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 foreverness 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.
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 blankets made a deal with men. And in the last analysis 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 places 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’ll 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-off.
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.