A portrait of science fiction writer Algis Budrys. Credit: Courtesy of Dave Budrys

If Algirdas Budrys--who signed his work "Algis Budrys" and answered to "Ajay" among the regular Americans with whom he lived--maintained an apprehensive watchfulness toward much of the human race, it wasn't without justification. To start with, as the small son of Lithuania's consul general in Königsberg, East Prussia, he had seen Adolf Hitler pass in full Nazi pomp, while the citizens of the city where Immanuel Kant lay buried whipped themselves into such frenzies of admiration that they soiled themselves and defecated in public.

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