file:///G|/rah/Theodore%20Sturgeon%20-%20Slow%20Sculpture.txt

VERSION 1.0 DTD 032600


SLOW SCULPTURE

Theodore Sturgeon

He didn't know who he was when she met him--well, not
many people did. He was in the high orchard doing some-
thing under a pear tree. The land smelled of late summer
and wind--bronze, it smelled bronze.
He looked up at a compact girl in her mid-twenties, at
a fearless face and eyes the same color as her hair, which
was extraordinary because her hair was red-gold. She
looked down at a leather-skinned man in his forties, at a
gold-leaf electroscope in 'his hand, and felt she was an
intruder.
She said, "Oh" in what was apparently the right way.
Because he nodded once and said, "Hold this" and
there could then be no thought of intrusion.
She kneeled down beside him and took the instrument,
holding it exactly where he positioned her hand. He
moved away a little and struck a tuning fork against his
kneecap.
"What's it doing?"
He had a good voice, the kind of voice strangers notice
and listen to.
She looked at the delicate leaves of gold in the glass
shield of the electroscope.
"They're moving apart."
He struck the tuning fork again and the leaves pressed
away from one another.
"Much?"
"About forty-five degrees when you hit the fork."
"Good--that's about the most we'll get." From a
pocket of his 'bush jacket be drew a sack of chalk dust
and dropped a small handful on the ground. "I'll move
now. You stay right there and tell me how much the
leaves separate."
He traveled around the pear tree in a zigzag course,
striking his tuning fork while she called out numbers
ten degrees, thirty, five, twenty, nothing. Whenever the
gold foil pressed apart to maximum--forty degrees or
more--he dropped more chalk. When he was finished the
tree was surrounded by a rough oval of white dots. He
took out a notebook and diagramed them and the tree,
put away the book and took 'the electroscope out of her
hands.
. "Were you looking for something?" he asked her.
"No," she said. "Yes."
He could smile. Though it did not 'last long she found
the expression surprising in a face like his.
"That's not what is called, in a court of law, a respon-
sive answer."
She glanced across the hillside, metallic in that late
light. There wasn't much on it--rocks, weeds the summer
was done with, a tree or so, the orchard. Anyone present
had come a long way to get here.
"It wasn't a simple question," she said, tried to smile
and burst into tears.
She was sorry and said so.


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"Why?" he asked.
This was the first time she was to experience this ask-
the-next-question thing of his. It was unsettling. It always
would 'be--never less, sometimes a great deal more.
"Well--one doesn't have emotional explosions in pub-
lic."
"You do. I don't know this 'one' you're talking about."
"I guess I don't either, now that you mention it."
"Tell the truth then. No sense in going around and
around about it: He'll think that I . . . and the like. I'll
think what I think, whatever you say. Or--go down the
mountain and just don't say any more." She did not turn
to go, so he added: "Try the truth, then. If it's important,
it's simple. And if it's simple it's easy to say."
"I'm going to die!" she cried.
"So am 1."
"I have a lump in my breast."
"Come up to the house and I'll fix it."
Without another word he turned away and started
through the orchard. Startled half out of her wits, indig-
nant and full of insane hope, experiencing, even, a quick
curl of astonished laughter, she stood for a moment
watching him go and 'then found herself (at what point
did I decide?) running after him.
She caught up with him on the uphill margin of the
orchard.
"Are you a doctor?"
He appeared not to notice that she had waited, had
run.
"No," he said and, walking on, appeared not to see her
stand again pulling at her lower lip, then run again to
catch up.
"I must be out of my mind," she said, joining him on
a garden path.
She said it to herself. He must have known because he
did not answer. The garden was alive with defiant chrys-
anthemums and a pond in which she saw the flicker of a
pair of redcap imperials--silver, not gold fish--the largest
she had ever seen. Then--the house.
First it was part of the garden with its colonnaded
Terrace--and then, with its rock walls (too massive to be
called fieldstone) part of the mountain. It was on and in
the hillside. Its roof paralleled the skylines, front and
sides, and part of it was backed against an out-jutting
cliff face. The door, beamed and studded and featuring
two archers' slits, was opened for them (but there was no
one there) and when it closed it was silent, a far more
solid exclusion of things outside than any click or clang
of latch or bolt.
She stood with her back against it watching him cross
what seemed to be the central well of the house, or at
least this part of it. It was a kind of small court in the
center of which was an atrium, glazed on all of its five
sides and open to the sky at the top. In it was a tree,
a cypress or juniper, gnarled and twisted and with the
turnedback, paralleled, sculptured appearance of what the
Japanese call bonsai.
"Aren't you coming?" he called, holding open a door
behind the atrium.
"Bonsai just aren't fifteen feet .tail," she said.
"This one is."


