The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy

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.

Gus had glanced up briefly while the flivver was on its silent way down. He’d made out the barely-legible “Falmouth County Clerk’s Office” lettered over the faded paint on its door, shrugged, and gone on with what he was doing.

Gus was a big man. His shoulders were heavy and broad; his chest was deep, grizzled with thick, iron-gray hair. His stomach had gotten a little heavier with the years, but the muscles were still there under the layer of flesh. His upper arms were thicker than a good many thighs, and his fore­arms were enormous.

His face was seamed by a network of folds and creases. His flat cheeks were marked out by two deep furrows that ran from the sides of his bent nose, merged with the creases bracketing his wide lips, and converged toward the blunt point of his jaw. His pale blue eyes twinkled above high cheekbones which were covered with wrinkles. His close-cropped hair was as white as cotton.

Only repeated and annoying exposure would give his body a tan, but his face was permanently browned. The pink of his body sunburn was broken in several places by white scar tissue. The thin line of a knife cut emerged from the tops of his pants and faded out across the right side of his stomach. The other significant area of scarring lay across the uneven knuckles of his heavy-fingered hands.

The clerk looked at the mailbox to make sure of the name, checking it against an envelope he was holding in one hand. He stopped and looked at Gus again, mysteri­ously nervous.

Gus abruptly realized that he probably didn’t present a reassuring appearance. With all the screening and raking he’d been doing, there’d been a lot of dust in the air. Mixed with perspiration, it was all over his face, chest, arms, and back. Gus knew he didn’t look very gentle even at his cleanest and best-dressed. At the moment, he couldn’t blame the clerk for being skittish.

He tried to smile disarmingly.

The clerk ran his tongue over his lips, cleared his throat with a slight cough, and jerked his head toward the mail-box. “Is that right? You Mr. Kusevic?” Gus nodded. “That’s right. What can I do for you?” The clerk held up the envelope. “Got a notice here from the County Council,” he muttered, but he was obviously much more taken up by his effort to equate Gus with the rose arbor, the neatly edged and carefully tended flower beds, the hedges, the flagstoned walk, the small goldfish pond under the willow tree, the white-painted cottage with its window boxes and bright shutters, and the curtains showing inside the sparkling windows.

Gus waited until the man was through with his obvious thoughts, but something deep inside him sighed quietly. He had gone through this moment of bewilderment with so many other people that he was quite accustomed to it, but that is not the same thing as being oblivious.

“Well, come on inside,” he said after a decent interval. “It’s pretty hot out here, and I’ve got some beer in the cooler.”

The clerk hesitated again. “Well, all I’ve got to do is deliver this notice—” he said, still looking around. “Got the place fixed up real nice, don’t you?”

Gus smiled. “It’s my home. A man likes to live in a nice place. In a hurry?”

The clerk seemed to be troubled by something in what Gus had said. Then he looked up suddenly, obviously just realizing he’d been asked a direct question. “Huh?”

“You’re not in any hurry, are you? Come on in; have a beer. Nobody’s expected to be a ball of fire on a spring afternoon.”

The clerk grinned uneasily. “No… nope, guess not.” He brightened. “O.K.! Don’t mind if I do.”

Gus ushered him into the house, grinning with pleasure. Nobody’d seen the inside of the place since he’d fixed it up; the clerk was the first visitor he’d had since moving in. There weren’t even any delivery men; Boonesboro was so small you had to drive in for your own. shopping. There wasn’t any mail carrier service, of course—not that Gus ever received any mail.

He showed the clerk into the living room. “Have a seat. I’ll be right back.” He went quickly out to the kitchen, took some beer out of the cooler, loaded a tray with glasses, a bowl of chips and pretzels, and the beer, and carried it out.

The clerk was up, looking around the library that cov­ered two of the living room walls.

Looking at his expression, Gus realized with genuine regret that the man wasn’t the kind to doubt whether an obvious clod like Kusevic had read any of this stuff. A man like that could still be talked to, once the original misconceptions were knocked down. No, the clerk was too plainly mystified that a grown man would fool with books. Particularly a man like Gus; now, one of these kids that messed with college politics, that was something else. But a grown man oughtn’t to act like that.

Gus saw it had been a mistake to expect anything of the clerk. He should have known better, whether he was hun­gry for company or not. He’d always been hungry for com­pany, and it was time he realized, once and for all, that he just plain wasn’t going to find any.

He set the tray down on the table, uncapped a beer quickly, and handed it to the man.

“Thanks,” the clerk mumbled. He took a swallow, sighed loudly, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He looked around the room again. “Cost you a lot to have all this put in?”

Gus shrugged. “Did most of it myself. Built the shelves and furniture; stuff like that. Some of the paintings I had to buy, and the books and records.”

The clerk grunted. He seemed to be considerably ill at ease, probably because of the notice he’d brought, what­ever it was. Gus found himself wondering what it could possibly be, but, now that he’d made the mistake of giving the man a beer, he had to wait politely until it was finished before he could ask.

He went over to the TV set. “Baseball fan?” he asked the clerk.

“Sure!”

