Collected Short Fiction, page 91
But Jennerton fixed that with a couple of twists of his pliers, and Barren mentally kicked himself.
Then something went wrong with the detector of the electronic mousetrap and it snaped the robot watchdog by mistake, causing serious feedbacks in the nervous systems of both articles. Jennerton came over, amiably disconnected both of them, and repaired the damage, explaining to Barren what he should have done to avoid such difficulties.
Helen frequently complained now, both about Barren’s preoccupation with do-it-yourself things and Jennerton’s obvious superiority. The more she spoke about the big man’s ability, the harder Barren was goaded to the workshop. And he worked with a hopeless desperation.
For Jennerton’s skill was incredible. Besides repairing the inevitable flaws in the items Barren assembled, the big man turned out quite a collection of things himself. In short order he designed and built a robot nursemaid, a radio-TV that turned itself on when the baseball games were broadcast and shut off when the last out was recorded, a self-propelling baby carriage, an automatic potato-peeler. And they worked flawlessly.
Barren plunged deeper and deeper into the workshop world. He began to wear an angry, hunted look. His work at the office suffered, his children never saw him, he snarled at his wife on those infrequent moments when he emerged from his workshop. But still, every gadget he designed was promptly topped by something which Jennerton had apparently turned out between sneezes one morning, and Jennerton seemed to take real delight in tracking down the bugs in Karren’s devices and setting them straight.
Karren’s house now overflowed with strange and impossible things: butterfly nets, skin-diving outfits, toasters boasting little hands that would pluck the toast and butter it. If it could be built yourself, Karren built one.
The idea for the cybernetic brain came to him one day when Billy, his oldest son, had wandered into the workshop to get some help with his math homework. Karren’s irritation changed to delight when the idea came to him, and he set to work.
The huge thing occupied what had formerly been the guest room. Karren toiled for days and nights on it, feeling like Michelangelo in the Sistine as he patiently assembled one tiny part after another and hooked them all together. At last it was complete, and he invited Jennerton over for the usual demonstration.
“I’ll begin with something simple,” Karren said, noting with a thrill of pure joy Jennerton’s whistle of amazement at the sight of the formidable computer.
He tapped out a simple equation and fed it to the machine.
2X Plus X = 18
Immediately the answer clicked out.
X = 7.
Karren showed the tape to Jennerton, waved it joyously around.
“Very good,” Jennerton said. “Just one trouble. In that equation, X is 6.”
“What?” Karren looked at the tape, then at his son’s algebra book, and to his horror saw that the big man was right. The machine had made an error on its first try.
“Let’s try again,” he said, mustering a heartiness he did not feel.
3X Plus Y = 24
Y = 6
Without a moment’s hesitation, the machine clicked back.
X = 7.
Karren began frantically to search through his schematics, wondering where he had gone wrong. By the time he found the error (a trifling miswiring) Jennerton had already corrected it and the computer was happily spewing out differential equations.
Karren remained in the grip of despair for almost a week, sitting silently in the living room, growling at anyone who approached, wondering why it was that the whole world could do things while he invariably failed.
Jennerton’s house was now bristling with new gadgets; Michael Karren couldn’t even bear to look at it through the window.
But after a while, the cloud lifted. Karren resumed everyday life, carefully avoiding Jennerton. And now, he started to make thoughtful inquiries.
“Been doing any handiwork yourself, Joe?” he would ask. “Any projects on the line?”
And slowly the truth came to him.
He was just like everybody else.
Jennerton hadn’t lied. This was an age of Do-It-Yourself. But Karren was a perfectly normal, ordinary man, and the average man is a fumbler. Karren gradually discovered that his mechanical mishaps were perfectly customary, that most of the other local build-it men had had similar troubles.
No. Jennerton had embarked on a deliberate campaign to convince Michael Karren that he was inferior. For what reasons, Karren didn’t know and didn’t care. Perhaps, he thought, it was sheer pride; Jennerton, so swelled up by his uncanny mechanical aptitude, was loftly reaching down to crush Michael Karren’s soul with god-like gratuitousness.
