But all things have to end, and one May afternoon I sat staring into my top desk drawer, the last to be cleaned out, wondering what to do with the accumulation of useless things in it. But I wasn’t really seeing the contents of the drawer, I was concentrating on the great weary emptiness that pressed my shoulders down and weighted my mind. “It’s not fair,” I muttered aloud and illogically, “to show me heaven and then snatch it away.”
“That’s about what happened to Moses, too, you know.”
My surprised start spilled an assortment of paper clips and thumbtacks from the battered box I had just picked up.
“Well, forevermore!” I said, righting the box. “Dr. Curtis! What are you doing here?”
“Returning to the scene of my crime,” he smiled, coming through the open door. “Can’t keep my mind off Abie. Can’t believe he recovered from all that—shall we call it repair work? I have to check him every time I’m anywhere near this part of the country—and I still can’t believe it.”
“But he has.”
“He has for sure! I had to fish him down from a treetop to look him over—” The doctor shuddered dramatically and laughed. “To see him hurtling down from the top of that tree curdled my blood! But there’s hardly even a visible scar left.”
“I know,” I said, jabbing my finger as I started to gather up the tacks. “I looked last night. I’m leaving tomorrow, you know.” I kept my eyes resolutely down to the job at hand. “I have this last straightening up to do.”
“It’s hard, isn’t it?” he said, and we both knew he wasn’t talking about straightening up.
“Yes,” I said soberly. “Awfully hard. Earth gets heavier every day.”
“I find it so lately, too. But at least you have the satisfaction of knowing that you—”
I moved uncomfortably and laughed.
“Well, they do say: those as can, do; those as can’t, teach.”
“Umm,” the doctor said noncommittally, but I could feel his eyes on my averted face and I swiveled away from him, groping for a better box to put the clips in.
“Going to summer school?” His voice came from near the windows.
“No,” I sniffed cautiously. “No, I swore when I got my Master’s that I was through with education—at least the kind that’s come-every-day-and-learn-something.”
“Hmm!” There was amusement in the doctor’s voice. “Too bad. I’m going to school this summer. Thought you might like to go there, too.”
“Where?” I asked bewildered, finally looking at him.
“Cougar Canyon summer school,” he smiled. “Most exclusive.”
“Cougar Canyon! Why that’s where Karen—”
“Exactly,” he said. “That’s where the other Group is established. I just came from there. Karen and Valancy want us both to come. Do you object to being an experiment?”
“Why, no—” I cried, and then, cautiously, “What kind of an experiment?” Visions of brains being carved up swam through my mind.
The doctor laughed. “Nothing as gruesome as you’re imagining, probably.” Then he sobered and sat on the edge of my desk. “I’ve been to Cougar Canyon a couple of times, trying to figure out some way to get Bethie to help me when I come up against a case that’s a puzzler. Valancy and Karen want to try a period of training with Outsiders—” that’s us—he grimaced wryly, “to see how much of what they are can be transmitted by training. You know Bethie is half Outsider. Only her mother was of the People.”
He was watching me intently.
“Yes,” I said absently, my mind whirling, “Karen told me.”
“Well, do you want to try it? Do you want to go?”
“Do I want to go!” I cried, scrambling the clips into a rubber-band box. “How soon do we leave? Half an hour? Ten minutes? Did you leave the motor running?”
“Woops, woops!” The doctor took me by both arms and looked soberly into my eyes.
“We can’t set our hopes too high,” he said quietly. “It may be that for such knowledge we aren’t teachable—”
I looked soberly back at him, my heart crying in fear that it might be so.
“Look,” I said slowly. “If you had a hunger, a great big gnawing-inside hunger and no money and you saw a bakery shop window, which would you do? Turn your back on it? Or would you press your nose as close as you could against the glass and let at least your eyes feast? I know what I’d do.” I reached for my sweater.
“And, you know, you never can tell. The shop door might open a crack, maybe—someday—”
NOBODY BOTHERS GUS
by Algis Budrys
Budrys is another boy who gives me trouble. He came into the science-fantasy field four years or so ago as a very young man with a very big talent. In the intervening years, I watched him—as I thought—trade that talent for a mess of wordage. He wrote prolifically, but seldom at his best.
He is still prolific; but his work in 1955 reached and maintained a consistent high level that puts him easily in a class with the best writers in the field today. Selecting just one story to include here was difficult. I chose Gus, finally, because it is the only story of a superman that I have found personally convincing since I read Olaf Stapledon’s “Odd John,” more years ago than I care to mention.
Two years earlier, Gus Kusevic had been driving slowly down the narrow back road into Boonesboro.
It was good country for slow driving, particularly in the late spring. There was nobody else on the road. The woods were just blooming into a deep, rich green as yet unburned by summer, and the afternoons were still cool and fresh. And, just before he reached the Boonesboro town line, he saw the locked and weathered cottage standing for sale on its quarter-acre lot.
He had pulled his roadcar up to a gentle stop, swung sideways in his seat, and looked at it.
It needed paint; the siding had gone from white to gray, and the trim was faded. There were shingles missing here and there from the roof, leaving squares of darkness on the sun-bleached rows of cedar, and inevitably, some of the windowpanes had cracked. But the frame hadn’t slouched out of square, and the roof hadn’t sagged. The chimney stood up straight.
He looked at the straggled clumps and windrowed hay that were all that remained of the shrubbery and the lawn. His broad, homely face bunched itself into a quiet smile along its well-worn seams. His hands itched for the feel of a spade.
He got out of the roadcar, walked across the road and up to the cottage door, and copied down the name of the real estate dealer listed on the card tacked to the doorframe.
Now it was almost two years later, early in April, and Gus was top-dressing his lawn.
Earlier in the day he’d set up a screen beside the pile of topsoil behind his house, shoveled the soil through the screen, mixed it with broken peat moss, and carted it out to the lawn, where he left it in small piles. Now he was carefully raking it out over the young grass in a thin layer that covered only the roots, and let the blades peep through. He intended to be finished by the time the second half of the Giants-Kodiaks doubleheader came on. He particularly wanted to see it because Halsey was pitching for the Kodiaks, and he had something of an avuncular interest in Halsey.
He worked without waste motion or excess expenditure of energy. Once or twice he stopped and had a beer in the shade of the rose arbor he’d put up around the front door. Nevertheless, the sun was hot; by early afternoon, he had his shirt off.
Just before he would hare been finished, a battered flivver settled down in front of the house. It parked with a flurry of its rotors, and a gangling man in a worn serge suit, with thin hair plastered across his tight scalp, climbed out and looked at Gus uncertainly.