“Giants-Kodiaks ought to be on.” He switched the set on and pulled up a hassock, fitting on it so as not to get one of the chairs dirty. The clerk wandered over and stood looking at the screen, taking slow swallows of his beer.

The second game had started, and Halsey’s familiar fig­ure appeared on the screen as the set warmed up. The lithe young lefthander was throwing with his usual boneless motion, apparently not working hard at all, but the ball was whipping past the batters with a sizzle that the home plate microphone was picking up clearly.

Gus nodded toward Halsey. “He’s quite a pitcher, isn’t he?”

The clerk shrugged. “Guess so. Walker’s their best man, though.”

Gus sighed as he realized he’d forgotten himself again. The clerk wouldn’t pay much attention to Halsey, natu­rally.

But he was getting a little irritated at the man, with his typical preconceptions of what was proper and what wasn’t, of who had a right to grow roses and who didn’t.

“Offhand,” Gus said to the clerk, “could you tell me what Halsey’s record was, last year?”

The clerk shrugged. “Couldn’t tell you. Wasn’t bad— I remember that much. 13-7, something like that.”

Gus nodded to himself. “Uh-huh. How’d Walker do?”

“Walker! Why, man, Walker just won something like twenty-five games, that’s all. And three no-hitters. How’d Walker do? Huh!”

Gus shook his head. “Walker’s a good pitcher, all right-but he didn’t pitch any no-hitters. And he only won eight­een games.”

The clerk wrinkled his forehead. He opened his mouth to argue and then stopped. He looked like a sure-thing bet­tor who’d just realized that his memory had played him a trick.

“Say—I think you’re right! Huh! Now what the Sam Hill made me think Walker was the guy? And you know something—I’ve been talking about him all winter, and nobody once called me wrong?” The clerk scratched his head. “Now, somebody pitched them games! Who the dick­ens was it?” He scowled in concentration.

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.

Only God can make a tree, he thought, looking at the shrubs and flower beds. Should we all, then, look for our challenge in landscape gardening? Should we become the gardeners of the rich humans in their expensive houses, driving up in our old, rusty trucks, oiling our lawnmowers, kneeling on the humans’ lawns with our clipping shears, coming to the kitchen door to ask for a drink of water on a hot summer day?

The highway. Yes, he could stop the highway. Or make it go around him. There was no way of stopping the curi­osity damper, no more than there was a way of willing his heart to stop, but it could be stepped up. He could force his mind to labor near overload, and no one would ever even see the cottage, the lawn, the rose arbor, or the bat­tered old man, drinking his beer. Or rather, seeing them, would pay them absolutely no attention.

But the first time he went into town, or when he died, the field would be off, and then what? Then curiosity, then investigation, then, perhaps a fragment of theory here or there to be fitted to another somewhere else. And then what? Pogrom?

He shook his head. The humans couldn’t win, and would lose monstrously. That was why he couldn’t leave the hu­mans a clue. He had no taste for slaughtering sheep, and he doubted if his fellows did.

His fellows. Gus stretched his mouth. The only one he could be sure of was Halsey. There had to be others, but there was no way of finding them. They provoked no re­action from the humans; they left no trail to follow. It was only if they showed themselves, like Halsey, that they could be seen. There was, unfortunately, no private tele­pathic party line among them.

He wondered if Halsey hoped someone would notice him and get in touch. He wondered if Halsey even sus­pected there were others like himself. He wondered if anyone had noticed him, when Gus Kusevic’s name had been in the papers occasionally.

It’s the dawn of my race, he thought. The first genera­tion—or is it, and does it matter?—and I wonder where the females are.

He turned back to the clerk. “I want what I paid for the place,” he said. “No more.”

The clerk’s eyes widened slightly, then relaxed, and he shrugged. “Suit yourself. But if it was me, I’d soak the government good.”

Yes, Gus thought, you doubtless would. But I don’t want to, because you simply don’t take candy from babies.

So the superman packed his bags and got out of the human’s way. Gus choked a silent laugh. The damping field. The damping-field. The thrice-cursed, ever-benevo­lent, foolproof, autonomic, protective damping field.

Evolution had, unfortunately, not yet realized that there was such a thing as human society. It produced a being with a certain modification from the human stock, thereby arriving at practical psi. In order to protect this feeble new species, whose members were so terribly sparse, it gave them the perfect camouflage.

Result: When young Augustin Kusevic was enrolled in school, it was discovered that he had no birth certificate. No hospital recalled his birth. As a matter of brutal fact, his human parents sometimes forgot his existence for days at a time.

Result: When young Gussie Kusevic tried to enter high school, it was discovered that he had never entered gram­mar school. No matter that he could quote teachers’ names, textbooks, or classroom numbers. No matter if he could produce report cards. They were misfiled, and the an­guished interviews forgotten. No one doubted his exis­tence—people remembered the fact of his being, and the fact of his having acted and being acted upon. But only as though they had read it in some infinitely boring book.

He had no friends, no girl, no past, no present, no love. He had no place to stand. Had there been such things as ghosts, he would have found his fellowship there.