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She walked past it slowly, looking.
"How long have you had it?"
His tone of voice said he was immensely pleased. It
is a clumsiness to ask the owner of a bonsai how old it
is--you are then demanding to know if it is his work or
if he has acquired and continued the concept of another;
you are tempting him to claim for his own the concept
and the meticulous labor of someone else and it becomes
rude to tell a man he is being tested. Hence, How long
have you had it? is polite, forbearing, profoundly cour-
teous.
He answered, "Half my life."
She looked at the tree. Trees can be found, sometimes,
not quite discarded, not quite forgotten, potted in rusty
gallon cans in not quite successful nurseries, unsold be-
cause they are shaped oddly or have dead branches here
and there, or because they have grown too slowly in
whole or part. These are the ones which develop inter-
esting trunks and a resistance to misfortune that makes
them flourish if given the least excuse for living. This one
was far older than half this man's life, or all of it. Looking
at it. She was terrified by the unbidden thought that a
fire, a family of squirrels, some subterranean worm or
termite could end this beauty--something working out-
side any concept of rightness or justice or of respect.
She looked at the tree. She looked at the man.
"Coming?"
"Yes," she said and went with him into his laboratory.
"Sit down over there and relax," he told her. "This might
take a little while."
"Over there" was a big leather chair by the bookcase.
The books were right across the spectrum--reference
works in medicine and engineering, nuclear physics,
chemistry, biology, psychiatry. Also tennis, gymnastics,
chess, the oriental war game Go, and golf. And then
drama, the techniques of fiction. Modern English Usage,
The American Language and supplement. Wood's and
Walker's Rhyming Dictionaries and an array of other
dictionaries and encyclopedias. A whole long shelf of
biographies.
"You have quite a library."
He answered her rather shortly--clearly he did not
want to talk just now, for he was very busy.
He said only, "Yes I have--perhaps you'll see it some
time" which left her to pick away at his words to find
out what on earth he meant by them.
He could only have meant, she decided, that the books
beside her chair were what he kept handy for his work
that his real library was elsewhere. She looked at him
with a certain awe.
And she watched him. She liked the way he moved
swiftly, decisively. Clearly he knew what he was doing.
He used some equipment that she recognized a glass
still, titration equipment, a centrifuge. There were two
refrigerators, one of which was not a refrigerator at all,
for she could see the large indicator on the door. It stood
at 70 F. It came to her that a modern refrigerator is
perfectly adaptable to the demand for controlled environ-
ment, even a warm one.
But all that and the equipment she did not recognize



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was only furniture. It was the man who was worth
watching, the man who kept her occupied so that not
once in all the long time she sat there was she tempted
toward the bookshelves.
At last he finished a long sequence at the bench, threw
some switches, picked up a tall stool and came over to
her. He perched on the stool, hung his heels on the cross-
spoke and lay a pair of long brown hands over his knees.
"Scared."
He made it a statement.
"I suppose I am."
"You don't have to stay."
"Considering the alternative" she began bravely but
the courage-sound somehow oozed out. "It can't matter
much."
"Very sound," he said almost cheerfully. "I remember
when I was a kid there was a fire scare in the apartment
house where we lived. It was a wild scramble to get out
and my tea-year-old brother found himself outside in the
street with an alarm clock in his hand. It was an old one
and it didn't workbut of all the things in the place he
might have snatched up at a time like that, it turned out
to be 'the clock. He's never been able to figure out why."
"Have you?"
"Not why he picked that particular thing--no. But I
think I know why he did something obviously irrational.
You see, panic is a very special state. Like fear and
flight, or fury and attack, it's a pretty primitive reaction
to extreme danger. It's one of the expressions of the will
to survive. What makes it so special is that it's irrational.
Now, why would the abandonment of reason be a sur-
vival mechanism?"
She thought about this seriously. There was that about
this man which made serious thought imperative.
"I can't imagine," she said finally. "Unless it's 'because,
in some situations, reason just doesn't work."
"You can't imagine," he said, again radiating that huge
approval, making her glow. "And you just did. If you are
in danger and you try reason and reason doesn't work
you abandon it. You can't say it's unintelligent to abandon
what doesn't work, right? So then you are in panic. You
start to perform random acts. Most of them--far and
away most will be useless. Some might even be danger-
ous. But that doesn't matter--you're in danger already.
Where the survival factor comes in is that away down
deep you know that one chance in a million is better
than no chance at all. So--here you sit--you're scared and
you could run. Something says you should run but you
won't."
She nodded.
He went on: "You found a lump. You went to a doctor
and he made some tests and gave you the bad news.
Maybe you went to another doctor and he confirmed it.
You then did some research and found out what was to
happen next--the exploratory, the radical, the question-
able recovery, the whole long agonizing procedure of
being what they call a terminal case. You then flipped
out. Did some things you hope I won't ask you about.
Took a trip somewhere, anywhere, wound up in my or-
chard for no reason." He spread the good hands and let
them go back to their kind of sleep. "Panic. The reason


