“Brown Shoes” by Theodore Sturgeon
My late wife introduced me to Theodore Sturgeon. It is high on the list of things I’m deeply grateful to her for.
His name was Mensch; it once was a small joke between them, and then it became a bitterness. “I wish to God I could have you now the way you were,” she said, “moaning at night and jumping up and walking around in the dark and never saying why, and letting us go hungry and not caring how we lived or how we looked. I used to hitch at you for it, but I never minded, not really. I held still for it. I would’ve, just for always, because with it all you did your own thing, you were a free soul.”
“I’ve always done my own thing,” said Mensch, “and I did so tell you why.”
She made a disgusted sound. “Who could understand all that?” It was dismissal, an old one; something she had recalled and worked over and failed to understand for years, a thing that made tiredness. “And you used to love people – really love them. Like the time that kid wiped out the fire hydrant and the streetlight in front of the house and you fought off the fuzz and the schlock lawyer and the ambulance and everybody, and got him to the hospital and wouldn’t let him sign the papers because he was dazed. And turning that cheap hotel upside down to find Victor’s false teeth and bring them to him after they put him in jail. And sitting all day in the waiting room the time Mrs. What’s-her-name went for her first throat cancer treatment, so you could take her home, you didn’t even know her. There wasn’t anything you wouldn’t do for people.”
“I’ve always done what I could. I didn’t stop.”
Scorn. “So did Henry Ford. Andrew Carnegie. The Krupp family. Thousands of jobs, billions in taxes for everybody. I know the stories.”
“My story’s not quite the same,” he said mildly.
Then she said it all, without hate or passion or even much emphasis; she said in a burnt-out voice, “We loved each other and you walked out.”
They loved each other. Her name was Fauna; it once was a small joke between them. Fauna the Animal and Mensch the Man, and the thing they had between them. “Sodom is a-cumen in,” he misquoted Chaucer, “Lewd sing cuckold” (because she had a husband back there somewhere amongst the harpsichord lessons and the mildewed unfinished hooked rugs and the skeleton of a play and all the other abandoned projects in the attic of her life). Mensch was the first one she could have carried through, all the way. She was one of those people who waits for the right thing to come along and drops all others as soon as she finds out they aren’t the main one. When someone like that gets the right thing, it’s forever, and everyone says, my how you’ve changed. She hasn’t changed.
But then when the right thing comes along, and it doesn’t work out, she’ll never finish anything again. Never.
They were both very young when they met and she had a little house back in the woods near one of those resort towns that has a reputation for being touristy-artsy-craftsy and actually does have a sprinkling of real artists in and around it. Kooky people are more than tolerated in places like that providing only that (a) they attract, or at least do not repel, the tourists and (b) they never make any important money. Nothing disturbs the people who really run a town like that more than an oddball who strikes it rich; people begin to listen to him, and that could change things. Fauna wasn’t about to change things. She was a slender pretty girl who liked to be naked under loose floor-length gowns and take care of sick things as long as they couldn’t talk – brokenwing birds and philodendrons and the like – and lots of music – lots of kinds of music; and cleverly doing things she wouldn’t finish until the real thing came along. She had a solid title to the little house and a part-time job in the local frame shop; she was picturesque and undemanding and never got involved in marches and petitions and the like. She just believed in being kind to everyone around her and thought . . . well, that’s not quite right. She hadn’t ever thought it out all the way, but she felt that if you’re kind to everyone the kindness will somehow spread over the world like a healing stain, and that’s what you do about wars and greed and injustice. So she was an acceptable, almost approved fixture in the town even when they paved her dirt road and put the lamppost and fire hydrant in front of it. Mensch came into this with long hair and a guitar strapped to his back, a head full of good books and a lot of very serious restlessness. He moved in with Fauna the day after she discovered his guitar was tuned like a lute. He had busy hands too, and a way of finishing what he started, yes, and making a dozen more like them – beautifully designed kitchen pads for shopping lists made out of hand-rubbed local woods, which used adding-machine rolls and had a hunk of hacksaw blade down at the bottom so you could neatly tear off a little or a lot, and authentic reproductions of fireplace bellows and apple-peelers and stuff like that which could be displayed on the shoppes (not stores, they were shoppes) on the village green, and bring in his share. Also he knew about transistors and double-helical gears and eccentric linkages and things like Wankels and fuel cells. He fiddled around a lot in the back room with magnets and axles and colored fluids of various kinds, and one day he had an idea and began fooling with scissors and cardboard and some metal parts. It was mostly frame and a rotor, but it was made of certain things in a certain way. When he put it together the rotor began to spin, and he suddenly understood it. He made a very slight adjustment and the rotor, which was mostly cardboard, uttered a shrill rising sound and spun so fast that the axle, a tenpenny nail, chewed right through the cardboard bearings and the rotor took off and flew across the room, showering little unglued metal bits. He made no effort to collect the parts, but stood up blindly and walked into the other room. Fauna took one look at him and ran to him and held him: what is it? what’s the matter? but he just stood there looking stricken until the tears began rolling down his cheeks. He didn’t seem to know it.
That was when he began moaning suddenly in the middle of the night, jumping up and walking around in the dark. When she said years later that he would never tell her why, it was true, and it wasn’t, because what he told her was that he had something in his head so important that certain people would kill him to get it, and certain other people would kill him to suppress it, and that he wouldn’t tell her what it was because he loved her and didn’t want her in danger. She cried a lot and said he didn’t trust her, and he said he did, but he wanted to take care of her, not throw her to the wolves. He also said – and this is what the moaning and nightwalking was all about – that the thing in his head could make the deserts bloom and could feed hungry people all over the world, but that if he let it loose it could be like a plague too, not because of what it was but because of what people would do with it; and the very first person who died because of it would die because of him, and he couldn’t bear the idea of that. He really had a choice to make, but before he could make it he had to decide whether the death of one person was too great a price to pay for the happiness and security of millions, and then if the deaths of a thousand would be justified if it meant the end of poverty for all. He knew history and psychology and he had a mathematician’s head as well as those cobbler’s hands, and he knew damned well what would happen if he took this way or that. For example, he knew where he could unload the idea and all responsibility for it for enough money to keep him and Fauna – and a couple hundred close friends, if it came to that – in total luxury for the rest of their lives; all he would have to do would be to sign it away and see it buried forever in a corporate vault, for there were at least three industrial giants which would urgently bid against one another for the privilege.
Or kill him.
He also thought of making blueprints and scattering millions of copies over cities all over the world, and of finding good ethical scientists and engineers and banding them together into a firm which would manufacture and license the device and use it only for good things. Well you can do that with a new kind of rat-killer or sewing machine, but not with something so potent that it will change the face of the earth, eliminate hunger, smog, and the rape of raw materials – not when it will also eliminate the petrochemical industry (except for dyes and plastics), the electric-power companies, the internal-combustion engine and everything involved in making it and fueling it, and even atomic energy for most of its purposes.
Mensch tried his very best to decide not to do anything at all about it, which was the moaning and nightwalking interval, and that just wouldn’t work – the thing would not let him go. Then he decided what to do, and what he must do in order to do it. His first stop was at the town barbershop.
Fauna held still for this and for his getting a job at Flextronics, the town’s light industry, which had government contracts for small computer parts and which was scorned by the town’s art, literature and library segment. The regular hours appalled her, and although he acted the same (he certainly didn’t look the same) around the house, she became deeply troubled. She had never seen so much money as he brought in every payday, and didn’t want to, and for the first time in her life had to get stubborn about patching and improvising and doing without instead of being able to blame poverty for it. The reasons she found now for living that way seemed specious even to her, which only made her stubborn about it, and more of a kook than ever. Then he bought a car, which seemed to her an immorality of sorts.
What tore it was when somebody told her he had gone to the town-board meeting, which she had never done, and had proposed that the town pass ordinances against sitting on the grass on the village green, playing musical instruments on town thoroughfares, swimming at the town swimming hole after sundown, and finally, hiring more police. When she demanded an explanation he looked at her sadly for a long time, then would not deny it, would not discuss it, and moved out.
He got a clean room in a very square boarding house near the factory, worked like hell until he got his college credits straightened out, went to night school until he had another degree. He took to hanging around the Legion post on Saturday nights and drank a little beer and bought a lot of whiskey for other people. He learned a whole portfolio of dirty jokes and dispensed them carefully, two-thirds sex, one-third bathroom. Finally he took a leave of absence from his job, which was, by this time, section manager, and moved down the river to a college town where he worked full time on a postgraduate engineering degree while going to night school to study law. The going was very tough around then because he had to pinch every nickel to be able to make it and still keep his pants creased and his brown shoes shiny, which he did. He still found time to join the local church and become a member of the vestry board and a lay preacher, taking as his text the homilies from Poor Richard’s Almanac and delivering them (as did their author) as if he believed every word.
