Killdozer! (2 page)

“How I watched for his stories myself. I remember ‘It’ and ‘Ether Breather’ (his first) and ‘Shottle Bop’ and ‘Yesterday was Monday’ and ‘Killdozer’—and how eagerly I read them and how hopelessly I decided I couldn’t match him. And I never could. He had a delicacy of touch that I couldn’t duplicate if my fingers were feathers.”

Those early stories of Sturgeon’s stood out like beacons in the pages of Campbell’s two magazines, even against those of Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, A.E. van Vogt, and the rest of Campbell’s galaxy of new stars, because of that magical lightness of touch and the cunning of his narrative strategies, so different from the earnest straightforward storytelling and simple functional prose of most of his contemporaries.

Consider the insinuating, ingratiating charm of the first words of “Microcosmic God”—“Here is a story about a man who had too much power, and a man who took too much, but don’t worry; I’m not going political on you.” Pulp-magazine writers in 1941 didn’t begin stories that way, unless they were Theodore Sturgeon.

Consider the tone of the opening, both disarming and compelling, of “Medusa”—“I wasn’t sore at them. I didn’t know what they had done to me, exactly—I knew that some of it wasn’t so nice, and that I’d probably never be the same again.” It is a tone we will hear again in the famous opening lines of
The Dreaming Jewels
a decade later: “They caught the kid doing something disgusting out under the bleachers at the high school stadium, and he was sent home from the grammar school across the street. He was eight years old then. He’d been doing it for years.”

Consider the last line of “He Shuttles”—“Perhaps he was never here at all. But this is the story I wrote last night.” Sturgeon speaking to the reader in his own voice: confident of his irresistible appeal,
smiling and winking as he pulls us through the convolutions of his plots.

It was a new and refreshing way to write science fiction, which until then had, by and large, been straitjacketed by pulp-magazine conventions of plot and narrative mode. What it was, actually, was a compounding of Sturgeon’s unique irreverent sensibility and a storytelling manner imported from mainstream fiction, from the broader, more expansive modes common in such magazines as
The Saturday Evening Post
, modes which such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald had raised in the 1920s from slick commercialism to something approaching art. The slick-magazine stories were primarily
people
-centered rather than
plot
-centered or (as in the best science fiction of the day)
idea
-centered, and their writers allowed themselves considerably more latitude in their narrative methods than pulp editors permitted.

At the beginning of his career in the late 1930s, Sturgeon had had little luck selling the stories that he aimed at such magazines. The best of them, “Bianca’s Hands,” had to wait until 1947 to see print, and others remained unpublished until collected in the first of these present volumes,
The Ultimate Egoist
. But his application of slick-magazine techniques to a pulp-magazine market made an immediate impact. John Campbell, then engaged in an all-out challenge of science fiction’s established modes, which ran heavily to rarefied tales of science on the one hand and slam-bang adventure on the other, welcomed Sturgeon’s material eagerly and only occasionally rejected any of it. (“Blabbermouth,” one of the weaker Sturgeon stories of the period, probably was intended for
Unknown
, but went unpublished for six years.

His stories still relied heavily on mechanical plot contrivances, and his style was freighted with colloquialisms that now seem archaic; but, thanks to Campbell, Sturgeon quickly found himself selling regularly and developing the self-confidence a professional writer needs.

He was now the head of a family, though, with a host of new responsibilities, and the writing income available to even a successful science-fiction writer in pre-war America was proving insufficient. Sturgeon found a job managing a resort hotel in the British
West Indies in June of 1941 and hoped to go on writing on the side. But the coming of the war brought a swift close to this period of Sturgeon’s literary career. Married and the father of a small child, he was safe from the military draft, but the outbreak of war meant the end of his resort job and soon he was serving as assistant chief steward for the U.S. Army at Fort Simonds, where he ran a tractor lubrication center and learned to handle earth-moving machinery. The following year saw him in Puerto Rico at Ensenada Honda, an airfield, drydock, and shipyard, where he had further experience with bulldozers and other heavy-duty equipment, until the end of 1943. After some months doing clerical work for the Navy, he and his family moved to St. Croix in the American Virgin Islands. From the summer of 1941 to the spring of 1944 he wrote no fiction at all. The end of his military employment forced him back to writing in April 1944, and for the first story of this new period he drew on all the considerable knowledge that he had acquired during the war about earth-moving machinery, an unlikely subject, perhaps, for science fiction, but one which brought forth gripping results. In nine days Sturgeon wrote the 31,000–word novella “Killdozer!,” his longest and probably most successful work up until then, in which he imbued a fantastic notion with rock-solid specificity of detail to create great conviction and enormous suspense. Campbell, who had been struggling to keep
Astounding
filled with good material during the wartime absence of most of his best contributors, was overjoyed, and rushed the powerful story into print within a few months, in the November, 1944 issue. The magazine’s readers responded enthusiastically.

