“Whereas I’m limited to my one paltry art, is that it? I’m merely a poet?”
A sudden feeling of inferiority swept over him for the first time in ages. He had felt humble before—humble before Milton or Aeschylus, before Yeats or Shakespeare, as he struggled to equal their accomplishments, or even approach them. But there was a shade of difference between humility and inferiority. What he felt now was inadequacy, not merely as a poet, but as a person. For a man as self-assured as Vilar, it was a painful thing.
He looked up at old Carpenter.
“Will you excuse me?” he said, his voice strangely harsh and edgy.
Alone, in his shack, he stared at the sheet of paper, regretfully, and read the lines he had written:
Slippery shadows of daylight stand
Between each man and himself; each cries out,
But—
That was where they ended. He had just composed them—or so he had thought, at the moment. Now, five minutes later, he recognized them for what they were: lines from a poem he had composed in his youth and rightfully burned for the adolescent twaddle it was.
Where was his technique, his vaunted vowel sense, his intricate rhythms, and subtle verbal conflicts? He looked sadly at the clumsy nonsense his fear-numbed brain had dictated, and swept the sheet contemptuously to the floor.
Have I lost the gift?
It was a cold, soul-withering question, but it was followed hastily by another even more deadly: Did I ever have the gift?
But that was an easily answered question. There was the slim blue-bound volume, right over here—
The book was gone.
He stared at the quarter of an inch left vacant in the bookcase for a moment. The book had been taken. One of the Carpenters was evidently curious about his poetry.
Well, never mind, he thought, I still carry the poems with me.
To prove it, he recited “The Apples of Idun”, one of the longest, and, to his mind, the best. When he was finished, his old confidence had returned. His gift had been no illusion.
But neither was the Carpenter family. And he could no longer stay here in their presence.
Dejectedly, he recalled the performance of the patriarch: with astonishing versatility, the old man flitted from one art form to the next—as did the others. There wasn’t a man in the family who couldn’t turn a verse, set his own song to music, perform the piece on one of a dozen instruments, and render a nonobjective interpretation of it in oils, to boot. Beside formidable talent of this sort, Vilar felt his own paltry gift fade into insignificance. Art was as natural to these people as breathing. They had been bred to it; no one wore the label “artist” on Rigel Seven, no specialist lurked in his private nook or category.
And Emil Vilar was aware that there was no place for him in a world of this sort. His talent was too ephemeral to survive among these genial philistines—for philistines they were, despite or perhaps because of their great range of abilities. They had no awareness that art was a sacred rite. To them it was an amusement, a pastime for gentlemen. Whatever they did, they did well, for they were trained toward excellence, but it was all on the same level of affable skilled amateurism. That was to be admired, certainly, more than the crude boorishness of Earth, but such an environment was also fatal to the real poetic fire.
These people were omniartistic—and omnivorous, too. They would devour Emil Vilar.
He took his suitcase from the closet and calmly began to pack. Returning to Earth was out of the question, but he would go somewhere, somewhere where life was more complex and art more highly valued.
“Why are you packing?” a resonant voice asked.
Vilar whirled. It was old Carpenter, standing in the doorway.
“I’ve decided to go. That’s reason enough.”
Carpenter smiled pleasantly. “Go? Where could you go? Back to Earth?”
“No—but anywhere away from here.”
“You’ll find the other fifteen Families much the same,” the old man said. “Take my advice; stay here. We like you, Vilar. We don’t want to lose you so soon.”
Vilar was silent and motionless for a while. Then, without saying a word, he resumed packing.
Carpenter crossed the cabin quickly and put his hand on Vilar’s arm. The old man’s grip was surprisingly strong.
“Please,” he said urgently. “Don’t go.”
Vilar loosened the grip and stepped away. “I can’t stay here. I have to leave.”
“But why?”
“Because you’re driving me crazy!” Vilar shouted suddenly. It was the first time he had lost his temper in more than thirty years.
