Bright Segment by Theodore Sturgeon Read Free Book Online

peyotl out of it,” I floundered. “That’s no symbol. That’s cash money.”
    “It is? What do I do with the money? Well,
what?
”
    “Grubstake,” I mumbled, frightened by his intensity.
    “I sell it for just what I need, no more,” he said. “And with it I stay out here and”—he chuckled—“study my references.”
    At the saloon Grantham wrote his resignation, and I was glad to see that it was written exactly as the old Grantham would have done it. I tucked it away safely. We dined heartily and slept in the same room back of the bar, and in the morning he helped me buy a horse. It was, therefore, not until I was out on the hot sand again that I had a chance to study my specimen.
    I felt very good that morning. I was, of course, sorry for poor mad Grantham. On the other hand—what was the little white moth that clustered over peyotl at night? Not the yucca moth, surely. Surely not.
    I wondered what had happened to that strange, pathetic little girl. Wandered out in her blue polka-dot dress to die among the yuccas, no doubt.
    I studied the wilted flower as I rode. Poor Grantham! This was enough to tip any trained botanist over the edge—this freak, sport, mutant yucca. Who ever heard of a white yucca flower with a large blue patch on each petal?
    I closed my eyes and smiled, seeing through the red heat-haze of my lids the cool shadowed library, turning the clop-clop of my horse into the delicate music of teacups on saucers.

The Golden Helix
    T OD AWOKE FIRST , probably because he was so curious, so deeply alive; perhaps because he was (or had been) seventeen. He fought back, but the manipulators would not be denied. They bent and flexed his arms and legs, squeezed his chest, patted and rasped and abraded him. His joints creaked, his sluggish blood clung sleepily to the walls of his veins, reluctant to move after so long.
    He gasped and shouted as needles of cold played over his body, gasped again and screamed when his skin sensitized and the tingling intensified to a scald. Then he fainted, and probably slept, for he easily reawoke when someone else started screaming.
    He felt weak and ravenous, but extraordinarily well rested. His first conscious realization was that the manipulators had withdrawn from his body, as had the needles from the back of his neck. He put a shaky hand back there and felt the traces of spot-tape, already half-fused with his healing flesh.
    He listened comfortably to this new screaming, satisfied that it was not his own. He let his eyes open, and a great wonder came over him when he saw that the lid of his Coffin stood open.
    He clawed upward, sat a moment to fight a vicious swirl of vertigo, vanquished it, and hung his chin on the edge of the Coffin.
    The screaming came from April’s Coffin. It was open too. Since the two massive boxes touched and their hinges were on opposite sides, he could look down at her. The manipulators were at work on the girl’s body, working with competent violence. She seemed to be caught up in some frightful nightmare, lying on her back, dreaming of riding a runaway bicycle with an off-center pedal sprocket and epicyclic hubs. And all the while her arms seemed to be flailing at a cloud of dream-hornets round her tossing head. The needle-cluster rode with her head, fanning out behind the nape like the mechanicalextrapolation of an Elizabethan collar.
    Tod crawled to the end of his Coffin, stood up shakily, and grasped the horizontal bar set at chest level. He got an arm over it and snugged it close under his armpit. Half-suspended, he could then manage one of his feet over the edge, then the other, to the top step. He lowered himself until he sat on it, outside the Coffin at last, and slumped back to rest. When his furious lungs and battering heart calmed themselves, he went down the four steps one at a time, like an infant, on his buttocks.
    April’s screams stopped.
    Tod sat on the bottom step, jackknifed by fatigue, his feet on the metal floor, his