It didn’t matter why. Jennerton was doing it. And so, Karren set about constructing his last do-it-yourself project, the one that would symbolize his final capitulation to Jennerton.
He built it in the garage, moving the autocopter to the roof, keeping the garage-door locked at all times. When anyone questioned him, he explained that he was working on something new, something that represented a completely unthought-of advance in the do-it-yourself field.
At length it was completed, and he invited Jennerton over to see it in operation.
“You look terrible, Mike,” Jennerton said as he approached. He smiled heartily.
“I know,” said Karren. “I’ve been working till all hours. But I’ve built something new,” he said dreamily. “Something that will revolutionize the whole do-it-yourself field. And it’s a gift—for you.”
“For me?”
“Yes, Phil,” Karren said, almost affectionately. “I did it all specially for you—and here it is.”
Inside was a squat metal cabinet, unpainted, rectangular, about seven feet square.
“What is this, Mike?” asked Jennerton. “A joke?”
“I made it for you because you love to do things yourself. It’s the ultimate do-it-yourself gadget.” He pressed a button on the side, feeling his moment of triumph at last approaching, and a door in the cabinet opened, disclosing a roaring furnace within. A pair of metallic arms shot out from the sides of the cabinet, wrapping around Jennerton and pinioning him firmly.
“What the hell, Mike?”
“Don’t you see?” Karren asked. “You like to do things yourself. Here’s your big chance. All you have to do is press this button over here, and the arms will transport you smoothly inside. Inside, there is light—like the sun. It’s a Karren Jiffy Crematorium, specially created for self-use. Go on, Phil—press the button. Here’s your chance.”
He smiled. Jennerton’s last do-it-yourself act wouldn’t require any talent at all. Why, Karren could even help him, if necessary. THE END
The Man with Talent
Yesterday, today, tomorrow—a poet’s life is not an easy one!
Following in the lines suggested by such stories as James Blish’s “Art Work” and Clifford D. Simak’s “Spaceman’s Van Gogh”, Robert Silverberg considers the case of a poet who wanted to escape the philistines. Emil Vilar wanted to be appreciated for his true worth; but he hadn’t considered just what that might involve.
THERE WAS a little clipping that Emil Vilar carried about with him, a review of his first and only volume of poetry. Now, on this new world, he drew it out and read it for the ten-thousandth time.
It was yellow with age, and the print was getting blurred, but that didn’t matter; the words were inscribed on Emil Vilar’s brain in perpetuity.
“Emil Vilar understands the world as jew poets ever have,” the clipping said. “Tragically, the world will never understand him. His talent is too great.”
Vilar had blushed when that review appeared; he had known, inwardly, that it was the truth, but he had neither dared to admit it to himself nor welcomed another’s saying it.
He had tried. For twenty years after, he had continued to write and to try. And finally, he had admitted the truth of what the anonymous reviewer had said—and he had left Earth forever.
Fie looked up from the clipping at the landscape of his new world. He had selected it at random, from the thick volume of catalogued worlds in the library. Which world it was, did not matter to him; all that mattered was that it was not Earth.
“Rigel Seven,” he said aloud. The words were strange in his mouth, and he savored the interplay of the not-quite-assonant vowels of the two mild trochees that named his new home.
HE WAS faintly disappointed, now that he was here, that he had picked a Terraformed planet. His motives had been clear enough at the start: he wanted a world as much like and as far from Earth as possible, where he could work in peace, unknown and undisturbed—where people would not plague him with their well-meant misinterpretations of his work, sting him with accusations of ivory-towerism or artistic irresponsibility, or call Vilar any of the other names they had called him because he insisted on writing his poetry for himself and himself alone.