Quivering, he turned towards the older man. “You paint, you sing, you write, you compose. You do everything! And what of me? I’m a poet, nothing more. A mere poet. In this world that’s like being a man with only one arm—someone to be pitied.”
“But—”
“Let me finish,” Vilar said. “Let me pass this information along to you: you’re not artists, any one of you. You’re artists-manqué, would-be artists, not-quite artists.
“Art’s an ennobling thing—a gift, a talent. If everyone’s talented, no talent exists. When gold lines the street, it’s worth no more than dross. And so you people who are so proud of yourselves for many talents—why, you have none at all! Only skills.”
Carpenter seemed to ignore Vilar’s tirade. “Is that why you’re leaving?” he asked.
“I’m—I’m—” Vilar paused, confused. “I’m leaving because I want to leave. Because I’m a real artist, and I know I am. I don’t want to be polluted by the pretended art I see here. I have something real and wonderful, and I don’t want to lose it. And I will lose it here.”
“How wrong you are,” Carpenter said. “In just that last, I mean. You do have a gift—and we need it. We want you to stay. Will you?”
“But you said this morning that I couldn’t stay, not unless I brought something new to this place. And I haven’t. What good is one more poet in a town full of them? Even,” he added belligerently, “if that poet’s worth all the rest in one?”
“You misunderstand,” Carpenter said. “True, we need no more poets. But we need you. Vilar, we need an audience!”
Suddenly Emil Vilar understood. The joke was on him, after all. He had failed to see the real texture of life here, just as he had failed all these years to see his own role in human society. These people needed him, all right; what kind of army was it that had a thousand generals and no foot soldiers?
He started to laugh, slowly at first, then in violent upheaving gasps that brought tears to his eyes. After nearly a minute he grew silent again.
It was ideal, after all. So far as they were concerned, he had but a single talent: that of being an audience. Very well. They had no understanding of high art, and to them he was pitiful, useful only because of his limits. Good. Let them think that. Privately, he knew he was a poet, not an audience. But one had to pay a price in services rendered, in order to be a poet for one’s self alone.
“I see,” he said softly. “Very well, then. I’ll be your audience.”
He saw how the days to come would be. His value to them would be as a nonpainter, a noncomposer, an onlooker and critic. His private poetic endeavors would seem beneath contempt to them. Which was as he wanted it. The real artist was always alone, whether on Rigel Seven or in the midst of Earth’s most teeming city. The audience might find him, but he must not fret about finding the audience. On Earth he had found no audience at first, and that had been all right, really; only when he had acquired the wrong kind of audience, a falsely knowing one, had he decided it was time to flee. A mistake, for the solace he sought was not to be had anywhere. Now he had come to a place that would neither reject him as a person nor meddle in his art, and he saw the conclusion that had escaped him before. It was senseless to flee again. He would be misunderstood anywhere; he saw now that it had always been pointless to go on from place to place in quest of the true environment of art
. That environment was a myth, unattainable, unreal. Or, rather, that environment was within him, wherever he was. The wise thing was to hold his ground, play some useful role in society, and privately practice his art.
Alone among these gifted but complicated people, he could work out his artistic destiny on this strange and familiar planet without fear of the watchers. The Carpenters, that closed family group, hungered for spectators, for the love and appreciation of outsiders who would admire them for their attainments. Vilar did not need that.
“By the way,” the old man said, smiling guiltily. “While you were in the park this morning, I took the liberty of borrowing this.” He reached inside his jacket and drew forth Vilar’s collected poems.
“Oh? What did you think of them?” Vilar asked.
The patriarch frowned, fidgeted, coughed. “Ah—”
“An honest opinion,” Vilar said. “As I gave this morning.”
“Well, to be frank—two of my sons looked at them with me. And none of us could see any meaning or value in the lot, Vilar. I don’t know where you got the idea you had any talent for poetry. You really don’t, you know.”
“I’ve often suspected that myself,” Vilar said happily. He took the book and fondled it with satisfaction. Already he was envisioning a second volume—a volume that would appear in an edition of one, for his eyes alone.
