Condition of Employment
by
Clifford D. Simak
HE HAD BEEN dreaming of home, and when he came awake, he held his eyes tight shut in a desperate effort not to lose the dream. He kept some of it, but it was blurred and faint and lacked the sharp distinction and the color of the dream.
He could tell it to himself, he knew just how it was, he could recall it as a lost and far-off thing and place, but it was not there as it had been in the dream.
But even so, he held his eyes tight shut, for now that he was awake, he knew what they’d open on, and he shrank from the drabness and the coldness of the room in which he lay. It was, he thought, not alone the drabness and the cold, but also the loneliness and the sense of not belonging. So long as he did not look at it, he need not accept this harsh reality, although he felt himself on the fringe of it, and it was reaching for him, reaching through the color and the warmth and friendliness of this other place he tried to keep in mind.
At last it was impossible. The fabric of the held-onto dream became too thin and fragile to ward off the moment of reality, and he let his eyes come open.
It was every bit as bad as he remembered it. It was drab and cold and harsh, and there was the maddening alienness waiting for him, crouching in the corner. He tensed himself against it, trying to work up his courage, hardening himself to arise and face it for another day.
The plaster of the ceiling was cracked and had flaked away in great ugly blotches. The paint on the wall was peeling and dark stains ran down it from the times the rain leaked in. And there was the smell, the musty human smell that had been caged in the room too long.
Staring at the ceiling, he tried to see the sky. There had been a time when he could have seen it through this or any ceiling. For the sky had belonged to him, the sky and the wild, dark space beyond it. But now he’d lost them. They were his no longer.
A few marks in a book, be thought, an entry in the record. That was all that was needed to smash a man’s career, to crush his hope forever and to keep him trapped and exiled on a planet that was not his own.
He sat up and swung his feet over the edge of the bed, hunting for the trousers he’d left on the floor. He found and pulled them on and scuffed into his shoes and stood up in the room.
The room was small and mean – and cheap. There would come a day when he could not afford a room even as cheap as this. His cash was running out, and when the last of it was gone, he would have to get some job, any kind of job. Perhaps he should have gotten one before he began to run so short. But he had shied away from it. For settling down to work would be an admission that he was defeated, that he had given up his hope of going home again.
He had been a fool, he told himself, for ever going into space. Let him just get back to Mars and no one could ever get him off it. He’d go back to the ranch and stay there as his father had wanted him to do. He’d marry Eller and settle down, and other fools could fly the death-traps around the Solar System.
Glamor, he thought-it was the glamor that sucked in the kids when they were young and starry-eyed. The glamor of the far place, of the wilderness of space, of the white eyes of the stars watching in that wilderness – the glamor of the engine-song and of the chill white metal knifing through the blackness and the loneliness of the emptiness, and the few cubic feet of courage and defiance that thumbed its nose at that emptiness.
But there was no glamor. There was brutal work and everlasting watchfulness and awful sickness, the terrible fear that listened for the stutter in the drive, for the ping against the metal hide, for any one of the thousand things that could happen out in space.
He picked up his wallet off the bedside table and put it in his pocket and went out into the hall and down the rickety stairs to the crumbling, lopsided porch outside.
And the greenness waited for him, the unrelenting, bilious green of Earth. It was a thing to gag at, to steel oneself against, an indecent and abhorrent color for anyone to look at. The grass was green and all the plants and every single tree. There was no place outdoors and few indoors where one could escape from it, and when one looked at it too long, it seemed to pulse and tremble with a hidden life.
The greenness, and the brightness of the sun, and the sapping beat – these were things of Earth that it was hard to bear. The light one could get away from, and the heat one could somehow ride along with – but the green was always there.
He went down the steps, fumbling in his pocket for a cigarette. He found a crumpled package and in it one crumpled cigarette. He put it between his lips and threw the pack away and stood at the gate, trying to make up his mind.
But it was a gesture only, this hardening of his mind, for he knew what he would do. There was nothing else to do. He’d done it day after day for more weeks than he cared to count, and he’d do it again today and tomorrow and tomorrow, until his cash ran out.
And after that, he wondered, what?
Get a job and try to strike a bargain with his situation? Try to save against the day when he could buy passage back to Mars – for they’d surely let him ride the ships even if they wouldn’t let him run them. But, he told himself, he’d figured that one out. It would take twenty years to save enough, and he had no twenty years.
He lit the cigarette and went tramping down the street, and even through the cigarette, he could smell the hated green.
Ten blocks later, he reached the far edge of the spaceport. There was a ship. He stood for a moment looking at it before he went into the shabby restaurant to buy himself some breakfast.
There was a ship, he thought, and that was a hopeful sign. Some days there weren’t any, some days three or four.
But there was a ship today and it might be the one.
One day, he told himself, he’d surely find the ship out there that would take him home – a ship with a captain so desperate for an engineer that he would overlook the entry in the book.
But even as he thought it, be knew it for a lie – a lie he told himself each day. Perhaps to justify his coming here each day to check at the hiring hall, to lie to keep his hope alive, to keep his courage up. A lie that made it even barely possible to face the bleak, warm room and the green of Earth.
He went into the restaurant and sat down on a stool.
The waitress came to take his order. “Cakes again?” she asked.
He nodded. Pancakes were cheap and filling and he had to make his money last.
“You’ll find a ship today,” said the waitress. “I have a feeling you will.”
“Perhaps I will,” he said, without believing it.
“I know just how you feel,” the waitress told him. “I know how awful it can be. I was homesick once myself, the first time I left home. I thought I would die.”
He didn’t answer, for he felt it would not have been dignified to answer. Although why he should now lay claim to dignity, he could not imagine.
But this, in any case, was more than simple homesickness. It was planetsickness, culturesickness, a cutting off of all he’d known and wanted.
Sitting, waiting for the cakes to cook, he caught the dream again – the dream of red hills rolling far into the land, of the cold, dry air soft against the skin, of the splendor of the stars at twilight and the faery yellow of the distant sandstorm. And the low house crouched against the land, with the old gray-haired man sitting stiffly in a chair upon the porch that faced toward the sunset.
The waitress brought the cakes.
The day would come, he told himself, when he could afford no longer this self-pity he carried. He knew it for what it was and he should get rid of it. And yet it was a thing he lived with – even more than that, it had become a way of life. It was his comfort and his shield, the driving force that kept him trudging on each day.