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for little boys in their pajamas standing at midnight with
a broken alarm clock in their arms and for the existence
of quacks." Something chimed over on the bench and he
gave her a quick smile and went back to work, saying
over his shoulder, "I'm not a quack, by the way. To qual-
ify as a quack you have to claim to be a doctor. I don't."
She watched him switch off, switch on, stir, measure
and calculate. A little orchestra of equipment chorused
and soloed around him as he conducted, whirring, hissing,
clicking, flickering. She wanted to laugh, to cry and to
scream. She did not one of these things for fear of not
stopping, ever.
When he came over again, the conflict was not raging
within her but was exerting steady and opposed tensions.
The result was a terrible stasis and all she could do when
she saw the instrument in his hand was to widen her eyes.
She quite forgot to breathe.
"Yes, it's a needle," he said, his tone almost bantering.
"A long shiny sharp needle. Don't tell me you are one of
those needle-shy people." He flipped the long power cord
that trailed from the black housing around the hypoder-
mic to get some slack, straddled the stool. "Want some-
thing to steady your nerves?"
She was afraid to speak. The membrane containing her
sane self was very thin, stretched very tight.
He said, "I'd rather you didn't, because this pharma-
ceutical stew is complex enough as it is. But if you need
it"
She managed to shake her head a little and again felt
the wave of approval from him. There were a thousand
questions she wanted to ask--had meant to ask--needed
to ask. What was in the needle? How many treatments
must she have? What would they be like? How long must
she stay and where? And most of all-oh, could she live,
could she live?
                           II
He seemed concerned with the answer to only one of
these.
"It's mostly built around an isotope of potassium. If I
told you all I know about it and how I came on it in
the first place it would take--well, more time than we've
got. But here's the general idea. Theoretically, every atom
is electrically balanced--never mind ordinary exceptions.
Likewise all electrical charges in the molecule are sup-
posed to be balanced--so much plus, so much minus,
total zero. I happened on the fact that 'the balance of
charges in a wild cell is not zero--not quite. It's as if there
were a submicroscopic thunderstorm going on at 'the
molecular level, with little lightning bolts flashing back and
forth and changing the signs. Interfering with oommu-
nications-static--and that," he said, gesturing with the
shielded hypo in his hand, "is what this is all about.
When something interferes with communications--espe-
cially the RNA mechanism that says. Read this blueprint,
build accordingly and stop when it's done--when that
message gets garbled lopsided things get built. Off balance
things. Things that do almost what they should, do it
almost right-they're wild cells and the messages they
pass on are even worse.
"Okay. Whether these thunderstorms are caused by



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viruses or chemicals or radiation or physical 'trauma or
even anxiety and don't think anxiety can't do--it is
secondary. The important thing is to fix it so the thunder-
storm can't happen. If you can do that the cells have
plenty of ability all by themselves to repair and replace
what's gone wrong. And biological systems aren't like
ping-pong balls with static charges waiting for the charge
to leak away or to discharge into a grounded wire. They
have a kind of resilience--I call it forgiveness--that
enables them to take on a little more charge, or a little
less, and do all right. Well, then say a certain clump of
cells is wild and say it carries an aggregate of a hundred
units extra on the positive side. Cells immediately around
it are affected but not the next layer or the next.
"If they could be opened to the extra charge if they
could help to drain it off they would, well, cure the wild
cells of the surplus. You see what I mean? And they
would be able to handle that little overage themselves or
pass it on to other cells and still others who could deal
with it. In other words, if I can flood your body with a
medium that can drain off and distribute a concentration
of this unbalanced charge, the ordinary bodily processes
will be free to move in and clear up the wild-cell damage.
And that's what I have here."
He held the shielded needle between his knees and
from a side pocket of his lab coat he took a plastic box,
opened it and drew out an alcohol swab. Still cheerfully
talking, he took her terror-numbed arm and scrubbed at
the inside of her elbow.
"I am not for one second implying that nuclear charges
in the atom are the same thing as static electricity. They're
in a different league altogether. But the analogy holds. I
could use another analogy. I could liken the charge in
the wild cells to accumulations of fat. And this gunk of
mine to a detergent that would break it up and spread it
so far it couldn't be detected any more. But I'm led to
the static analogy by an odd side effect organisms in-
jected with this stuff do build up one hell of a static
charge. It's a byproduct and, for reasons I can only
theorize about at the moment, it seems to be keyed to
the audio spectrum. Tuning forks and the like. That's
what I was playing with when I met you. That tree is
drenched with this stuff. It used to have a whorl of wild-
cell growth. It hasn't any more."
He gave her the quick, surprising 'smile and let it
flicker away as he held the needle point upward and
squirted it. With his other hand wrapped around her left
bicep he squeezed gently and firmly. The needle was
lowered and placed and slid into the big vein so deftly
that she gasped not because it hurt but because it did
not. Attentively he watched the bit of glass barrel pro-
truding from the black housing as he withdrew the
plunger a fraction and saw the puff of red into the color-
less fluid inside.
Then he bore steadily on the plunger again.
"Please don't move. I'm sorry, this will take a little
time. I have to get quite a lot of this into you. Which
is fine, you know," he said, resuming the tone of his
previous remarks about audio spectra, "because side
effect or no, it's consistent. Healthy bio systems develop
a strong electrostatic field, unhealthy ones a weak one or


