Simak, Clifford D - Galactic Chest

VIP免费

2024-11-23 0 0 50.59KB 17 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

file:///G|/rah/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Galactic%20Chest.txt

Title : Galactic Chest

Author : Clifford D. Simak

Original copyright year: 1956

Genre : science fiction

Comments : to my knowledge, this is the only available e-text of this book

Source : scanned and OCR-read from a paperback edition with Xerox TextBridge Pro 9.0,

proofread in MS Word 2000.

Date of e-text : February 13, 2000

Prepared by : Anada Sucka

======================================================================

Galactic Chest

Clifford D. Simak

I had just finished writing the daily Community Chest story, and each day I wrote that story I

was sore about it; there were plenty of punks in the office who could have ground out that kind of

copy. Even the copy boys could have written it and no one would have known the difference; no one

ever read it - except maybe some of the drive chairmen, and I'm not even sure about them reading

it.

I had protested to Barnacle Bill about my handling the Community Chest for another year. I had

protested loud. I had said: "Now, you know, Barnacle, I been writing that thing for three or four

years. I write it with my eyes shut. You ought to get some new blood into it. Give one of the cubs

a chance; they can breathe some life into it. Me, I'm all written out on it."

But it didn't do a bit of good. The Barnacle had me down on the assignment book for the

Community Chest, and he never changed a thing once he put it in the book.

I wish I knew the real reason for that name of his. I've heard a lot of stories about how it

was hung on him, but I don't think there's any truth in them. I think he got it simply from the

way he can hang on to a bar.

I had just finished writing the Community Chest story and was sitting there, killing time and

hating myself, when along came Jo Ann. Jo Ann was the sob sister on the paper; she got some lousy

yarns to write, and that's a somber fact I guess it was because I am of a sympathetic nature, and

took pity on her, and let her cry upon my shoulder that we got to know each other so well. By now,

of course, we figure we're in love; off and on we talk about getting married, as soon as I snag

that foreign correspondent job I've been angling for.

"Hi, kid," I said.

And she says, "Do you know, Mark, what the Barnacle has me down for today?"

"He's finally ferreted out a one-armed paperhanger," I guessed, "and he wants you to do a

feature..."

"Its worse than that," she moans. "It's an old lady who is celebrating her one hundredth

birthday."

"Maybe," I said, "she will give you a piece of her birthday cake."

"I don't see how even you can joke about a thing like this," Jo Ann told me. "It's positively

ghastly."

Just then the Barnacle let out a bellow for me, so I picked up the Community Chest story and

went over to the city desk.

file:///G|/rah/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Galactic%20Chest.txt (1 of 17) [2/14/2004 12:05:40 AM]

file:///G|/rah/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Galactic%20Chest.txt

Barnacle Bill is up to his elbows in copy; the phone is ringing and he's ignoring it, and for

this early in the morning he has worked himself into more than a customary lather. "You remember

old Mrs. Clayborne?"

"Sure, she's dead. I wrote the obit on her ten days or so ago."

"Well, I want you to go over to the house and snoop around a bit."

"What for?" I asked. "She hasn't come back, has she?"

"No, but there's some funny business over there. I got a tip that someone might have hurried

her a little."

"This time," I told him, "you've outdone yourself. You've been watching too many television

thrillers."

"I got it on good authority," he said and turned back to his work.

So I went and got my hat and told myself it was no skin off my nose how I spent the day; I'd

get paid just the same!

But I was getting a little fed up with some of the wild-goose chases to which the Barnacle was

assigning not only me, but the rest of the staff as well. Sometimes they paid off; usually, they

didn't. And when they didn't, Barnacle had the nasty habit of making it appear that the man he had

sent out, not he himself, had dreamed up the chase. His "good authority" probably was no more than

some casual chatter of someone next to him at the latest bar he'd honored with his cash.

Old Mrs. Clayborne had been one of the last of the faded gentility which at one time had

graced Douglas Avenue. The family had petered out, and she was the last of them; she had died in a

big and lonely house with only a few servants, and a nurse in attendance on her, and no kin close

enough to wait out her final hours in person.

It was unlikely, I told myself, that anyone could have profited by giving her an overdose of

drugs, or otherwise hurrying her death. And even if it was true, there'd be little chance that it

could be proved; and that was the kind of story you didn't run unless you had it down in black and

white.

I went to the house on Douglas Avenue. It was a quiet and lovely place, standing in its fenced-

in yard among the autumn-colored trees.

There was an old gardener raking leaves, and he didn't notice me when I went up the walk. He

was an old man, pottering away and more than likely mumbling to himself, and I found out later

that he was a little deaf.

I went up the steps, rang the bell and stood waiting, feeling cold at heart and wondering what

I'd say once I got inside. I couldn't say what I had in mind; somehow or other I'd have to go

about it by devious indirection.

A maid came to the door.

"Good morning, ma'am," I said, "I am from the _Tribune_. May I come in and talk?"

She didn't even answer; she looked at me for a moment and then slammed the door. I told myself

I might have known that was the way it would be.

I turned around, went down the steps, and cut across the grounds to where the gardener was

working. He didn't notice me until I was almost upon him; when he did see me, his face sort of lit

up. He dropped the rake, and sat down on the wheelbarrow. I suppose I was as good an excuse as any

for him to take a breather.

file:///G|/rah/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Galactic%20Chest.txt (2 of 17) [2/14/2004 12:05:40 AM]

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Simak, Clifford D - Galactic Chest.pdf

共17页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Simak, Clifford D - Galactic Chest

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: