THEEARLYASIMOV

Already the stars were out, though the sun had just dipped under the horizon, and the sky of the west was a blood-stuck gold behind the Sierra Nevadas.

But the one-lunged motor of the old Ford was making too much noise; the driver didn’t hear him. Harley cursed as he watched the old car careen along the sandy ruts on its half-flat tires. Its taillight was saying a red no to him. No, you can’t get away tonight; no, you’ll have to stay here and fight it out.

Harley grunted and climbed back up the porch stairs of the old wooden house. It was well made, anyhow. The stairs, though half a century old, neither creaked beneath him nor showed cracks.

Harley picked up the bags he’d dropped when he experienced his abrupt change of mind-fake leather and worn out, they were-and carted them into the house. He dumped them on a dust-jacketed sofa and looked around.

It was stifling hot, and the smell of the desert outside had permeated the room. Harley sneezed.

He’d prowled through every room on the ground floor before he stopped still and smote his head. Plumbing-naturally there’d be no plumbing in this hole eight miles out on the desert! A well was the best he could hope for

It was getting dark. No electric lights either, of course. He blundered irritatedly through the dusky rooms to the back of the house. The screen door shrieked metallically as he opened it. A bucket hung by the door. He picked it up, tipped it, shook the loose sand out of it. He looked over the “back yard”-about thirty thousand visible acres of hilly sand, rock and patches of sage and flame-tipped ocotillo.

The old fool got water from somewhere, he thought savagely. Obstinately he climbed down the back steps and wandered out into the desert. Overhead the stars were blinding, a million billion of them, but the sunset was over already and he could see only hazily. The silence was murderous. Only a faint whisper of breeze over the sand, and the slither of his shoes.

He caught a glimmer of starlight from the nearest clump of sage and walked to it. There was a pool of water, caught in the angle of two enormous boulders. He stared at it doubtfully, then shrugged. It was water. It was better than nothing. He dipped the bucket in the little pool. Knowing nothing of the procedure, he filled it with a quart of loose sand as he scooped it along the bottom. When he lifted it, brimful, to his lips, he spat out the first mouthful and swore violently.

Then he used his head. He set the bucket down, waited a second for the sand grains to settle, cupped water in his hands, lifted it to his lips....

”What the hell!” Harley stood up, looked around in abrupt puzzlement. It sounded like water dripping from somewhere, onto a redhot stove, Hashing into sizzling steam. He saw nothing, only the sand and the sage and the pool of tepid, sickly water.

Then he saw it, and his eyes bulged. Out of nowhere it was dripping, a drop a second, a sticky, dark drop that was thicker than water, that fell to the ground lazily, in slow defiance of gravity. And when it struck each drop sizzled and skittered about, and vanished. It was perhaps eight feet from him, just visible in the starlight.

Harley got. By the time he got to Rebel Butte three hours later, he was barely managing to walk, wishing desperately that he’d delayed long enough for one more good drink of water, despite all the fiends of hell. But he’d run the first three miles. He’d had plenty of encouragement. He remembered with a shudder how the clear desert air had taken milkly shape around the incredible trickle of dampness and had advanced on him threateningly.

And when he got to the first kerosene-lighted saloon of Rebel Butte, and staggered inside, the saloonkeeper’s fascinated stare at the front of his shoddy coat showed him strong evidence that he hadn’t been suddenly taken with insanity, or drunk on the unaccustomed sensation of fresh desert air. All down the front of him it was, and the harder he rubbed the harder it stayed, the stickier it got. Blood!

“Whiskey!” he said in a strangled voice, tottering to the bar. He pulled a threadbare dollar bill from his pocket, flapped it onto the mahogany.

The blackjack game at the back of the room had stopped. Harley was acutely conscious of the eyes of the players, the bartender and the tall, lean man leaning on the bar. All were watching him.

The bartender broke the spell. He reached for a bottle behind him without looking at it, placed it on the counter before Harley. He poured a glass of water from a jug, set it down with a shot glass beside the bottle.

“I could of told you that would happen, “ he said casually. “Only you wouldn’t of believed me. You had to meet Hank for yourself before you’d believe he was there:’

Harley remembered his thirst and drained the glass of water, then poured himself a shot of the whiskey and swallowed it without waiting for the chaser to be refilled. The whiskey felt good going down, almost good enough to stop his internal shakes.

“What are you talking about?” he said finally. He twisted his body and leaned forward across the bar to partly hide the stains on his coat. The saloonkeeper laughed.

