Bright Segment (58 page)

“Bulkhead”:
first published in
Galaxy Science Fiction
, March 1955, under the title “Who?” Editor’s blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance: NO MAN COULD MAKE THE LONG HAUL ALONE AND SO THERE HAD TO BE SOMEBODY BEHIND THE BULKHEAD—BUT THE ENORMOUSLY IMPORTANT QUESTION WAS: WHO?

In a 1979 collection of three stories called
Maturity
, TS wrote in the book’s introduction:
“Bulkhead” was written in 1954, and appeared in Horace Gold’s
Galaxy.
A few months before I wrote it I ran across a statement by Philip Van Doren Stern: “Never set pen to paper until you can state your theme in one single, simple declarative sentence.” This really
intrigued me, and I began to look for it in every story I read. Well, it is not as simple as it seems, nor so obvious. I found few of these ‘single, simple declarative statements’ anywhere. So I began to look for them in my own writings, and couldn’t find them there either. But about a year and a half after “Bulkhead” appeared in print, I reread it, and I found that theme in the simplest words. Can you? The discovery qualified this story for this book: a further advance in understanding the nature of maturity. I’ll tell you this in the postscript
. In the book’s postscript, TS wrote:
A single, simple declarative statement: A man doesn’t grow up until he can come to terms with his early self
.

The text of this story as it appears in Judith Merril’s widely read anthologies
SF: The Year’s Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy
and
SF: The Best of the Best
is different from the text of this story in Sturgeon’s own collections
A Way Home
(1955) and
Maturity
(1979). This is because the Merrill books reprint the story as it ran in
Galaxy
. Uncharacteristically, Sturgeon provided the publisher of
A Way Home
with the carbon of his original manuscript of this story rather than a copy of the published story, possibly because he was not happy with H.L. Gold’s editing of the story for
Galaxy
, but probably also because the book (which was published in May 1955) went into production before a copy of the printed magazine was available. The Theodore Sturgeon papers in the Dept. of Special Collections, Spencer Library, University of Kansas, include Sturgeon’s original manuscript for “Bulkhead” as line-edited by Gold and sent to
Galaxy’s
printer. An examination of this “setting copy” shows that Gold, for example, changed the opening words of the story’s third paragraph from
Which, of course, eliminates
to
Naturally, that eliminates
and added the sentence
You have a shipmate, but even so, you’re alone
. after the opening sentence of the fifth paragraph
(Then there’s this: You’re alone.)
. In the
Galaxy
text, in this same paragraph, in the sentence that begins
Psychodynamics has come a long way
, Gold cut the following phrases:
it hasn’t begun to alter the fact that human beings are the most feral, vicious, destructive, and self-destructive creatures God ever made
. Close examination of the Spencer Library’s copy of the (marked-up by Gold) original manuscript further reveals that Sturgeon did make some small changes of his own (possibly in response to suggestions from the book’s copy editor) to the story before
A Way Home
went to press.

In her introduction to “Bulkhead” in the first volume of her annual
Year’s Best
anthologies, Judith Merril called Sturgeon “The Man With
The Golden Pen; for my money, the top writer among established ‘names’ in sf.” She notes that the U.S. Air Force is currently (1956) studying a problem central to “Bulkhead” and another story in her anthology: “They call it ‘Space Medicine’; their object is to make certain that human minds and bodies will be able to survive the Big Jump, when we make it.”

The reference late in the story to
Dell’s hypothesis
(
promulgated ’way back in the 1960’s by a lay analyst named Dudley Dell, who was, as I remember, the editor of a love-story magazine
) is an in-joke. H. L. Gold had used the pseudonym Dudley Dell on occasional features he wrote in
Galaxy
. And Gold was certainly prone to articulating his own psychological theories in conversations with and letters to Sturgeon and other
Galaxy
writers. In the original manuscript of the story and as it appeared in
Galaxy
, Dell’s hypothesis
was formulated way back in the middle of the 20th century by Dudley Dell, which was one of the pseudonyms of a magazine editor. As I remember it, he later became a lay analyst and—

