Simak, Cliffard D - Condition Of Employment - Notisblokk

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Simak, Cliffard D - Condition Of Employment

Condition of Employment

Clifford D. Simak

HE HAD BEEN dreaming of home, and when he came awake, he held his eyes tight

shut in a desperate effort not to lose the dream. He kept some of it, but it was

blurred and faint and lacked the sharp distinction and the color of the dream.

He could tell it to himself, he knew just how it was, he could recall it as

a lost and far-off thing and place, but it was not there as it had been in the

dream.

But even so, he held his eyes tight shut, for now that he was awake, he knew

what they'd open on, and he shrank from the drabness and the coldness of the

room in which he lay. It was, he thought, not alone the drabness and the cold,

but also the loneliness and the sense of not belonging. So long as he did not

look at it, he need not accept this harsh reality, although he felt himself on

the fringe of it, and it was reaching for him, reaching through the color and

the warmth and friendliness of this other place he tried to keep in mind.

At last it was impossible. The fabric of the held-onto dream became too thin

and fragile to ward off the moment of reality, and he let his eyes come open.

It was every bit as bad as he remembered it. It was drab and cold and harsh,

and there was the maddening alienness waiting for him, crouching in the corner.

He tensed himself against it, trying to work up his courage, hardening himself

to arise and face it for another day.

The plaster of the ceiling was cracked and had flaked away in great ugly

blotches. The paint on the wall was peeling and dark stains ran down it from the

times the rain leaked in. And there was the smell, the musty human smell that

had been caged in the room too long.

Staring at the ceiling, he tried to see the sky. There had been a time when

he could have seen it through this or any ceiling. For the sky had belonged to

him, the sky and the wild, dark space beyond it. But now he'd lost them. They

were his no longer.

A few marks in a book, be thought, an entry in the record. That was all that

was needed to smash a man's career, to crush his hope forever and to keep him

trapped and exiled on a planet that was not his own.

He sat up and swung his feet over the edge of the bed, hunting for the

trousers he'd left on the floor. He found and pulled them on and scuffed into

his shoes and stood up in the room.

The room was small and mean - and cheap. There would come a day when he

could not afford a room even as cheap as this. His cash was running out, and

when the last of it was gone, he would have to get some job, any kind of job.

Perhaps he should have gotten one before he began to run so short. But he had

shied away from it. For settling down to work would be an admission that he was

defeated, that he had given up his hope of going home again.

He had been a fool, he told himself, for ever going into space. Let him just

get back to Mars and no one could ever get him off it. He'd go back to the ranch

and stay there as his father had wanted him to do. He'd marry Eller and settle

down, and other fools could fly the death-traps around the Solar System.

Glamor, he thought-it was the glamor that sucked in the kids when they were

young and starry-eyed. The glamor of the far place, of the wilderness of space,

of the white eyes of the stars watching in that wilderness - the glamor of the

engine-song and of the chill white metal knifing through the blackness and the

loneliness of the emptiness, and the few cubic feet of courage and defiance that

thumbed its nose at that emptiness.

But there was no glamor. There was brutal work and everlasting watchfulness

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Simak, Cliffard D - Condition Of Employment - Notisblokk

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