The Big Front Yard and Other Stories (34 page)

“We not complain,” said Green Shirt, gently. “We just with you mop up the condemned place.”

Blake brought the bottle and thumped it down in the center of the table. Green Shirt picked it up and filled their glasses to the brim.

“Drink up,” he said and set a fine example.

He drank and Green Shirt filled his glass again. Hart picked up his glass and twirled it in his fingers.

There had to be a way out of this mess, he told himself. It was absurd that this thundering barbarian from one of the farther suns should be able to walk into a bar and tell a man to come along with him.

However, there was no percentage in stirring up a fight – not with ten or eleven Caphians waiting just outside.

“I explain it to you,” said Green Shirt. “I try hard to explain it well so that you will – so that you will –”

“Understand,” supplied Jasper Hansen.

“I thank you, Hansen man. So you will understand. We get the stories only shortly ago. Many of the other races got them long ago, but with us it is new and most wonderful. It takes us – how would you say – out of ourselves. We get many things from other stars, useful things, things to hold in the hand, things to see and use. But from you we get the going of far places, the doing of great deeds, the thinking of great things.”

He filled the glasses all around again.

“You understand?” Green Shirt asked.

They nodded.

“And now we go.”

Hart rose slowly to his feet.

“Kemp, you can't!” screamed Angela.

“You shut the mouth,” said Green Shirt.

Hart marched through the door and out into the street. The other Caphians oozed out of dark alleyways and surrounded him.

“Off we go,” said Green Shirt, happily. “It gives big time on Caph.”

Halfway to the river, Hart stopped in the middle of the street.

“I can't do it,” he said.

“Can't do what?” asked Green Shirt, prodding him along.

“I let you think,” said Hart, “that I was the man you wanted. I did it because I'd like to see your planet. But it isn't fair. I'm not the man you want.”

“You write the bang-bangs, do you not? You think up the wild and woolies?”

“Certainly. But not really good ones. Mine aren't the kind where you hang on every word. There's another man who can do it better.”

“This man we want,” said Green Shirt. “Can you tell us where to find him?”

“That's easy. The other man at the table with us. The one who was so happy when you ordered whiskey.”

“You mean the Hansen man?”

“He is the one, exactly.”

“He write the bang-bangs good?”

“Much better than I do. He's a genius at it.”

Green Shirt was overcome with gratitude. He hugged Hart to him in an extravagant expression of good will.

“You fair,” he said. “You fine. It was nice of you to tell us.”

A window banged up in a house across the street and a man stuck his head out.

“If you guys don't break it up,” he bellowed, “I'll call the cops.”

“We shatter the peace,” sighed Green Shirt. “It is a queer law you have.”

The window banged down again.

Green Shirt put a friendly hand upon Hart's shoulder. “We love the wild and woolies,” he said gravely. “We want the very best. We thank you. We find this Hansen man.”

He turned around and loped back up the street, followed by his ruffians.

Hart stood on the corner and watched them go. He drew a deep breath and let it slowly out.

It had been easy, he told himself, once you got the angle. And it had been Jasper, actually, who had given him the angle.
Truth is regarded as a universal constant,
Jasper had said.
We are the only liars
.

It had turned out tough on Jasper – a downright dirty trick. But the guy wanted to go on vacation, didn't he? And here was the prospect of a travel jaunt which would be really worthwhile. He'd refused the use of his machine and he had guffawed insultingly when Green Shirt had asked about the wild and woolies. If ever a guy had it coming to him, Jasper Hansen was that guy.

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 machine-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.