Theodore Sturgeon - The Man Who Lost The Sea

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THE MAN WHO LOST THE SEA

Say you're a kid, and one dark night you're running along the cold sand with this helicopter

in your hand, saying very fast witch y-witchy-witchy. You pass the sick man and he wants you to

shove off with that thing. Maybe he thinks you're too old to play wit-h toys. So you squat next to

him in the sand and tell him it isn't a toy, it's a model. You tell him look hers, here's

something most people don't know about helicopters. You take a blade of the rotor in your fingers

and show him how it can move in the hub, up and down a little, back and forth a little, and twist

a little, to change pitch. You start to tell hun how this flexibility does away with the

gyroscopic effect, but he won't listen. He doesn't want to think about flying, about helicopters,

About you, and he most especially does not want explanations about anything by anybody. Not

now. Now, he wants to think about the sea. So you go away.

The sick man is buried in the cold sand with only his head and his left arm showing. He is

dressed in a pressure suit and looks like a man from Mars. Built into his left sleeve is a

combination time-piece and pressure gauge, the gauge with a luminous blue indicator which makes no

sense, the clock hands luminous red. He can hear the pounding of surf and the soft swift pulse of

his pumps. One time long ago when he was swimming he went too deep and stayed down too long and

came up too fast, and when he came to it was like this: they said, "Don't move, boy. You've got

the bends. Don't even try to move." He had tried anyway. It hurt. So now, this time, he lies in

the sand without moving, without trying.

His head isn't working right. But he knows clearly that it isn't working right, which is a

strange thing that happens to people in shock sometimes. Say you were that kid, you could say how

it was, because once you woke up lying in the gym office in high school and asked what had

happened. They explained how you tried something on the parallel bars and fell on your head. You

understood exactly, though you couldn't remember falling. Then a minute later you asked again what

had happened and they told you. You understood it. And a minute later. . .forty-one times they

told you, and you understood. It was just that no matter how many times they pushed it into your

head, it wouldn't stick there; but all the while you knew that your head would start working again

in time. And in time it did.... Of course, if you were that kid, always explaining things to

people and to yourself, you wouldn't want to bother the sick man with it now.~

Look what you've done already, making him send you away with that angry shrug of the mind

(which, with the eyes, are the only things which will move just now). The motionless effort t~osts

him a wave of nausea. He has felt seasick before but he has never been, seasick, and the formula

for that is to keep, your eyes on the horizon and stay busy. Now! Then he'd better get busy-now;

for there's one place especially not to be seasick in, and that's locked up in a pressure suit.

Now!

So he busies himself as best he can, with the seascape, landscape, sky. He lies on high

ground, his head propped on a vertical wall of black rock. There is another such outcrop before

him, whip-topped with white sand and with smooth fiat sand. Beyond and down is valley, salt-flat,

estuary; he cannot yet be sure. He is sure of the line of footprints, which begin behind him, pass

to his left, disappear in the outcrop shadows, and reappear beyond to vanish at last into the

shadows of the valley.

Stretched across the sky is old mourning-cloth, with starlight burning holes in it, and

between the holes the black is absolute-wintertime, mountaintop sky-black.

(Far off on the horizon within himself, he sees the swell and crest of approaching nausea; he

counters with an undertow of weakness, which meets and rounds and settles the wave before it can

break. Get busier. Now.)

Burst in on him, then, with the X-15 model. That'll get him. Hey, how about this for a

gimmick? Get too high for the thin air to give you any control, you have these little jets in the

wingtips, see? and on the sides of the empennage: bank, roll, yaw, whatever, with squirts of

compressed air.

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Th...20-%20The%20Man%20Who%20Lost%20The%20Sea.txt (1 of 6) [10/18/2004 5:33:15 PM]

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