“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 some thing 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.”
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, be thought, it might be a good idea to move. It would be hard at times to explain why all at once be 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 a reward,” it piped and tossed the bills to Hart.
Hart put out a hand and caught them absentmindedly.
“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.
He gasped at the thought of it, and riffled through them once again. He had been right the first time – all the denominations _were_ the same. He did a bit of rapid calculation and it was strictly unbelievable. In credits, too – and a credit was convertible, roughly, into five Earth dollars.
He had seen credits before, but never actually held one in his hand. They were the currency of galactic trade and were widely used in interstellar banking circles, but seldom drifted down into general circulation. He held them in his hand and took a good look at them and they sure were beautiful.
The being must have immeasurably prized that blanket, he thought – to give him such a fabulous sum simply for taking care of it. Although, when you came to think of it, it wasn’t necessarily so. Standards of wealth differed greatly from one planet to another and the fortune he held in his hands might have been little more than pocket money to the blanket’s owner.
He was surprised to find that he wasn’t too thrilled or happy, as he should have been. All he seemed to be able to think about was that he’d lost the blanket.
He thrust the bills into his pocket and walked across the street to the little park. Doc was awake and sitting on a bench underneath a tree. Hart sat down beside him.
“How you feeling, Doc?” he asked.
“I’m feeling all right, son,” the old man replied.
“Did you see an alien, like a spider wearing snowshoes?”
“There was one of them here just a while ago. It was here when I woke up. It wanted to know about that thing you’d found.”
“And you told it.”
“Sure. Why not? It said it was hunting for it. I figured you’d be glad to get it off your hands.”