Jack of No Trades, Evelyn E. Smith [10 best books of all time .TXT] 📗

of the machines. The government built a hospital just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I wouldn't be able to do even that.

When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. "I'm your assistant, Kev," she said shyly.

I looked at her. "You are?"

"I—I hope you want me," she went on, coyness now mixing with apprehension.

I gave her shoulder a squeeze. "I do want you, Lucy. More than I can tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to say. But right now—" I clapped her arm—"there's a job to be done."

"Yes, Kevin," she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were waiting for me.

They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.

I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently disfigured. In a sense, they were—well, my children; I felt a warm glow of affection toward them.

They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the hospital soon leaked out—during all those years of peace, the government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets—and people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me.

The government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than they wanted to risk me.

Plenty of people did come to see me officially—the President, generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I began to love everybody.

"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?" Lucy asked me one day.

I gave her an incredulous glance. "You mean I shouldn't help people?"

"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that. Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work."

"Why shouldn't I be?" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. "Are you jealous, Lucy?"

She lowered her eyes. "Not only that, but the war's bound to come to an end, you know, and—"

It was the first part of her sentence that interested me. "Why, do you mean—"

And just then a fresh batch of casualties arrived and I had to tend to them. For the next few days, I was so busy, I didn't get the chance to have the long talk with Lucy I'd wanted....

Then, after only four months, the war suddenly stopped. It seemed that the aliens' weapons, despite their undeniable mysteriousness, were not equal to ours. And they had the added disadvantage of being light-years away from home base. So the remnant of their fleet took off and blew itself up just outside of Mars, which we understood to be the equivalent of unconditional surrender. And it was; we never heard from the Centaurians again.

Peace once more. I had a little mopping up to do at the hospital; then I collected my possessions and went back home after a dignitary—only the Vice President this time—had thanked me on behalf of a grateful country. I wasn't needed any more.

For a while, I was glad to be back home. I was a celebrity. People dropped in from all around to see me and talk to me. And my family, basking in the reflection of glory, was nice to me ... for a while.

"I don't have any trouble making appointments with any firm," my father boasted, "when I tell 'em I'm the father of Kevin Faraday."

Mother smiled approvingly—Tim, a little sadly. He was the only one who didn't seem pleased by what had happened to me, even though he'd prophesied it.

Sylvia slipped her arm through mine. "The agency wondered whether you wouldn't give them a testimonial for Panacetic Pills, Kev," she said, squeezing my arm. "They'd pay a lot, and the rest of the family sure could use the money if you're too high-minded to accept it."

"I couldn't do a thing like that, Sylvia. It wouldn't be ethical."

"Why wouldn't it be?" She dropped my arm. "The pills couldn't possibly hurt anybody. Maybe take a little business away from Mother, but Mother doesn't mind, do you, dear?"

Mother frowned.

"But people would think the pills had my healing powers," I explained. "I would be breaking faith with myself if I shilled for them."

Sylvia snorted. "Breaking faith with himself. Look who's talking!"

"Sylvia," my mother said. "Please."

But Sylvia went on—she was in an overwrought state because her guy hadn't called her, though that was no reason to take it out on me. "Who needs healing power now? The machines can cope with all peacetime ailments. Better take your loot while the getting's good, Kev."

"Nevertheless, Kevin is right, Sylvia," my mother said. "He mustn't prostitute his talent."

"And we don't actually need the money the testimonial could bring in, no matter how much it is," my father said a little wistfully. "I can support my family."

Tim sighed.

The months went on. Once again there was nothing for me to do, only it was worse for me now because I had tasted usefulness and fame. People did come for a while with their headaches and cut fingers for me to heal, and I was happy healing them until I realized they were just coming to make me feel good. They didn't really need me. Anybody who had anything seriously wrong with him went to a psychiatrist or a machine, same as always. I healed them too quickly for them to have time to take pleasure in it. They couldn't talk for days about a three-second operation.

By and by, even the cut fingers didn't come. Maybe I hadn't been exactly gracious toward the end. Maybe the whole thing was my fault. Even the Lucy business. My mother said it was, anyhow.

You see, Lucy lived quite a distance away and we couldn't call each other up because of my not being able to use the tellies. We wrote and I went to see her a few times, and then she came to meet my family. Once.

