But even in his exaltation he sensed a threat within the Gothic shape and the feeling of foreverness. Some lurking intuition told him that the grove was a place to get away from. He tried for a moment to remember how he had gotten there, but there was no memory. It was as if he had become familiar with the grove only a second or two before and yet he knew that he had been walking beneath the sun-dappled foliage for what must have been hours or days.
He felt a tingling on his throat and raised a hand to brush it off and his hand touched something small and warm that brought him upright out of bed.
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 blanket made a deal with men. And in the last anaylsis 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 planes 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 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…
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.”