The Big Front Yard: And Other Stories

  And above and beyond all that, he always kept his door locked – which showed a contemptible suspicion of his fellow writers.

  Hart swung about and walked rapidly away in an opposite direction. Eventually he’d go back home, he told himself. But not right now.

  Later on he’d go, when the dust had settled slightly.

  VI

  It was dawn when Hart climbed the stairs to the seventh floor and went down the corridor to Jasper Hansen’s door. The door was locked as usual. But he took out of his pocket a thin piece of spring steel he’d picked up in a junkyard and did some judicious prying. In the matter of seconds, the lock clicked back and the door swung open.

  The yarner squatted in its corner, a bright and lovely sight.

  Jiggered up, Jasper had affirmed. If someone else ever tried to use it, it would very likely burn out or kill him. But that had been just talk, just cover-up for his pig-headed selfishness.

  Two weeks, Hart told himself. If he used his head he should be able to operate it without suspicion for at least two weeks. It would be easy. All he’d have to say was that Jasper had told him that he could borrow it any time he wished. And if he was any judge of character, Jasper would not be returning soon.

  But even so, two weeks would be all the time he’d need. In two weeks, working day and night, he could turn out enough copy to buy himself a new machine.

  He walked across the room to the yarner and pulled out the chair that stood in front of it. Calmly he sat down, reached out a hand and patted the instrument panel. It was a good machine. It turned out a lot of stuff – good stuff. Jasper had been selling steadily.

  Good old yarner, Hart said.

  He dropped his finger to the switch and flipped it over. Nothing happened. Startled, he flipped it back, flipped it on again. Still nothing happened.

  He got up hastily to check the power connection. There was no power connection! For a shocked moment, he stood rooted to the floor.

  Jiggered up, Jasper had said. Jiggered up so ingeniously that it could dispense with power?

  It just wasn’t possible. It was unthinkable. With fumbling fingers, he lifted the side panel, and peered inside.

  The machine’s innards were a mess. Half of the tubes were gone. Others were burned out, and the wiring had been ripped loose in places. The whole relay section was covered with dust. Some of the metal, he saw, was rusty. The entire machine was just a pile of junk.

  He replaced the panel with suddenly shaking fingers, reeled back blindly and collided with a table. He clutched at it and held on tight to still the shaking of his hands, to steady the mad roaring in his head.

  Jasper’s machine wasn’t jiggered up. It wasn’t even in operating condition.

  No wonder Jasper had kept his door locked. He lived in mortal fear that someone would find out that he wrote by hand!

  And now, despite the dirty trick he’d played on a worthy friend, Hart was no better off than he had been before. He was faced with the same old problems, with no prospect of overcoming them. He still had his own beaten-up machine and nothing more. Maybe it would have been better if he had gone to Caph.

  He walked to the door, paused there for an instant, and looked back. On the littered desk he could see Jasper’s typewriter, carefully half-buried by the litter, and giving the exact impression that it was never used.

  Still, Jasper sold. Jasper sold almost every word he wrote. He sold – hunched over his desk with a pencil in his hand or hammering out the words on a muted typewriter. He sold without using the yarner at all, but keeping it all bright and polished, an empty, useless thing. He sold by using it as a shield against the banter and the disgust of all those others who talked so glibly and relied so much upon the metal and the magic of the ponderous contraption.

  First it was told by mouth, Jasper had said that very evening. Then it was writ by hand. Now it’s fabricated by machine.

  And what’s next, he’d asked – as if he had never doubted that there would be something next.

  What next? thought Hart. Was this the end and all of Man – the moving gear, the clever glass and metal, the adroit electronics?

  For the sake of Man’s own dignity – his very sanity – there had to be a next. Mechanics, by their very nature, were a dead end. You could only get so clever. You could only go so far.

  Jasper knew that. Jasper had found out. He had discarded the mechanistic aid and gone back to hand again.

  Give a work of craftsmanship some economic value and Man would find a way to turn it out in quantity. Once furniture had been constructed lovingly by artisans who produced works of art that would last with pride through many generations. Then the machine had come and Man had turned out furniture that was purely functional, furniture that had little lasting value and no pride at all.

  And writing had followed the same pattern. It had pride no longer. It had ceased to be an art, and become a commodity.

  But what was a man to do? What could he do? Lock his door like Jasper and work through lonely hours with the bitter taste of nonconformity sharp within his mind, tormenting him night and day?

  Hart walked out of the room with a look of torment in his eyes. He waited for a second to hear the lock click home. Then he went down the hall and slowly climbed the stairs.

  VII

  The alien – the blanket and the face – was still lying on the bed. But now its eyes were open and it stared at him when he came in and closed the door behind him.

  He stopped just inside the door and the cold mediocrity of the room – all of its meanness and its poverty – rose up to clog his nostrils. He was hungry, sick at heart and lonely, and the yarner in the corner seemed to mock at him.

  Through the open window he could hear the rumble of a spaceship taking off across the river and the hooting of a tug as it warped a ship into a wharf.

