Selected Stories by Theodore Sturgeon Read Free Book Online

look now? I want to see the stars.”
    “We’ll see to Alma first.” Teague rose, ignoring the lip of his Coffin and the handhold it offered. He went to Alma’s. With his height, he was the only one among them who could see through the top plate without mounting the steps.
    Then, without turning, he said, “Wait.”
    The others, half across the room from him, stopped. Teague turned to them. There was no expression on his face at all. He stood quite motionless for perhaps ten seconds, and then quietly released a breath. He mounted the steps of Alma’s Coffin, reached, and the side nearest his own machine sank silently into the floor. He stepped down, and spent a long moment bent over the body inside. From where they stood, tense and frightened, the others could not see inside. They made no effort to move closer.
    “Tod,” said Teague, “get the kit. Surgery Lambda. Moira. I’ll need you.”
    The shock of it went to Tod’s bones, regenerated, struck him again; yet so conditioned was he to Teague’s commands that he was on his feet and moving before Teague had stopped speaking. He went to the after bulkhead and swung open a panel, pressed a stud. There was a metallic whisper, and the heavy case slid out at his feet. He lugged it over to Teague, and helped him rack it on the side of the Coffin. Teague immediately plunged his hands through the membrane at one end of the kit, nodding to Moira to do likewise at the other. Tod stepped back, studiously avoiding a glance in at Alma, and returned to April. She put both her hands tight around his left biceps and leaned close. “Lambda. …” she whispered. “That’s … parturition, isn’t it?”
    He shook his head. “Parturition is Surgery Kappa ,” he said painfully. He swallowed. “ Lambda’s Caesarian.”
    Her crimson eyes widened. “Caesarian? Alma? She’d never need a Caesarian!”
    He turned to look at her, but he could not see, his eyes stung so. “Not while she lived, she wouldn’t,” he whispered. He felt the small white hands tighten painfully on his arm. Across the room, Carl sat quietly. Tod squashed the water out of his eyes with the heel of his hand. Carl began pounding knuckles, very slowly, against his own temple.
    Teague and Moira were busy for a long time.
II
    Tod pulled in his legs and lowered his head until the kneecaps pressed cruelly against his eyebrow ridges. He hugged his shins, ground his back into the wall-panels, and in this red-spangled blackness he let himself live back and back to Alma and joy, Alma and comfort, Alma and courage.
    He had sat once, just this way, twisted by misery and anger, blind and helpless, in a dark corner of an equipment shed at the spaceport. The rumor had circulated that April would not come after all, because albinism and the Sirius Rock would not mix. It turned out to be untrue, but that did not matter at the time. He had punched her, punched Alma! because in all the world he had been given nothing else to strike out at, and she had found him and had sat down to be with him. She had not even touched her face, where the blood ran; she simply waited until at last he flung himself on her lap and wept like an infant. And no one but he and Alma ever knew of it. …
    He remembered Alma with the spaceport children, rolling and tumbling on the lawn with them, and in the pool; and he remembered Alma, her face still, looking up at the stars with her soft and gentle eyes, and in those eyes he had seen a challenge as implacable and pervasive as space itself. The tumbling on the lawn, the towering dignity—these co-existed in Alma without friction. He remembered things she had said to him; for each of the things he could recall the kind of light, the way he stood, the very smell of the air at the time. “Never be afraid, Tod. Just think of the worst possible thing that might happen. What you’re afraid of will probably not be that bad—and anything else just has to be better.” And she said once, “Don’t