The Big Front Yard and Other Stories (32 page)

Only three more minutes to go.

A hand came down from nowhere, and picked up the camera. Hart swiveled around. The proprietor stood directly behind him, with the camera under his arm.

Good Lord,
thought Hart,
I was watching the Caphians so closely I forgot about this guy!

The proprietor roared at him: “So! You sneak in here under false pretenses to get your film! Are you trying to give my place a bad name?”

Swiftly Hart flung himself out of the booth, one frantic eye on the door. There was just a chance that he might make it. But the proprietor stuck out an expert foot and tripped him. Hart landed on his shoulders and somersaulted. He skidded across the floor, smashed into a table and rolled half under it.

The Caphians had come to their feet and were looking at him. He could see that they were hoping he'd get his head bashed in.

The proprietor hurled the camera with great violence to the floor. It came apart with an ugly, splintering sound. The film rolled free and snaked across the floor. The lens wobbled crazily. A spring came unloose from somewhere and went
zing
. It stood out at an angle, quivering.

Hart gathered his feet beneath him, and leaped out from the table. The Caphians started moving in on him – not rushing him, not threatening him in any way. They just kept walking toward him and spreading out so that he couldn't make a dash for the door.

He backed away, step by careful step, and the Caphians still continued their steady advance.

Suddenly he leaped straight toward them in a direct assault on the center of the line. He yelled and lowered his head and caught Green Shirt squarely in the belly. He felt the Caphian stagger and lurch to one side, and for a split second he thought that he had broken free.

But a hairy, muscular hand reached out and grabbed him and flung him to the floor. Someone kicked him. Someone stepped on his fingers. Someone else picked him up and threw him – straight through the open door into the street outside.

He landed on his back and skidded, with the breath completely knocked out of him. He came to rest with a jolt against the curbing opposite the place from which he had been heaved.

The Caphians, the full dozen of them, were grouped around the doorway, aroar with booming laughter. They slapped their thighs, and pounded one another on the back. They doubled over, shrieking. They shouted pleasantries and insults at him. Half of the jests he did not understand, but the ones that registered were enough to make his blood run cold.

He got up cautiously, and tested himself, He was considerably bruised and battered and his clothes were torn. But seemingly he had escaped any broken bones. He tried a few steps, limping. He tried to run and was surprised to find that he could.

Behind him the Caphians were still laughing. But there was no telling at what moment they might cease to think that his predicament was funny and start after him in earnest – for blood.

He raced down the street and ducked into an alley that led to a tangled square. He crossed the square into another street without pausing for breath and went running on. Finally he became satisfied that he was safe and sat down on a doorstep in an alley to regain his breath and carefully review the situation.

The situation, he realized, was bad. He not only had failed to get the character he needed. He had lost the camera, suffered a severe humiliation and barely escaped with his life.

There wasn't a thing that he could do about it. Actually, he told himself, he had been extremely lucky. For he didn't have a legal leg to stand on. He'd been entirely in the wrong. To film a character without the permission of the character's original was against the law.

It wasn't that he was a lawbreaker, he thought. It wasn't as if he'd deliberately set out to break the law. He'd been forced into it. Anyone who might have consented to serve as a character would have demanded money – more money than he was in a position to shell out.

But he did desperately need a character! He simply had to have one, or face utter defeat.

He saw that the sun had set, and that twilight was drifting in. The day, he thought, had been utterly wasted, and he had only himself to blame.

A passing police officer stopped and looked into the alley.

“You,” he said to Hart. “What are you sitting there for?”

“Resting,” Hart told him.

“All right. You're rested. Now get a move on.”

Hart got a move on.

IV

He was nearing home when he heard the crying in the areaway between an apartment house and a bindery. It was a funny sort of crying, a not-quite-human crying – perhaps not so much a crying as a sound of grief and loneliness.

He halted abruptly and stared around him. The crying had cut off, but soon it began again. It was a low and empty crying, a hopeless crying, a crying to one's self.

For a moment he stood undecided, then started to go on. But he had not gone three paces before he turned back. He stepped into the areaway and at the second step his foot touched something lying on the ground.

He squatted and looked at the form that lay there, crying to itself. It was a bundle – that described it best – a huddled, limp, sad bundle that moaned heartbrokenly.

He put a hand beneath it and lifted it and was surprised at how little weight it had. Holding it firmly with one hand, he searched with the other for his lighter. He flicked the lighter and the flame was feeble, but he saw enough to make his stomach flop. It was an old blanket with a face that once had started out to be humanoid and then, for some reason, had been forced to change its mind. And that was all there was – a blanket and a face.

He thumbed the lighter down and crouched in the dark, his breath rasping in his throat. The creature was not only an alien. It was, even by alien standards, almost incredible. And how had an alien strayed so far from the spaceport? Aliens seldom wandered. They never had the time to wander, for the ships came in, freighted up with fiction, and almost immediately took off again. The crews stayed close to the rocket berths, seldom venturing farther than the dives along the riverfront.

He rose, holding the creature bundled across his chest as one would hold a child – it was not as heavy as a child – and feeling the infant-like warmth of it against his body and a strange companionship. He stood in the areaway while his mind went groping back in an effort to unmask the faint recognition he had felt. Somewhere, somehow, it seemed he once had heard or read of an alien such as this. But surely that was ridiculous, for aliens did not come, even the most fantastic of them, as a living blanket with the semblance of a face.

He stepped out into the street and looked down to examine the face again. But a portion of the creature's blanket-body had draped itself across its features and he could see only a waving blur.

Within two blocks he reached the Bright Star bar, went around the corner to the side door and started up the stairs. Footsteps were descending and he squeezed himself against the railing to let the other person past.