When it was time he redesigned his device, not with cardboard and glue, but with machined parts that were 70 percent monkey-puzzle-mechanical motions that canceled each other out, and wiring which energized coils which shorted themselves out, He patented parts and certain groupings of parts, and finally the whole contraption. He then took his degrees and graduate degrees, his published scholarly papers, his patents and his short haircut, together with a letter of introduction from his pastor, to a bank, and borrowed enough to buy into a failing company which made portable conveyor belts. His device was built into the drive segment, and he went on the road to sell the thing. It sold very well. It should. A six-volt automobile battery would load coal with that thing for a year without needing replacement or recharging, and no wonder, because the loading was being powered by that little black lump in the drive segment, which, though no bigger than a breadbox, and requiring no fuel, would silently and powerfully spin a shaft until the bearings wore out.
It wasn’t too long before the competition was buying Mensch’s loaders and tearing them down to see where all that obscene efficiency was coming from. The monkey-puzzle was enough to defeat most of them, but one or two bright young men and a grizzled oldster or so were able to realize that they were looking at something no bigger than a breadbox which would turn a shaft indefinitely without fuel, and wonder what things would be like with this gadget under the hood of a car or in the nacelles of aircraft, or pumping water in the desert, or generating light and power ‘way back in the hills and jungles without having to build roads or railways or to string power lines. Some of these men found their way to Mensch. Either he hired them and tied them up tight with ropes of gold and fringe benefits, or had them watched and dissuaded, or discredited, or, if need be, ruined.
Inevitably someone was able to duplicate the Mensch effect, but by that time Mensch had a whole office building full of lawyers with their pencils sharpened and their instructions ready. The shrewd operator who had duplicated the effect, and who had sunk everything he had and could borrow into retooling an engine factory for it, found himself in such a snarl of infringement, torts, ceases-and-desists, and prepaid royalty demands that he sold his plant at cost to Mensch and gratefully accepted a job managing it. And he was only the first.
The military moved in at about this point, but Mensch was ready for them and their plans to take over his patents and holdings as a national resource. He let himself be bunted higher and higher in the chain of command, while his refusals grew stronger and stronger and the threats greater and greater, until he emerged at the top in the company of the civilian who commanded them all. This meeting was brought about by a bishop, for never in all these busy years did Mensch overlook his weekly duty at the church of his choice, nor his tithes, nor his donations of time for an occasional Vacation Bible School or picnic or bazaar. And Mensch, on this pinnacle of wealth, power and respectability, was able to show the President the duplicate set of documents he had placed in a Swiss bank, which, on the day his patents were preempted by the military, would donate them to research institutes in Albania and points north and east. That was the end of that.
The following year a Mensch-powered car won the Indy. It wasn’t as fast as the Granatelli entry; it just voomed around and around the brickyard without making any stops at all. There was, of course, a certain amount of static for a while, but the inevitable end was that the automobile industry capitulated, and with it the fossil-fuel people. Electric light and power had to follow and, as the gas and steam and diesel power sources obsolesce and are replaced by Mensch prime movers, the atomic plants await their turn.
It was right after the Indianapolis victory that Mensch donated his blueprints to Albania anyway – after all, he had never said he wouldn’t – and they showed up about the same time in Hong Kong and quickly reached the mainland. There was a shrill claim from the Soviet Union that the Mensch Effect had been discovered in the nineteenth century by Siolkovsky, who had set it aside because he was more interested in rockets, but even the Russians couldn’t keep that up for long without laughing along with the audience, and they fell to outstripping all other nations in development work. No monkey-puzzle on earth can survive this kind of effort – monkey-puzzles need jungles of patent law to live and thrive – and it was not long before the Soviets (actually, it was a Czech scientist, which is the same thing, isn’t it? Well, the Soviets said it was) were able to proclaim that they had improved and refined the device to a simple frame supporting one moving part, the rotor: each made, of course, of certain simple substances which, when assembled, began to work. It was, of course, the same frame and rotor with which Mensch, in terror and tears, had begun his long career, and the Czech, that is, Soviet “refinement” was, like all else, what he had predicted and aimed himself toward.
