A Touch of Strange by Theodore Sturgeon

Author:Theodore Sturgeon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-04-12T16:00:00+00:00

It Opens the Sky

Opportunity knocked again, this time right on the eyeball, making him blink.

Deeming had stopped at a crosswalk—he lived in one of the few parts of town where streets still crossed on the same level—and was waiting for the light to change, when on the post by his head, right at eye level, a hand appeared. It wore a thin gold band and a watch. It was the watch that made him blink. He’d seen only one like it in his life before, a beautifully made little thing with slender carved-ruby numerals and, instead of hands, the ability to make its rubies glow one at a time for the hours, and a ruddy-amber pip of light float mysteriously at the right minute. It was geomagnetically powered and wouldn’t wear out or run down for a thousand years. It came from someplace in the Crab Nebulae, where the smallest intelligent life form yet known to man did a brisk trade in precision engineering.

Deeming tore his gaze away from the watch and followed its wrist and arm down to its owner. Deeming was not especially fond of animals, but he categorized his women with a zoological code. They were chicks, fillies, bunnies, and dogs, in descending order of appeal.

This one was a goat.

She looked as if she had packed sixty years of living into thirty-five plus. She had half a bag on already, though it was still early in the evening, which accounted for her holding the pole up while she waited with him for the light to change. She had not noticed him, which was fine, and he acted just as abstracted as she was.

I’ll give it two hours, he thought, and then, as she sagged slightly and caught her balance too quickly and too much, as befits any drunk passing through dignity on the way to sloppiness, he made it ninety minutes. That watch is mine in ninety minutes. Bet?

The light changed and he strode out ahead of her. Just past the comer he stopped to look in a display window and see her reflection as she approached, stiff but listing a bit to port. He let her pass him and then to his delight saw her step into a cocktail bar. He went the other way, rounded the corner, entered a restaurant, and went straight back to the men’s

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room. He had it to himself for the moment, and a moment was all he needed. Off came the stiff, clipped mustache; out came the golden-brown contact lenses, so that now his eyes were blue. He combed the part out of his flat black hair and set up waves. Half-inch inserts came out of his side pockets and were slipped into his heels, to change his gait and increase his already considerable height. He took off his jacket and turned it inside out, so that he was no longer drab and monochrome, as befitted Mr. Deeming, second assistant to the assistant desk man at the Rotoril Hotel, but sport-jacketed and cocky the way Jimmy the Flick ought to be.

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