Hugo awards the short st.., p.51
Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 1), page 51
“What you come for?” he said, approaching so close to her that his enormous nose almost touched hers. “You want me just as I am, Old Man Paley, descendant a the Real Folk—Paley, who loves you? Or you come to give the batty old junkman a tranquillizer so you kin take him by the hand like a lamb and lead him back to the slaughterhouse, the puzzle factory, where they’ll stick a ice pick back a his eyeball and rip out what makes him a man and not an ox.”
“I came…”
“Yeah?”
“For this!” she shouted, and she snatched off his hat and raced away from him, toward the river.
Behind her rose a bellow of agony so loud she could hear it even above the thunder. Feet splashed as he gave pursuit.
Suddenly, she slipped and sprawled facedown in the mud. At the same time, her glasses fell off. Now it was her turn to feel despair, for in this halfworld she could see nothing without her glasses except the lightning flashes. She must find them. But if she delayed to hunt for them, she’d lose her headstart.
She cried out with joy, for her groping fingers found what they sought. But the breath was knocked out of her, and she dropped the glasses again as a heavy weight fell upon her back and half stunned her. Vaguely, she was aware that the hat had been taken away from her. A moment later, as her senses came back into focus, she realized she was being raised into the air. Old Man was holding her in the crook of his arm, supporting part of her weight on his bulging belly.
“My glasses. Please, my glasses. I need them.”
“You won’t be needin em for a while. But don’t worry about em. I got em in my pants pocket. Old Man’s takin care a you.”
His arm tightened around her so she cried out with pain.
Hoarsely, he said, “You was sent down by the G’yaga to get that hat, wasn’t you? Well, it din’t work cause The Old Guy’s stridin the sky tonight, and he’s protectin his own.”
Dorothy bit her lip to keep from telling him that she had wanted to destroy the hat because she hoped that that act would also destroy the guilt of having made it in the first place. But she couldn’t tell him that. If he knew she had made a false hat, he would kill her in his rage.
“No. Not again,” she said. “Please. Don’t. I’ll scream. They’ll come after you. They’ll take you to the State Hospital and lock you up for life. I swear I’ll scream.”
“Who’ll hear you? Only The Old Guy, and he’d get a kick out a seein you in this fix cause you’re a Falser and you took the stuffin right out a my hat and me with your Falser Magic. But I’m gettin back what’s mine and his, the same way you took it from me. The door swings both ways.”
He stopped walking and lowered her to a pile of wet leaves.
“Here we are. The forest like it was in the old days. Don’t worry. Old Man’ll protect you from the cave bear and the bull a the woods. But who’ll protect you from Old Man, huh?”
Lightning exploded so near that for a second they were blinded and speechless. Then Paley shouted, “The Old Guy’s whoopin it up tonight, just like he used to do! Blood and murder and wicked-ness’re ridin the howlin night air!”
He pounded his immense chest with his huge fist.
“Let The Old Guy and The Old Woman fight it out tonight. They ain’t goin to stop us. Dor’thy. Not unless that hairy old god in the clouds is going to fry me with his lightnin, jealous a me cause I’m havin what he kin’t.”
Lightning rammed against the ground from the charged skies, and lightning leaped up to the clouds from the charged earth. The rain fell harder than before, as if it were being shot out of a great pipe from a mountain river and pouring directly over them. But for some time the flashes did not come close to the cottonwoods. Then, one ripped apart the night beside them, deafened and stunned them.
And Dorothy, looking over Old Man’s shoulder, thought she would die of fright because there was a ghost standing over them. It was tall and white, and its shroud flapped in the wind, and its arms were raised in a gesture like a curse.
But it was a knife that it held in its hand.
Then, the fire that rose like a cross behind the figure was gone, and night rushed back in.
Dorothy screamed. Old Man grunted, as if something had knocked the breath from him.
He rose to his knees, gasped something unintelligible, and slowly got to his feet. He turned his back to Dorothy so he could face the thing in white. Lightning flashed again. Once more Dorothy screamed, for she saw the knife sticking out of his back.
Then the white figure had rushed toward Old Man. But instead of attacking him, it dropped to its knees and tried to kiss his hand and babbled for forgiveness.
No ghost. No man. Deena, in her white terrycloth robe.
“I did it because I love you!” screamed Deena.
Old Man, swaying back and forth, was silent.
“I went back to the shanty for a knife, and I came here because I knew what you’d be doing, and I didn’t want Dorothy’s life ruined because of you, and I hated you, and I wanted to kill you. But I don’t really hate you.”
Slowly, Paley reached behind him and gripped the handle of the knife. Lightning made everything white around him, and by its brief glare the women saw him jerk the blade free of his flesh.
Dorothy moaned, “It’s terrible, terrible. All my fault, all my fault.”
She groped through the mud until her fingers came across the Old Man’s jeans and its backpocket, which held her glasses. She put the glasses on, only to find that she could not see anything because of the darkness. Then, and not until then, she became concerned about locating her own clothes. On her hands and knees she searched through the wet leaves and grass. She was about to give up and go back to Old Man when another lightning flash showed the heap to her left. Giving a cry of joy, she began to crawl to it.
But another stroke of lightning showed her something else. She screamed and tried to stand up but instead slipped and fell forward on her face.
Old Man, knife in hand, was walking slowly toward her.
