Selected Stories

by Theodore Sturgeon

A disease made other humans our enemies for a time, but as the generations march past, enemies become friends and friends enemies. The enmity of those who have killed us is such a tiny, temporary thing in the long sweep of history!”

No planet, no universe, is greater to a man than his own ego, his own observing self. These hands were the hands of all history, and like the hands of all men, they could by their small acts make human history or end it.

“Don’t confuse logic and truth, however good the logic. You can stick one end of logic in solid ground and throw the other end clear out of the cosmos without breaking it. Truth’s a little less flexible.”

Life goes on, and death with it, but there must be more death than life when too much life is thrown together.

Men are oriented out of simplicity toward the complex, and make of the latter a goal. Nature treats complex matters as expediencies and so is never confused.

They say no one human being ever did anything. They say it takes a hundred pairs of hands to build a house, ten thousand pairs to build a ship. They say a single pair is not only useless—it’s evil. All humanity is a thing made up of many parts. No part is good by itself.

A cardinal dictum on humans as he knew them was: Every man has something to hide. Seeing a mode of living like this did not make him change his dictum: he simply increased his watchfulness, asking: How do they hide it?

“Surely there are many differences between us, as there always are between different worlds. But I am certain of this one similarity: the young at times run straight where wisdom has built a winding path.”

“Ever since there were human beings, there has been conflict between Man and his machines. They will run him or he them; it’s hard to say which is the less disastrous way. But a culture which is composed primarily of men has to destroy one made mostly of machines, or be destroyed.

Peebles had never gotten angry at a machine—a rare trait in a born mechanic—and in fifty-odd years he had learned it was even less use getting angry at a man. Because no matter what, you could always fix what was wrong with a machine.

A bulldozer is a crawling powerhouse, a behemoth of noise and toughness, the nearest thing to the famous irresistible force. The beginner, awed and with the pictures of unconquerable Army tanks printed on his mind from the newsreels, takes all in his stride and with a sense of limitless power treats all obstacles alike, not knowing the fragility of a cast-iron radiator core, the mortality of tempered manganese, the friability of over-heated babbitt, and most of all, the ease with which a tractor can bury itself in mud.

And the time soon came when he had busied himself out of things to do, and fretted himself into a worry-reflex that operated by itself, and the very act of thinking new thoughts trapped him into facing the old ones, and then of course there was nothing to do but let them run on through, with all the ache and humiliation they carried with them.

He thought, in your most secret dreams you cut a niche in yourself, and it is finished early, and then you wait for someone to come along to fill it—but to fill it exactly, every cut, curve, hollow and plane of it. And people do come along, and one covers up the niche, and another rattles around inside it, and another is so surrounded by fog that for the longest time you don’t know if she fits or not; but each of them hits you with a tremendous impact. And then one comes along and slips in so quietly that you don’t know when it happened, and fits so well you almost can’t feel anything at all. And that is it.

“Do you know, you couldn’t describe sexuality to me so that I could understand it? I have no—no comparison, no analogies. It—” she looked from one to the other—“it amazes me. In some ways I envy it. I know it is a strife, which we avoid, for we are very gentle. But you have a capacity for enjoying strife, and all the pain, all the misery and poverty and cruelty which you suffer, is the cornerstone of everything you build. And you build more than anyone or anything in the known universe.”

“Why, you poor things—didn’t you know? Knowledge and understanding aren’t props for one another. Knowledge is a pile of bricks, and understanding is a way of building. Build for me!”

Living in our midst, here and now, is a man who occupies himself with the weight-gain of amoebæ? from their natal instant to the moment they fission. There is a man who, having produced neurosis in cats, turns them into alcoholics for study. Someone has at long last settled the matter of the camel’s capacity for, and retention of, water. People like these are innocent of designs on the destinies of all amoebæ, cats, camels and cultures; there are simply certain things they want to know. This is the case no matter how unusual, elaborate, or ingenious their methods might be.

The optimum gun design is that which, having shot Halvorsen between the eyes, need no longer exist. Since optimum carried with it the flavor of preferred performance, it is fair to state that within himself Halvorsen found a preference for being shot to death. More specifically, for dying. Correction: for being dead—gladly.

for the first time he could have communion with another human being without the cautious and watchful attention he usually paid to “Where did you go to school?” and “Who are your people?” Perhaps it was the warmth of friendship radiating from a face so disturbingly like the one which still intruded itself between his eyes and his work once in a while, and which was so masked and controlled when he encountered it in the flesh.

Men get very fond of the things they defend, especially when they find themselves defending something stupid.”

Within him were the things he believed, about the right sort of people, about background, breeding, and blood. Around him was this place, as real as the things he believed in. Why he was here, why he wanted a drink just now, why he wanted to see the place and what happened in it—this was a bridge between one reality and the other, and a misty, maddening, nebulous bridge it was.

you might say every set of laws ever dreamed up, even the sets that were bigger and older and lasted longer than the one you practice, even any set you can imagine for the future—they’re all goin’ to contradict one another some way or other. So, who’s really to say whose set of laws are right—or fit to build anything on, or breed up a handful of folks fit to run it?”

“Put it like this: there’s part of me that’s dead, and wants the rest of me dead. There’s a part of me that’s alive, and wants all of me alive.” He looked that over and nodded at it. “My hand, my arm, my thumb on the trigger—they’re alive. All the live parts of me want to help me go on living, d’you see? No live part should help the dead part get what it wants. The way it’ll happen, the way it should happen, is not when I do something to make it happen. It’ll be when I don’t do something. I won’t get out of the way, and that’s it,

“That’s why I wanted to be dead. I just don’t think the way other people do; if I act the way other people do I feel … feel guilty.

As long as a man treated the body of law like a great stone buttress, based in bedrock and propping up civilization, he was fortifying a dead thing which could only kill the thing it was built to uphold. But if he saw civilization as an intricate, moving entity, the function of law changed. It was governor, stabilizer, inhibitor, control of something dynamic and progressive, subject to the punishments and privileges of evolution like a living thing.

I cannot be excluded unless I exist, so here’s an end to being excluded. I cannot be looked down on when I can no longer be seen.

It came to him that those who obey the gospel of Average Man are, in their efforts to be like the mass of humanity, obeying the dictates of one of the smallest minorities of all.