the end of year two
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.