“Don’t try to run away!” he bellowed. “You’ll never get away! The Old Guy’ll light thins up for me so you kin’t sneak away in the dark. Besides, your white skin shines in the night, like a rotten toadstool. You’re done for. You snatched away my hat so you could get me out here defenseless, and then Deena could stab me in the back. You and her are Falser witches, I know damn well!”
“What do you think you’re doing?” asked Dorothy. She tried to rise again but could not. It was as if the mud had fingers around her ankles and knees.
“The Old Guy’s howlin for the blood a C’yaga wimmen. And he’s gonna get all the blood he wants. It’s only fair. Deena put the knife in me, and The Old Woman got some a my blood to drink. Now it’s your turn to give The Old Guy some a yours.”
“Don’t!” screamed Deena. “Don’t! Dorothy had nothing to do with it! And you can’t blame me, after what you were doing to her!”
“She’d done everythin to me. I’m gonna make the last sacrifice to Old Guy. Then they kin do what they want to me. I don’t care. I’ll have had one moment a bein a real Real Folker.”
Deena and Dorothy both screamed. In the next second, lightning broke the darkness around them. Dorothy saw Deena hurl herself on Old Man’s back and carry him downward. Then, night again.
There was a groan. Then, another blast of light. Old Man was on his knees, bent almost double but not bent so far Dorothy could not see the handle of the knife that was in his chest.
“Oh, Christ!” wailed Deena. “When I pushed him, he must have fallen on the knife. I heard the bone in his chest break. Now he’s dying!”
Paley moaned. “Yeah, you done it now, you sure paid me back, din’t you? Paid me back for my takin the monkey off a your back and supportin you all these years.”
“Oh, Old Man,” sobbed Deena, “I didn’t mean to do it. I was just trying to save Dorothy and save you from yourself. Please! Isn’t there anything I can do for you?”
“Sure you kin. Stuff up the two big holes in my back and chest. My blood, my breath, my real soul’s flowin out a me. Guy In the Sky, what a way to die! Kilt by a crazy woman!”
“Keep quiet,” said Dorothy. “Save your strength. Deena, you run to the service station. It’ll still be open. Call a doctor.”
“Don’t go, Deena,” he said. “It’s too late. I’m hangin onto my soul by its big toe now; in a minute I’ll have to let go, and it’ll jump out a me like a beagle after a rabbit.
“Dor’thy, Dor’thy, was it the wickedness a The Old Woman put you up to this? I must a meant something to you… under the flowers… maybe it’s better… I felt like a god, then… not what I really am… a crazy old junkman… a alley man… Just think a it… fifty thousand years behint me… older’n Adam and Eve by far… now, this…”
Deena began weeping. He lifted his hand, and she seized it.
“Let loose,” he said faintly. “I was gonna knock hell outta you for blubberin… just like a Falser bitch… kill me… then cry… you never did ‘predate me… like Dorothy…”
“His hand’s getting cold,” murmured Deena.
“Deena, bury that damn hat with me… least you kin do… Hey, Deena, who you goin to for help when you hear that monkey chitterin outside the door, huh? Who… ?”
Suddenly, before Dorothy and Deena could push him back down, he sat up. At the same time, lightning hammered into the earth nearby and it showed them his eyes, looking past them out into the night.
He spoke, and his voice was stronger, as if life had drained back into him through the holes in his flesh.
“Old Guy’s given me a good send-off. Lightnin and thunder. The works. Nothin cheap about him, huh? Why not? He knows this is the end a the trail for me. The last a his worshipers… last a the Paleys…”
He sank back and spoke no more.
THE MAN WHO LOST THE SEA
Theodore Sturgeon
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 with 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 here, 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 hun 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 costs 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 flat 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. Watch 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.
But if you were that kid, eager or resourceful or whatever, you wouldn't jabber about it to the sick man, for not only does he not want to be bothered with you, he's thought of all that long since and is even now watching the shadows for that triangular split second of measurement. Now! His eyes drop to the face of his chronometer: 0400, near as makes no never mind.
He has minutes to wait now—ten?... thirty?.. . twentythree?—while this baby moon eats up its slice of shadowpie; and that's too bad, the waiting, for though the inner sea is calm there are currents below, shadows that shift and swim. Be busy. Be busy. He must not swim near that great invisible ameba, whatever happens: its first cold pseudopod is even now reaching for the vitals.
Being a knowledgeable young fellow, not quite a kid any more, wanting to help the sick man too, you want to tell him everything you know about that cold-in-the-gut, that reaching invisible surrounding implacable ameba. You know all about it—listen, you want to yell at him, don't let that touch of cold bother you. Just know what it is, that's all. Know what it is that is touching your gut. You want to tell him, listen:
Listen, this is how you met the monster and dissected it. Listen, you were skin-diving in the Grenadines, a hundred tropical shoal-water islands; you had a new blue snorkel mask, the kind with face-plate and breathing-tube all in one, and new blue flippers on your feet, and a new blue spear-gun—all this new because you'd only begun, you see; you were a beginner, aghast with pleasure at your easy intrusion into this underwater otherworld. You'd been out in a boat, you were coming back, you'd just reached the mouth of the little bay, you'd taken the notion to swim the rest of the way. You'd said as much to the boys and slipped into the warm silky water. You brought your gun.