By the time of his adolescence, he had discovered an absolute lack of involvement with the human race. He stud­ied it, because it was the salient feature of his environ­ment. He did not live with it. It said nothing to him that was of personal value; its motivations, morals, manners and morale did not find responsive reactions in him. And his, of course, made absolutely no impression on it.

The life of the peasant of ancient Babylon is of interest to only a few historical anthropologists, none of whom actually want to be Babylonian peasants.

Having solved the human social equation from his dis­passionate viewpoint, and caring no more than the natu­ralist who finds that deer are extremely fond of green aspen leaves, he plunged into physical release. He discovered the thrill of picking fights and winning them; of making some­body pay attention to him by smashing his nose.

He might have become a permanent fixture on the Man­hattan docks, if another longshoreman hadn’t slashed him with a carton knife. The cultural demand on him had been plain. He’d had to kill the man.

That had been the end of unregulated personal combat. He discovered, not to his horror but to his disgust, that he could get away with murder. No investigation had been made; no search was attempted.

So that had been the end of that, but it had led him to the only possible evasion of the trap to which he had been born. Intellectual competition being meaningless, orga­nized sports became the only answer. Simultaneously regu­lating his efforts and annotating them under a mound of journalistic record-keeping, they furnished the first official continuity his life had ever known. People still forgot his accomplishments, but when they turned to the records, his name was undeniably there. A dossier can be misfiled. School records can disappear. But something more than a damping field was required to shunt aside the mountain of news copy and statistics that drags, ball-like, at the ankle of even the mediocre athlete.

It seemed to Gus—and he thought of it a great deal—that this chain of progression was inevitable for any male of his kind. When, three years ago, he had discovered Halsey, his hypothesis was bolstered. But what good was Halsey to another male? To hold mutual consolation sessions with? He had no intention of ever contacting the man.

The clerk cleared his throat. Gus jerked his head around to look at him, startled. He’d forgotten him.

“Well, guess I’ll be going. Remember, you’ve only got two months.”

Gus gestured noncommittally. The man had delivered his message. Why didn’t he acknowledge he’d served his purpose, and go?

Gus smiled ruefully. What purpose did homo nondescriptus serve, and where was he going? Halsey was already walking downhill along the well-marked trail. Were there others? If so, then they were in another rut, somewhere, and not even the tops of their heads showed. He and his kind could recognize each other only by an elaborate proc­ess of elimination; they had to watch for the people no one noticed.

He opened the door for the clerk, saw the road, and found his thoughts back with the highway.

The highway would run from Hollister, which was a railroad junction, to the Air Force Base at Farnham, where his calculations in sociomathematics had long ago pre­dicted the first starship would be constructed and launched. The trucks would rumble up the highway, feed­ing the open maw with men and material.

He cleaned his lips. Up there in space, somewhere; somewhere outside the Solar System, was another race. The imprint of their visits here was plain. The humans would encounter them, and again he could predict the result; the humans would win.

Gus Kusevic could not go along to investigate the chal­lenges that he doubted lay among the stars. Even with scrapbooks full of notices and clippings, he had barely made his career penetrate the public consciousness. Hal­sey, who had exuberantly broken every baseball record in the books, was known as a “pretty fair country pitcher.”

What credentials could he present with his application to the Air Force? Who would remember them the next day if he had any? What would become of the records of his inoculations, his physical check-ups, his training courses? Who would remember to reserve a bunk for him, or stow supplies for him, or add his consumption to the total when the time came to allow for oxygen?

Stow away? Nothing easier. But, again; who would die so he could live within the tight lattice of shipboard econ­omy? Which sheep would he slaughter, and to what useful purpose, in the last analysis?

“Well, so long,” the clerk said.

“Good-by,” Gus said.

The clerk walked down the flagstones and out to his flivver.

I think, Gus said to himself, it would have been much better for us if Evolution had been a little less protective and a little more thoughtful. An occasional pogrom wouldn’t have done us any harm. A ghetto at least keeps the courtship problem solved.

Our seed has been spilt on the ground.

Suddenly, Gus ran forward, pushed by something he didn’t care to name. He looked up through the flivver’s open door, and the clerk looked down apprehensively.

“Danvers, you’re a sports fan,” Gus said hastily, realiz­ing his voice was too urgent; that he was startling the clerk with his intensity.

“That’s right,” the clerk answered, pushing himself nervously back along the seat.

“Who’s heavyweight champion of the world?”

“Mike Frazier. Why?”

“Who’d he beat for the title? Who used to be cham­pion?”

The clerk” pursed his lips: “Huhl It’s been years— Gee, I don’t know. I don’t remember. I could look it up, I guess.”

Gus exhaled slowly. He half-turned and looked back toward the cottage, the lawn, the flower beds, the walk, the arbor, and the fish pond under the willow tree. “Never mind,” he said, and walked back into the house while the clerk wobbled his flivver into the air.

The TV set was blaring with sound. He checked the status of the game.

It had gone quickly. Halsey had pitched a one-hitter so far, and the Giants’ pitcher had done almost as well. The score was tied at 1-1, the Giants were at bat, and it was the last out in the ninth inning. The camera boomed in on Halsey’s face.

Halsey looked at the batter with complete disinterest in his eyes, wound up, and threw the home-run ball.