Algis Budrys's "Gus" stories

The third story in Budrys' Inferno is "And Then She Found Him," which isfdb is telling me is the second of the three "Gus" stories written by Algis Budrys and published between 1955 and 1957 under the Paul Janvier nom de plume.  I decided to look up the other two Gus tales at the internet archive and read the three of them in chronological order.

"Nobody Bothers Gus" (1955)

Augustin Kusevic is one of the early specimens of homo superior.  He has tremendous intellectual and psychic abilities--he can use math to foretell future social and economic developments; he need only read the first three pages of a novel to predict its course and conclusion; he can manipulate matter, say, turn a pen into a bouncing ball and back again or melt a twelve-lane highway, with ease.  But all these powers have come with a terrible price.  Gus autonomically generates a "field that damps curiosity," with the effect that people pay no attention to him, dismissing as magic tricks the psychic miracles he performs and forgetting that he was once heavyweight boxing champion of the world.  Superior to everyone, and  unable to form any emotional connection to an individual or to the larger culture, Gus is a lonely man without a country, without friends, without love.

"Nobody Bothers Gus" is a mood and character piece whose main plot (middle-aged Gus, having abandoned his too-easy boxing career, buys and fixes up a remote house only to lose it to eminent domain when the Feds decided to build Earth's first spaceport nearby) feels secondary.  The tantalizing component of the plot is the revelation that there are other people like Gus out there, presenting the possibility that maybe Gus need not be alone forever.

Not bad.  "Nobody Bothers Gus" first appeared in Astounding and was well received, chosen by Judith Merril for her first Year's Greatest SF anthologies and included since then in a multitude of anthologies edited by everybody ranging from Damon Knight and James Gunn to Barry Malzberg and Martin H. Greenberg.

"And Then She Found Him" (1957)

Gus Kusevic doesn't actually appear in "And Then She Found Him," making me doubt the utility of calling these three stories "The Gus stories," but the tale does take place in the same universe and address similar themes.  It appeared in Venture and later in the anthology No Limits, as well as the various printings of Budrys' Inferno (AKA The Furious Future) and some European publications.

"And Then She Found Him" is quite plot-driven, and even has a shock ending.  In Chicago a community of fifty of the superhumans with the curiosity-damping field has assembled.  Following various clues, one of the supermen, Deerbush, travels the country finding these mutants and bringing them back to Chi-town to be welcomed to the super-community.  Deerbush is sort of like a matchmaker; when he finds a mutant he usually senses that there is a person back in the Windy City who would make a perfect spouse for this new member of the homo superior colony.

In a town he finds Viola, a mutant who has been using her superpowers to steal expensive consumer goods.  Viola has a power Deerbush has encountered in no other mutant--she can hypnotize people into obeying her; nobody can resist her commands, even commands to steal or to assault others. So rapacious is Viola that her thefts are wrecking the local economy and making the local retailers and law enforcement personnel paranoid.  If the Viola crime wave is not ended soon many people may lose their jobs and innocent people may be imprisoned or suffer mob justice!

Almost as mindblowing as Viola's powers is that Deerbush the matchmaker realizes Viola is his soulmate and he falls in love!

Tragedy strikes when the extent of Viola's mental illness becomes fully apparent.  She refuses to go to Chicago and leave behind all the luxury items she has stolen, and she has no interest in marrying Deerbush.  Unreformable, her powers of hypnosis a threat to all of civilization, Deerbush has no choice but to kill her!

This story is acceptable, less moving and more sensationalistic than "Nobody Bothers Gus."  I suppose feminists might object to it as a story in which a woman is so selfish, materialistic, and manipulative that she has to be put down for the good of the universe, or just on the basis that it is a story written by a man which attempts to psychoanalyze a woman. 

"Lost Love" (1957)

Old Doc Bennett is riding a bus across the great state of New Jersey.  Doc is dozing on mass transit among the plebs instead of caressing the wheel of a Mercedes because he is the kind of doctor who ministers to the poor instead of providing face lifts to the haute bourgeoisie!  Doc notices a teen-aged boy across the aisle, a pathetic wretch clad in rags!  He wants to help this emaciated scarecrow of a human being, and engages him in conversation, even offering to let him stay in his household a while until he gets on his feet.  But the boy refuses Doc's help, saying it would be no use; he describes his life and we readers of "Nobody Bothers Gus" recognize that this kid is one of those supermen with a curiosity-damping field, that he can't make friends with us normies because we forget him as soon as we look away from him.  Case in point: every time Doc Bennett wakes up from a snooze the kid has to introduce himself again!  The kid has been travelling the nation, refusing to use his superpowers to steal and thus living on the edge of starvation, hoping he will somehow meet somebody who will remember him, somebody of his own superhuman species.

The tragic twist ending comes when Doc gets home.  He greets his wife but is surprised to find that a teenage girl who actually looks a little like his wife is also living in his house--this girl moans that Mom forgot to set the table for her yet again.  Dun dun dun!  Doc Bennett's own daughter is one of the superpeople, and if the boy had accepted Doc's hospitality he would have met his soulmate and his (and her!) abject loneliness would have been relieved for good!

Acceptable, but inferior to "Nobody Bothers Gus" because it is too sappy and too melodramatic.  "Lost Love" first jerked the tears of SF readers in a magazine called Science Fiction Stories edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes that endured for seven years (1953-1960, 38 issues total.)  Martin H. Greenberg would later include it in 101 Science Fiction Stories, which was published in the United Kingdom as The Giant Book of Science Fiction Stories.

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"Nobody Bothers Gus" stands above the crowd, but I think "And Then She Found Him" and "Lost Love" are just average, though I guess "And Then She Found Him" is remarkable for being one of those stories (like Tom Godwin's famous 1954 "The Cold Equations") that contrives a situation in which it makes sense to slay a woman who isn't perhaps really morally responsible for all the trouble she has caused.

We'll finish up Budrys' Inferno in our next blog post.