The sale of “Killdozer!” brought Sturgeon a bonus rate of $542.50, the most he had ever received for a story—something like $10,000, or even more, in modern purchasing power. The end of the war seemed in sight, here in mid-1944, and the story’s success awakened in him the possibility of reviving his dormant writing career. It was at this time that he wrote “Abreaction,” another bulldozer story but this one a psychological fantasy, which perhaps might have sold to Campbell’s off-trail magazine
Unknown;
but
Unknown
had vanished in 1943, a victim of wartime paper shortages, and the
story went unpublished until the venerable
Weird Tales
, a magazine market of the most marginal kind, printed it in 1948. Once again he attempted an entry into mainstream fiction, too, with “Noon Gun,” probably written late in 1944 or early in 1945. But it was a mediocre story at best, and found no takers. (Slightly refurbished, it sold to
Playboy
in 1962, most likely on the strength of Sturgeon’s science fiction accomplishments in the intervening years.)

Despite these unpromising early results, Sturgeon persisted in his plans for returning to writing as a profession. A clause in his government contract enabled him to wangle plane fare from St. Croix back to the American mainland, where he attempted to make arrangements for finding a job or a new literary agent and moving his family to New York. But nothing worked out. The literary agents of the era had no use for writers who proposed to earn a living writing stories at a cent or two a word for a single specialized market that consisted only of John Campbell’s remaining magazine and five or six low-paying quasi-juvenile competitors. Sturgeon drifted into a period of confusion and despair; what had been intended as a ten-day trip stretched into a futile eight months, during which time he received word from his wife in the Virgin Islands that she wanted a divorce. By late 1945 he found himself alone in New York, penniless, bewildered, and wholly unable to write.

It was Campbell, once again, who rescued him. In December of 1945, Sturgeon was staying as a house guest in Campbell’s New Jersey home, and Campbell sat him before a typewriter in his gadget-crowded basement. Out came the story “The Chromium Helmet,” which Campbell read as it emerged and accepted instantly. It was the first substantial fiction Sturgeon had managed to write in a year and a half.

“The Chromium Helmet” is marked by slick-magazine cuteness (“Dreams is all fuzzy. But I stinkly
remember
about that doll”) and clichéd pulp-magazine slanginess (“ ‘Don’t let me horn in,’ I said. ‘Only—I’ve known youse guys for a long time’ ”) that put it below such masterpieces to come as 1953’s “A Saucer of Loneliness” and 1954’s “To Here and the Easel.” But the intricacy of its high-tech plot showed that Sturgeon’s story-constructing skills were undiminished,
and the thoroughness of its machine-shop technical background (perhaps inspired by the clutter of electronic gear all about him in Campbell’s legendary basement as he worked) is impressive testimony to his unwillingness to fake his material. He works his story out down to the last inductance bridge and oscilloscope, where a lesser writer might have been content to speak vaguely of unspecified “devices” and “gadgets” and let it go at that.

So a new beginning had been made. Sturgeon followed “The Chromium Helmet” with “Memorial,” a heavy-handed and implausible vignette written (as so many stories in Campbell’s magazine were that year) in an emotional response to the detonation of the first atomic bombs the previous summer, and then with the much stronger “Mewhu’s Jet,” which anticipates the themes of Stephen Spielberg’s movie
E.T
. and much of Sturgeon’s own later output by putting a normal American family in contact with a highly abnormal situation and working it not for horror or thrills but for emotional warmth.