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none at all. With an instrument as primitive and simple
as that little electroscope you can tell if any part of the
organism has a community of wild cells and if so, where
it is and how big and how wild." Deftly he shifted his
grip on .the encased hypodermic without moving the point
or varying the plunger pressure. It was beginning to be
uncomfortable an ache turning into a bruise. "And if
you're wondering why this mosquito has a housing on it
with a wire attached (although I'll bet you're not and
that you know as well as I do that I'm doing all this
talking just to keep your mind occupied) I'll tell you.
It's nothing but a coil carrying a high-frequency alter-
nating current. The alternating field sees to it that the
fluid is magnetically and electrostatically neutral right
from the start."
He withdrew the needle suddenly and smoothly, bent
an arm and trapped in the inside of her elbow a cotton
swab.
"Nobody ever told me that after a treatment," she said.
"What?"
"No charge," she said.
Again that wave of approval, this time with words: "I
like your style. How do you feel?"
She cast about for accurate phrases.
"Like .the owner of a large sleeping hysteria begging
someone not to wake it up."
He laughed.
"In a little while you are going to feel so weird you
won't have 'time for hysteria."
He got up and returned 'the needle to -the bench,
looping up the cable as he went. He turned off the AC
field and returned with a large glass bowl and a square
of plywood. He inverted the bowl on the floor near her
and placed the wood on its broad base.
"I remember something like that," she said. "When I
was in junior high school. They were generating
artificial lightning with a--let me see--well, it had a long,
endless belt running over pulleys and some little wires
scraping on it and a big copper ball on top."
"Van de Graaf generator."
"Right. And they did all sorts of things with it. But
what I specially remember is standing on a piece of wood
on a bowl like that and they charged me up with the
generator. I didn't feel much of anything except all my
hail stood out from my head. Everyone laughed. I
looked like a golliwog. They said I was carrying forty
thousand volts."
"Good. I'm glad you remember that. This'll be a little
different, though. By roughly another forty thousand."
"Oh!"
"Don't worry. As long as you're insulated and as long
as grounded or comparatively grounded objects--me, for
example--stay well away from you, there won't be any
fireworks."
"Are you going to use a generator like that?"
"Not like that--and I already did. You're the genera-
*N
ror.
"I'm--oh!" She had raised her hand from the uphol-
stered chair arm and there was a crackle of sparks and