“Kemp,” said Angela Maret. “Kemp, what have you there?”

“I found it in the street,” Hart told her.

He shifted his arm a little and the blanket-body slipped and she saw the face. She moved back against the railing, her hand going to her mouth to choke off a scream.

“Kemp! How awful!”

“I think that it is sick. It –”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don't know,” Hart said. “It was crying to itself. It was enough to break your heart. I couldn't leave it there.”

“I'll get Doc Julliard.”

Hart shook his head. “That wouldn't do any good. Doc doesn't know any alien medicine. Besides, he's probably drunk.”

“No one knows any alien medicine,” Angela reminded him. “Maybe we could get one of the specialists uptown.” Her face clouded. “Doc is resourceful, though. He has to be, down here. Maybe he could tell us –”

“All right,” Hart said. “See if you can rout out Doc.”

In his room he laid the alien on the bed. It was no longer whimpering. Its eyes were closed and it seemed to be asleep, although he could not be sure.

He sat on the edge of the bed and studied it and the more he looked at it the less sense it seemed to make. Now he could see how thin the blanket body was, how light and fragile. It amazed him that a thing so fragile could live at all, that it could contain in so inadequate a body the necessary physiological machinery to keep itself alive.

He wondered if it might be hungry and if so what kind of food it required. If it were really ill how could he hope to take care of it when he didn't know the first basic thing about it?

Maybe Doc – But, no, Doc would know no more than he did. Doc was just like the rest of them, living hand to mouth, cadging drinks whenever he could get them, and practicing medicine without adequate equipment and with a knowledge that had stopped dead in its tracks forty years before.

He heard footsteps coming up the stairs – light steps and trudging heavy ones. It had to be Angela with Doc. She had found him quickly and that probably meant he was sober enough to act and think with a reasonable degree of coordination.

Doc came into the room, followed by Angela. He put down his bag and looked at the creature on the bed.

“What have we here?” he asked and probably it was the first time in his entire career that the smug doctorish phrase made sense.

“Kemp found it in the street,” said Angela quickly. “It's stopped crying now.”

“Is this a joke?” Doc asked, half wrathfully. “If it is, young man, I consider it in the worst possible taste.”

Hart shook his head. “It's no joke. I thought that you might know –”

“Well, I don't,” said Doc, with aggressive bitterness.

He let go of the blanket edge and it quickly flopped back upon the bed.

He paced up and down the room for a turn or two. Then he whirled angrily on Angela and Hart.

“I suppose you think that I should do something,” he said. “I should at least go through the motions. I should act like a doctor. I'm sure that is what you're thinking. I should take its pulse and its temperature and look at its tongue and listen to its heart. Well, suppose you tell me how I do these things. Where do I find the pulse? If I could find it, what is its normal rate? And if I could figure out some way to take its temperature, what is the normal temperature for a monstrosity such as this? And if you would be so kind, would you tell me how – short of dissection – I could hope to locate the heart?”

He picked up his bag and started for the door.

“Anyone else, Doc?” Hart pleaded, in a conciliatory tone. “Anyone who'd know?”

“I doubt it,” Doc snapped.

“You mean there's
no one
who can do a thing? Is that what you're trying to say?”

“Look, son. Human doctors treat human beings, period. Why should we be expected to do more? How often are we called upon to treat an alien? We're not
expected
to treat aliens. Oh, possibly, once in a while some specialist or researcher may dabble in alien medicine. But that is the correct name for it – just plain dabbling. It takes years of a man's life to learn barely enough to qualify as a human doctor. How many lifetimes do you think we should devote to curing aliens?”

“All right, Doc. All right.”

“And how can you even be sure there's something wrong with it?”

“Why, it was crying and I quite naturally thought –”

“It might have been lonesome or frightened or grieving. It might have been lost.”

Doc turned to the door again.

“Thanks, Doc,” Hart said.

“Not at all.” The old man hesitated at the door. “You don't happen to have a dollar, do you? Somehow, I ran a little short.”

“Here,” said Hart, giving him a bill.

“I'll return it tomorrow,” Doc promised.

He went clumping down the stairs.

Angela frowned. “You shouldn't have done that, Kemp. Now he'll get drunk and you'll be responsible.”

“Not on a dollar,” Hart said confidently.

“That's all you know about it. The kind of stuff Doc drinks –”

“Let him get drunk then. He deserves a little fun.”

“But –” Angela motioned to the thing upon the bed.

“You heard what Doc said. He can't do anything. No one can do anything. When it wakes up –
if
it wakes up – it may be able to tell us what is wrong with it. But I'm not counting on that.”

He walked over to the bed and stared down at the creature. It was repulsive and abhorrent and not in the least humanoid. But there was about it a pitiful loneliness and an incongruity that made a catch come to his throat.

“Maybe I should have left it in the areaway,” he said. “I started to walk on. But when it began to cry again I went back to it. Maybe I did wrong bothering with it at all. I haven't helped it any. If I'd left it there it might have turned out better. Some other aliens may be looking for it by now.”

“You did right,” said Angela. “Don't start in fighting with windmills.”

She crossed the room and sat down in a chair. He went over to the window and stared somberly out across the city.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“But your clothes. Just look at your clothes.”

“I got thrown out of a dive. I tried to take some film.”

“Without paying for it.”

“I didn't have the money.”

“I offered you a fifty.”

“I know you did. But I couldn't take it. Don't you understand, Angela?
I simply couldn't take it.”

She said softly, “You're bad off, Kemp.”

He swung around, outraged. She hadn't needed to say that. She had no right to say it. She –

He caught himself up before the words came tumbling out.