Success Story

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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 pressureagainst his tightly squinched eyes. He tried to burrow deeper into theprotectively warm, cave-like place where he'd been safe from them forso long. But he couldn't escape them. Their hands, their big, red,hideously smooth hands had him, now. They were tugging and pulling athim with a strength impossible to fight. Still he struggled.

  He tried to cry out but there was no sound from his constrictedthroat. There were only the frightening noises from outside, louder,now. He tried to twist and squirm against the hands dragging himtoward that harsh, blinding light. He was too small, too weak,compared to them. He couldn't fight them off. He felt himself beingstretched and strained and forced with cruel determination. He didn'twant 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 scaldingwater from the stove onto himself. He was badly burned and scarred. Hehovered between life and death for several weeks. Jeff's father wasout 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 wasplayed up as a human interest sob story. It came to the attention of awealthy man who volunteered to pay for plastic surgery. Then followed,long months of that kind of torture, but Jeff McKinney came out of itnot too badly scarred. Not on the surface, anyhow. But his face had astrange hue. There was a frozen, mask-like cast to his features whenhe smiled.

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

  Jeff was a strange boy. He didn't have an average childhood. Thepoverty was more extreme after his father's death. He stayed homealone while his mother was out working at whatever job she could get,reading too much and thinking too much. Once, he looked at her withhaunted eyes and said: "Mother, why is life so bad? Why are peopleeven 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 behappy. The good times will come."

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

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

  Once, on the way home from his cello lesson in the music building, hesaw some boys playing football on the orphanage athletic field. He wassuddenly seized with a fierce determination to belong, to grab at someof the shouting, laughing happiness these boys seemed to have. He toldthem he wanted to join in and play, too. He didn't understand why theylaughed so at this idea.

  They stopped laughing, though, after the first time he ran with theball, 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 ofblood coming out of his ears. But Jeff didn't know they had stoppedlaughing.

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

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

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

  They didn't find him for awhile. He changed his name and appearanceand hid in the soiled seams and ragged fringes of society. He learnedthe anaesthetic powers of drugs and alcohol. He gave up trying to getanything out of this life. Then they finally picked him up, fished himfrom the river into which he'd jumped. There were days of tortureafter 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 notedcriminal lawyer. Neither Nina nor her lover had died from their knifewounds. On the plea of the unwritten law, Jeff McKinney got off with asuspended sentence. The lawyer and psychiatrist learned of hisinterest and knowledge and talent for chemistry and got him anotherjob 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 justoff the University campus. For several years, they had all they wantedof life--comfort, health, happiness. Jeff thought that life couldnever be more wonderful. All of his former, bitter, cynical views fellaway from him. Hadn't he, with all odds against him, finally won outand acquired peace and contentment and a purpose in life? What waswrong with a world in which that could happen?

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

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

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

  But in the middle of his talk he broke off suddenly. A flash ofblinding brilliance slashed through the windows. Horror painted hisface. In a whisper, he cried: "No! No! It would make it all sosenseless!" His eyes looked like the eyes of a man with flamingsplinters jammed under his fingernails. His face seemed to pucker, andgrow infantile. Then he screamed: "No! L
eave me alone! I _told_ you Ididn't want to come _out here_, to be one of _you_! Damn you, why didyou 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 slowmotion. The dust cloud and the sound, the flat blast-sound, came afterthat, as the entire building--perhaps the world--disintegrated in theeye-searing light....

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

  The flat of a rubber-gloved hand striking flesh made a splattingnoise. A thin, breathless but concentrated crying followed. The doctorlooked down at his charity clinic patient, the woman under the brightdelivery room lights.

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

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

  The baby's terrified squalling subsided into fretful, whimperingresignation.

  --THE END--