“Old Hank,” he said. “I knowed who you was right away, even before Tom came back and told me where he’d took you. I knowed you was Zeb Harley’s no-good nephew, come to take Harley Hall an’ sell it before he was cold in the grave.”

The blackjack players were still watching him, Russell Harley saw. Only the lean man farther along the bar seemed to have dismissed him. He was pouring himself another drink, quite occupied with his task.

Harley flushed. “Listen,” he said, “I didn’t come in here for advice. I wanted a drink. I’m paying for it. Keep your mouth out of this.”

The saloonkeeper shrugged. He turned his back and walked away to the blackjack table. After a couple of seconds one of the players turned, too, and threw a card down. The others followed suit.

Harley was just getting set to swallow his pride and talk to the saloonkeeper again-he seemed to know something about what Harley’d been through, and might be helpful-when the lean man tapped his shoulder. Harley whirled and almost dropped his glass. Absorbed and jumpy, he hadn’t seen him come up.

“Young man, “ said the lean one, “My name’s Nicholls. Come along with me, sir, and we’ll talk this thing over. I think we may be of service to each other.”

Even the twelve-cylinder car Nicholls drove jounced like a haywagon over the sandy ruts leading to the place old Zeb had-laughingly-named “Harley Hall.”

Russell Harley twisted his neck and stared at the heap of paraphernalia in the open rumble seat. “I don’t like it, “ he complained. “I never had anything to do with ghosts. How do I know this stuff’ll work?”

Nicholls smiled. “You’ll have to take my word for it. I’ve had dealings with ghosts before. You could say that I might qualify as a ghost exterminator, if I chose.”

Harley growled. “I still don’t like it.” Nicholls turned a sharp look on him. “You like the prospect of owning Harley Hall, don’t you? And looking for all the money your late uncle is supposed to have hidden around somewhere?” Harley shrugged. “Certainly you do,” said Nicholls, returning his eyes to the road. “ And with good reason. The local reports put the figure pretty high, young man.”

“That’s where you come in, I guess,” Harley said sullenly. “I find the money-that I own anyhow-and give some of it to you. How much?”

“We’ll discuss that later,” Nicholls said. He smiled absently as he looked ahead.

The smile faded from Nicholls’ face. “No,” he said. “We won’t. I’ve doing you a favor, young Harley. Remember that. In return-you’ll do as I say, all the way!”

Harley digested that carefully, and it was not a pleasant meal. He waited a couple of seconds before he changed the subject.

“I was out here once when the old man was alive,” he said. “He didn’t say nothing about any ghost. “

“Perhaps he felt you might think him-well, peculiar,” Nicholls said. “And perhaps you would have. When were you here?”

“Oh, a long time ago,” Harley said evasively. “But I was here a whole day, and part of the night. The old man was crazy as a coot, but he didn’t keep any ghosts in the attic...

“This ghost was a friend of his.” Nicholls said. “The gentleman in charge of the bar told you that. surely. Your late uncle was something of a recluse. He lived in this house a dozen miles from nowhere. came into town hardly ever. Wouldn’t let anyone get friendly with him. But he wasn’t exactly a hermit. He had Hank for company.”

Nicholls inclined his head seriously. “Oh, I don’t know.” he said. “From all accounts, they got on well together. They played pinochle and chess-Hank’s supposed to have been a great pinochle player. He was killed that way, according to the local reports. Caught somebody dealing from the bottom and shot it out with him. He lost. A bullet pierced his throat and he died quite bloodily... He turned the wheel, putting his weight into the effort, and succeeded in twisting the car out of the ruts of the “road, “ sent it jouncing across unmarked sand to the old frame house to which they were going.

“That,” he finished as he pulled up before the porch. “Accounts for the blood that accompanies his apparition...

Harley opened the door slowly and got out, looking uneasily at the battered old house. Nicholls cut the motor, got out and walked at once to the back of the car.

“Come on.” he said, dragging things out of the compartment. “Give me a hand with this. I’ve not going to carry this stuff all by myself...

Harley came around reluctantly, regarded the curious assortment of bundles of dried faggots, lengths of colored cord, chalk pencils, ugly little bunches of wilted weeds, bleached bones of small animals and a couple of less pleasant things without pleasure.

”He’s here!” Harley yelped. “Listen! He’s someplace around here watching us.”

