Gus silently watched Halsey strike out his third batter in a row, and his face wrinkled into a slow smile. Halsey was still young; just hitting his stride. He threw himself into the game with all the energy and enjoyment a man felt when he realized he was at his peak, and that, out there on the mound in the sun, he was as good as any man who ever had gone before him in this profession.
Gus wondered how soon Halsey would see the trap he’d set for himself.
Because it wasn’t a contest. Not for Halsey. For Christy Mathewson, it had been a contest. For Lefty Grove and Dizzy Dean, for Bob Feller and Slats Gould, it had been a contest. But for Halsey it was just a complicated form of solitaire that always came out right.
Pretty soon, Halsey’d realize that you can’t handicap yourself at solitaire. If you knew where all the cards are; if you knew that unless you deliberately cheated against yourself, you couldn’t help but win—what good was it? One of these days, Halsey’d realize there wasn’t a game on Earth he couldn’t beat; whether it was a physical contest, organized and formally recognized as a game, or whether it was the billion-triggered pinball machine called Society.
What then, Halsey? What then? And ‘if you find out, please, in the name of whatever kind of brotherhood we share, let me know.
The clerk grunted. “Well, it don’t matter, I guess. I can always look it up in the record book at home.”
Yes, you can, Gus commented silently. But you won’t, notice what it says, and, if you do, you’ll forget it and never realize you’ve forgotten.
The clerk finished his beer, set it down on the tray, and was free to remember what he’d come here for. He looked around the room again, as though the memory were a cue of some kind.
“Lots of books.” he commented.
Gus nodded, watching Halsey walk out to the pitcher’s mound again.
“Uh… you read ‘em all?”
Gus shook his head.
“How about that one by that Miller fellow? I hear that’s a pretty good one.”
So. The clerk had a certain narrow interest in certain aspects of certain kinds of literature.
“I suppose it is,” Gus answered truthfully. “I read the first three pages, once.” And, having done so, he’d known how the rest of it was going to go, who would do what when, and he’d lost interest. The library had been a mistake, just one of a dozen similar experiments. If he’d wanted an academic familiarity with human literature, he could just as easily have picked it up by browsing through bookstores, rather than buying the books and doing substantially the same thing at home. He couldn’t hope to extract any emotional empathies, no matter what he did.
Face it, though; rows of even useless books were better than bare wall. The trappings of culture were a bulwark of sorts, even though it was a learned culture and not a felt one, and meant no more to him than the culture of the Incas. Try as he might, he could never be an Inca. Nor even a Maya or an Aztec, or any kind of kin, except by the most tenuous of extensions.
But he had no culture of his own. There was the thing; the emptiness that nevertheless ached; the rootlessness, the complete absence of a place to stand and say: “This is my own.”
Halsey struck out the first batter in the inning with three pitches. Then he put a slow floater precisely where the next man could get the best part of his bat on it, and did not even look up as the ball screamed out of the park. He struck out the next two men with a total of eight pitches.
Gus shook his head slowly. That was the first symptom; when you didn’t bother to be subtle about your handicapping any more.
The clerk held out the envelope. “Here,” he said brusquely, having finally shilly-shallied his resolution up to the point of doing it despite his obvious nervousness at Gus’ probable reaction.
Gus opened the envelope and read the notice. Then, just as the clerk had been doing, he looked around the room. A dark expression must have flickered over his face, because the clerk became even more hesitant. “I… I want you to know I regret this. I guess all of us do.”
Gus nodded hastily. “Sure, sure.” He stood up and looked out the front window. He smiled crookedly, looking at the top-dressing spread carefully over the painstakingly rolled lawn, which was slowly taking form on the plot where he had plowed last year and picked out pebbles, seeded and watered, shoveled topsoil, laid out flower beds… ah, there was no use going into that now. The whole plot, cottage and all, was condemned, and that was that.
“They’re… they’re turnin’ the road into a twelve-lane freight highway,” the clerk explained.
Gus nodded absently.
The clerk moved closer and dropped his voice. “Look— I was told to tell you this. Not in writin’.” He sidled even closer, and actually looked around before he spoke. He laid his hand confidentially on Gus’ bare forearm.
“Any price you ask for,” he muttered, “is gonna be O.K., as long as you don’t get too greedy. The county isn’t paying this bill. Not even the state, if you get what I mean.”
Gus got what he meant. Twelve-lane highways aren’t built by anything but national governments.
He got more than that. National governments don’t work this way unless there’s a good reason.
“Highway between Hollister and Farnham?” he asked..
The clerk paled. “Don’t know for sure,” he muttered.
Gus smiled thinly. Let the clerk wonder how he’d guessed. It couldn’t be much of a secret, anyway—not after the grade was laid out and the purpose became self-evident. Besides, the clerk wouldn’t wonder very long.
A streak of complete perversity shot through Gus. He recognized its source in his anger at losing the cottage, but there was no reason why he shouldn’t allow himself to cut loose.
“What’s your name?” he asked the clerk abruptly.
“Uh… Harry Danvers.”
“Well, Harry, suppose I told you I could stop that highway, if I wanted to? Suppose I told you that no bulldozer could get near this place without breaking down, that no shovel could dig this ground, that sticks of dynamite just plain wouldn’t explode if they tried to blast? Suppose I told you that if they did put in the highway, it would turn soft as ice cream if I wanted it to, and run away like a river?”
“Huh?”
“Hand me your pen.”
Danvers reached out mechanically and handed it to him. Gus put it between his palms and rolled it into a ball. He dropped it and caught it as it bounced up sharply from the soft, thick rug. He pulled it out between his fingers, and it returned to its cylindrical shape. He unscrewed the cap, flattened it out into a sheet between two fingers, scribbled on it, rolled it back into a cap, and, using his fingernail to draw out the ink which was now part of it, permanently inscribed Danvers’ name just below the surface of the metal. Then he screwed the cap on again and handed the pen back to the county clerk. “Souvenir,” he said.
The clerk looked down at it.
“Well?” Gus asked. “Aren’t you curious about how I did it and what I am?”
The clerk shook his head. “Good trick. I guess you magician fellows must spend a lot of time practicing, huh? Can’t say I could see myself spendin’ that much working time on a hobby.”
Gus nodded. “That’s a good, sound, practical point of view,” he said. Particularly when all of us automatically put out a field that damps curiosity, he thought. What point of view could you have?
He looked over the clerk’s shoulder at the lawn, and one side of his mouth twisted sadly.