Condition of Employment

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2024-11-20 4 0 19.17KB 10 页 5.9玖币

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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 and awful

sickness, the terrible fear that listened for the stutter in the drive, for the ping against the metal hide,

for any one of the thousand things that could happen out in space.

He picked up his wallet off the bedside table and put it in his pocket and went out into the hall

and down the rickety stairs to the crumbling, lopsided porch outside.

And the greenness waited for him, the unrelenting, bilious green of Earth. It was a thing to gag

at, to steel oneself against, an indecent and abhorrent color for anyone to look at. The grass was

green and all the plants and every single tree. There was no place outdoors and few indoors where

one could escape from it, and when one looked at it too long, it seemed to pulse and tremble with a

hidden life.

The greenness, and the brightness of the sun, and the sapping beat - these were things of Earth

that it was hard to bear. The light one could get away from, and the heat one could somehow ride

along with - but the green was always there.

He went down the steps, fumbling in his pocket for a cigarette. He found a crumpled package

and in it one crumpled cigarette. He put it between his lips and threw the pack away and stood at

the gate, trying to make up his mind.

But it was a gesture only, this hardening of his mind, for he knew what he would do. There was

nothing else to do. He'd done it day after day for more weeks than he cared to count, and he'd do it

again today and tomorrow and tomorrow, until his cash ran out.

And after that, he wondered, what?

Get a job and try to strike a bargain with his situation? Try to save against the day when he could

buy passage back to Mars - for they'd surely let him ride the ships even if they wouldn't let him run

them. But, he told himself, he'd figured that one out. It would take twenty years to save enough, and

he had no twenty years.

He lit the cigarette and went tramping down the street, and even through the cigarette, he could

smell the hated green.

Ten blocks later, he reached the far edge of the spaceport. There was a ship. He stood for a

moment looking at it before he went into the shabby restaurant to buy himself some breakfast.

There was a ship, he thought, and that was a hopeful sign. Some days there weren't any, some

days three or four.

But there was a ship today and it might be the one.

One day, he told himself, he'd surely find the ship out there that would take him home - a ship

with a captain so desperate for an engineer that he would overlook the entry in the book.

But even as he thought it, be knew it for a lie - a lie he told himself each day. Perhaps to justify

his coming here each day to check at the hiring hall, to lie to keep his hope alive, to keep his

courage up. A lie that made it even barely possible to face the bleak, warm room and the green of

Earth.

He went into the restaurant and sat down on a stool.

The waitress came to take his order. "Cakes again?" she asked.

He nodded. Pancakes were cheap and filling and he had to make his money last.

"You'll find a ship today," said the waitress. "I have a feeling you will."

"Perhaps I will," he said, without believing it.

"I know just how you feel," the waitress told him. "I know how awful it can be. I was homesick

once myself, the first time I left home. I thought I would die."

He didn't answer, for he felt it would not have been dignified to answer. Although why he should

now lay claim to dignity, he could not imagine.

But this, in any case, was more than simple homesickness. It was planetsickness, culturesickness,

a cutting off of all he'd known and wanted.

Sitting, waiting for the cakes to cook, he caught the dream again - the dream of red hills rolling

far into the land, of the cold, dry air soft against the skin, of the splendor of the stars at twilight and

the faery yellow of the distant sandstorm. And the low house crouched against the land, with the

old gray-haired man sitting stiffly in a chair upon the porch that faced toward the sunset.

The waitress brought the cakes.

The day would come, he told himself, when he could afford no longer this self-pity he carried.

He knew it for what it was and he should get rid of it. And yet it was a thing he lived with - even

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ConditionofEmploymentCliffordD.SimakHEHADBEENdreamingofhome,andwhenhecameawake,heheldhiseyestightshu...

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