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the faint smell of ozone.
"You sure are and more than I bought--and quicker.
Get up."
She started up slowly. She finished the maneuver with
speed. As her body separated from the chair she was, for
a fractional second, seated in a tangle of spitting blue-
white threads. They, or she, propelled her a yard and a
half away, standing. Literally shocked half out of her
wits, she almost fell.
"Stay on your feet," he snapped and she recovered,
gasping. He stepped back a pace. "Get up on the board.
Quickly now."
She did as she was told, leaving, for the two paces she
traveled, two brief footprints of fire. She teetered on the
board. Visibly, her hair began to stir.
"What's happening to me?" she cried.
"You're getting charged after all," he said jovially but
at this point she failed to appreciate the extension of even
her own witticism.
She cried again, "What's happening to me?"
"It's all right," he said consolingly.
He went to the bench and turned on a tone generator.
It moaned deep in the one to three hundred cycle range.
He increased the volume and turned the pitch control.
It howled upward and, as it did so, her red-gold hair
shivered and swept up and out, each hair attempting
frantically to gat away from all the others. He ran the
tone up above ten thousand cycles and all the way back
to a belly-bumping inaudible eleven. At the extremes her
hair slumped but at around eleven hundred it stood out
in, as she had described it, golliwog style. She could feel
it.
He turned down the gain to a more or less bearable
level and picked up the electroscope. He came toward
her, smiling.
"You are an electroscope, you know that? And a living
Van de Graaf generator as well. And a golliwog."
"Let me down," was all she could say.
"Not yet. Please hang tight. The differential between
you and everything else here is so high that if you got
near any of it you'd discharge into it. It wouldn't harm
you--it isn't current electricity--but you might get a burn
and a nervous shock out of it." He held out the electro-
scope. Even at that distance--and in her distress--she
could see the gold leaves writhe apart. He circled her,
watching the leaves attentively, moving the instrument
forward and back and from side to side. Once he went
to the tone generator and turned it down some more.
"You're sending such a strong field I can't pick up the
variations," he explained and returned to her, coming
closer now.
"I can'tmuch more1 can't," she murmured.
He did not hear or he did not care. He 'moved the
electroscope near her abdomen, up and from side to side.
"Yup. There you are," he said cheerfully, moving the
instrument close to her right breast.
"What?" she whimpered.
"Your cancer. Right breast, low, around toward the
armpit." He whistled. "A mean one, too. Malignant as
hell."
She swayed and then collapsed forward and down. A


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sick blackness swept down on her, receded explosively in
a glare of agonizing blue-white and then crashed down
on her like a mountain falling.
Place where wall meets ceiling. Another wall, another
ceiling. Hadn't seen it before. Didn't matter. Don't care.
Sleep.
Place where wall meets ceiling. Something in the way.
His face, close, drawn, tired--eyes awake, though, and
penetrating. Doesn't matter. Don't care.
Sleep.
Place where wall meets ceiling. Down a bit, late sun-
light. Over a little, rusty-gold chrysanthemums in a gold-
green glass cornucopia. Something in the way again--his
face.
"Can you hear me?"
Yes, but don't answer. Don't move. Don't speak.
Sleep.
It's a room, a wall, a table, a man pacing--a nighttime
window and mums you'd think were alive but don't you
know they're cut right off and dying?
Do they know that?
"How are you?"
Urgent, urgent.
"Thirsty."
Cold and a bite to it that aches the hinges of 'the jaws.
Grapefruit juice. Lying back on his arm while he holds
the glass in the other hand.
O/i, no, that's not . . .
"Thank you. Thanks very"
Try to sit up. The sheet--my clothes!
"Sorry about that," he said, the mind--reader-almost-
"Some things that have to be done just aren't consistent
with pantyhose and a minidress. All washed and dried
and ready for you, though--any time. Over there."
The brown wool and the pantyhose and the shoes, on
the chair.
He's respectful, standing back, putting the glass next
to an insulated carafe on the night table.
"What things?"
"Throwing up. Bedpans," he said candidly.
Protective with the sheet, which can hide bodies bat
Oh--not embarrassment.
"Oh, I'm sorry. Oh. I must have"
Shake head and he slides back and forth in the vision.
"You went into shock and then you just didn't come
out of it."
He hesitated. It was the first time she had ever seen
him hesitate over anything. She became for a moment an
almost-mindreader.
Should I tell her what's in my mind?
Sure, he should. And he did.
"You didn't want to come out of it."
"It's all gone out of my head."
"The pear tree, the electroscope. The injection, the
electrostatic response."
"No," she said, not knowing. Then, knowing: "No!"
"Hang on," he rapped and next thing she knew he was
by the bed, over her, his two hands hard on her cheeks.
"Don't slip off again. You can handle it. You can handle
it because it's all right now, do you understand that?