  He stumbled to the bed.

  “Move over, you,” he said to the wide-eyed alien, and tumbled down beside it. He turned his back to it and drew his knees up against his chest and lay huddled there.

  He was right back where he’d started just the other morning. He still had no tape to do the job that Irving wanted. He still had a busted-up haywire machine. He was without a camera and he wondered where he could borrow one – although there would be no sense of borrowing one if he didn’t have the money to pay a character. He’d tried once to take a film by stealth and he wouldn’t try again. It wasn’t worth the risk of going to prison for three or four years.

  We love the wild and woolies, Green Shirt had said. From them we get the going of far places.

  And while with Green Shirt it would be the bang-bangs and the wild and woolies, with some other race it would be a different type of fiction – race after race finding in this strange product of Earth a new world of enchantment. The far places of the mind, perhaps – or the far places of emotion. The basic differences were not too important.

  Angela had said it was a lousy way to make a living. But she had only been letting off steam. All writers at times said approximately the same thing. In every age men and women of every known profession at some time must have said that theirs was a lousy way to make a living. At the moment they might have meant it, but at other times they knew that it was not lousy because it was important.

  And writing was important, too – tremendously important. Not so much because it meant the “going of far places,” but because it sowed the seed of Earth – the seed of Earth’s thinking and of Earth’s logic – among the myriad stars.

  They are out there waiting, Hart thought, for the stories that he would never write.

  He would try, of course, despite all obstacles. He might even do as Jasper had done, scribbling madly with a sense of shame, feeling anachronistic and inadequate, dreading the day when someone would ferret out his secret, perhaps by deducing from a certain eccentricity of style that it was not ma
chine-written.

  For Jasper was wrong, of course. The trouble was not with the yarners nor with the principle of mechanistic writing. It was with Jasper himself – a deep psychopathic quirk that made a rebel of him. But even so he had remained a fearful and a hidden rebel who locked his door, and kept his yarner polished, and carefully covered his typewriter with the litter on his desk so no one would suspect that he ever used it.

  Hart felt warmer now and he seemed to be no longer hungry and suddenly he thought of one of those far places that Green Shirt had talked about. It was a grove of trees and a brook ran through the grove. There was a sense of peace and calm and a touch of majesty and foreverness about it. He heard birdsong and smelled the sharp, spice-like scent of water running in its mossy banks. He walked among the trees and the Gothic shape of them made the place seem like a church. As he walked he formed words within his mind – words put together so feelingly and so rightly and so carefully that no one who read them could mistake what he had to say. They would know not only the sight of the grove itself, but the sound and the smell of it and the foreverness that filled it to overflowing.

  But even in his exaltation he sensed a threat within the Gothic shape and the feeling of foreverness. Some lurking intuition told him that the grove was a place to get away from. He tried for a moment to remember how he had gotten there, but there was no memory. It was as if he had become familiar with the grove only a second or two before and yet he knew that he had been walking beneath the sun-dappled foliage for what must have been hours or days.

  He felt a tingling on his throat and raised a hand to brush it off and his hand touched something small and warm that brought him upright out of bed.

  His hand tightened on the creature’s neck. He was about to rip it from his chest when suddenly he recalled, full-blown, the odd circumstance he had tried to remember just the night before.

  His grip relaxed and he let his hand drop to his side. He stood beside the bed, in the warm familiarity of the room, and felt the comfort of the blanket-creature upon his back and shoulders and around his throat.

  He wasn’t hungry and he wasn’t tired and the sickness that he’d felt had somehow disappeared. He wasn’t even worried and that was most unusual, for he was customarily worried.

  Twelve hours before he had stood in the areaway with the blanket creature in his arms and had sought to pry out of a suddenly stubborn mind an explanation for the strange sense of recognition he’d experienced – the feeling that somewhere he had read or heard of the crying thing he’d found. Now, with it clasped around his back and clinging to his throat, he knew.

  He strode across the room, with the blanket creature clinging to him, and took a book down from a narrow, six foot shelf. It was an old and tattered book, worn smooth by many hands, and it almost slipped from his clasp as he turned it over to read the title on the spine:

  Fragments from Lost Writings.

  He reversed the volume and began to leaf through its pages. He knew now where to find what he was looking for. He remembered exactly where he had read about the thing upon his back.

  He found the pages quickly enough – a few salvaged paragraphs from some story, written long ago and lost, He skipped the first two pages, and came suddenly upon the paragraphs he wanted:

  Ambitious vegetables, the life blankets waited, probably only obscurely aware of what they were waiting for. But when the humans came the long, long wait was over. The life blankets made a deal with men. And in the last analysis they turned out to be the greatest aid to galactic exploration that had ever been discovered.

  And there it was, thought Hart – the old, smug, pat assurance that it would be the humans who would go into the galaxy to explore it and make contact with its denizens and carry to every planet they visited the virtues of the Earth.

  With a life blanket draped like a bobtailed cloak around his shoulders, a man had no need to worry about being fed, for the life blanket had the strange ability to gather energy and convert it into food for the body of its host.