It was a ghastly evening. We all sat around stiffly, my family being excessively polite to her, thinking, I knew, that this was my only chance to get myself a wife and so they'd better be nice to the girl, no matter what she was like. And seeing her with what I fancied to be their eyes, I realized that she wasn't outstandingly pretty, particularly bright, or even very talented.

And what was she thinking? That she had got herself virtually engaged to a useless half-sense because he had had a brief moment of glory as a war hero? Trapped with this imbecile and his dull, stuffy family, and not being able to get out of it without being cruel?

What were they actually thinking? I didn't know. But they did—Mother knew what everybody was thinking, right down to the last convolution of the subconscious mind and Sylvia knew what everyone else was feeling, and the others ... they knew or at least sensed part of what was going on. But I was impercipient, I couldn't tell anything, I was excluded—out in the cold—and, being unable ever really to know, was forced to draw the worst conclusions.

I took Lucy home that evening. They had to trust me that far alone because it would have looked absurd for Danny or Tim to come along as chaperone, and anyway I had been there alone before, when I had gone to see her.

"Lucy," I said as we stood awkwardly before her door, "I don't want you to feel, just because of what might have happened in a burst of—of patriotic fervor, that you're bound or—"

"No, Kevin," she murmured, without looking at me. "I understand. I don't feel bound or—committed in any way. And you mustn't feel bound, either."

"That's good." I felt a deep sense of sorrow working its way down to settle in my viscera and, if she'd had much perceptiveness, things might have been different then. But she hadn't. I took a deep breath, determined to carry my heartbreak off with dignity. "Well, good-by, Lucy."

Although she had never really been close to me—in fact, I had never so much as kissed her—I felt lonelier now, without even the hope of her, than I ever had before. I began to take my long walks in the park again, brooding over the power that might have been mine, if only I hadn't been such a damn fool as to give freely without asking anything in return. During the war, I could have got anything I wanted in exchange for what I'd done, or, rather, for what I could do, but I'd been too busy healing. Now it was too late for asking.

Nature, being all I had left, became closer to me than ever before. And one morning, after a violent storm the night before, I mourned over the fallen trees and smashed flowers as I had never mourned over fallen and smashed men—first, because I hadn't cared, and then because I had known I could help.

Come to think of it, how did I know it was only people I could help?

"Mother," I said eagerly when I came home that evening, "I can heal other things besides people! Trees and shrubs and—"

"That's nice, dear. Perhaps we can get you a job with the Park Department if you're tired of sitting home, and in the meantime you'd better comb those leaves out of your hair. Sylvia, did you call that techno?"

"Yes, Mother," Sylvia said gloomily. Her guy still hadn't called. Knowing now how she must feel, I could feel sorry for her. "It said it'll be over as soon as it can, but that it might take days."

"We'll have to eat synthetics for dinner if that stove isn't fixed soon," my mother said fretfully, and went off into the kitchen to mess around with the machinery and thus make certain the techno had a real hard job on its hands when it finally did show up.

Oh, the devil with it, I thought. No use hoping to interest the family in any extension of my gift that had no practical value except for nature lovers. I might as well seize such meager chances as were still open to me. I wasn't going to be an idealistic idiot any longer.

"Sylvie," I said to my sister, "I've changed my mind about that testimonial."

She looked blankly at me out of her reverie. "What testimonial?"

"The—you know, the Panacetic Pills."

She laughed and patted me on the shoulder, not unkindly, because she could probably feel a sympathy in me now that she never could before. "Too late for that, honey. Your name wouldn't mean a thing any more."

So many of them owed their lives to me—and yet they had forgotten me.

Tim looked at me. "Be careful, Kev," he said anxiously.

"Careful of what?"

"I don't know exactly." He ran his hand through his hair. "But be careful, won't you?"

Just at that moment, an easy chair floated in from the next room, banged into me, swerved, and crashed into a table. Danny, who had been thinking of going into interior decoration as a sideline to his business, had been making the furniture leap without looking first.

I gave Tim a reproachful glance as I used my gift to heal my bruised shin. "You might have been a little more explicit," I complained. "I'm no 'path."

"I didn't mean—" But Danny caromed into Tim on his way to inspect the damage. My whole family was so used to relying on their psi powers that they were pretty clumsy when it came to using the merely physical ones.

Danny looked sadly at the wreckage. The chair was only nicked, but the table was pretty well smashed. "Gee, Kev," he said mournfully, "if only you could fix furniture the way you fix up people."

"I can heal trees," I said. "And they're wood."

"So try the table,"