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SUCCESS STORY

By Robert Turner

Illustrated by KELLY FREAS

    _What is to be will be. Our only refuge lies in that which
    might not have been._


_December 8th, 1952, Two-Thirty A. M._

After awhile the blinding light was like actual physical pressure
against his tightly squinched eyes. He tried to burrow deeper into the
protectively warm, cave-like place where he'd been safe from them for
so long. But he couldn't escape them. Their hands, their big, red,
hideously smooth hands had him, now. They were tugging and pulling at
him with a strength impossible to fight. Still he struggled.

He tried to cry out but there was no sound from his constricted
throat. There were only the frightening noises from outside, louder,
now. He tried to twist and squirm against the hands dragging him
toward that harsh, blinding light. He was too small, too weak,
compared to them. He couldn't fight them off. He felt himself being
stretched and strained and forced with cruel determination. He didn't
want to go _out there_. He knew what was waiting for him _out there_.
He _couldn't_ go. Not _out there_, where....

       *       *       *       *       *

When Jeff McKinney was three years old he tipped a pot of scalding
water from the stove onto himself. He was badly burned and scarred. He
hovered between life and death for several weeks. Jeff's father was
out of work at the time and they were living in a cold water tenement.
Something about the case caught a tabloid's attention and it was
played up as a human interest sob story. It came to the attention of a
wealthy man who volunteered to pay for plastic surgery. Then followed,
long months of that kind of torture, but Jeff McKinney came out of it
not too badly scarred. Not on the surface, anyhow. But his face had a
strange hue. There was a frozen, mask-like cast to his features when
he smiled.

[Illustration]

He was eight when he saw his father killed. He was in the taxi the
older McKinney now drove for a living when the father stepped out of
the driver's side onto a busy street without looking back first. The
speeding truck took the car door and Jeff's father with it for half a
block, wedged between front wheel and fender. Jeff never forgot the
sound of that, and the screaming. Nor his shock when he suddenly
realized that the screams were his own.

Jeff was a strange boy. He didn't have an average childhood. The
poverty was more extreme after his father's death. He stayed home
alone while his mother was out working at whatever job she could get,
reading too much and thinking too much. Once, he looked at her with
haunted eyes and said: "Mother, why is life so bad? Why are people
even born into a world like this?"

What could she say to a question like that? She said: "Please,
Jefferson! Please don't talk that way. Life isn't all bad. You'll see.
Some day, in spite of everything, you'll be somebody and you'll be
happy. The good times will come."

They did, of course. A few of them. There was the day he went upstate
on an outing for underprivileged boys and went fishing for the first
time. He caught a whopping trout and won a prize for it. That was
nice; that was fun. That was when he was thirteen. That was the year
the gang of kids caught him on the way home from school and beat him
unconscious because he never laughed; because they couldn't _make_ him
laugh. The year before his mother died.

At the orphanage he didn't mingle much with the other boys. He spent
most of his after-classes hours alone in the school's chemistry lab.
He liked to tinker with chemicals. They were cold, emotionless, immune
to joy and sadness, yet they had purpose. He played the cello, too,
with haunting beauty, but not in the school band, only when he wanted
to, when nobody was around and he could really feel the music.

Once, on the way home from his cello lesson in the music building, he
saw some boys playing football on the orphanage athletic field. He was
suddenly seized with a fierce determination to belong, to grab at some
of the shouting, laughing happiness these boys seemed to have. He told
them he wanted to join in and play, too. He didn't understand why they
laughed so at this idea.

They stopped laughing, though, after the first time he ran with the
ball, and they all piled up on him and he didn't get up. He lay there,
looking so ghostly and breathing so harshly and with the trickle of
blood coming out of his ears. But Jeff didn't know they had stopped
laughing.

He recovered from that skull fracture, all right. Worse, though, than
any of the unhappiness he suffered during his life, worse even than
the shocks of his father's and mother's deaths, was the thing that
happened to him when he was twenty and working at the laboratories of
a big drug company.

