The Nail and the Oracle by Theodore Sturgeon Page B

world and the sin of its inhabitants to theirrefusal to heed those Rules. But in his ponderings, God Himself, he at last devoutly concluded, had underestimated the stupidity of mankind. So he undertook to amend the Decalogue himself, by adding “… or cause …” to each Commandment, just to make it easier for a man to work with:
    “… or cause the Name of the Lord to be taken in vain.”
    “… or cause stealing to be done.”
    “… or cause dishonor to thy father and thy mother.”
    “… or cause the commission of adultery.”
    “… or cause a killing to be done.”
    But his revelation came to him when he came to the last one. It was suddenly clear to him that all mankind’s folly—all greed, lust, war, all dishonor—sprang from humanity’s almost total disregard for this edict and its amendment: “Thou shall not covet … 
nor cause covetousness!
”
    It came to him then that to arouse covetousness in another is just as deadly a sin as to kill him or to cause his murder. Yet all around the world empires rose, great yachts and castles and hanging gardens came into being, tombs and trusts and college grants, all for the purpose of arousing the envy or covetousness of the less endowed—or having that effect no matter what the motive.
    Now, one way for a man as rich as Gamaliel Wyke to have resolved the matter for himself would be St. Francis’ way; but (though he could not admit this, or even recognize it) he would have discarded the Decalogue and his amendments, all surrounding Scripture and his gnarled right arm rather than run so counter to his inborn, ingrained Yankee acquisitiveness. And another way might have been to take his riches and bury them in the sand of Martha’s Vineyard, to keep them from causing covetousness; the very thought clogged his nostrils with the feel of dune-sand and he felt suffocation; to him money was a living thing and should not be interred.
    And so he came to his ultimate answer: Make your money, enjoy it, but
never let anyone know
. Desire, he concluded, for a neighbor’s wife, or a neighbor’s ass, or for anything, presupposed knowing about these possessions. No neighbor could desire anything of his if he couldn’t lay a name to it.
    So Gamaliel brought weight like granite and force like gravity to bear upon the mind and soul of his son Walter, and Walter begat Jedediah, and Jedediah begat Caiaphas (who died) and Samuel, and Samuel began Zebulon (who died) and Sylva; so perhaps the true beginning of the story of the boy who became his own mother lies with Cap’n Gamaliel Wyke and his sand-scoured, sea-deep, rock-hard revelation.
    —fell on his side on the bed and doubled up, grunting, gasping, wrapped away from her, even her, unreachable even by her.
    She screamed. She screamed. She pressed herself up and away from him and ran naked into the sitting room, pawed up the ivory telephone: “Keogh,” she cried; “For the love of God,
Keogh!
”
    —and back into the bedroom where he lay open-mouthing a grating horrible
uh uh!
while she wrung her hands, tried to take one of his, found it agony-tense and unaware of her. She called him, called him, and once, screamed again.
    The buzzer sounded with inexcusable discretion.
    “Keogh!” she shouted, and the polite buzzer
shhh
’d her again—the lock, oh the damned lock … she picked up her negligee and ran with it in her hand through the dressing room and the sitting room and the hall and the living room and the foyer and flung open the door. She pulled Keogh through it before he could turn away from her; she thrust one arm in a sleeve of the garment and shouted at him, “Keogh, please, please, Keogh, what’s wrong with him?” and she fled to the bedroom, Keogh sprinting to keep up with her.
    Then Keogh, chairman of the board of seven great corporations, board-member of a dozen more, general manager of a quiet family holding company which had, for most of a century, specialized in the ownership of corporate