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?
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