Sanderson was still watching him sharply. “Well?”
“She says she’s Mongoose.”
And Sanderson really wasn’t trying to threaten him, or playing some elaborate political game, because her face softened in a real smile, and she said, “Of course she is.”
Irizarry swished a sweet mouthful between his teeth. He thought of what Sanderson had said, of the bandersnatch on the Jenny Lind wriggling through stretched rips in reality like a spiny, deathly puppy tearing a blanket. “How would you domesticate a bandersnatch?”
She shrugged. “If I knew that, I’d be an Arkhamer, wouldn’t I?” Gently, she extended the back of her hand for Mongoose to sniff. Mongoose, surprising Irizarry, extended one tentative tendril and let it hover just over the back of Sanderson’s wrist.
Sanderson tipped her head, smiling affectionately, and didn’t move her hand. “But if I had to guess, I’d say you do it by making friends.”
Theodore Sturgeon
The ship was crewed with men who had been deliberately, painstakingly driven insane, except for one man. They had told him that he wasn’t insane—but then, they might have been lying to him. Then they sent them to a place in space from which ships did not return. The mission was insane in every meaning of the word . . .
Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985) was one of the great writers of science fiction’s “golden age” in the 1940s, and by the 1950s was renowned for his three-dimensional characters and his highly individual style. His early works, of which “Medusa” is an example, were elegantly constructed, fast-paced stories told by a wisecracking narrator, but he soon developed a fluent prose poetry of style that accomplished wonders. Another notable prose poet, Ray Bradbury, admitted the strong influence Sturgeon’s writing had on his own work in the introduction he wrote for Without Sorcery, Sturgeon’s first story collection. His now-classic novel, More Than Human, won the International Fantasy Award, the first of a number of awards (though there should have been many more). The distinguished editor and reviewer Groff Conklin once wrote, “You don’t read [Sturgeon’s] stories. They happen to you.” (Nailed it, Mr. Conklin!) Two Star Trek episodes were scripted by him, and one of them, “The Amok Time,” was a high point of that program. He wrote over 200 short stories, all of which have now been collected in thirteen volumes published by North Atlantic Books. (Many thanks to the late Paul Williams and Noël Sturgeon for bringing this miracle to pass.) He was also the author of unforgettable horror stories, such as “It!,” “The Professor’s Teddy Bear,” “Farewell to Eden,” and, of course, “Bianca’s Hands.” Not to mention the story which follows . . .
MEDUSA
Theodore Sturgeon
I wasn’t sore at them. I don’t know what they’d done to me, exactly—I knew that some of it wasn’t so nice, and that I’d probably never be the same again. But I was a volunteer, wasn’t I? I’d asked for it. I’d signed a paper authorizing the department of commerce of the league to use me as they saw fit. When they pulled me out of the fleet for routine examination, and when they started examinations that were definitely not routine, I didn’t kick. When they asked for volunteers for a project they didn’t bother to mention by name, I accepted it sight unseen. And now—
“How do you feel, Rip?” old Doc Renn wanted to know. He spoke to me easylike, with his chin on the backs of his hands and his elbows on the table. The greatest name in psychoscience, and he talks to me as if he were my old man. Right up there in front of the whole psycho board, too.
“Fine, sir,” I said. I looked around. I knew all the doctors and one or two of the visitors. All the medicos had done one job or another on me in the last three years. Boy, did they put me through the mill. I understood only a fraction of it all—the first color tests, for instance, and the electro-coordination routines. But that torture machine of Grenfell’s and that copper helmet that Winton made me wear for two months—talk about your nightmares! What they were doing to or for me was something I could only guess at. Maybe they were testing me for something. Maybe I was just a guinea pig. Maybe I was in training for something. It was no use asking, either. I volunteered, didn’t I?
“Well, Rip,” Doc Renn was saying, “It’s all over now—the preliminaries, I mean. We’re going ahead with the big job.”
“Preliminaries?” I goggled. “You mean to tell me that what I’ve been through for the last three years was all preliminaries?”
Renn nodded, watching me carefully. “You’re going on a little trip. It may not be fun, but it’ll be interesting.”
“Trip? Where to?” This was good news; the repeated drills on spaceship techniques, the refresher courses on astrogation, had given me a good-sized itch to get out into the black again.
“Sealed orders,” said Renn, rather sharply. “You’ll find out. The important thing for you to remember is that you have a very important role to play.” He paused. I could see him grimly ironing the snappiness out of his tone. Why in Canaan did he have to be so careful with me? “You will be put aboard a Forfield Super—the latest and best equipped that the league can furnish. Your job is to tend the control machinery, and to act as assistant astrogator no matter what happens. Without doubt, you will find your position difficult at times. You are to obey your orders as given, without question, and without the use of force where possible.”
This sounded screwy to me. “That’s all written up, just about word for word, in the ‘Naval Manual,’” I reminded him gently, “under ‘Duties of Crew.’ I’ve had to do all you said every time I took a ship out. Is there anything special about this one, that it calls for all this underlining?”
He was annoyed, and the board shuffled twenty-two pairs of feet. But his tone was still friendly, half-persuasive when he spoke. “There is definitely something special about this ship, and—its crew. Rip, you’ve come through everything we could hand you, with flying colors. Frankly, you were subgjected to psychic forces that were enough to drive a normal man quite mad. The rest of the crew—it is only fair to tell you—are insane. The nature of this expedition necessitates our manning the ship that way. Your place on the ship is a key position. Your responsibility is a great one.”
“Now—hold on, sir,” I said. “I’m not questioning your orders, sir, and I consider myself under your disposition. May I ask a few questions?”
He nodded.
“You say the crew is insane. Isn’t that a broad way of putting it—” I couldn’t help needling him; he was trying so hard to keep calm— “for a psychologist?”
He actually grinned. “It is. To be more specific, they’re schizoids—dual personalitites. Their primary egos are paranoiac. They’re perfectly rational except on the subject of their particular phobia—or mania as the case may be. The recessive personality is a manic depressive.”
Now, as I remembered it, most paranoiacs have delusions of grandeur coupled with a persecution mania. And a manic depressive is the “Yes master” type. They just didn’t mix. I took the liberty of saying as much to one of Earth’s foremost psychoscientists.
“Of course they don’t mix,” snapped Renn. “I didn’t say they did. There’s no interflowing egos in these cases. They are schizoids. The cleavage is perfect.”