  It became, in fact, almost a second body – a watchful, fussy, quasiparental body that watched over the body of its host, keeping metabolism in balance despite alien conditions, rooting out infections, playing the role of mother, cook and family doctor combined.

  But in return the blanket became, in a sense, the double of its host. Shedding its humdrum vegetable existence, it became vicariously a man, sharing all of its host’s emotions and intelligence, living the kind of life it never could have lived if left to itself.

  And not content with this fair trade, the blankets threw in a bonus, a sort of dividend of gratitude. They were storytellers and imaginers. They could imagine anything – literally anything at all. They spent long hours spinning out tall yarns for the amusement of their hosts, serving as a shield against boredom and loneliness…

  There was more of it, but Hart did not need to read on. He turned back to the beginning of the fragment and he read: Author Unknown. Circa 1956.

  Six hundred years ago! Six hundred years--and how could any man in 1956 have known?

  The answer was he couldn’t.

  There was no way he could have known. He’d simply dreamed it up. And hit the truth dead center! Some early writer of science fiction had had an inspired vision!

  There was something coming through the grove and it was a thing of utter beauty. It was not humanoid and it was not a monster. It was something no man had ever seen before. And yet despite the beauty of it, there was a deadly danger in it and something one must flee from.

  He turned around to flee and found himself in the center of the room.

  “All right,” he said to the blanket. “Let’s cut it out for now. We can go back later.”

  We can go back later and we can make a story of it and we can go many other places and make stories of them, too. I won’t need a yarner to write those kind of stories, for I can recapture the excitement and splendor of it, and link it all together better than a yarner could. I’ll have been there and lived it, and that’s a setup you can’t beat.

  And there it was! The answer to the question that Jasper had asked, sitting at the table in the Bright Star bar.

  What next?

  And this was next: a symbiosis between Man and an alien thing, imagined centuries ago by a man whose very name was lost.

  It was almost, Hart thought, as if God had placed His hand against his back and propelled him gently onward, for it was utterly fantastic that he should have found the answer crying in an areaway between an apartment house and a bindery.

  But that did not matter now. The important thing was that he’d found it and brought it home – not quite knowing why at the time and wondering later why he had even bothered with it.

  The important thing was that now was the big pay-off.

  He heard footsteps coming up the stairs and turning down the hall. Alarmed by their rapid approach he reached up hastily and snatched the blanket from his shoulders. Frantically he looked about for a place to hide the creature. Of course! His desk. He jerked open the bottom drawer and stuffed the blanket into it, ignoring a slight resistance. He was kicking the drawer shut when Angela came into the room.

  He could see at once that she was burned up.

  “That was a lousy trick,” she said. “You got Jasper into a lot of trouble.”

  Hart stared at her in consternation. “Trouble? You mean he didn’t go to Caph?”

  “He’s down in the basement hiding out. Blake told me he was there. I went down and talked to him.”

  “He got away from them?” Hart appeared badly shaken.

  “Yes. He told them they didn’t want a man at all. He told them what they wanted was a machine and he told them about that glittering wonder – that Classic model – in the shop uptown.”

  “And so they went and stole it.”

  “No. If they had it would have been
all right. But they bungled it. They smashed the glass to get at it, and that set off an alarm. Every cop in town came tearing after them.”

  “But Jasper was all –”

  “They took Jasper with them to show them where it was.”

  Some of the color had returned to Hart’s face. “And now Jasper’s hiding from the law.”

  “That’s the really bad part of it. He doesn’t know whether he is or not. He’s not sure the cops even saw him. What he’s afraid of is that they might pick up one of those Caphians and sweat the story out of him. And if they do, Kemp Hart, you have a lot to answer for.”

  “Me? Why, I didn’t do a thing –”

  “Except tell them that Jasper was the man they wanted. How did you ever make them believe a line like that?”

  “Easy. Remember what Jasper said. Everyone else tells the truth. We’re the only ones who lie. Until they get wise to us, they’ll believe every word we say. Because, you see, no one else tells anything but the truth and so –”

  “Oh, shut up!” Angela said impatiently.

  She looked around the room. “Where’s that blanket thing?” she asked.

  “It must have left. Maybe it ran away. When I came home it wasn’t here.”

  “Haven’t you any idea what it was?”

  Hart shook his head. “Maybe it’s just as well it’s gone,” he said. “It gave me a queasy feeling.”

  “You and Doc! That’s another thing. This neighborhood’s gone crazy. Doc is stretched out dead drunk under a tree in the park and there’s an alien watching him. It won’t let anyone come near him. It’s as if it were guarding him, or had adopted him or something.”

  “Maybe it’s one of Doc’s pink elephants come to actual life. You know, dream a thing too often and –”

  “It’s no elephant and it isn’t pink. It’s got webbed feet that are too big for it and long, spindly legs. It’s something like a spider, and its skin is warts. It has a triangular head with six horns. It fairly makes you crawl just to look at it.”