I read an awful amount of science fiction while growing up in a small Cotswold town, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. An addiction chiefly fed by the local public library and, in Woolworths, trays of cheap paperbacks and magazines from the US, supposedly shipped across the Atlantic as ballast, which is where I discovered a collection by Theodore Sturgeon, and this story. Unlike that of most of his contemporaries in the so-called Golden Age of SF, Sturgeon’s fiction is emotionally complex, sometimes sexually challenging and always humane. This brief tale is barely fantasy: its dreams of escape interrogate genre fiction’s escapist stories. The protagonist (who shares my first name, which seemed significant to me back then) is a bright young boy who runs away from the suffocating milieu of his small town, where nothing much changes. When he reaches the highway, an expensive car draws up and its driver, a caricature of a self-important business man, with an exotic woman at his side and chocolate-covered cherries in the glove compartment, boasts about the fortune he’s made and asks for directions to the place he left twenty years ago, telling the boy, Paul, that he aims to give “give the folks in the old town a treat”. Paul points out the way and accepts a handful of cherries, but cherries and car vanish as he walks on, he tells himself “It’ll just be like that,” and we realise that the businessman was his fantasy of what he might become: that the narrative, a perfectly pitched parody of pulp fiction cliches, is fed by his imagination. He dreams up two more unlikely future selves – a globe-trotting hobo with a maimed hand, and the dashing pilot of a sleek aeroplane – before the town sheriff draws up in his patrol car, reality reasserts itself, and Paul decides to go home. All the other ways of getting back – making a killing on the stock market, acquiring an aeroplane, even losing his hand – would take too long, he thinks, but the sheriff’s car “would go right past his house, soon’s it got in town. Wasn’t much of a house. In it, though, was his own room. Small, but absolutely his own.”
First published in Amazing Stories, 1953. Collected in A Way Home: Stories of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1955 and Thunder and Roses, Gateway/Orion, 2003
A Personal Anthology 