But Saul had a cellar. He lived there all year round, in winter when the snow was unbroken from his door to the high-water line on the sand, and no other human moved in sight; and also in the summer. This was summer, you see. I had my bathing suit with me. It was not because I liked so well to swim - who needs to swim? But outside that cellar of Saul's, in the streets, on the boardwalk, on the beach, were thousands and thousands of persons, one-half of whom were female. They were dressed for the sun.
And Saul puttered in his cellar!
"Come, Saul," I said gently. "Go to Mars some other time. Invent a method of flying to the Moon when winter comes. Now put on a bathing suit and come with me."
And I took him out to show him Girls.
Up in the morning, work, eat, work. I'm a 664.8I8-A, and all my days are reading and reading. From Shakespeare, Mallarmé, and the prose-poems of Kahlil Gibran, it is my task to extract the essential truth, the bare statement of fact, which alone deserves the space to be retained. (The other day I reduced Moby Dick to "Nineteenth-century knowledge of cetaceans was inexact.") And the secret which I clutch to my bosom is that even that job is of no real importance; it is like raking leaves for the W.P.A., a metaphor which I have not the youth to untangle for you.
For once I met another 664.818-A in the laundry queue, an old crone, a step-dame or a dowager, long withering out the waiting for my shirts. We compared notes.
She had done Christopher Marlowe the month before, and I had been assigned him for my next; she did the Beau Geste books of Percival Christopher Wren, and I had done them early the previous year.
I gloated secretly over her, for she had got only that "cafard" was a Legionnaire's term for desert insanity from Wren, missing entirely the important observation that socks breed foot blisters.
Then I gloated no longer. It had been barely possible to pretend the job was useful when I thought I alone did it, but two of us? And where there were two there were more. And I wondered just what the file clerks did with my neatly lettered green slips headed: Synoptic Analysis of Essential Information Content of… (Fill in Title and Author). They made binary digits of it all somehow, I suppose. But what then?
So I concealed the vixen in my shirtfront and chatted with her of other things. She had drawn an April, 2037 slot on the Mars colonization rocket. I certainly hope she lived to make it.
My own emigration date is October of 2071. Since this will require attaining an age of more than a hundred and fifty years, I am not wildly hopeful.
I can therefore look forward to a good many additional mornings of wake, dress, eat, work, eat… to spinach Jello. I suppose it is better in the colonies, or else we wouldn't all be so anxious to get there. Certainly it is less crowded. That's the trouble with atomic rockets, and of course I blame it all on my friend Saul.
I can tell you a story.
Once there was a very rich man who took a poor man into his house. The poor man, whose name was Ittel, ate at the rich man's table, slept in a good warm bed, wore the rich man's clothes. One night the rich man was about to eat when Ittel stopped him.
"Stop," he cried, "don't eat!"
"Don't eat?" repeated the rich man, puzzled.
"Don't eat," cried Ittel, and he jumped up from his place at the table and rushed over to the rich man's seat. "You call that salt?" he scolded, and put more salt on the rich man's food.
"But I don't like so much salt," objected the rich man, "and besides it's bad for my heart."
"Heart!" scoffed Ittel. "Enjoy your food!" And he dumped the silver salt dish on the rich man's meat. "You call that pepper?" he demanded, and dumped on the pepper, too. "You call that garlic?" And he chopped up a whole clove of garlic and put that on, too.
"But I'm not well, Ittel," the rich man complained. "My doctor says———"
"Doctor, schmoctor," ordered Ittel, "you paid for this salt, right? You paid for this pepper? Enjoy them."
So the rich man ate, and what do you think? He had a heart attack that night and died.
And what did Ittel do? The whole household was wailing and moaning, and Ittel just stood there with a scowl on his face and a lip curled in scorn. The doctor came by and saw him. "Ittel," he accused, "what's with you? This man was your benefactor! Now that he is dead, can't you at least look sorry?"
Ittel gave the doctor a look. "Sorry!" he said. "Sorry! I try to do something nice for him, and look how he pays me back!"
So I remember my friend Saul. There he was in his cellar, and maybe he was the only man in the world who knew that the way to the planets did not lie through rockets and metal ships but (I remember him tapping his skull) the power of the mind.
I took his mind off his science.
I showed him Girls.
He never did anything. He was a bum all his life, this boy that maybe could have shown us all the way from 18 billion people and Spinach Jello.
I tried to do something nice for him - and look how he paid us all back!
You call that gratitude?