On one sheet of the “maunderings” in which Sturgeon typed notes to himself exploring story ideas, he seems to arrive at the idea of reviving his unpublished 1947 story “Hurricane Trio” by interpolating a science fictional element. He did this, and the story was published in
Galaxy
in the April 1955 issue, and included in his 1955 collection
A Way Home
. At the bottom of this sheet, after an asterisk, the following note appears:

Coexistence of older-younger entities in a person: psychiatric treatment separates entities which would otherwise be in conflict, so that a man has company on a space trip. He doesn’t know, of course, that he’s talking to himself, and the similarity-conflict factor will be just ideal to keep him alert. Title: BULKHEAD. denouement when he’s shown the bulkhead, the too-small-for-a-passenger space behind it, then the psych snaps fingers and commands him to remember—his own memory—some preoccupation of the junior member
.

It is of course quite unusual, and just the sort of stunt that Sturgeon would undertake and succeed at, for a story to be written entirely in a second person narrative voice (“You’re alone. You crouch in this little cell in the nose of your ship”). It is possible that this aspect of this story had a significant influence on Rod Serling’s use of a similar narrative technique on many scripts for his popular television series “Twilight Zone.”

The protagonist’s ruminations
Nobody but a cadet
deserves
a ship!… Why did you hold still for Base routines, for the hazing you got from the upper classmen?
derive partly from Sturgeon’s experiences at age seventeen
on a school ship, the Penn State Nautical School, which included being “brutalized and beat up” (he told me in 1976) along with other new cadets in routine hazings conducted by upper classmen.

“The Riddle of Ragnarok”:
first published in
Fantastic Universe
, June 1955. Editor’s blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance: IT WAS A WORLD OF GIANTS AND OF WOMEN WHOSE LIMBS WERE MAGIC—AND FABULOUSLY STRANGE WERE THE WEAVING STRANDS OF ITS DESTINY. Also on this page was another editorial note, which said: “Theodore Sturgeon, who recently won the International Fantasy Committee Award for the most distinguished SF novel of the year, is probably the most versatile of the scant dozen writers who have compelled the moulders of our literary climate to take science fiction seriously as an important branch of imaginative fiction. We are happy to welcome him to our pages for the first time with this glowingly fanciful saga of a realm enchanted.”

The details of the events in this unusual Sturgeon story seem to be consistent with the story of the death of Balder or Baldur as it is often told in Norse mythology—particularly as recounted circa 1225 in the
Prose Edda
by Icelandic poet and historian Snorri Sturluson (Saxo’s Danish account differs)—with the exception of the twist of Loki’s possible innocence and the non-weeping giantess as a figure other than Loki in disguise. These elements and the remarkable conversations (and ultimate reconciliation) between Memory and Thought appear to be Sturgeon’s inventions. (
A Guide to the Gods
by Richard Carlyon, 1981, and
Encyclopedia of Gods
by Michael Jordan, 1993, were helpful to me in this determination.)

“Twink”:
first published in
Galaxy Science Fiction
, August 1955.

In his 1984 collection
Alien Cargo
, Sturgeon said of “Twink”:
This is the one and only time I used this particular writer’s trick in narrative. I wonder if you can divine what it is. Otherwise, I must express pride at the insightful look at society’s insensitivities toward the unusual person. The disabled are unusual; special gifts are unusual; too many people don’t know the difference. The slow learners are unusual; psychopaths are unusual; too many people think they’re suffering from the same thing. These
, among other things,
are what this story’s about, so I hope you will forgive the trickery
.

Editor’s blurb above the title in the original magazine appearance: IT WAS BAD ENOUGH BEING TREATED LIKE A FREAK—NOW THERE WAS THE HORROR OF WHAT I HAD DONE TO …

“Bright Segment”:
first published in
Caviar
, an anthology of short stories by Theodore Sturgeon published by Ballantine Books in October 1955.

