“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.”
The two of them sat silently for a while.
Then Hart asked, “Doc, what would you do if you had about a billion bucks?”
“Me,” said Doc, without the slightest hesitation, “I’d drink myself to death. Yes, sir, I’d drink myself to death real fancy, not on any of this rotgut they sell in this end of town.”
And that was the way it went, thought Hart. Doc would drink himself to death. Angela would go in for arty salons and the latest styles. Jasper more than likely would buy a place out in the mountains where he could be away from people.
And me, thought Hart, what will I do with a billion bucks – take or give a million?
Yesterday, last night, up until a couple of hours ago, he would have traded in his soul on the Classic yarner.
But now it seemed all sour and off-beat.
For there was a better way – the way of symbiosis, the teaming up of Man and an alien biologic concept.
He remembered the grove with its Gothic trees and its sense of foreverness and even yet, in the brightness of the sun, he shivered at the thought of the thing of beauty that had appeared among the trees.
That was, he told himself, a surely better way to write – to know the thing yourself and write it, to live the yarn and write it.
But he had lost the blanket and he didn’t know where to find another. He didn’t even know, if he found the place they came from, what he’d have to do to capture it.
An alien biologic concept, and yet not entirely alien, for it had first been thought of by an unknown man six centuries before. A man who had written as Jasper wrote even in this day, hunched above a table, scribbling out the words he put together in his brain. No yarner there – no tapes, no films, none of the other gadgets. But even so that unknown man had reached across the mists of time and space to touch another unknown mind and the life blanket had come alive as surely as if Man himself had made it.
And was that the true greatness of the human race – that they could imagine something and in time it would be so?
And if that were the greatness, could Man afford to delegate it to the turning shaft, the spinning wheel, the clever tubes, the innards of machines?
“You wouldn’t happen,” asked Doc, “to have a dollar on you?”
“No,” said Hart, “I haven’t got a dollar.”
“You’re just like the rest of us,” said Doc. “You dream about the billions and you haven’t got a dime.”
Jasper was a rebel and it wasn’t worth it. All the rebels ever got were the bloody noses and the broken heads.
“I sure could use a buck,” said Doc.
It wasn’t worth it to Jasper Hansen and it wasn’t worth it to the others who must also lock their doors and polish up their never-used machines, so that when someone happened to drop in they’d see them standing there.
And it isn’t worth it to me, Kemp Hart told himself. Not when by continuing to conform he could become famous almost automatically and virtually overnight.
He put his hand into his pocket and felt the roll of bills and knew that in just a little while he’d go uptown and buy that wonderful machine. There was plenty in the roll to buy it. With what there was in that roll he could buy a shipload of them.
“Yes, sir,” said Doc, harking back to his answer to the billion dollar question. “It would be a pleasant death. A pleasant death, indeed.”
A gang of workmen were replacing the broken window when Hart arrived at the uptown showroom, but he scarcely more than glanced at them and walked straight inside.
The same salesman seemed to materialize from thin air.
But he wasn’t happy. His expression was stern and a little pained.
“You’ve come back, no doubt,” he said, “to place an order for the Classic.”
“That is right,” said Hart and pulled the roll out of his pocket.
The salesman was well-trained. He stood wall-eyed for just a second, then recovered his composure with a speed which must have set a record.
“That’s fine,” he said. “I knew you’d be back. I was telling some of the other men this morning that you would be coming in.”
I just bet you were, thought Hart.
“I suppose,” he said, “that if I paid you cash you would consider throwing in a rather generous supply of tapes and films and some of the other stuff I need.”
“Certainly, sir. I’ll do the best I can for you.”
Hart peeled off twenty-five thousand and put the rest back in his pocket.
“Won’t you have a seat,” the salesman urged. “I’ll be right back. I’ll arrange delivery and fix up the guarantee …”
“Take your time,” Hart told him, enjoying every minute of it.
He sat down in a chair and did a little planning.
First he’d have to move to better quarters and as soon as he had moved he’d have a dinner for the crowd and he’d rub Jasper’s nose in it. He’d certainly do it – if Jasper wasn’t tucked away in jail. He chuckled to himself, thinking of Jasper cringing in the basement of the Bright Star bar.