Authors: Theodore Sturgeon
“Then what?”
“Then it can change itself—if it ever thinks of changing itself. It can be almost anything if it wants to be.”
Bunny stopped chewing, thought, swallowed, and asked, “Change how?”
“Oh, it could get bigger or smaller. Grow more limbs. Go into a funny shape—thin and flat, or round like a ball. If it’s hurt it can grow new limbs. And it could do things with thought that we can’t even imagine. Bunny, did you ever read about werewolves?”
“Those nasty things that change from wolves to men and back again?”
Zena sipped coffee. “Mmm. Well, those are mostly legends, but they could have started when someone saw a change like that.”
“You mean these crystal-things aren’t new on earth?”
“Oh, heavens no! The Maneater says they’re arriving and living and breeding and dying here all the time.”
“Just to make strange people and werewolves,” breathed Bunny in wonder.
“No, darling! Making those things is nothing to them! They live a life of their own. Even the Maneater doesn’t know what they do, what they think about. The things they make are absent-minded things, like doodles on a piece of paper that you throw away. But the Maneater thinks he could understand them if he could get that middle-man.”
“What’s he want to understand a crazy thing like that for?”
Zena’s small face darkened. “When I found that out, I began listening carefully—and hoping that some day I could stop him. Bunny, the Maneater hates people. He hates and despises all people.”
“Oh, yes,” said Bunny.
“Even now, with the poor control he has over the crystals, he’s managed to make some of them do what he wants. Bunny, he’s planted crystals in swampland with malaria mosquito eggs all around them. He’s picked up poisonous coral snakes in Florida and planted them in Southern California. Things like that. It’s one of the reasons he keeps the carnival. It covers the country, the same route year after year. He goes back and back, finding the crystals he’s planted, seeing how much harm they’ve done to people. He keeps finding more. He finds them all over. He walks in the woods and out on the prairies, and every once in a while he sends out a—a kind of thought he knows how to do. It hurts the crystals. When they feel pain, he knows it. He hunts around, hurting the crystals until their pain leads him right to them. But anyway, there are plenty around. They look like pebbles or clods until they’re cleaned.”
“Oh, how—how awful!” Tears brightened Bunny’s eyes. “He ought to be—killed!”
“I don’t know if he can be killed.”
“You mean he really is one of those things from the crystals?”
“Do you think a human being could do what he does?”
“But—what would he do if he got that middleman?”
“He’d train him up. Those creatures that are made by two crystals, they’re whatever they think they are. The Maneater would tell the middle-man that he was a servant; he was under orders. The middle-man would believe him, and think that of himself. Through him the Maneater would have real power over the crystals. He could probably even make them mate, and dream-together any horrible thing he wanted. He could spread disease and plant-blight and poison until there wouldn’t be a human being left on earth! And the worst thing about it is that the crystals don’t even seem to want that! They’re satisfied to go on as they are, making a flower or a cat once in a while, and thinking their own thoughts, and living whatever strange sort of life they live. They aren’t after people! They just don’t
care.”
“Oh, Zee! And you’ve been carrying all this around with you for years!” Bunny ran around the table and kissed her. “Oh, baby, why didn’t you tell someone?”
“I didn’t dare, sweetheart. They would think I was out of my mind. And besides—there’s Horty.”
“What about Horty?”
“Horty was a baby in an orphanage when, somehow, that toy with the crystal eyes was brought in. The crystals picked on him. It all fits. He told me that when the jack-in-the-box—he called it Junky—was taken away from him; he almost died. The doctors there thought it was some kind of psychosis. It wasn’t, of course; the child was in some strange bondage to the married crystals and could not exist away from them. It seems that it was far simpler to leave the toy with the child—it was an ugly toy, Horty tells me—than to try to cure the psychosis. In any case, Junky went along with Horty when he was adopted—by that Armand Bluett, incidentally; that judge.”
“He’s awful! He looks all soft and—
wet.”
“The Maneater has been looking for one of those twin-crystal creatures for twenty years or more, only he didn’t know it. Why, the very first crystal he found was probably one of a pair, and he didn’t realize it. Not ever—not until he found out about Horty. He guessed it, but he never
knew
until now. I knew that night we picked up Horty. The Maneater would give everything he owns in the world for Horty—a human. Not a human; Horty isn’t human and hasn’t been since he was a year old. But you know what I mean.”
