But even so, two weeks would be all the time he’d need. In two weeks, working day and night, he could turn out enough copy to buy himself a new machine.
He walked across the room to the yarner and pulled out the chair that stood in front of it. Calmly he sat down, reached out a hand and patted the instrument panel. It was a good machine. It turned out a lot of stuff – good stuff. Jasper had been selling steadily. _Good old yarner_, Hart said.
He dropped his finger to the switch and flipped it over. Nothing happened. Startled, he flipped it back, flipped it on again. Still nothing happened.
He got up hastily to check the power connection. There was no power connection! For a shocked moment, he stood rooted to the floor.
Jiggered up, Jasper had said. Jiggered up so ingeniously that it could dispense with power?
It just wasn’t possible. It was unthinkable. With fumbling fingers, he lifted the side panel, and peered inside.
The machine’s innards were a mess. Half of the tubes were gone. Others were burned out, and the wiring had been ripped loose in places. The whole relay section was covered with dust. Some of the metal, he saw, was rusty. The entire machine was just a pile of junk.
He replaced the panel with suddenly shaking fingers, reeled back blindly and collided with a table. He clutched at it and held on tight to still the shaking of his hands, to steady the mad roaring in his head.
Jasper’s machine wasn’t jiggered up. It wasn’t even in operating condition…
No wonder Jasper had kept his door locked. He lived in mortal fear that someone would find out that be wrote by hand!
And now, despite the dirty trick he’d played on a worthy friend, Hart was no better off than he had been before. He was faced with the same old problems, with no prospect of overcoming them. He still had his own beaten-up machine and nothing more. Maybe it would have been better if he had gone to Caph.
He walked to the door, paused there for an instant, and looked back. On the littered desk he could see Jasper’s typewriter carefully half-buried by the litter, and giving the exact impression that it was never used.
Still, Jasper sold. Jasper sold almost every word he wrote. He sold – hunched over his desk with a pencil in his hand or hammering out the words on a muted typewriter. He sold without using the yarner at all, but keeping it all bright and polished, an empty, useless thing. He sold by using it as a shield against the banter and the disgust of all those others who talked so glibly and relied so much upon the metal and the magic of the ponderous contraption.
_First it was told by mouth_, Jasper had said that very evening. _Then it was writ by hand. Now it’s fabricated by machine._
And what’s next, he’d asked – as if he had never doubted that there would be something next.
_What next?_ thought Hart. Was this the end and all of Man – the moving gear, the clever glass and metal, the adroit electronics?
For the sake of Man’s own dignity – his very sanity – there _had_ to be a next. Mechanics, by their very nature, were a dead end. You could only get so clever. You could only go so far.
Jasper knew that. Jasper had found out. He had discarded the mechanistic aid and gone back to hand again.
Give a work of craftsmanship some economic value and Man would find a way to turn it out in quantity. Once furniture had been constructed lovingly by artisans who produced works of art that would last with pride through many generations. Then the machine had come and Man had turned out furniture that was purely functional, furniture that had little lasting value and no pride at all.
And writing had followed the same pattern. It had pride no longer. It had ceased to be an art, and become a commodity.
But what was a man to do? What _could_ he do? Lock his door like Jasper and work through lonely hours with the bitter taste of nonconformity sharp within his mind, tormenting him night and day?
Hart walked out of the room with a look of torment in his eyes. He waited for a second to hear the lock click home. Then he went down the hall and slowly climbed the stairs.
The alien – the blanket and the face – was still lying on the bed. But now its eyes were open and it stared at him when he came in and closed the door behind him.
He stopped just inside the door and the cold mediocrity of the room – all of its meanness and its poverty – rose up to clog his nostrils. He was hungry, sick at bean and lonely, and the yarner in the corner seemed to mock him.
Through the open window he could hear the rumble of a spaceship taking off across the river and the hooting of a tug as it warped a ship into a wharf.
He stumbled to the bed.
“Move over, you,” he said to the wide-eyed alien, and tumbled down beside it. He turned his back to it and drew his knees up against his chest and lay huddled there.
He was right back where he’d started just the other morning. He still had no tape to do the job that Irving wanted. He still had a busted up haywire machine. He was without a camera and he wondered where he could borrow one – although there would be no sense of borrowing one if he didn’t have the money to pay a character. He’d tried once to take a film by stealth and he wouldn’t try again. It wasn’t worth the risk of going to prison for three or four years.
_We love the wild and woollies_, Green Shirt had said. _From them we get the going of far places._
And while with Green Shirt it would be the bang-bangs and the wild and woollies, with some other race it would be a different type of fiction – race after race finding in this strange product of Earth a new world of enchantment. The far places of the mind, perhaps – or the far places of emotion. The basic differences were not too important
Angela had said it was a lousy way to make a living.
But she had only been letting off steam. All writers at times said approximately the same thing. In every age men and women of every known profession at some time must have said that theirs was a lousy way to make a living. At the moment they might have meant it, but at other times they knew that it was not lousy because it was important.
And writing was important, too – tremendously important. Not so much because it meant the “going of far places,” but because it sowed the seed of Earth – the seed of Earth’s thinking and of Earth’s logic – among the myriad stars.
They are out there waiting, Hart thought, for the stories that he would never write.
He would try, of course, despite all obstacles. He might even do as Jasper had done, scribbling madly with a sense of shame, feeling anachronistic and inadequate, dreading the day when someone would ferret out his secret, perhaps by deducing from a certain eccentricity of style that it was not machine-written.
For Jasper was wrong, of course. The trouble was not with the yarners nor with the principle of mechanistic writing. It was with Jasper himself – a deep psychopathic quirk that made a rebel of him. But even so he had remained a fearful and a hidden rebel who locked his door and kept his yarner polished, and carefully covered his typewriter with the litter on his desk so no one would suspect that he ever used it.
Hart felt warmer now and he seemed to be no longer hungry and suddenly he thought of one of those far places that Green Shirt had talked about It was a grove of trees and a brook ran through the grove. There was a sense of peace and calm and a touch of majesty and for-everness about it. He heard birdsong and smelled the sharp, spice-like scent of water running in its mossy banks. He walked among the trees and the Gothic shape of them made the place seem like a church. As he walked he formed words within his mind – words put together so feelingly and so rightly and so carefully that no one who read them could mistake what he had to say. They would know not only the sight of the grove itself, but the sound and the smell of it and the foreverness that filled it to overflowing.