The laugh was deep, unpleasant and-bodiless. Harley looked around desperately for the tell-tale trickle of blood. And he found it; from the air it issued, just beside the car, sinking gracefully to the ground and sizzling, vanishing, there.

“I’m watching you, all right,” the voice said grimly. “Russell, you worthless piece of corruption, I’ve got no more use for you than you used to have for me. Dead or alive, this is my land! I shared it with your uncle, you young scalawag, but I won’t share it with you. Get out!”

Harley’s knees weakened and he tottered dizzily to the rear bumper, sat on it. “Nicholls-” he said confusedly.

“Oh, brace up,” Nicholls said with irritation. He tossed a ball of gaudy twine, red and green, with curious knots tied along it, to Harley. Then he confronted the trickle of blood and made a few brisk passes in the air before it. His lips were moving silently, Harley saw, but no words came out.

There was a gasp and a chopped-off squawk from the source of the blood drops. Nicholls clapped his hands sharply, then turned to young Harley.

“Take that cord you have in your hands and stretch it around the house,” he said. “ All the way around, and make sure it goes right across the middle of the doors and windows. It isn’t much, but it’ll hold him till we can get the good stuff set up.”

Harley nodded, then pointed a rigid finger at the drops of blood, now sizzling and fuming more angrily than before. “What about that?” he managed to get out.

Nicholls grinned complacently. “I’ll hold him here till the cows come home,” he said. “Get moving!”

Harley inadvertently inhaled a lungful of noxious white smoke and coughed till the tears rolled down his cheeks. When he recovered he looked at Nicholls, who was reading silently from a green leather book with dog-eared pages. He said, “Can I stop stirring this now?”

Nicholls grimaced angrily and shook his head without looking at him. He went on reading, his lips contorting over syllables that were not in any language Harley had ever heard, then snapped the book shut and wiped his brow.

“Fine,” he said. “So far, so good.” He stepped over to windward of the boiling pot Harley was stirring on the hob over the fireplace, peered down into it cautiously.

“That’s about done,” he said. “Take it off the fire and let it cool a bit.”

Harley lifted it down, then squeezed his aching biceps with his left hand. The stuff was the consistency of sickly green fudge.

Nicholls didn’t answer. He looked up in mild surprise at the sudden squawk of triumph from outside, followed by the howling of a chill wind.

“Hank must be loose,” he said casually. “He can’t do us any harm, I think, but we’d better get a move on.” He rummaged in the dwindled pile of junk he’d brought from the car, extracted a paintbrush. “Smear this stuff around all the windows and doors. All but the front door. For that I have something else.” He pointed to what seemed to be the front axle of an old Model-T. ”Leave that on the doorsill. Cold iron. You can just step over it, but Hank won’t be able to pass it. It’s been properly treated already with the very best thaumaturgy.”

“Step over it, “ Harley repeated. “What would I want to step over it for? He’s out there.”

“He won’t hurt you,” said Nicholls. “You will carry an amulet with you-that one, there-that will keep him away. Probably he couldn’t really hurt you anyhow, being a low-order ghost who can’t materialize to any great density. But just to take no chances, carry the amulet and don’t stay out too long. It won’t hold him off forever, not for more than half an hour. If you ever have to go out and stay for any length of time, tie that bundle of herbs around your neck.” Nicholls smiled. “That’s only for emergencies, though. It works on the asafoetida principle. Ghosts can’t come anywhere near it-but you won’t like it much yourself. It has-ah-a rather definite odor.”

“Well, that’s cool enough,” he said. “Before it hardens, get moving. Start spreading the stuff upstairs-and make sure you don’t miss any windows.”

But he wasn’t. When Harley finished his disagreeable task and came down, he called Nicholls’ name, but the man was gone. Hurley stepped to the door and looked out; the car was gone, too.

He shrugged. “Oh, well, “ he said, and began taking the dust-cloths off the furniture.

Somewhere within the cold, legal mind of Lawyer Turnbull, he weighed the comparative likeness of nightmare and insanity.

He stared at the plush chair facing him, noted with distinct uneasiness how the strangely weightless, strangely sourceless trickle of redness disappeared as it hit the floor, but left long, mud-ochre streaks matted on the upholstery. The sound was unpleasant, too; Pat. HISS. Pat. HISS-

The voice continued impatiently, “Damn your human stupidity! I may be a ghost, but heaven knows I’m not trying to haunt you. Friend, you’re not that important to me. Get this-I’m here on business.”