“And that would be his middle-man?”
“That’s right. So when I saw what Horty was, I jumped at the chance to hide him in the last place in the world Pierre Monetre would think of looking—right under his nose.”
“Oh, Zee! What a terrible chance to take! He was bound to find out!”
“It wasn’t too much of a chance. The Maneater can’t read my mind. He can prod it; he can call me in a strange way; but he can’t find out what’s in it. Not the way Horty did on you before. The Maneater hypnotized you to make you steal the jewels and bring them back. Horty went right into your mind and cleared all that away.”
“I—I remember. It was crazy.”
“I kept Horty by me and worked on him constantly. I read everything I could get my hands on and fed it to him. Everything, Bunny—comparative anatomy and history and music and mathematics and chemistry—everything I could think of that would help him to a knowledge of human things. There’s an old Latin saying, Bunny:
Cogito ergo sum
—‘I think, therefore I am.’ Horty is the essence of that saying. When he was a midget he believed he was a midget. He didn’t grow. He never thought of his voice changing. He never thought of applying what he learned to himself; he let me make all his decisions for him. He digested everything he learned in a reservoir with no outlet, and it never touched him until he decided himself that it was time to use it. He has eidetic memory, you know.”
“What’s that?”
“Camera memory. He remembers perfectly everything he has seen or read or heard. When his fingers began to grow back—they were smashed hopelessly, you know—I kept it a secret. That was the one thing that would have told the Maneater what Horty was. Humans can’t regenerate fingers. Single-crystal creatures can’t either. The Maneater used to spend hours in the dark, in the menagerie tent, trying to force the bald squirrel to grow hair, or trying to put gills on Gogol the Fish Boy, by prodding at them with his mind. If any of them had been twin-crystal creatures, they would have repaired themselves.”
“I think I see. And what you were doing was to convince Horty that he was human?”
“That’s right. He had to identify himself first and foremost with humanity. I taught him guitar for that reason, after his fingers grew back, so that he could learn music quickly and thoroughly. You can learn more music theory in a year on guitar than you can in three on a piano, and music is one of the most human of human things… He trusted me completely because I never let him think for himself.”
“I—never heard you talk like this before, Zee. Like out of books.”
“I’ve been playing a part too, sweet,” said Zena gently. “First, I had to keep Horty hidden until he had learned everything I could teach him. Then I had to plan some way to make him stop the Maneater, without danger of the Maneater’s making a servant of him.”
“How could he do that?”
“I think the Maneater is a single-crystal thing. I think if Horty could only learn to use that mental whip that the Maneater has, he could destroy him with it. If I should kill the Maneater with a bullet, it won’t kill his crystal. Maybe that crystal will mate, later, and produce him all over again—with all the power that a twin-crystal creature has.”
“Zee, how do you know the Maneater isn’t a twin-crystal thing?”
“I don’t,” Zee said bleakly. “If that’s the case, then I can only pray that Horty’s estimate of himself as a human being is strong enough to fight what the Maneater wants to make of him. Hating Armand Bluett is a human thing. Loving Kay Hallowell is another. Those are two things that I needled him with, drilled into him, teased him about, until they became part of his blood and bone.”
Bunny was silent before this bitter flood of words. She knew that Zena loved Horty; that she was enough of a woman to feel Kay Hallowell’s advent as a deep menace to her; that she had fought and won against the temptation to steer Horty away from Kay; and that, more than anything else, she was face to face with terror and remorse now that her long campaign had come to a head.
She watched Zena’s proud, battered face, the lips which drooped slightly on one side, the painfully canted head, the shoulders squared under the voluminous robe, and she knew that here was a picture she would never forget. Humanity is a concept close to the abnormals, who are wistfully near it, who state their membership with aberrated breath, who never cease to stretch their stunted arms toward it. Bunny’s mind struck a medallion of this torn and courageous figure—a token and a tribute.
Their eyes met, and slowly Zena smiled. “Hi, Bunny…”
Bunny opened her mouth and coughed, or sobbed. She put her arms around Zena and snuggled her chin into the cool hollow of the dark-skinned neck. She closed her eyes tight to squeeze away tears. When she opened them she could see again. And then she couldn’t speak.
