The end of Year Two on the Ecological Base in the Eighteenth System
arrived and went by without Barney's being immediately aware of the
fact. Some two hours later, he glanced at his wrist watch, pushed back
the chair, got up from the desk and went over to the big grandfather
clock to confirm his surmise.
"Well, well, Brother Chard," he said aloud. "Another anniversary ...
and three of them to go. We're almost at the halfway mark--"
He snapped the cover plate back over the multiple clock faces, and
turned away. Three more years on the Ecological Base was a gruesome
stretch of time when you thought of it as a whole....
Which was precisely why he rarely let himself think of it as a whole
nowadays.
This last year, at any rate, Barney conceded to himself, had to be
regarded as an improvement on the first. Well, he added irritably,
and what wouldn't be? It hadn't been delightful, he'd frequently felt
almost stupefied with boredom. But physically, at least, he was
fit--considerably fitter, as a matter of fact, than he'd ever been in
his life.
Not very surprising. When he got too restless to be able to settle
down to anything else, he was walking about the valley, moving along
at his best clip regardless of obstacles until he was ready to drop to
the ground wherever he was. Exertion ate up restlessness
eventually--for a while. Selecting another tree to chop into firewood
took the edge off the spasms of rage that tended to come up if he
started thinking too long about that association of jerks somewhere
beyond the sun. Brother Chard was putting on muscle all over. And
after convincing himself at last--after all, the animals weren't
getting hurt--that the glaring diamond of fire in the daytime sky
couldn't really be harmful, he had also rapidly put on a Palm Beach
tan. When his carefully rationed sleep periods eventually came around,
he was more than ready for them, and slept like a log.
Otherwise: projects. Projects to beat boredom, and never mind how much
sense they made in themselves. None of them did. But after the first
month or two he had so much going that there was no question any more
of not having something to do. Two hours allotted to work out on the
typewriter a critical evaluation of a chapter from one of McAllen's
abstruse technical texts. If Barney's mood was sufficiently sour, the
evaluation would be unprintable; but it wasn't being printed, and two
hours had been disposed of. A day and a half--Earth Standard Time--to
construct an operating dam across the stream. He was turning into an
experienced landscape architect; the swimming pool in the floor of the
valley beneath the cabin might not have been approved by Carstairs of
California, but it was the one project out of which he had even drawn
some realistic benefit.
Then:
Half an hour to improve his knife-throwing technique.
Fifteen minutes to get the blade of the kitchen knife straightened out
afterwards.
Two hours to design a box trap for the capture of one of the fat gray
squirrels that always hung about the cabin.
Fifty minutes on a new chess problem. Chess, Barney had discovered,
wasn't as hairy as it looked.
Five hours to devise one more completely foolproof method of bringing
about the eventual ruin of the association. That made no more
practical sense than anything else he was doing--and couldn't, until
he knew a great deal more about McAllen's friends than he did now.
But it was considerably more absorbing, say, than even chess.
Brother Chard could beat boredom. He could probably beat another three
years of boredom.
He hadn't forgiven anyone for making him do it.