Turnbull learned that you cannot wet dry lips with a dehydrated tongue. “Legal business?”

“Sure. The fact that I was once killed by violence, and have to continue my existence on the astral plane, doesn’t mean I’ve lost my legal rights. Does it?”

The lawyer shook his head in bafflement. He said, “This would be easier on me if you weren’t invisible. Can’t you do something about it?”

There was a short pause. ‘Well, I could materialize for a minute,” the voice said. “It’s hard work-damn hard, for me. There are a lot of us astral entities that can do it easy as failing out of bed, but-Well, if I have to I shall try to do it once.”

There was a shimmering in the air above the armchair, and a milky, thin smoke condensed into an intangible seated figure. Turnbull took no delight in noting that, through the figure, the outlines of the chair were still hazily visible. The figure thickened. Just as the features took form-just as Turnbull’s bulging eyes made out a prominent hooked nose and a crisp beard-it thinned and exploded with a soft pop.

The voice said weakly, “I didn’t think I was that bad. I’m way out of practice. I guess that’s the first daylight materialization I’ve made in seventy-five years.”

The lawyer adjusted his rimless glasses and coughed. Hell’s binges, he thought, the worst thing about this is that I’m believing it!”

“Oh, well, “ he said aloud. Then he hurried on before the visitor could take offense: “Just what did you want? I’m just a small-town lawyer, you know. My business is fairly routine-”

“I know all about your business,” the voice said. “You can handle my case-it’s a land affair. I want to sue Russell Harley.”

Turnbull nodded. “Yes, I remember now. My wife’s folks live in Rebel Butte, and I’ve been there. Quite a coincidence you should come to me-“

“Oh.” Turnbull was silent for a second. Then, “I see,” he said. He cast a shrewd glance at the chair. “Lawsuits cost money, Mr.-I don’t think you mentioned your name?”

“Hank Jenkins,” the voice prompted. “I know that. Would-let’s see. Would six hundred and fifty dollars be sufficient?”

Turnbull swallowed. “I think so,” he said in a relatively unemotional tone-relative to what he was thinking.

“Then suppose we call that your retainer. I happen to have cached a considerable sum in gold when I was-that is to say, before I became an astral entity. I’m quite certain it hasn’t been disturbed. You will have to call it treasure trove, I guess, and give half of it to the state, but there’s thirteen hundred dollars altogether.”

Turnbull nodded judiciously. “Assuming we can locate your trove,” he said, “I think that would be quite satisfactory.” He leaned back in his chair and looked legal. His aplomb had returned.

Judge Lawrence Gimbel had always liked his job before. But his thirteen honorable years on the bench lost their flavor for him as he grimaced wearily and reached for his gavel. This case was far too confusing for his taste.

The clerk made his speech, and the packed courtroom sat down en masse. Gimbel held a hand briefly to his eyes before he spoke.

“Ready, your honor!” Fred Wilson snapped. He looked with a hard flicker of interest at Turnbull and his solitary table, then leaned over and whispered in Russell Harley’s ear. The youth nodded glumly, then shrugged.

Gimbel said, “I understand the attorneys for both sides have waived jury trial in this case of Henry Jenkins versus Russell Joseph Harley.”

Both lawyers nodded. Gimbel continued, “In view of the unusual nature of this case, I imagine it will prove necessary to conduct it with a certain amount of informality. The sole purpose of this court is to arrive at the true facts at issue, and to deliver a verdict in accord with the laws pertaining to these facts. I will not stand on ceremony. Nevertheless, I will not tolerate any disturbances or unnecessary irregularities. The spectators will kindly remember that they are here on privilege. Any demonstration will result in the clearing of the court.”

He looked severely at the white faces that gleamed unintelligently up at him. He suppressed a sigh as he said, “The counsel for the plaintiff will begin.”

“Your honor,” he said, “we propose to show that my client, Henry Jenkins, has been deprived of his just rights by the defendant. Mr. Jenkins, by virtue of a sustained residence of more than twenty years in the house located on Route 22, eight miles north of the town of Rebel Butte, with the full knowledge of its legal owner, has acquired certain rights. In legal terminology we define these as the rights of adverse possession. The layman would call them common-law rights-squatters’ rights.”

Gimbel folded his hands and tried to relax. Squatters’ rights-for a ghost! He sighed, but listened attentively as Turnbull went on.