Earth didn’t understand. Earth wanted him to be a rhymer, not a poet—and so Emil Vilar had quietly removed himself from the Terran scene. He had chosen a Terraformed planet as his new home. But as he looked at the gently sloping green hills and the familiar-seeming puffs of white fleece in the soft blue sky, he realized he had made one of his rare mistakes. How much richer his imagination would have been, he thought sadly, had he selected an alien-form world—one which had not yet been converted into a carbon copy of the mother planet. Here, he had the same sky and the same clouds as on Earth; only the sun was different.
Well, he was here, and here he would stay. Carefully, he folded his clipping and slid it into his wallet. Rigel Seven was as good a place as any, and any would be better than Earth.
THE ROBOT in the Earthside routing office had told him, with a smirk on its mirrored face, that he was the first emigrant to Rigel Seven in over eight hundred years. That had been all right, too.
The planet had been settled, a thousand years earlier, by sixteen wealthy Terran families; they had purchased it jointly as a private estate. The conditions of the sale, of course, had been that the planet remain open to all comers of emigration, but that was a safe risk. The sky was full of stars, and each had its cluster of worlds. Who would cross five hundred light-years to settle on Rigel Seven, when Sirius and Vega and Procyon and the Centauri stars beckoned just a few light-years from Earth?
Who but Emil Vilar, fleeing quietly from the world that would never understand him?
He had saved some five thousand dollars, in his fifty years. That had nearly covered the transit fee; the rest had been supplied by his friends.
There had been six of them, men with faith in Emil Vilar. They had fought against his going, but when they saw he was determined to go they helped him. They contributed the needed thousand to see him through the journey; they established a trust fund that would provide a monthly remittance for him for the rest of his life.
He took a deep breath. Rigel Seven was Terraformed, but they had left out the stink of Earth’s air and the filth of her cities. The air was fresh and clear here. He smiled at the sight of his shadow, stretched mightily ahead of him over the grass.
For the first time in his memory, he felt happy.
THE RIGEL SEVEN spaceport was at the edge of a broad field that swept up the side of the hill in the distance like a green carpet. Further back, on the hill, Vilar could see the shimmering paleness of a domed house. Someone was coming down the brown, winding path that led from the hill to the field.
He hefted his small suitcase and started to walk forward rapidly. The man met him in the middle of the field. He was tall and bronzed, shirtless, with long, rippling muscles lying flat and firm on his arms and chest. Vilar felt suddenly ashamed of his own dumpy body.
“You’re the emigrant, aren’t you?”
“I am Emil Vilar. The ship has just left me here.”
“I know,” the tall man said, grinning affably. “We saw it come down. It was quite a novelty for us; we don’t get much traffic here, you know.”
“I can imagine,” Vilar said quietly. “Well, I shan’t bother you much. I keep to myself most of the time.”
“We have a place all ready for you. My name’s Carpenter, by the way—Melbourne Hadley Carpenter. Come: I’ll show you to your shack, and then you can come visit us later. We’ll tell you how things work here.”
“Work? But—I do not plan to participate in any communal activ—”
He paused, frowning, and shook his head gently: this was no time to spout a declaration of principles. “Never mind,” he said. “Show me where I stay.”
CARPENTER led him back up the path to the foot of the hill, where there was a small shack looking upward at the great domed house.
“This is ideal,” said Vilar. It was just what he had envisioned when he had made arrangements to live here.
“See you later,” Carpenter told him, waved cheerily, and left. Vilar put a hand on the door-opener, broke the photonic circuit, and stepped in.
One bookcase, one bed, one closet, one desk, one dresser.
Ideal.
Vilar unpacked his single suitcase rapidly. It had been no struggle for him to break away from his Earthly possessions; he had been able to bring everything he owned, and still make the fifty-pound mass limit of the subspace liner with ease.
First came the books, just eight of them. There was the slim blue-bound copy of Poems, by Emil Vilar (London, 2643, 61 pp.) After that, Pound’s Cantos, the complete hundred and eight. Next came the King James Bible, Swann’s Way, the complete Yeats, Davis’ On Historical Analysis (both volumes in one), the plays of Cyril Tourneur, and the Greek Anthology. These were all Vilar had kept from a lifetime of reading, and he had added the most recent—the single volume of Proust—sixteen years before. Now, he considered his library closed.