For now there wasn’t a mechanics magazine in the world, nor hardly a tinkerer’s workshop anywhere, that didn’t begin turning out Mensch rotors. Infringements occurred so widely that even Mensch’s skyscraperful of legal-eagles couldn’t have begun to stem the flood. And indeed they did not try, because –
For the second time in modern history (the first was an extraordinary man named Kemal Ataturk) a man of true national dictator stature set his goal, achieved it, and abdicated. It didn’t matter one bit to Mensch that the wiser editorialists, with their knowledgeable index fingers placed alongside their noses, were pointing out that he had defeated himself, shattered his own empire by extending its borders, and that by releasing his patents into the public domain he was making an empty gesture to the inevitable. Mensch knew what he had done, and why, and what other people thought of it just did not matter.
“What does matter,” he said to Fauna in her little house by the old fire hydrant and the quaint streetlamp, “is that there isn’t a kraal in Africa or a hamlet in Asia that can’t pump water and plow land and heat and light its houses by using a power plant simple enough to be built by any competent mechanic anywhere. There are little ones to rock cradles and power toys and big ones to light whole cities. They pull trains and sharpen pencils, and they need no fuel. Already desalted Mediterranean water is pouring into the northern Sahara; there’ll be whole new cities there, just as there were five thousand years ago. In ten years the air all over the earth will be measurably cleaner, and already the demand for oil is down so much that offshore drilling is almost completely stopped. ‘Have’ and ‘have-not’ no longer mean what they once meant, because everyone has access to cheap power. And that’s why I did it, don’t you see?” He really wanted very much to make her understand.
“You cut your hair,” she said bitterly. “You wore those awful shoes and went to church and got college degrees and turned into a – a typhoon.”
“Tycoon,” he corrected absently. “Ah, but Fauna, listen: remember when we were kids, how there were protests and riots in the universities? Think of just one small aspect of that. Suppose a crowd of students wanted to take the administration building – how did they do it? They swarmed up the roads and sidewalks, didn’t they? Now – oh hear me out!” for she was beginning to shake her head, open her mouth to interrupt. “Up the roads and sidewalks. Now when those roads and walks were built, the planners and architects didn’t put them there to be used that way, did they? But that doesn’t matter – when the mob wants to get to the administration building, they take the road that’s there. And that’s all I did. The way to get what I wanted was short hair, was brown shoes, was published postgraduate papers, was the banks and businesses and government and all of those things that were already there for me to use.”
“You didn’t need all that. I think you just wanted to move things and shake things and be in the newspapers and history books. You could’ve made your old motor right here in this house and showed it to people and sold it and stayed here and played the lute, and it would have been the same thing.”
“No, there you’re wrong,” said Mensch. “Do you know what kind of a world we live in? We live in a world where, if a man came up with a sure cure for cancer, and if that man were found to be married to his sister, his neighbors would righteously burn down his house and all his notes. If a man built the most beautiful tower in the country, and that man later begins to believe that Satan should be worshipped, they’ll blow up his tower. I know a great and moving book written by a woman who later went quite crazy and wrote crazy books, and nobody will read her great one any more. I can name three kinds of mental therapy that could have changed the face of the earth, and in each case the men who found it went on to insane Institutes and so-called religions and made fools of themselves – dangerous fools at that – and now no one will look at their really great early discoveries. Great politicians have been prevented from being great statesmen because they were divorced. And I wasn’t going to have the Mensch machine stolen or buried or laughed at and forgotten just because I had long hair and played the lute. You know, it’s easy to have long hair and play the lute and be kind to people when everyone else around you is doing it. It’s a much harder thing to be the one who does it first, because then you have to pay a price, you get jeered at and they throw stones and shut you out.”
“So you joined them,” she accused.
“I used them,” he said flatly. “I used every road and path that led to where I was going, no matter who built it or what it was built for.”
“And you paid your price,” she all but snarled. “Millions in the bank, thousands of people ready to fall on their knees if you snap your fingers. Some price. You could have had love.”
He stood up then and looked at her. Her hair was much thinner now, but still long and fine. He reached for it, lifted some. It was white. He let it go.
He thought of fat Biafran babies and clean air and unpolluted beaches, cheaper food, cheaper transportation, cheaper manufacturing and maintenance, more land to lessen the pressures and hysteria during the long slow process of population control. What had moved him to deny himself so much, to rebel, to move and shake and shatter the status quo the way he had, rather than conforming – conforming! – to long hair and a lute? You could have had love.
“But I did,” he said; and then, knowing she would never, could never understand, he got in his silent fuelless car and left.
Copyright © 1969 Knight Publishing Corp. Published by permission of The Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust c/o The Lotts Agency, Ltd.