“Upon the death of Zebulon Harley, the owner of the house involved-it is better known, perhaps, as Harley Hall-the defendant inherited title to the property. We do not question his right to it. But my client has an equity in Harley Hall; the right to free and full existence. The defendant has forcefully evicted my client, by means which have caused my client great mental distress, and have even endangered his very existence.”

Gimbel nodded. If the case only had a precedent somewhere.... But it hadn’t; he remembered grimly the hours he’d spent thumbing through all sorts of unlikely law books, looking for anything that might bear on the case. It had been his better judgment that he throw the case out of court outright-a judge couldn’t afford to have himself laughed at, not if he were ambitious. And public laughter was about the only certainty there was to this case. But Wilson had put up such a fight that the judge’s temper had taken over. He never did like Wilson, anyhow.

“Objection!” he bellowed. “The so-called Henry Jenkins cannot qualify as a witness!”

The judge clutched his gavel with one hand, forehead with the other. He banged on the desk to quiet the courtroom.

Turnbull stood there, smiling. “Naturally,” he said, “you’ll have proof of that statement.”

Wilson snarled. “Certainly.” He referred to his brief. “The so-called Henry Jenkins is the ghost, spirit or specter of one Hank Jenkins, who prospected for gold in this territory a century ago. He was killed by a bullet through the throat from the gun of one Long Tom Cooper, and was declared legally dead on September 14, 1850. Cooper was hanged for his murder. No matter what hocus-pocus you produce for evidence to the contrary now, that status of legal death remains completely valid.”

“What evidence have you of the identity of my client with this Hank Jenkins?” Turnbull asked grimly.

Turnbull shrugged. “I deny nothing. I’m not being cross-examined. Furthermore, the sole prerequisite of a witness is that he understand the value of an oath. Henry Jenkins was tested by John Quincy Fitzjames, professor of psychology at the University of Southern California. The results-I have Dr. Fitzjames’ sworn statement of them here, which I will introduce as an exhibit-show clearly that my client’s intelligence quotient is well above normal, and that a psychiatric examination discloses no important aberrations which would injure his validity as a witness. I insist that my client be allowed to testify on his own behalf.”

“My client.” said Turnbull stiffly, “is not present just now. Undoubtedly that accounts for what you term his invisibility.” He paused for the appreciative murmur that swept through the court. Things were breaking perfectly, he thought, smiling. “I have here another affidavit,” he said. “It is signed by Elihu James and Terence MacRae, who respectively head the departments of physics and biology at the same university. It states that my client exhibits all the vital phenomena of life. I am prepared to call all three of my expert witnesses to the stand, if necessary.”

Wilson scowled but said nothing. Judge Gimbel leaned forward. “I don’t see how it is possible for me to refuse the plaintiff the right to testify,” he said. “If the three experts who prepared these reports will testify on the stand to the facts contained in them, Henry Jenkins may then take the stand.”

Wilson sat down heavily. The three experts spoke briefly-and dryly. Wilson put them through only the most formal of cross-examinations.

The judge declared a brief recess. In the corridor outside, Wilson and his client lit cigarettes and looked unsympathetically at each other.

“I feel like a fool,” said Russell Harley. “Bringing suit against a ghost.”

“The ghost brought the suit,” Wilson reminded him. “If only we’d been able to hold fire for a couple more weeks, till another judge came on the bench, I could’ve got this thing thrown right out of court.”

“Because you were in such a damn hurry!” Wilson said. “you and that idiot Nicholls-so confident that it would never come to trial.”

Harley shrugged, and thought unhappily of their failure in completely exorcising the ghost of Hank Jenkins. That had been a mess. Jenkins had somehow escaped from the charmed circle they’d drawn around him, in which they’d hoped to keep him till the trial was forfeited by non-appearance.

Harley shrugged again. “I dunno. The last I saw of him was in your office. He came around to see me right after the deputy slapped the show-cause order on me at the house. He brought me down to you-said you’d been recommended to him. Then you and him and I talked about the case for a while. He went out, after he lent me a little money to help meet your retainer. Haven’t seen him since.”

“I’d like to know who recommended me to him,” Wilson said grimly. “I don’t think he’d ever recommend anybody else. I don’t like this case-and I don’t much like you.”

Harley growled but said nothing. He flung his cigarette away. It tasted of the garbage that hung around his neck-everything did. Nicholls had told no lies when he said Harley wouldn’t much like the bundle of herbs that would ward off the ghost of old Jenkins. They smelled.

