backwards. Always spell things backward when you see them on car cards. If you don’t, there’s no telling what you might be mising.”

  “Oh, you blithering idiot!”

  “Sorry. What were you saying?”

  “I was getting to this,” she said patiently. “There doesn’t seem to be anything you can’t do. You write, you paint, you compose, you invent things, you fix other things, you—”

  “Cook,” he said, as she stopped for breath; and he added idly, “I make love, too.”

  “No doubt,” said the gland specialist primly. “On the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be anything you’ve accomplished with all of these skills.”

  “They’re not skills. They’re talents. I have no skills.”

  Peg saw the distinction, and smiled. It was quite true. One had to spend a little time in practice to acquire a skill. If Robin couldn’t do promisingly the first time he tried something, he would hardly try again. “A good point. And that is what Dr. Warfield and I want to adjust.”

  “ ‘Adjust,’ she says. Going to shrivel up all the pretty pink lobulae in my thymus. The only thymus I’ve got, too.”

  “And about time. You should have gotten rid of it when you were thirteen. Most people do.”

  “And then I’ll be all grim and determined about everything, and generate gallons of sweat, and make thousands of dollars, so that at age thirty I can go back to school and get that high school diploma.”

  “Haven’t you got a high school diploma?” asked Peg, her appalled voice echoing hollowly against her four post-graduate degrees.

  “As a senior,” smiled Robin, “I hadn’t a thing but seniority. I’d been there six years. I didn’t graduate from school; I was released.”

  “Robin, that’s awful!”

  “Why is it awful? Oh—I suppose it is.” He looked puzzled and crestfallen.

  Peg put her hand on his arm. It had nothing to do with logic, but something in her was wrenched when Robin looked hurt. “I suppose it doesn’t matter, Robin. What you learn, and what you do with it, are really more important than where you learn.”

  “Yes … but not when. I mean, you can learn too late. I know lots of things, but the things I don’t know seem to have to do with getting along in the world. Isn’t that what you mean by ‘awful’? Isn’t that what you and Dr. Warfield are going to change?”

  “That’s it. That’s right. Robin. Oh, you’re such a strange person!”

  “Strange?”

  “I mean … you know, I was sure that Mel Warfield and I would have no end of trouble in persuading you to take these thymus treatments.”

  “Why?”

  With a kind of exasperation she said, “I don’t think you fully realize that the change in you will be drastic. You’re going to lose a lot that’s bad about you—I’m sure of that. But you’ll see things quite differently. You … you—” She fought for a description of what Robin would be like without his passionate interest in too many things, and her creative equipment bogged down. “You’ll probably see things quite differently.”

  He looked into her eyes thoughtfully. “Is that bad?”

  Bad? There never was a man who had less evil about him, she thought. “I think not,” she said.

  He spread his hands. “I don’t think so either. So why hesitate? You have mentioned that I do a lot of things. Would that be true if I got all frothed up every time I tried something I’d never tried before?”

  “No. No, of course not.” She realized that it had been foolish of her to mix ordinary practical psychology into any consideration of Robin English. Obviously gland imbalances have frequent psychological symptoms, and in many of these cases the abnormal condition has its own self-justifying synapses which will set up a powerful defense mechanism when treatment is mentioned. Equally obviously, this wouldn’t apply to Robin. Where most people seem to have an inherent dislike of being changed, Robin seemed to have a subconscious yearning for just that.

  He said, “We get off at the next station.”

  “I know.”

  “I just wanted to tell you.”

  “Where to get off?”

  In utter surprise, he said “Me?” and it was the most eloquent monosyllable she had ever heard. For the first time it occurred to her to wonder consciously what he thought of her. It hadn’t seemed to matter, before. What was she, in his eyes? She suddenly realized that she, as a doctor meeting a man socially, had really no right to corner him, question him, analyze and diagnose the way she had over the past few weeks. She couldn’t abide the existence of a correctable condition in her specialty, and this was probably the essence of selfishness. He probably regarded her as meddling and dominating. She astonished herself by asking him, point-blank.

  “What do I think of you?” He considered, carefully. He appeared not to think it remarkable that she could have asked such a question. “You’re a taffy-puller.”

  “I’m a what?”

  “A taffy-puller. They hypnotize me. Didn’t you ever see one?”

  “I don’t think so,” she breathed. “But—”

  “You see them down on the boardwalk. Beautifully machined little rigs, all chrome-plated eccentrics and cams. There are two cranks set near each other so that the ‘handle’ of each passes the axle of the other. They stick a big mass of taffy on one ‘handle’ and start the machine. Before that sticky, homogeneous mass has a chance to droop and drip off, the other crank has swung up and taken most of it. As the crank handles move away from each other the taffy is pulled out, and then as they move together again it loops and sags; and at the last possible moment the loop is shoved together. The taffy welds itself and is pulled apart again.” Robin’s eyes were shining and his voice was rapt. “Underneath the taffy is a stainless steel tray. There isn’t a speck of taffy on it. Not a drop, not a smidgin. You stand there, and you look at it, and you wait for that lump of guff to slap itself all over those roller bearings and burnished con rods, but it never does. You wait for it to get tired of that fantastic juggling, and it never does. Sometimes gooey little bubbles get in the taffy and get carried around and pulled out and squashed flat, and when they break they do it slowly, leaving little soft craters that take a long time to fill up; and they’re being mauled around the way the bubbles were.” He sighed. “There’s almost too much contrast—that competent, beautiful machinist’s dream handling—what? Taffy—no definition, no boundaries, no predictable tensile strength. I feel somehow as if there ought to be an intermediate stage somewhere. I’d feel better if the machine handled one of Dali’s limp watches, and the watch handled the mud. But that doesn’t matter. How I feel, I mean. The taffy gets pulled. You’re a taffy-puller. You’ve never done a wasteful or incompetent thing in your life, no matter what you were working with.”
r />   She sat quietly, letting the vivid picture he had painted fade away. Then, sharply, “Haven’t I!” she cried. “I’ve let us ride past our station!”

  Dr. Mellett Warfield let them in himself. Towering over his colleague, he bent his head, and the light caught his high white forehead, which, with his peaked hairline, made a perfect Tuscan arch. “Peg!”

  “Hello, Mel. This is Robin English.”

  Warfield shook hands warmly. “I am glad to see you. Peg has told me a lot about you.”

  “I imagine she has,” grinned Robin. “All about my histones and my albumins and the medullic and cortical tissues of my lobulae. I love that word. Lobulae. I lobule very much, Peg.”

  “Robin, for Pete’s sake!”

  Warfield laughed. “No—not only that. You see, I’d heard of you before. You designed that, didn’t you?” He pointed. On a side table was a simple device with two multicolored disks mounted at the ends of a rotating arm, and powered by a little electric motor.

  “The Whirltoy? Robin, I didn’t know that!”

  “I don’t know a child psychologist or a pediatrician who hasn’t got one,” said Warfield. “I wouldn’t part with that one for fifty times what it cost me—which is less than it’s worth. I have yet to see the child, no matter how maladjusted, glandular, spoiled, or what have you, who isn’t fascinated by those changing colors. Even the colorblind children can’t keep their eyes off it because of the changing patterns it makes.”

  Peg looked at Robin as if he had just come in through the wall. “Robin … the patent on that—”

  “Doesn’t exist,” said Warfield. “He gave it to the Parents’ Association.”

  “Well, sure. I made mine for fun. I had it a long time before a friend of mine said I ought to sell the idea to a toy manufacturer. But I heard that the Parents’ Association sent toys to hospitals and I sort of figured maybe kids that needed amusement should have it, rather than only those whose parents could afford it.”