She saw, over Zena’s shoulder through the kitchen door, out in the living room, a huge, gaunt figure. Its lower lip swung loosely as it bent over the coffee table. Its exquisite hands plucked up one, two jewels. It straightened, sent her a look of dull pity from its sage-green face, and went silently out.
“Bunny, darling, you’re hurting me.”
Those jewels are Horty,
Bunny thought.
Now I’ll tell her Solum has taken them back to the Maneater.
Her face and her voice were as dry and as white as chalk as she said, “You haven’t been hurt yet…”
H
ORTY POUNDED UP THE
stairs and burst into his apartment. “I’m walking under water,” he gasped. “Every damn thing I reached for is snatched away from me. Everything I do, everywhere I go, it’s too early or too late or—” Then he saw Zena on the easy-chair, her eyes open and staring, and Bunny crouched at her feet. “What’s the matter here?”
Bunny said, “Solum came in when we were in the kitchen and took the jewels and we couldn’t do anything and Zena hasn’t said a word since and I’m scared and I don’t know what to do—hoo…” and she began to cry.
“Oh Lord.” He was across the room in two strides. He lifted Bunny up and hugged her briefly and set her down. He knelt beside Zena. “Zee—”
She did not move. Her eyes were all pupil, windows to a too-dark night. He tilted her chin up and fixed his gaze on her. She trembled and then cried out as if he had burned her, twisted into his arms. “Don’t, don’t…”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Zee. I didn’t know it would hurt you.”
She leaned back and looked up at him, seeing him at last. “Horty, you’re all right…”
“Well, sure. What’s this about Solum?”
“He got the crystals. Junky’s eyes.”
Bunny whispered, “For twelve years she’s been keeping them away from the Maneater, Horty; and now—”
“You think the Maneater sent him for them?”
“Must have. I guess he must have followed me, and waited until he saw you leave. He was in here and out again before we could do so much as turn and look.”
“Junky’s eyes…” There was the time he had almost died, as a child, when Armand threw the toy away. And the time when the tramp had crushed them under his knee, and Horty, in the lunch room two hundred feet away, had felt it. Now the Maneater might… oh, no. This was too much.
Bunny suddenly clapped her hand to her mouth. “Horty—I just thought—the Maneater wouldn’t’ve sent Solum by himself. He wanted those jewels… you know how he gets when he wants something. He can’t bear to wait. He must be in town right now.”
“No.” Zena rose stiffly. “No, Bun. Unless I’m quite wrong, he was here and is on his way back to the carnival. If he thinks Kay Hallowell is Horty, he’ll want to have the jewels where he can work on them and watch her at the same time. I’ll bet he’s burning up the road back to the carnival this minute.”
Horty moaned. “If only I hadn’t gone out! I might’ve been able to stop Solum, maybe even get to the Maneater and—Damn it! Nick’s car was in the garage; first I had to find Nick and borrow it, and then I had to get a parked truck out from in front of the garage, and then there was no water in the radiator, and—oh, you know. Anyway, I have the car now. It’s downstairs. I’m going to take off right now. In three hundred miles I ought to be able to catch up with… how long ago was Solum here?”
“An hour or so. You just can’t, Horty. And what will happen to you when he goes to work on those jewels, I hate to think.”
Horty took out keys, tossed and caught them. “Maybe,” he said suddenly, “Just maybe we can—” He dove for the phone.
Listening to him talk rapidly into the instrument, Zena turned to Bunny. “A plane. But of course!”
Horty put the phone down, looking at his watch. “If I can get out to the airport in twelve minutes I can get a feeder flight.”
“You mean ‘we.’”
“You’re not coming. This is my party, from here on out. You kids have been through enough.”
Bunny was pulling on her light coat. “I’m going back to Havana,” she said grimly, and for all her baby features, her face showed case-hardened purpose.
“You’re not going to leave me here,” said Zena flatly. She went for her coat. “Don’t argue with me, Horty. I have a lot to tell you, and maybe a lot to do.”
“But—”
“I think she’s right,” said Bunny. “She has a lot to tell you.”
The plane was wobbling out to the runway when they arrived. Horty drove right out onto the tarmac, horn blasting, and it waited. And after they were settled in their seats, Zena talked steadily. They were ten minutes away from their destination when she was finished.