The court clerk was in the corridor, bawling something, and people were beginning to trickle back in. Harley and his attorney went with them.

Wilson was on his feet at once. He opened the door of the judge’s chamber, said something in a low tone. Then he stepped back, as if to let someone through.

There was a concerted gasp from the spectators as the weirdly appearing trickle of blood moved slowly across the open space to the witness chair. This was the ghost-the plaintiff in the most eminently absurd case in the history of jurisprudence.

“All right, Hank,” Turnbull whispered. “You’ll have to materialize long enough to let the clerk swear you in.”

The clerk drew back nervously at the pillar of milky fog that appeared before him, vaguely humanoid in shape. A phantom hand, half transparent, reached out to touch the Bible. The clerk’s voice shook as he administered the oath, and heard the response come from the heart of the cloudpillar.

The haze drifted into the witness chair, bent curiously at about hip-height, and popped into nothingness.

The judge banged his gavel wildly. The buzz of alarm that had arisen from the spectators died out.

“I’ll warn you again,” he declared, “that unruliness will not be tolerated. The counsel for the plaintiff may proceed.”

“Mr. Jenkins, just what connection have you with the building referred to as Harley Hall?”

“During this time, did you come to know the late Zebulon Harley, owner of the Hall?”

“In the spring of 1907. Zeb had just lost his wife. After that, you see, he made Harley Hall his year-round home. He became-well, more or less of a hermit. Before that we had never met, since he was only seldom at the Hall. But we became friendly then.”

“Until he died last fall. I was with him when he died. I still have a few keepsakes he left me then.” There was a distinct nostalgic sigh from the witness chair, which by now was liberally spattered with muddy red liquid. The falling drops seemed to hesitate for a second, and their sizzling noise was muted as with a strong emotion.

“I’d call them excellent,” the emptiness replied firmly. “Every night we sat up together. When we didn’t play pinochle or chess or cribbage, we just sat and talked over the news of the day. I still have the book we used to keep records of the chess and pinochle games. Zeb made the entries himself, in his own handwriting.”

Turnbull abandoned the witness for a moment. He faced the judge with a smile. “I offer in evidence,” he said, “the book mentioned. Also a ring given to the plaintiff by the late Mr. Harley, and a copy of the plays of Gilbert and Sullivan. On the flyleaf of this book is inscribed, ‘To Old Hank’, in Harley’s own hand.”

He said, “In all your years of association, did Zebulon Harley ever ask you to leave, or to pay rent?”

Turnbull nodded. “Very good,” he said. “Now, just one or two more questions. Will you tell in your own words what occurred, after the death of Zebulon Harley, that caused you to bring this suit?”

“Yes. He arrived at Harley Hall on January fifth. I asked him to leave, which he did. On the next day he returned with another man. They placed a talisman upon the threshold of the main entrance, and soon after sealed every threshold and windowsill in the Hall with a substance which is noxious to me. These activities were accompanied by several of the most deadly spells in the Ars Magicorum. He further added an Exclusion Circle with a radius of a little over a mile, entirely surrounding the Hall.”

“I see,” the lawyer said. “Will you explain to the court the effects of these activities?”

“Well,” the voice said thoughtfully, “it’s a little hard to put in words. I can’t pass the Circle without a great expenditure of energy. Even if I did I couldn’t enter the building because of the talisman and the seals.”

“No. The Exclusion Circle is really a sphere. I’m pretty sure the effort would destroy me.”

“In effect, then, you are entirely barred from the house you have occupied for ninety years, due to the wilful acts of Russell Joseph Harley, the defendant, and an unnamed accomplice of his.”

He turned to Wilson, whose face had been a study in dourness throughout the entire examination. “Your witness,” he said.

“Before?” There was surprise in the voice that emanated from above the trickling blood-drops. “Before when?”

Wilson scowled. “Don’t pretend ignorance,” he said sharply. “Before you died, of course.”

“Objection!” Turnbull was on his feet, glaring at Wilson. “The counsel for the defense has no right to speak of some hypothetical death of my client!”

Gimbel raised a hand wearily and cut off the words that were forming on Wilson’s lips. “Objection sustained,” he said. “No evidence has been presented to identify the plaintiff as the prospector who was killed in 1850-or anyone else.”

“Ninety-two years next month. The Hall wasn’t built-in its present form, anyhow-until 1876, but I occupied the house that stood on the site previously.”

