The Perfect Host by Theodore Sturgeon

Author:Theodore Sturgeon [Sturgeon, Theodore]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-58394-749-4
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2013-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

They started by giving me something I didn’t want—but wasn’t that the whole trouble? This time it was a sort of surprise party and testimonial dinner. I guess I was a little sour. They didn’t understand. Crispin, he tried to make me feel better by guaranteeing that he’d see to it I was paid twice over for breaking my radio contract. Fawn—well, Fawn shouldn’t have been so sweet to me. That was a huge mistake. Anyway, there was a dinner and some drinks and Crispin and Skid and Moff and them got up one by one and said what a fine cat I was. Then they all sat around playing “remember when” and passing remarks to the empty chair at the head of the table where Lutch’s clarinet was. It was a fine party.

After that I went to work. What they saw me doing was “Is coming a sizzle-swizzle for Rum and Coca Cola, featuring the Id-kid, Skid, and his supercharged git-fiddle, so look out!” And “We got a dream-scheme, kizd, all soft and lofty, smooth, forsooth, but full of nerve-verve. Hey Moff, stroke these quiet cats with Velvet Paws …” So—I helped them.

What I was doing was trying to find Lutch so’s I could kill him. You should have been a fly on the wall to hear those slave-sessions. Take a tune, find old Lutch, mix ’em up, make ’em be something new that’s styled like something they wouldn’t let be dead. So—they helped me.

I could have killed Lutch by killing the lot of them. I never did discard that idea. But maybe I’m lazy. Somewhere in that aggregation was the essence of what was Lutch. If I could smoke that out and kill it, he’d be dead. I knew that. It was just a matter of finding out what it was. It shouldn’t have been much trouble. Hell, I knew that outfit inside out—performers, arrangements, even what they liked to eat. I told you—there was damn little turnover there. And in the music business people show up real soon for what they are.

But it wasn’t easy.

That outfit was like a machine made for a very special purpose—but made all out of standard parts you could buy on the open market. That isn’t to say that some of the parts weren’t strictly upper-bracket; all of them were machined to a millionth. But I couldn’t believe that what Lutch called “unit” was the thing that made the group an individual, great one. If Lutch had been around, you could’ve said that Lutch made the difference between a good machine and something alive. But Lutch wasn’t around, and the thing still lived. Lutch had put the life in it, by choosing the right pieces and giving them the right push. After that the thing ran under its own power—the power of life—and Lutch Crawford wouldn’t be dead until that life was gone. It was going to be him or me.

So I helped them. We had club and hotel dates, and we made records, and in keeping Lutch alive, I helped them.

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