The Big Front Yard and Other Stories (31 page)

Blake came with the beer and plunked it down on the table and waited pointedly for Hart to do the expected thing.

Hart paid him and he waddled off.

“Have you heard about Jasper?” Angela asked.

Hart shook his head. “Nothing recent,” he said. “Did he finish his book?”

Angela's face lit up. “He's going on vacation. Can you imagine that?
Him
going on vacation!”

“I don't see why not,” Hart protested. “Jasper has been selling. He's the only one of us who manages to stay loaded week after week.”

“But that's not it, Kemp. Wait until I tell you – it simply is a scream. Jasper thinks he can write better if he goes off on vacation.”

“Well, why not? Just last year Don went to one of those summer camps. That Bread Loaf thing, as they call it.”

“All they do there,” she said, “is brush up on mechanics. It's a sort of refresher course on the gadgetry of yarners. How to soup up the old heap so it'll turn out fresher stuff.”

“I still don't see why Jasper can't take a vacation if he can afford it.”

“You're so dense,” said Angela. “Don't you get the point at all?”

“I get the point all right. Jasper thinks there's still a human factor in our writing. He's not entirely satisfied to get his facts out of a standard reference work or encyclopedia. He's not content to let the yarner define an emotion he has never felt or the color of a sunset he has never seen. He was nuts enough to hint at that and you and the rest of them have been riding him. No wonder the guy is eccentric. No wonder he keeps his door locked all the time.”

“That locked door,” Angela said cattily, “is symbolic of the kind of man he is.”

“I'd lock my door,” Hart told her. “I'd be eccentric too – if I could turn it out like Jasper. I'd walk on my hands. I'd wear a sarong. I'd even paint my face bright blue.”

“You sound like you believe the same as Jasper does.”

He shook his head. “No, I don't think the way he does. I know better. But if he wants to think that way let him go ahead and think it.”

“You do,” she crowed at him. “I can see it in your face. You think it's possible to be independently creative.”

“No, I don't. I know it's the machines that do the creating – not us. We're nothing but attic tinkers. We're literary mechanics. And I suppose that's the way it should be. There is, naturally, the yearning for the past. That's been evident in every age. The ‘good old days' complex. Back in those days a work of fiction was writ by hand and human agony.”

“The agony's still with us, Kemp.”

He said: “Jasper's a mechanic. That's what's wrong with me. I can't even repair that junk-heap of mine and you should see the way Jasper has his clunk souped up.”

“You could hire someone to repair it. There are firms that do excellent work.”

“I never have the money.”

He finished his beer.

“What's that stuff you're drinking?” he asked. “Want another one?”

She pushed her glass away. “I don't like that mess,” she said. “I'll have a beer with you, if you don't mind.”

Hart signaled to Blake for two beers.

“What are you doing now, Angela?” he asked. “Still working on the book?”

“Working up some films,” she said.

“That's what I'll have to do this afternoon. I need a central character for this Irving stuff. Big and tough and boisterous – but not too uncouth. I'll look along the riverfront.”

“They come high now, Kemp,” she said. “Even those crummy aliens are getting wise to us. Even the ones from
way out
. I paid twenty for one just the other day and he wasn't too hot, either.”

“It's cheaper than buying made-up films.”

“Yes, I agree with you there. But it's a lot more work.”

Blake brought the beers and Hart counted out the change into his waiting palm.

“Get some of this new film,” Angela advised. “It's got the old stuff beat forty different ways. The delineation is sharper and you catch more of the marginal factors. You get a more rounded picture of the character. You pick up all the nuances of the subject, so to speak. It makes your people more believable. I've been using it.”

“It comes high, I suppose,” he said.

“Yes, it's a bit expensive,” she admitted.

“I've got a few spools of the old stuff. I'll have to get along with that.”

“I've an extra fifty you can have.”