The Sturgeon of 1946 is not yet the Sturgeon of the sudden 1950–51 efflorescence (“The Stars are the Styx,” “Rule of Three,” and the gaudy adventure story “The Incubi of Parallel X,”) or of the more profound “Hurricane Trio” and “Bulkhead” and “A Way of Thinking,” which will come another few years onward from those. But the man who wrote the splendid stories of his major epoch—that man of such outward tenderness and charm, such inner turbulence and stormy ambition—is recognizably present here, and so are the basic technical skills, however they would develop and blossom later on. Everything is in place for the greatness to come.

S
HE WAS A LOVELY THING
, and before either of us knew it my arms were around her and her deep eyes were all tangled up in mine. I held her a little too close a little too long, I guess; she squirmed away, got her balance and brushed me off like so much pretzel-juice.

“Sorry,” I lied.

A winged eyebrow went up as two heavy lids went down.

“That’s all right,” she said in a voice like the sound of a cello whispering in the low register. “But you really ought to signal for a turn.” I’d been trying to whip in front of a rotund individual who was about to climb into the taxi I wanted to get, and in doing so had almost knocked the girl off her feet. She turned away just in time to miss the practiced click of my heels as I tipped my hat. I sighed and flagged another cab. I had a lot of friends and knew a lot of glamour, and until this minute I had flattered myself on having a pretty picturesque string of ’em in my little black book. But now—well, I could only wish I had seen her somewhere before. She reminded me of someone I used to know a few years back, when I really was a bigshot. Instead of running an all-night radio program and writing feature articles on the side, I used to be a Power. I was in high school and managed the basketball team. I cut a lot of ice and a lot of corners.

I stepped into the cab and gave the address of the restaurant where I was supposed to meet Sylvia. That was a date I’d worked hard to get, and now for some strange reason, I had little stomach for it. I stared out of the side window as the taxi drew past the girl I’d just run into. She was walking slowly, apparently looking at something beautiful two miles away and two hundred feet up, and there was an entrancing half-smile on her face. Her hair was long and black and it turned under just about where her straight back started to
make her waist so slim; I’d never seen hair like that, but there was something about the strong, clean curve of her jaw and the way the inside corners of her eyes were lower than they should be—

“Stop!” I screamed to the cabby. He must have thought that I was about to have some kind of an attack. He was wrong, then. I had already had the attack but it had just now hit me. Anyway, he did a dollar and a half’s worth of damage to his brake linings, took the dollar I threw at him as I dived out, and went his unprofitable way.

I ran to her, caught her elbow. “Hey! I—”

“Ah,” she contraltoed. “My friend the Juggernaut.”

“Amend that,” I said quickly. “Your very dear friend Eddie Gretchen.”

“Oh?” said her eyebrow, and she said, “And when and where did Eddie Gretchen become my very dear friend?”

“Damfino,” I said, and we began walking. By glancing at me without turning her head, she conveyed the general idea that we were walking the same way but not together. “That’s for you to figure out,” I went on, “and in all sincerity I wish you would. I know you. I used to circulate around you like a bloodstream. But I honestly can’t remember when it happened. You’re a dream that got broken up by an alarm clock. Come on now—you have my face and you have my name. What do they mean to you?”

“I was never married to you,” she said distantly. “So I haven’t your name. And I don’t want your face.”

“With a face like yours,” I said, “I can’t blame—”

She actually smiled at me. “You haven’t changed a bit, Eddie.”

I glowed for a second and then realized that she didn’t intend to help any. “All right—when was it?”

“The year Covina High beat your Filthy Five 48 to 17.”

“It was 48 to 19,” I said furiously, “And they were the Fighting Five.”

“They were filthy,” she said, and laughed richly.

“Fighting,” I growled. “And besides, the referees—hey! You’re not Underhanded Mazie?”

“I am not! No one knows me well enough to call me that! I’m Maria Undergaard—
Miss
Undergaard to you, Mr. Gretchen.”

“Aha! Er—Mazie, m’love, what was it they called the team?”