One-Way Journey
Another of the new science-fiction magazines that sprang into being in the late 1950s, just in time to help me harness my unexpectedly vast productivity, was Infinity, edited by a shrewd, owlish, pipe-smoking guy named Larry T. Shaw, who had been around science fiction for a long time as a reader, an agent, an editor, and even a (very occasional) writer. Shaw didn’t have much in the way of an editorial budget to buy stories with, but he loved and understood science fiction, his taste was enlightened and perceptive, and he had close and long-standing friendships with many of the key figures of the New York science-fiction world of the 1940’s and 1950’s; so Infinity, for the three or four years it lasted, was a distinguished effort whose contents pages regularly bore the names of such top-level writers as Clifford D. Simak, Robert Sheckley, Isaac Asimov, James Blish, and Damon Knight. (Not to mention that of Harlan Ellison, who made his first sale there in the summer of 1955.)
I was an eager contributor to Infinity too, of course; I missed the first issue, but was in virtually every one thereafter. Shaw was willing to look at and often to buy many of the earnest, careful stories that I had written in my college days and had been unable to sell then. The first, in November of 1955, was “Hopper, “which I expanded a decade later into the novel The Time Hoppers, and other sales to his magazine followed steadily. “One-Way Journey,” which I wrote in October, 1956—that highly sensitized immediately post-Milford period—was the fifth or sixth of them. I tried it first at Galaxy, since I believed that editor Horace Gold was fond of stories verging into psychopathology, but Gold found the story “too damned strong.” He returned it with a rejection slip advising me that he wasn’t as enthusiastic about psychiatric-case stories as I and a lot of other writers seemed to think, and wished I would turn to something else. “Why in hell compete with more people than you have to?” he asked me. “Leave these themes to them, where story literally battles story, like any other glut product. You’ve got other ideas. Let’s see them.” And so I did, with considerable success. But I took “One-Way Journey” over to Larry Shaw, who used it in the November, 1957 Infinity.
~
Behind the comforting walls of Terra Import’s headquarters on Kollidor, commander Leon Warshow was fumbling nervously with the psych reports on his mirror-bright desk. Commander Warshow was thinking about spaceman Matt Falk, and about himself. Commander Warshow was about to react very predictably.
Personnel Lieutenant Krisch had told him the story about Falk an hour before, and Warshow was doing the one thing expected of him: he was waiting for the boy, having sent for him, after a hasty conference with Cullinan, the Magyar’s saturnine psych officer.
An orderly buzzed and said, “Spaceman Falk to see you, sir.”
“Have him wait a few minutes,” Warshow said, speaking too quickly. “I’ll buzz for him.”
It was a tactical delay. Wondering why he, an officer, should be so tense before an interview with an enlisted man, Warshow riffled through the sheaf of records on Matt Falk. Orphaned, 2543…Academy…two years’ commercial service, military contract…injury en route to Kollidor…
Appended were comprehensive medical reports on Falk’s injury, and Dr. Sigstrom’s okay. Also a disciplinary chart, very favorable, and a jaggle-edged psych contour, good.
Warshow depressed the buzzer. “Send in Falk,” he said.
The photon beam clicked and the door swung back. Matt Falk entered and faced his commander stonily; Warshow glared back, studying the youngster as if he had never seen him before. Falk was just twenty-five, very tall and very blond, with wide, bunch-muscled shoulders and keen blue eyes. The scar along the left side of his face was almost completely invisible, but not even chemotherapeutic incubation had been able to restore the smooth evenness of the boy’s jaw. Falk’s face looked oddly lopsided; the unharmed right jaw sloped easily and handsomely up to the condyle, while the left still bore unseen but definitely present echoes of the boy’s terrible shipboard accident.
“You want me, commander?”
“We’re leaving Kollidor tomorrow, Matt,” Warshow said quietly. “Lieutenant Krisch tells me you haven’t returned to ship to pack your gear. Why?”
The jaw that had been ruined and rebuilt quivered slightly.
