The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 1 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  “You realize, of course, Dr. Curtis, that we’d rather you wouldn’t discuss Bendo or us with anyone else. We would rather be just people to Outsiders.”

  He laughed shortly, “Would I be believed if I did?”

  “Maybe no, maybe so,” Valancy said. “Maybe only enough to start people nosing around. And that would be too much. We have a bad situation here and it will take a long time to erase—” Her voice slipped into silence, and I knew she had dropped into thoughts to brief him on the local problem. How long is a thought? How fast can you think of hell—and heaven? It was that long before the doctor blinked and drew a shaky breath.

  “Yes,” he said. “A long time.”

  “If you like,” Valancy said, “I can block your ability to talk of us.”

  “Nothing doing!” the doctor snapped. “I can manage my own censorship, thanks.”

  Valancy flushed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be condescending.”

  “You weren’t,” the doctor said. “I’m just on the prod tonight. It has been a day, and that’s for sure!”

  “Hasn’t it, though?” I smiled and then, astonished, rubbed my cheeks because tears had begun to spill down my face. I laughed, embarrassed, and couldn’t stop. My laughter turned suddenly to sobs and I was bitterly ashamed to hear myself wailing like a child. I clung to Valency’s strong hands until I suddenly slid into a warm welcome darkness that had no thinking or fearing or need for believing in anything outrageous, but only in sleep.

  It was a magic year and it fled on impossibly fast wings, the holidays flicking past like telephone poles by a railroad train. Christmas was especially magical because my angels actually flew and the glory actually shone round about because their robes had hems woven of sunlight—I watched the girls weave them. And Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, complete with cardboard antlers that wouldn’t stay straight, really took off and circled the room. And as our Mary and Joseph leaned raptly over the manger, their faces solemn and intent on the miracle, I felt suddenly that they . were really seeing, really kneeling beside the manger in Bethlehem.

  Anyway the months fled, and the blossoming of Bendo was beautiful to see. There was laughter and frolicking and even the houses grew subtly into color. Green things crept out where only rocks had been before, and a tiny tentative stream of water had begun to flow down the creek again. They explained to me that they had to take it slow because people might wonder if the creek filled overnight! Even the rough steps up to the houses were becoming overgrown because they were seldom used, and I was becoming accustomed to seeing my pupils coming to school like a bevy of bright birds, playing tag in the treetops. I was surprised at myself for adjusting so easily to all the incredible things done around me by the People, and I was pleased that they accepted me so completely. But I always felt a pang when the children escorted me home—with me, they had to walk.

  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.

  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 grunt
ed. 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.