He shook his head. “Thanks, Angela. I'll cadge drinks and bum meals and hit up for a cigarette, but I'm not taking a fifty you'll need yourself. There's none of us so solvent we can lend someone else a fifty.”

“Well, I would have done so gladly. If you should change your mind –”

“Want another beer?” Hart asked, cutting her short.

“I have to get to work.”

“So have I,” said Hart.

III

Hart climbed the stairs to the seventh floor, then went down the corridor and knocked on Jasper Hansen's door.

“Just a minute,” said a voice from within the room.

He waited for three minutes. Finally a key grated in the lock and the door was opened wide.

“Sorry I took so long,” apologized Jasper. “I was setting up some data and I couldn't quit. Had to finish it.”

Hart nodded. Jasper's explanation was understandable. It was difficult to quit in the middle of setting up some data that had taken hours to assemble.

The room was small and littered. In one corner stood the yarner, a shining thing, but not as shiny as the one he'd seen that morning in the uptown showroom. A typewriter stood on a littered desk, half covered by the litter. A long shelf sagged with the weight of dog-eared reference works. Bright-jacketed books were piled helter-skelter in a corner. A cat slept on an unmade bed. A bottle of liquor stood on a cupboard beside a loaf of bread. Dirty dishes were piled high in the sink.

“Heard you're going on vacation, Jasper,” Hart said.

Jasper gave him a wary look. “Yes, I thought I might.”

“I was wondering, Jasper, if you'd do something for me.”

“Just name it.”

“When you're gone, could I use your yarner?”

“Well, now, I don't know, Kemp. You see –”

“Mine is busted and I haven't the cash to fix it. But I've got a line on something. If you'd let me use yours, I could turn out enough in a week or two to cover the repair bill.”

“Well, now,” said Jasper, “you know I'd do anything for you. Anything at all. But that yarner – I just can't let you use it. I got it jiggered up. There isn't a circuit in it that has remained the way it was originally. There isn't a soul but myself who could operate it. If someone else tried to operate it they might burn it out or kill themselves or something.”

“You could show me, couldn't you?” Hart asked, almost pleadingly.

“It's far too complicated. I've tinkered with it for years,” said Jasper.

Hart managed a feeble grin. “I'm sorry, I thought –”

Jasper draped an arm around his shoulder. “Anything else. Just ask me anything.”

“Thanks,” said Hart, turning to go.

“Drink?”

“No, thanks,” said Hart, and walked out of the door.

He climbed two more flights to the topmost floor and went into his room. His door was never locked. There was nothing in it for anyone to steal. And for that matter, he wondered, what did Jasper have that anyone might want?

He sat down in a rickety chair and stared at his yarner. It was old and battered and ornery, and he hated it.

It was worthless, absolutely worthless, and yet he knew he would have to work with it. It was all he had. He'd slave and reason with it and kick it and swear at it and he'd spend sleepless nights with it. And gurgling and clucking with overweaning gratitude, it would turn out endless reams of mediocrity that no one would buy.

He got up, and walked to the window. Far below lay the river and at the wharfs a dozen ships were moored, disgorging rolls of paper to feed the hungry presses that thundered day and night. Across the river a spaceship was rising from the spaceport, with the faint blue flicker of the ion stream wisping from the tubes. He watched it until it was out of sight.

There were other ships, with their noses pointed at the sky, waiting for the signal – the punched button, the flipped switch, the flicker of a piece of navigation tape – that would send them bounding homeward. First out into the blackness and then into that other place of weird other-worldness that annihilated time and space, setting at defiance the theoretic limit of the speed of light. Ships from many stars, all come to Earth for one thing only, for the one commodity that Earthmen had to sell.

He pulled his eyes from the fascination of the spaceport and looked across the sprawling city, the tumbled, canted, box-like rectangles of the district where he lived, while far to the north shone the faery towers and the massive greatness of the famous and the wise.