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You're all right."
"You told me I had cancer."
She sounded pouty, accusing.
He laughed at her, actually laughed.
"You told me you had it."
"Oh, but I didn't know."
"That explains it, then," he said in a load-off-my-baok
tone. "There wasn't anything in what I did that could
cause a three-day withdrawal like that. It had to be some-
thing in you."
"Three days!"
He simply nodded and went on with what he was say-
ing.
"I get a little pompous once in awhile," he said en-
gagingly. "Comes from being right so much of the time.
Took a bit more for granted than I should have, didn't I?
When I assumed you'd been to a doctor, maybe even
had a biopsy? You hadn't, had you?"
"I was afraid," she admitted. She looked at him. "My
mother died of it--and my aunt--and my sister had a
radical mastectomy. I couldn't bear it. And when you"
"When I told you what you already knew and what
you never wanted to hear--you couldn't take it. You
blacked right out, you know. Fainted away. And it had
nothing to do' with the seventy-odd thousand volts of
static you were carrying. I caught you." He put out his
aims where they were, on display, until she looked at
them and saw the angry red scorch marks on his fore-
arms and heavy biceps, as much of them as she could see
from under his short-sleeved shirt. "About nine-tenths
knocked me out too," he said. "But at least you didn't
crack your head or anything."
"Thank you," she said reflexively and then began to
cry. "What am .1 going to do?"
"Do? Go back home, wherever that is--pick up your
life again, whatever that might mean."
"But you said"
"When are you going to get it into your head that what
I did was not a diagnostic?"
"Are you--did you--you mean you cured it?"
"I mean you're curing it right now. I explained it all
to you 'before. You remember that now, don't you?"
"Not altogether but--yes." Surreptitiously (but not
enough, because he saw her) she felt under it--he sheet for
the lump. "It's still there."
"If I bopped you over the head with a bat," he said
with slightly exaggerated simplicity, "there would be a
lump on it. It would be there tomorrow and the next day.
The day after that it might be smaller. In a week you'd
still be able to feel it but it would be gone. Same thing
here."
At last she let the enormity of it touch her. "A one-
shot cure for cancer"
"Oh, God," he said harshly. "I can tell by looking at
you that I am going to have to listen to that speech again.
Well, I won't."
Startled, she asked, "What speech?"
"The 'one about my duty to humanity. It comes in two
phases and many textures. Phase one has to do with my
duty to humanity and really means we could make a
classic buck with it. Phase two deals solely with my duty


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to humanity and I don't hear that one very often. Phase
two utterly overlooks the reluctance humanity has to ac-
cept good things unless they arrive from accepted and
respectable sources. Phase one is fully aware of this but
gets rat shrewd in figuring ways around it."
She said, "I don't" but could get no farther.
"The textures," he overrode her, "are accompanied by
the light of revelation, with or without religion and/or
mysticism. Or they are cast sternly in the ethical-philoso-
phy mold and aim to force me to surrender through
guilt mixed--to some degree all the way up to total--with
compassion."
"But I only"
"You," he said, aiming a long index finger at her,
"have robbed yourself of the choicest example of every-
thing I have just said. If my assumptions had been right
and you had gone to your friendly local sawbones--and
he had diagnosed cancer and referred you to a specialist
and he had done likewise and sent you to a colleague
for consultation and, in random panic, you had fallen
into my hands and been cured--and had gone back to
your various doctors to report a miracle, do you know
what you'd have gotten from them? 'Spontaneous remis-
sion,' that's what you'd have gotten. And it wouldn't be
only doctors," he went on with a sudden renewal of
passion, under which she quailed in her bed. "Everybody
has his own commercial. Your nutritionist would have
nodded over his wheat germ or his macrobiotic rice cakes,
your priest would have dropped to his knees and looked
at the sky, your geneticist would have a pet theory about
generation-skipping and would assure you that your
grandparents probably had spontaneous remissions, too,
and never knew it."
"Please!" she cried but he shouted at her..
"Do you know what I am? I am an engineer twice
over, mechanical and electrical--and I have a law degree.
If you were foolish enough to tell anyone about what has
happened here (which I hope you aren't--but if you are
I know how to protect myself) I could be jailed for prac-
ticing medicine without a license. You could have me up
for assault because I stuck a needle into you and even
for kidnapping if you could prove I carried you in here
from the lab. Nobody would give a damn that I had
cured your cancer. You don't know who I am, do you?"
"No. I don't even know your name."
"And I won't tell you. I don't know your name
either"
"Oh! It's"
"Don't tell me! Don't tell me! I don't want to hear
it. I wanted to be involved with your lump and I was.
I want it and you to be gone as soon as you're both up
to it. Have I made myself absolutely clear?"
"Just let me get dressed," she said tightly, "and I'll
leave right now."
"Without making a speech?"
"Without making a speech." And in a flash her anger
turned to misery and she added: "I was going to say I
was grateful. Would that have been all right, sir!"
And his anger underwent a change too, for he came
close to the bed and sat down on his heel, bringing their



