Theodore Sturgeon - Venus Plus X

Utterly aside from the subject matter

To

GERTRUDE and her Isaac

VENUS PLUS X

A PYRAMID BOOK

First Printing, September 1960 Second printing. May 1962 Third printing, March 1968 Fourth printing, December 1969 Fifth printing, July 1971

This book is fiction. No resemblance is intended between any character herein and any person, living or dead; any such resemblance is purely coincidental.

Copyright, 1960, by Theodore Sturgeon All Rights Reserved Printed in Canada

PYRAMID BOOKS are published by Pyramid Publications

A Division of Pyramid Communications, Inc.

444 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10022, U.S.A.

\\ff*

CHARLIE JOHNS," URGENTLY

cried Charlie Johns: "Charlie Johns, Charlie Johns!" for that was the absolute necessityto know who Charlie Johns was, not to let go of that for a second, for anything, ever.

"I am Charlie Johns," he said argumentatively, and plaintively, he said it again. No one argued, no one denied it. He lay in the warm dark with his knees drawn up and his arms crossed and his forehead pressed tight against his kneecaps. He saw dull flickering red, but that was inside his eyelids, and he was Charlie Johns.

C, Johns once stencilled on a foot-locker, written in speed-ball black-letter on a high-school diploma, typed on a pay-check. Johns, Chas. in the telephone book.

The name, all right. All right, fine, okay, but a man is more than a name. A man is twenty-seven years old, he sees the hairline just so in his morning mirror and likes a drop of Tabasco on his eggs (over light: whites firm, yolks runny). He was born with one malformed toe and a strabismus. He can cook a steak drive a car love a girl run a mimeograph go to the bathroom brush his teeth, including the permanent bridge, left upper lateral incisor and bicuspid. He left the house in plenty of time but he is going to be late to work.

He opened his eyes and it wasn't dull flickering red at all, but greya cold sourceless silver, grey like snail trails on the lilac leavesa springtime thing, that. Spring it was, oh that springtime thing; it was love last night, Laura, she

When daylight saving time is new, the daylit evening is forever, and you can do so much. How he begged Laura for the chance to get her screens up; if Mom could have seen that, now! And down in Laura's stinking cellar, shuffling through the half-dark with the screens under his arm, he had walked into the cruel point of the dangling strap-hinge of a discarded shutter, torn a hole in his brown tweed pants, punched a red blood-bruise (with warp and woof stamped on it) on his thigh. And worth it, worth it, all that forever-evening, with a girl, a real girl (she could prove it) for all the long end of the evening; and all the way home love! of here and of now, and spring of course, and oh of course love! said the tree-frogs, the lilacs, the air, and the way sweat dried on him. (Goodthis is good. Good to be a part of here and of now, and spring of course, and oh of course, love; but best of all, to remember, to know it all, Charlie.) Better than love just to remember home, the walk between high hedges, the two white lamps with the big black 61 painted on each (Mom had done that for the landlord; she was clever with her hands) only they were pretty weathered by now, yes the hands too. The foyer with the mottled brass wall-full of mailboxes and discreet pushbuttons for the tenants, and the grille of the house phone that had never worked since they moved here, and that massive brass plate solidly concealing the electric lock, which for years he had opened with a blow of bis shoulder, never breaking stride... and get closer, closer, because it is so important to remember; nothing remembered is important; it's remembering that matters; you can! you can!

The steps from the ground floor had old-fashioned nickel-plated nosings over carpet worn down to the backing, red fuzz at the edges. (Miss Mundprf taught first grade, Miss Willard taught second grade, Miss Hooper taught fifth. Remember everything.) He looked around him, where he lay remembering in the silver light; the soft walls were unlike metal and unlike fabric but rather like both, and it was very warm ... he went on remembering with his eyes open: the flight from the second floor to the third had the nickel nosing too, but no carpeting, and the steps were all hollowed, oh, very slightly; mounting them, you could be thinking about anything, but that clack clack, as a change from the first flight's flap flap, put you right there, you knew where you were...

Charlie Johns screamed, "Oh Godwhere am I?" He unfolded himself, rolled over on his stomach, drew up his knees, and then for a moment could move no more. His mouth was dry and hot inside as pillowslips creasing under Mom's iron; his muscles, leg and back, all soft and tight-tangled like the knitting basket Mom was going to clean out some day...

... love with Laura, spring, the lights with 61, the shoulder on the lock, up the stairs flap flap, clack clack and surely he could remember the rest of the way, because he had gone in gone to bed gotten up left for work... hadn't he? Hadn't he?

Shakily he pressed himself up, knelt, weakly squatted. His head dropped forward and he rested, panting. He watched the brown fabric of his clothes as if it were a curtain, about to open upon unknown but certain horror.

And it did.

"The brown suit," he whispered. Because there on his thigh was the little rip (and under it the small hurtful bulge of the checkered bruise) to prove that he had not dressed for work this morning, had not even reached the top of the second flight. Instead, he washere.

Because he could not stand just yet, he hunched around, fists and knees, blinking and turning his unsteady head. Once he stopped and touched his chin. It had no more stubble than it should have for a man coming home from a date he had shaved for.

He turned again and saw a tall oval finely scribed into the curved wall. It was the first feature he had been able to discover in this padded place. He gaped at it and it gave him Nothing.

He wondered what time it was. He lifted his arm and turned his head and got his ear to his watch. It was, thank God, still running. He looked at it. He looked at it for a long time without moving. He seemed not to be able to read it. At last he was able to understand that the numerals were the wrong way round, mirror-reversed; 2 was where 10 should be, 8 where four should be. The hands pointed to what should have been eleven minutes to eleven, but was, if this watch really were running backwards, eleven minutes past one. And it was running backwards. The sweep second-hand said so.

And do you know, Charlie, something under the terror and the wonderment said to him, do you know, all you want to do, even now, is remember? there was the terrible old battleax you got for Algebra 3 in high school, when you'd flunked Algebra 1 and had to take it over, and had gone through Algebra 2 and Geometry 1 on your belly, and flunked Geometry 2 and had to take it overremember? and then for Algebra 3 you got this Miss Moran, and she was like IBM, with teeth. And then one day you asked her about something that puzzled you a little and the way she answered, you had to ask more... and she opened a door for you that you never knew was there, and she herself became something... well, after that, you watched her and knew what the frozen mein, the sharp discipline, the sheer inhumanity of the woman was for. She was just waiting for someone to come and ask her questions about mathematics a little beyond, a little outside the book. And it was as if she had long ago despaired of finding anyone that would. Why it meant so much to her was that she loved mathematics in a way that made it a pity the word "love" had ever been used for anything else. And also that from minute to minute she never knew if some kid asking questions would be the last she'd ever know, or open a door for, because she was dying of cancer, which nobody never even suspected until she just didn't show up one day.