“You know, sir. I’m not going back to Earth, sir. I’m staying here…with Thetona.”
There was a frozen silence. Then, with calculated cruelty, Warshow said, “You’re really hipped on that flatface, eh?”
“Maybe so,” Falk murmured. “That flatface. That gook. What of it?” His quiet voice was bitterly defiant.
Warshow tensed. He was trying to do the job delicately, without inflicting further psychopersonal damage on young Falk. To leave a psychotic crewman behind on an alien world was impossible—but to extract Falk forcibly from the binding webwork of associations that tied him to Kollidor would leave scars not only on crewman but on captain.
Perspiring, Warshow said, “You’re an Earthman, Matt. Don’t you—”
“Want to go home? No.”
The commander grinned feebly. “You sound mighty permanent about that, son.”
“I am,” Falk said stiffly. “You know why I want to stay here. I am staying here. May I be excused now, sir?”
Warshow drummed on the desktop, hesitating for a moment, then nodded. “Permission granted, Mr Falk.” There was little point in prolonging what he now saw had been a predeterminedly pointless interview.
He waited a few minutes after Falk had left. Then he switched on the communicator. “Send in Major Cullinan, please.”
The beady-eyed psychman appeared almost instantly. “Well?”
“The boy’s staying,” Warshow said. “Complete and singleminded fixation. Go ahead—break it.”
Cullinan shrugged. “We may have to leave him here, and that’s all there is to it. Have you met the girl?”
“Kollidorian. Alien. Ugly as sin. I’ve seen her picture; he had it over his bunk until he moved out. And we can’t leave him here, major.”
Cullinan raised one bushy eyebrow quizzically. “We can try to bring Falk back, if you insist—but it won’t work. Not without crippling him.”
Warshow whistled idly, avoiding the psychman’s stern gaze. “I insist,” he said finally. “There’s no alternative.”
He snatched at the communicator.
“Lieutenant Krisch, please.” A brief pause, then: “Krisch, Warshow. Tell the men that departure’s been postponed four days. Have Molhaus refigure the orbits. Yes, four days. Four.”
Warshow hung up, glanced at the heaped Falk dossier on his desk, and scowled. Psych Officer Cullinan sho
ok his head sadly, rubbing his growing bald spot.
“That’s a drastic step, Leon.”
“I know. But I’m not going to leave Falk behind.” Warshow rose, eyed Cullinan uneasily, and added, “Care to come with me? I’m going down into Kollidor City.”
“What for?”
“I want to talk with the girl,” Warshow said.
Later, in the crazily twisting network of aimless streets that was the alien city, Warshow began to wish he had ordered Cullinan to come with him. As he made his way through the swarms of the placid, ugly, broad-faced Kollidorians, he regretted very much that he had gone alone.
What would he do, he wondered, when he finally did reach the flat where Falk and his Kollidorian girl were living? Warshow wasn’t accustomed to handling himself in ground-borne interpersonal situations of this sort. He didn’t know what to say to the girl. He thought he could handle Falk.
The relation of commander to crewman is that of parent to child, the Book said. Warshow grinned self-consciously.
He didn’t feel very fatherly just now—more like a Dutch uncle, he thought.
He kept walking. Kollidor City spread out ahead of him like a tangled ball of twine coming unrolled in five directions at once; it seemed to have been laid down almost at random. But Warshow knew the city well. This was his third tour of duty to the Kollidor sector; three times he had brought cargo from Earth, three times waited while his ship was loaded with Kollidorian goods for export.
Overhead, the distant blue-white sun burnt brightly. Kollidor was the thirteenth planet in its system; it swung on a large arc nearly four billion miles from its blazing primary.
Warshow sniffled; it reminded him that he was due for his regular antipollen injection. He was already thoroughly protected, as was his crew, against most forms of alien disease likely to come his way on the trip.
But how do you protect someone like Falk? The commander had no quick answers for that. It wouldn’t ordinarily seem necessary to inoculate spacemen against falling in love with bovine alien women, but—
To Be Continued Page 19