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faces to a level, and said quite gently, "That would be
fine. Although you won't really be grateful for another
ten days, when you get your 'spontaneous remission' re-
ports--or maybe for six months or a year or two or five,
when examinations keep on testing out negative."
She detected such a wealth of sadness behind this that
she found herself reaching for the hand with which he
steadied himself against the edge of the bed. He did not
recoil but he didn't seem to welcome her touch either.
"Why can't I be grateful right now?"
"That would be an act of faith," he said bitterly, "and
that just doesn't happen any more--if it ever did." He rose
and went toward the door. "Please don't go tonight," he
said. "It's dark and you don't know the way. I'll see you in
the morning."
When he came back in the morning the door was open.
The bed was made and the sheets were folded neatly on
the chair, together with the pillow slips and the towels
she had used. She wasn't there.
He came out into the entrance court and contemplated
his bonsai.
Early sun gold-frosted the horizontal upper foliage of
the old tree and brought its gnarled limbs into sharp re-
lief, tough brown-gray creviced in velvet. Only the com-
panion of a bonsai (there are owners of bonsai but they
are a lesser breed) fully understands the relationship.
There is an exclusive and individual treeness to the tree
because it is a living thing and living things change--and
there are definite ways in which the tree desires to change.
A man sees the tree and in his mind makes certain exten-
sions and extrapolations of what he sees and sets about
making them happen. The tree in turn will do only what
a tree can do, will resist to the death any attempt to
do what it cannot do or to do in less time than it needs.
The shaping of a bonsai is therefore always a com-
promise and always a cooperation. A man cannot create
bonsai, nor can a tree. It takes both and they must un-
derstand one another. It takes a long time to do that. One
memorizes one's bonsai, every twig, the angle of every
crevice and needle and, lying awake at night or in a
pause a thousand miles away, one recalls this or that line
or mass, one makes one's plans. With wire and water and
light, with tilting and with the planting of water-robbing
weeds or heavy, root-shading ground cover, one explains
to the tree what one wants. And if the explanation is well
enough made and there is great enough understanding
the tree will respond and obey--almost.
Always there will be its own self-respecting highly in-
dividual variation. Very well, I shall do what you want,
but I will do it -my way. And for these variations the
tree is always willing to present a clear and logical ex-
planation and, more often than not (almost smiling), it
will make clear to the man that he could have avoided it
if his understanding had been better.
It is the slowest sculpture in the world, and there is,
at times, doubt as to which is being sculpted, man or
tree.
So he stood for perhaps ten minutes, watching the flow
of gold over the upper branches, and then went to a
carved wooden chest, opened it, shook out a length of
disreputable cotton duck. He opened the hinged glass at


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one side of the atrium and spread the canvas over the
roots 'and all 'the earth to one side of the trunk, leaving
the rest open to wind and water. Perhaps in a while--a
month or two--a certain shoot in the topmost branch
would take the hint and the uneven flow of moisture up
through the cambium layer would nudge it away from
that upward reach and persuade it to continue the hori-
zontal passage. And perhaps not--and it would need the
harsher language of binding and wire. But then it might
have something to say, too, about the rightness of an up-
ward trend and would perhaps say it persuasively enough
to convince the man--altogether, a patient, meaningful,
and rewarding dialogue.
"Good morning."
"Oh, god--dam!" he barked. "You made me bite my
tongue. I thought you'd gone."
"I had." She kneeled in the shadows, her back against
the inner wall, facing the atrium. "But then I stopped to
be with the tree for a while."
"Then what?"
"I thought a lot."
"What about?"
"You."
"Did you now?"
"Look," she said firmly. "I'm not going to any doctor
to get this thing checked out. I didn't want to leave until
I had told you that and until I was sure you believed me."
"Come on in and we'll get something to eat."
Foolishly, she giggled.
"I can't. My feet are asleep."
Without hesitation he scooped her up in his arms and
carried her around the atrium.
She asked, her arm around his shoulders and their
faces close, "Do you believe me?"
He continued around until they reached the wooden
chest, then stopped and looked into her eyes.
"I believe you. I don't know why you decided as you
did but I'm willing to believe you."
He sat her down on the chest and stood back.
"It's that act of faith you mentioned," she said gravely.
"I thought you ought to have it at least once in your life
so you can never say again what you said." She tapped
her heels gingerly against the slate floor. "Ow!" She made
a pained smile. "Pins and needles."
"You must have been thinking for a long time."
"Yes. Want more?"
"Sure."
"You are an angry, frightened man."
He seemed delighted.
"Tell me about all that!"
"No," she said quietly. "You tell me. I'm very serious
about this. Why are you angry?"
"I'm not."
"Why are you so angry?"
"I tell you I'm not. Although," he added good-na-
turedly, "you're pushing me in that direction."
"Well then, why?"
He gazed at her for what to her seemed a very long
time indeed.
"You really want to know, don't you?"



