The Big Front Yard and Other Stories (35 page)

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.”

Hart shuddered. Ordinary aliens could be all right, but a thing like that –

“Wonder what it wants of Doc.”

“Nobody seems to know. It won't talk.”

“Maybe it can't talk.”

“You know all aliens talk. At least enough of our language to make themselves understood. Otherwise they wouldn't come here.”

“It sounds reasonable,” said Hart. “Maybe it's acquiring a second-hand jag just sitting there beside Doc.”

“Sometimes,” said Angela, “your sense of humor is positively disgusting.”

“Like writing books by hand.”

“Yes,” she said. “Like writing books by hand. You know as well as I do that people just don't talk about writing anything by hand. It's like – well, it's like eating with your fingers or belching in public or going without clothes.”

“All right,” he said, “all right. I'll never mention it again.”

VIII

After she had left, Hart sat down and gave some serious thought to his situation.

In many ways he'd be a lot like Jasper, but he wouldn't mind if he could write as well as Jasper.

He'd have to start locking his door. He wondered where his key was. He never used it and now he'd have to look through his desk the first chance he got, to see if he couldn't locate it. If he couldn't find it, he'd have to have a new key made, because he couldn't have people walking in on him unexpectedly and catching him wearing the blanket or writing stuff by hand.

Maybe, he thought, it might be a good idea to move. It would be hard at times to explain why all at once he had started to lock his door. But he hated the thought of moving. Bad as it was, he'd gotten used to this place and it seemed like home.

Maybe, after he started selling, he should talk with Angela and see how she felt about moving in with him. Angela was a good kid, but you couldn't ask a girl to move in with you when you were always wondering where the next meal was coming from. But now, even if he didn't sell, he'd never have to worry where his next meal was coming from. He wondered briefly if the blanket could be shared as a food provider by two persons and he wondered how in the world he'd ever manage to explain it all to Angela.

And how had that fellow back in 1956 ever thought of such a thing? How many of the other wild ideas concocted out of tortuous mental efforts and empty whiskey bottles might be true as well?

A dream? An idea? A glimmer of the future? It did not matter which, for a man had thought of it and it had come true. How many of the other things that Man had thought of in the past and would think of in the future would also become the truth?

The idea scared him.

That “going of far places.” The reaching out of the imagination. The influence of the written word, the thought and power behind it. It was deadlier than a battleship, he'd said. How everlastingly right he had been.

He got up and walked across the room and stood in front of the yarner. It leered at him. He stuck out his tongue at it.

“That for you,” he said.

Behind him he heard a rustle and hastily whirled about.

The blanket had somehow managed to ooze out of the desk drawer and it was heading for the door, reared upon the nether folds of its flimsy body. It was slithering along in a jerky fashion like a wounded seal.

“Hey, you!” yelled Hart and made a grab at it. But he was too late. A being – there was no other word for it – stood in the doorway and the blanket reached it and slithered swiftly up its body and plastered itself upon its back.

The thing in the doorway hissed at Hart: “I lose it. You are so kind to keep it. I am very grateful.”

Hart stood transfixed.

The creature was a sight. Just like the one which Angela had seen guarding Doc, only possibly a little uglier. It had webbed feet that were three times too big for it, so that it seemed to be wearing snowshoes, and it had a tail that curved ungracefully halfway up its back. It had a melon-shaped head with a triangular face, and six horns and there were rotating eyes on the top of each and every horn.

The monstrosity dipped into a pouch that seemed to be part of its body, and took out a roll of bills.

“So small reward,” it piped and tossed the bills to Hart.

Hart put out a hand and caught them absent-mindedly.

“We go now,” said the being. “We think kind thoughts of you.”

It had started to turn around, but at Hart's bellow of protest it swiveled back.

“Yes, good sir?”

“This – blanket – this thing I found. What about it?”

“We make it.”

“But it's alive and –”

The thing grinned a murderous grin. “You so clever people. You think it up. Many times ago.”

“That story!”

“Quite so. We read of it. We make it. Very good idea.”

“You can't mean you actually –”

“We biologist. What you call them – biologic engineers.”

It turned about and started down the hall.

Hart howled after it. “Just a minute! Hold up there! Just a min –”

But it was going fast and it didn't stop. Hart thundered after it. When he reached the head of the stairs and glanced down it was out of sight. But he raced after it, taking the stairs three at a time in defiance of all the laws of safety.

He didn't catch it. In the street outside he pulled to a halt and looked in all directions but there was no sign of it. It had completely disappeared.

He reached into his pocket and felt the roll of bills he had caught on the fly. He pulled the roll out and it was bigger than he remembered it. He snapped off the rubber band, and examined a few of the bills separately. The denomination on the top bill, in galactic credits, was so big it staggered him. He riffled through the entire sheaf of bills and all the denominations seemed to be the same.