A fantastic world, he thought. A fantastic world to live in. Not the kind of world that H. G. Wells and Stapledon had dreamed. With them it had been far wandering and galactic empire, a glory and a greatness that Earth had somehow missed when the doors to space had finally been opened. Not the thunder of the rocket, but the thunder of the press. Not the great and lofty purpose, but the faint, quiet, persistent voice spinning out a yarn. Not the far sweep of great new planets, but the attic room and the driving fear that the machine would fail you, that the tapes had been used too often, that the data was all wrong.

He went to the desk and pulled all three of the drawers. He found the camera in the bottom one beneath a pile of junk. He hunted for and found the film in the middle drawer, wrapped in aluminum foil.

Rough and tough, he thought, and it shouldn't be too hard to find a man like that in one of the dives along the riverfront, where the space crews on planet leave squandered their pay checks.

The first dive he entered was oppressive with the stink of a group of spidery creatures from Spica and he didn't stay. He grimaced distastefully and got out as fast as he could. The second was repellently patronized by a few cat-like denizens of Dahib and they were not what he was looking for.

But in the third he hit the jackpot, a dozen burly humanoids from Caph – great brawling creatures with a flair for extravagance in dress, a swashbuckling attitude and a prodigious appetite for lusty living.

They were grouped about a large round table out in the center of the room and they were whooping it up. They were pounding the table with their tankards and chivvying the scuttling proprietor about and breaking into songs that they repeatedly interrupted with loud talk and argument.

Hart slipped into an unoccupied booth and watched the Caphians celebrate. One of them, bigger and louder and rowdier than the rest, wore red trousers, and a bright green shirt. Looped necklaces of platinum and outlandish alien gems encircled his throat and glittered on his chest, and his hair had not been trimmed for months. He wore a beard that was faintly satanic and, startlingly enough, his ears were slightly pointed. He looked like an ugly customer to get into a fracas with, and so, thought Hart, he's just the boy I want.

The proprietor finally lumbered over to the booth.

“Beer,” said Hart. “A big glass.”

“Buster,” said the man, “no one drinks beer here.”

“Well, then, what have you got?”

“I got
bocca
and
igno
and
hzbut
and
greno
and –”

“
Bocca,
” said Hart. He knew what
bocca
was and he didn't recognize any of the others. Lord knows what some of them might do to the human constitution.
Bocca,
at least, one could survive.

The man went away and in a little while came back with a mug of
bocca
. It was faintly greenish and it sizzled just a little. What was worse, it tasted like a very dilute solution of sulphuric acid.

Hart squeezed himself back into the corner of the booth and opened his camera case. He set the camera on the table, no farther forward than was necessary to catch Green Shirt in the lens. Sighting through the finder, he got the Caphian in focus, and then quickly pressed the button that set the instrument in motion.

Once that was done, he settled down to drinking
bocca
.

He sat there, gagging down the
bocca
and manipulating the camera. Fifteen minutes was all he needed. At the end of fifteen minutes Green Shirt would be on film. Probably not as good as if he had been using the new-fangled spools that Angela was using, but at least he'd have him.

The camera ground on, recording the Caphian's physical characteristics, his personal mannerisms, his habits of speech, his thought processes (if any), his way of life, his background, his theoretic reaction in the face of any circumstance.

Not three-dimensional, thought Hart, not too concise, nor too distinctive, not digging deep into the character and analyzing him – but good enough for the kind of tripe he'd have to write for Irving.

Take this joker and surround him with a few other ruffians chosen haphazardly from the file. Use one of the films from the Deep Dark Villain reel, throw in an ingenious treasure situation and a glob of violence, dream up some God-awful background, and he'd have it. He'd have it, that is, if the yarner worked…

Ten minutes gone. Just five more to go. In five more minutes he'd stop the camera, put it back into its case, slip the case into his pocket and get out of the place as fast as he could. Without causing undue notice, of course.

It had been simple, he thought – much simpler than he could possibly have imagined.

They're getting on to us,
Angela had said.
Even these crummy aliens
.