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She nodded.
He waved a sudden hand, up and out.
"Where do you suppose all this came from--the house,
the land, the equipment?"
She waited.
"An exhaust system," he said, with a thickening of his
voice she was coming to know. "A way of guiding exhaust
gases out of internal combustion engines in such a way
that they are given a spin. Unburned solids are embedded
in the walls of the muffler in a glass wool liner that slips
out in one piece and can be replaced by a clean one
every couple of thousand miles. The rest of the exhaust is
fired by its own spark plug and what will bum, burns.
The heat is used to preheat the fuel. The rest is spun again
through a five-thousand-mile cartridge. What finally gets
out is, by today's standards at least, pretty clean. And
because of the preheating it actually gets better mileage
out of the engine."
"So you've made a lot of money."
"I made a lot of money," he echoed. "But not because
the thing is being used to cut down air pollution. I got
the money because an automobile company bought it
and buried it in a vault. They don't like it because it costs
something to install in new cars. Some .friends of theirs in
the refining business don't like it because it gets high
performance out of crude fuels. Well, all right1 didn't
know any better and I won't make the same mistake
again. But yes I'm angry. I was angry when I was a kid
on a tank ship and we were set to washing down a bulk-
head with chipped brown soap and canvas. I went ashore
and bought a detergent and tried it and it was better,
faster and cheaper, so I took it to the bos'n, who gave me
a punch in the mouth for pretending to know his job
better than he did. Well, he was drunk at the time but
the rough part came when the old shellbacks in the crew
gauged up on me for being what they called a 'company
man that's a dirty name in a ship. I just couldn't un-
derstand why people got in the way of something better.
"I've been up against that all my life. I have something
in my head that just won't quit. It's a way I have of ask-
ing the next question: why is so-and-so the way it is?
Why can't it be such-and-such instead? There is always
another question to be asked about anything or any situa-
tionespecially you shouldn't quit when you like an an-
swer because there's always another one after it. And we
live in a world where people just don't want to ask the
next question!
"I've been paid all my stomach will take for things
people won't use and if I'm mad all the time, it's really
my fault--I admit it--because I just can't stop asking that
next question 'and coming up with answers. There are a
half-dozen real block-busters in 'that lab that nobody will
ever see and half a hundred more in my head. But what
can you do in a world where people would rather kill
each other in a desert, even when they're shown it can
turn green and bloom--where they'll fall all over them-
selves to pour billions into developing a new oil strike
when it's been proved over and over again that 'the fossil
fuels will kill us all? Yes, I'm angry. Shouldn't I be?"
She let the echoes of his voice swirl around the court
and out through the hole in the top of the atrium and


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waited a little longer to let him know he was here with her
and not beside himself and his fury. He grinned at her
sheepishly when he came to this.
And she said, "Maybe you're asking the next question
instead of asking the right question. I think people who
live by wise old sayings are trying not to 'think--but I
know one worth paying some attention to. It's this. If you
ask a question the right way, you've just given the an-
swer." She went on, "I mean, if you put your hand on a
hot stove you might ask yourself, how can I stop my hand
from burning? And the answer is pretty clear, isn't it? If
the world keeps rejecting what you have to give--there's
some way of asking why that contains the answer."
"It's a simple answer," he said shortly. "People are
stupid."
"That isn't the answer and you know it," she said.
"What is?"
"Oh, I can't tell you that! All I know is that the way
you do something, where people are concerned, is more
important than what you do. If you want results, I mean
you already know how to get what you want with 'the
tree, don't you?"
"I'll be damned."
"People are living, growing things, too. I don't know a
hundredth part of what you do about bonsai but I do
know this--when you start one, it isn't often the strong
straight healthy ones you take. It's the twisted sick ones
that can be made the most beautiful. When you get to
shaping humanity, you might remember that."
"Of all the--I don't know whether to laugh in your face
or punch you right in the mouth!"
She rose. He hadn't realized she was quite this tall.
"I'd better go."
"Come on now. You know a figure of speech when you
hear one."
"Oh, I didn't feel threatened. But--I'd better go, all
the same."
Shrewdly he asked her, "Are you .afraid to ask the next
question?"
"Terrified."
"Ask it anyway."
"No."
"Then III do it for you. You said I was angryand
'afraid. You want to know what I'm afraid of."
"Yes."
"You. I am scared to death of you."
"Are you really?"
"You have a way of provoking honesty," he said with
some difficulty. "I'll say what I know you're thinking: I'm
afraid of any close human relationship. I'm afraid of some-
thing I can't take apart with a screwdriver or a mass spec-
troscope or a table of cosines and tangents. I don't know
how to handle it."
His voice was jocular but his hands were shaking.
"You do it by watering one side," she said softly, "or
by turning it just so in the sun. You handle it as if it
were a living thing, like a species or a woman or a bonsai.
It will be what you want it to be if you let it be itself and
take the time and the care."
"I think," he said, "that you are making me some kind



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of offer. Why?"
"Sitting there most of the night," she said, "I had a
crazy kind of image. Do you think two sick twisted 'trees
ever made bonsai out of one another?"
"What's your name?" he asked her.




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