A. Bertram Chandler - Bad Patch

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2024-11-25 0 0 27.13KB 9 页 5.9玖币

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BAD PATCH

BY A. BERTRAM CHANDLER

A soft world of clouds and drizzles and weathered hills doesn't build a hard people. And a soft

people—well, they may have quite different, quite potent, means to their ends!

Illustrated by Swenson

For the seventh time George Whitley inserted fresh sheets of paper into his typewriter. For the

seventh time he typed the date in the upper left-hand corner. The thumb of his right hand rattled the shift

bar. Then, hard by the margin, appeared the numeral one. One space down—and the words

"PLEASURE DOME," in capitals, sprang into being in the top middle of the page. Two spaces—and

"by" was added. Two more spaces —and "GEORGE WHITLEY."

And that, for a long time, was that.

George Whitley filled his pipe. He lit it. He looked vainly at the many and various pin-up girls on the

bulkheads of his cabin for inspiration. He got up from his chair and went to the locker in which he kept

his mental lubricants. A glass of pink gin in his hand he returned to his chair.

Ensued an interval devoted to the consumption of gin and relighting of pipes. This was followed by a

brief burst of activity, a. sound as of a machine-gun post striving to fight off an attack in overwhelming

force. After a brief but spirited resistance the post was overwhelmed and the gunners bayoneted. Whitley

read, for the seventh time, the first page of "PLEASURE DOME," tore it from his machine and sent it to

join its crumpled predecessors in the wastepaper basket. He lit his pipe again and went out on deck. He

looked disapprovingly at the small men-o'-war berthed all around his own ship, looked almost longingly

towards the glare of lights in the eastern sky that was Honolulu. He wished that it was not his night

aboard, that he was with his fellow officers sampling the dubious delights of that vastly overrated city.

The quiet evening of literary endeavor to which he had looked forward had all the earmarks of a failure.

Yet there was a certain stubbornness, a knowledge that he could never hope to be a writer if he were

incapable of overcoming such bad patches. Somebody had told him once that if a story refused to get off

to a flying start, refused to write itself, the best policy was the abandonment of that story until such time

as it, of its own accord, clamored for expression. Somebody else had told him that if you took a bunch of

oddly assorted characters and dumped them down in some strange environment a story was bound to

grow from the potentialities of such a beginning.

It was possible, thought Whitley, relighting his pipe. It was worth trying. There was nothing to

lose—with the exception of a sheet or two of paper. Time was of no consequence. He had nothing better

to do. He conveniently forgot the arrears of correspondence that somehow never got made up, took

fresh paper from the box on his settee, placed the carbon between the two sheets and began.

Night and day the mists sweep slowly over the surface of Loalon. There is neither sunrise nor sunset

and dawn is but a creeping pallor in the eternal overcast, and dusk is a gradual, almost imperceptible

diminution of the dim, watery light.

Were Loalon a world of craggy peaks, of tortured rock masses upthrust into the gray vagueness of

the sky, the harsh outlines would be softened, the sharp edges and contours would be blunted in

appearance if not in actuality by the quivering, saturated air. But there is nothing hard on Loalon. Low,

rounded hills rise gently from long beaches that slope down reluctantly to meet the long, low swells of the

gray, tideless sea. And the gentle curves of hills and valleys are rendered even more formless, more

diffuse, by the feathery gray-green fronds of the luxuriant vegetation that springs from every square inch

of solidity, that struggles invisibly, silently, but with a grim ruthlessness for foothold, for life itself.

There was nothing hard on Loalon.

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A. Bertram Chandler - Bad Patch

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