HIS MEAGER wardrobe followed, and he arrayed it in the closet and dresser with customary methodical precision. After that, his linens and other household goods. Next, the thin file envelope containing his poetic output since the 2643 volume. It was all unpublished, and the world had seen little of it.
Those works which had somehow passed muster and been shown to a few friends—those poems Vilar now regarded as tainted, though he kept them. Each seemed stained by the muddleheaded comment it had inspired.
“A wonderful thing, Emil—but isn’t it a shade too long?”
“Marvelous imagery, but I don’t understand the applicability of the reference to Dido in line 11.”
“Magnificent, but—”
“Splendid, but—”
Or: “It’s worthless, Emil, but I have an idea for fixing it. Why don’t you—”
He had listened patiently to each of them, digested their often-conflicting critical views with dignity, and, finally, turned his back on the lot of them. Retreating to Rigel Seven was the easiest solution for all; there had been no other way.
Had he remained on Earth, he would have spent the rest of his days unchangingly, plagued by the cultists, the center of a well-meaning circle of admirers and worshippers who longed to share his gift—though they had no notion of the anguish they brought to its possessor.
Forget them, Emil, he ordered himself sternly. He continued unpacking. He drew out a package of paper: two reams, all he would need for the rest of his life. His pen. His notebook.
He looked around. Everything was where it should be. The room was complete.
VILAR SAT down at his desk and reached for a book. His hand lingered momentarily over his own little volume, quivered involuntarily, and moved on. He drew forth Yeats, then reconsidered and put him back. Fugitive lines from Eliot, whom he had long since memorized and so had not needed to bring with him, flickered through his mind:
. . . What will the spider do,
Suspend its operations,
will the weevil
Delay? De Bailhache,
Fresca, Mrs. Carnmel,
whirled
Beyond the circuit of the
shuddering Bear
In fractured atoms. Gull
against the wind, in the
windy straits
Of Belle Isle, or running
on the Horn,
White feathers in the
snow, the Gulf claims,
And an old man driven
by the Trades
To a sleepy corner.
Tenants of the house,
Thoughts of a dry brain
in a dry season.
HE WORKED, for most of that night, on a free fantasy based on the opening lines of The Revenger’s Tragedy. Toward dawn, Vilar rose, tore up the sheet, and blotted what he had written from his mind. He went outside on his tiny porch to watch the bloated sun creep above the horizon of Rigel Seven.
Shortly after sunrise, Melbourne Hadley Carpenter returned. “Have a good night?” Vilar, rumpled-looking and red-eyed, nodded. “Excellent.”
“Glad to hear it. Suppose you come up to the house, now. My Dad’s waiting to meet you, and so are all the others.” Vilar frowned suspiciously. “Why do they want to meet me?”
“Oh, just curiosity, I guess. You’re the only one here who’s not one of the Families, you know.”
“I know,” Vilar said, relieved. “You’re sure you’ve never heard of me then?” Carpenter shrugged. “How would we ever hear of you? We’re completely out of touch with things, you know.”
“True.” One major worry was thereby avoided—he would be a complete stranger here, as he had hoped. A fresh start would be possible. The old man’s brain was not dry; here in this sleepy corner, he could scale the greatest heights, without attracting the attention that was so fatal to artistic endeavor.
HE FOLLOWED the tall young man up the hill and into the domed house. The lines of the building were clear and simple; in his amateur’s way, Vilar approved of the architecture wholeheartedly. It had none of the falseness of Earth’s current pseudo-archaism.
In the spacious central hall, an immense table had been set, and at least fifty people sat around it. A tall man—looking much like Melbourne Hadley Carpenter, but much older—with iron-gray hair and faintly stooping shoulders, rose from his seat at the head of the table.
