wrong, but he counters that Siam is real only on
his sufferance and that it would vanish com-
pletely if he stopped believing in it.
He only partly believes this himself, but when
Judith begins to get angry, he jokingly offers to
prove his point by wishing a tree out of existence.
To their mutual surprise, he succeeds and is unable
to restore it because once it is gone, he clearly can-
not believe in its existence, because it has none. Ju-
dith is alternately intrigued and alarmed, but
Woodie relishes his sudden power and experiments
by picturing a rival lying injured on the floor. Real-
ity changes accordingly. Predictably, things begin to
get out of hand because he cannot stop himself
from being skeptical about certain things. An un-
likely looking fish results in the extinction of the
entire species. Certain laws of nature make no
sense to him, but he consciously stops thinking
about them in order not to introduce further chaos
into the world.
The story then makes a significant digression
in the form of Drip, Woodie’s paranoid friend.
Woodie is now able to see the world through his
eyes for some reason and discovers that Drip has
manufactured an entire ecology of horrible mon-
sters that are visible and tangible only to him. Ap-
palled, Woodie stops believing in Drip, thereby
disposing of both him and his creations, but that
opens the floodgates of disbelief. He begins to con-
sider the possibility that the entire universe is just a
dream, and when Judith walks out on him his last
anchor is lost. Ultimately, he wonders if he himself
is just a creation of his own imagination, and the
final sentence of the story is, significantly, left un-
completed.
Sturgeon makes playful use of a familiar
philosophical issue. Despite a plot structure that
rambles, “The Ultimate Egotist” has undeniable
power and remains one of the author’s most mem-
orable, if not technically impressive, works. Ursula
K. LE GUINwould use the concept of the ultimate
egotist with only a slight change in structure for
her science fiction novel The Lathe of Heaven
(1971).
“The Upper Berth”F. Marion Crawford
(1894)
Oceangoing vessels have been a popular setting
for ghost and horror stories ever since “The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner,” by Samuel Taylor Co-
leridge. Writers such as William Hope HODGSON
and Frederick Marryatt wrote classic ghost stories
set at sea, but neither ever surpassed this enig-
matic tale of a haunted stateroom. The story is
framed in a familiar manner, a group of men
swapping stories, of which this one proves to be
the best. Brisbane is a quiet but impressive man,
and his account of his last voyage aboard the
Kamtschatkais truly frightening.
He suspects something is wrong from the out-
set when the steward expresses surprise that Bris-
bane has been assigned to stateroom 105.
Although he declines to be specific, he hints that
bad things have happened there in the past. Bris-
bane is not easily cowed, however, and declines to
move even when the ship’s doctor informs him
that the three previous passengers from that par-
ticular stateroom all threw themselves over the rail
at night and perished. Fortunately, he takes the
lower berth, because his cabin mate leaps from his
berth in the middle of the night and rushes out,
never to be seen again. Perhaps even more unset-
tling is the porthole in the cabin, which opens and
locks itself in place even when firmly closed.
Brisbane is intrigued rather than frightened
and declines an offer from the captain to be relo-
cated. The captain then volunteers to keep watch
with him during the night, and the two observe a
series of strange events, the opening of the port-
hole, an unusual odor, and a conviction that some-
thing conscious is suddenly present in the upper
berth. Although they both survive, Brisbane is at
last convinced that he is witnessing the uncanny
and vows never to set foot near the stateroom
again. Although Crawford never explains the rea-
son for the haunting and refrains from describing
the horrors in any detail, the suggestive hints and
sense of supernatural dread are particularly well
handled in what is probably his best single story.360 “The Upper Berth”