He met and fell hopelessly in love with a girl named Nina, a girl a
few years older than he was. They married and for the first few weeks
Jeff McKinney had happiness he'd never known before. Until he came
home from work sick, one afternoon and saw Nina with the man from the
apartment over them. She didn't whine and beg for forgiveness, Nina
didn't. She stood boldly while the other man laughed and laughed and
she screamed invective upon Jefferson McKinney, telling him what she
really thought of him, a gloomy, puny weakling who couldn't even make
a decent living, telling him that she was through with him.

A blank spot came into Jeff's life right then. When it was over, Nina
and the other man were on the floor and there was blood on the kitchen
carving knife in Jeff's hand.

They didn't find him for awhile. He changed his name and appearance
and hid in the soiled seams and ragged fringes of society. He learned
the anaesthetic powers of drugs and alcohol. He gave up trying to get
anything out of this life. Then they finally picked him up, fished him
from the river into which he'd jumped. There were days of torture
after that, without the alcohol and drugs his wrecked system craved.
Right there was the final hell that could have broken him completely.
But it didn't. It was like the terrible crisis after a long illness.
Things began to get better, to go to the other extreme after that.

A state psychiatrist brought Jeff's case to the attention of a noted
criminal lawyer. Neither Nina nor her lover had died from their knife
wounds. On the plea of the unwritten law, Jeff McKinney got off with a
suspended sentence. The lawyer and psychiatrist learned of his
interest and knowledge and talent for chemistry and got him another
job in the experimental laboratory of a big university.

Later he married a girl named Elaine, who worked at the lab with him.
They had two children, and lived in a small comfortable cottage just
off the University campus. For several years, they had all they wanted
of life--comfort, health, happiness. Jeff thought that life could
never be more wonderful. All of his former, bitter, cynical views fell
away from him. Hadn't he, with all odds against him, finally won out
and acquired peace and contentment and a purpose in life? What was
wrong with a world in which that could happen?

Then there was the topper. Jefferson McKinney discovered a new drug
which would cure and eventually eliminate a disease that was one of
the world's worst killers, the drug for which thousands of scientists
had been seeking for years.

He was feted and honored, became a national hero. The story of his
life and his discovery temporarily pushed even the doleful forecasts
of an early Third War, the Big War, off the front pages. And Jeff was
humbly proud and grateful that he had paid now the debt he owed to a
society that could make a final victory, like his, possible.

In a zenith of almost holy happiness, he stood one evening on a
lecture platform in a huge auditorium in a great city, before
thousands of worshipping people to make a thank-you speech after being
awarded a world prize for his great scientific discovery.

But in the middle of his talk he broke off suddenly. A flash of
blinding brilliance slashed through the windows. Horror painted his
face. In a whisper, he cried: "No! No! It would make it all so
senseless!" His eyes looked like the eyes of a man with flaming
splinters jammed under his fingernails. His face seemed to pucker, and
grow infantile. Then he screamed: "No! Leave me alone! I _told_ you I
didn't want to come _out here_, to be one of _you_! Damn you, why did
you bring me _out here_? For--for _this_?..."

There were the shards of glass from the great auditorium windows,
floating inward, turning lazily. There were the brick walls crumbling,
tumbling inward, scattering through the air in the same seeming slow
motion. The dust cloud and the sound, the flat blast-sound, came after
that, as the entire building--perhaps the world--disintegrated in the
eye-searing light....


_December 8th, 1952, Two-Thirty A. M._

The flat of a rubber-gloved hand striking flesh made a splatting
noise. A thin, breathless but concentrated crying followed. The doctor
looked down at his charity clinic patient, the woman under the bright
delivery room lights.

"Look at him--fighting like a little demon!" the doctor said. "Seemed
almost as though he didn't want to come out and join us.... What's the
matter, son? This is a bright, new, wonderful world to be born
into.... What are you going to call the boy, Mrs. McKinney?"

The woman under the lights forced a tired smile. "Jeff. Jefferson
McKinney. That's going to be his name," she whispered proudly.

The baby's terrified squalling subsided into fretful, whimpering
resignation.


--THE END--