In his 1984 collection
Alien Cargo
, Sturgeon said of “Bright Segment”:
Surely one of the most powerful stories I have ever written. This was made into a 58-minute TV film in France, with Gert (Goldfinger) Frobe cast as the old man, and doing an extraordinary piece of acting. Further, the French shot it almost exactly the way I wrote it, and I wrote it despairing that it could not be filmed; American TV could never (1955) handle that much blood and that much skin. I wish you could see it. I own the only print in North America, but can’t use it for admission or release it to net or cable. I can, however, use it as a lecture resource: a three-hour performance during which I read the story up to but not including the ending; challenge the students (creative writing, scripting, directing, cinematography, what have you) to suggest what they would include or change or eliminate if this were their film; then I show the film, read my ending, and launch a Q&A. It takes about three hours, and it costs, but I understand it’s worth the nut. The French director is Christian de Chalonge; he’s unavailable at this writing, but he seems to be, so far, the only one in the industry anywhere who really understands what I am all about. He’s also unavailable at this writing
. ‘Sway,
as Lady Jayne says; it means, “That’s the way things are.” There is, by the way, no important language difficulty; you will see as you read it that it’s about 92% visual—virtually without dialogue, by its very nature
.

The film was first aired on French television in 1974, under the title
Parcelle Brillante
.

David Pringle in
A Touch of Sturgeon
(1987) calls “Bright Segment” “a disturbing variant on the Esmeralda and Quasimodo story [in Victor Hugo’s novel
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
].”

The similarity between the basic situation of this story and the way Wolf Reger and his wife met in “Extrapolation” suggests that when Sturgeon was asked to write a new piece of fiction for inclusion in his forthcoming Ballantine collection, he took the opportunity to explore a story-idea that had been with him since he wrote “Extrapolation,” but that he hadn’t pursued until now because it wasn’t science fiction or fantasy and so none
of the magazine markets he’d been selling to would be able to use it. It is interesting to note that although there is no science fiction element here, the form of the story arises from one of the premises that are most often used in developing a science fiction plot: What would happen if …? Certainly the powerful portrait of the pathos of the human need to be needed that results is unmistakably a “Sturgeon story,” regardless of what other genre it can or cannot be placed in.

“So Near the Darkness”:
first published in
Fantastic Universe
, November 1955. Editor’s blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance: BROKAW’S GUILT AND FEAR SEEMED MORE THAN HUMAN FLESH COULD ENDURE. BUT TINA COULD SEE THE UGLY BRIDGE-WORK BEHIND THE DARK ONE’S FANGS. The second editorial note read: “It was Theodore Sturgeon’s genius for combining fantasy with science fiction, in a blend of enchantment rare in our age, which won him an International Fantasy Committee Award in a year which saw an unprecedented display of competitive brilliance on library shelves. We doubt, indeed, if there is another writer of quite his stature in
both
genres. And now, for the second time, he appears in our pages with a tale as darkly terrifying and as fraught with Novembral direfulness as midnight’s frightful liaison with a demon moon.”

Tina’s “colorful little shop” where this story begins is located in the same neighborhood as the store in Sturgeon’s 1940 story “Shottle Bop”—Manhattan between the Chelsea District and Greenwich Village, where Sturgeon lived in 1940 and 1946.

The possible existence of powerful “psychic creatures” who are nourished by human souls and emotions and experiences is a recurrent Sturgeon theme (cf. “The Perfect Host,” 1948; “The Dark Room,” 1953; “Ghost of a Chance,” 1943).

“Clockwise”:
first published in
Calling All Boys
, August-September 1946.
Calling All Boys
was a monthly magazine published by the publishers of
Parents’ Magazine
. It included color comics along with articles and stories. “Clockwise” ran on one page of the magazine, illustrated by a drawing captioned, “Jemmy stood there, sweat pouring off him, still turning the first screw.” The editorial blurb atop the story read: WHICH WAY DOES A CLOCK HAND TURN? JEMMY DIDN’T KNOW. BACK IN THE HILLS HERE HE LIVED, THERE WERE NO CLOCKS.

Sturgeon had lived in Jamaica in 1941 and in the next few years did construction work for airbases in the West Indies.

“Smoke!”:
first published in
Calling All Boys
, December-January 1947.

For more than seven years your editor and other Sturgeon appreciators have been searching the Library of Congress and university library collections for copies of
Calling All Boys
magazine that might contain these two “missing” Sturgeon stories. They have finally been found and are included here thanks to the tireless efforts of Sturgeon scholar William F. Seabrook.