“Before then?” The voice paused, then said doubtfully, “I don’t remember.”

The voice got firmer. “Ninety years is a long time,” it said. “I don’t remember.”

“Let’s see if I can’t refresh your memory. Is it true that ninety-one years ago, in the very year in which you claim to have begun your occupancy of Harley Hall, Hank Jenkins was killed in a gun duel?”

“Do you remember that the shooting occurred not fifty feet from the present site of Harley Hall?”

“Well, then,” Wilson thundered, “is it not a fact that when Hank Jenkins died by violence his ghost assumed existence? That it was then doomed to haunt the site of its slaying throughout eternity?”

“Do you deny that it is well known throughout that section that the ghost of Hank Jenkins haunts Harley Hall?”

Wilson, badgered, lost his control. In a dangerously uneven voice, he said, “Perjury is a criminal offense. Mr. Jenkins, do you deny that you are the ghost of Hank Jenkins?”

“I can’t help what it’s called. I’ve heard you called a lot of things. Is that proof?”

There was a surge of laughter from the audience. Gimbel slammed his gavel down on the bench.

Wilson bellowed, “In spite of what you say, it’s true, isn’t it, that you are merely the spirit of a human being who had died through violence?”

The voice from above the blood drops retorted, “I repeat that I am an entity of the astral plane. I am not aware that I was ever a human being.”

“Your honor,” he said, “I ask that you instruct the witness to cease playing verbal hide-and-seek. It is quite evident that the witness is a ghost, and that he is therefore the relict of some human being, ipso facto. Circumstantial evidence is strong that he is the ghost of the Hank Jenkins who was killed in 1850. But this is a non-essential point. What is definite is that he is the ghost of someone who is dead, and hence is unqualified to act as witness! I demand his testimony be stricken from the record!”

Turnbull spoke up at once. “Will the counsel for the defense quote his authority for branding my client a ghost-in the face of my client’s repeated declaration that he is an entity of the astral plane? What is the legal definition of a ghost?”

Judge Gimbel smiled. “Counsel for the defense will proceed with the cross-examination,” he said.

Wilson’s face Hushed dark purple. He mopped his brow with a large bandanna, then glared at the dropping, sizzling trickle of blood.

“Whatever you are,” he said, “answer me this question. Can you pass through a wall?”

“Why, yes. Certainly.” There was a definite note of surprise in the voice from nowhere. “But it isn’t as easy as some people think. It definitely requires a lot of effort.”

“Could you be bound by any physical means? Would handcuffs hold you? Or ropes, chains, prison walls, a hermetically sealed steel chest?”

Jenkins had no chance to answer. Turnbull, scenting danger, cut in hastily. “I object to this line of questioning. It is entirely irrelevant. “

“On the contrary,” Wilson cried loudly, “it bears strongly on the qualifications of the so-called Henry Jenkins as a witness! I demand that he answer the question.”

The voice from the chair said superciliously, “I don’t mind answering. Physical barriers mean nothing to me, by and large.”

“Very good,” he said with satisfaction. “Very good.” Then to the judge, the words coming sharp and fast, “I claim, your honor, that the so-called Henry Jenkins has no legal status as a witness in court. There is clearly no value in understanding the nature of an oath if a violation of the oath can bring no punishment in its wake. The statements of a man who can perjure himself freely have no worth. I demand they be stricken from the record!”

“I had anticipated that, your honor,” he said quickly. “From the very nature of the case, however, it is clear that my client can be very definitely restricted in his movements-spells, pentagrams, talismans, amulets, Exclusion Circles and what-not. I have here-which I am prepared to deliver to the bailiff of the court-a list of the various methods of confining an astral entity to a restricted area for periods ranging from a few moments to all eternity. Moreover, I have also signed a bond for five thousand dollars, prior to the beginning of the trial, which I stand ready to forfeit should my client be confined and make his escape, if found guilty of any misfeasance as a witness.”

Gimbel’s face, which had looked startled for a second, slowly cleared. He nodded. “The court is satisfied with the statement of the counsel for the plaintiff,” he declared. “There seems no doubt that the plaintiff can be penalized for any misstatements, and the motion of the defense is denied.”

Wilson looked choleric, but shrugged. “ All right,” he said. “That will be all:’

“You may step down, Mr. Jenkins,” Gimbel directed, and watched in fascination as the blood-dripping column rose and floated over the floor, along the corridor, out the door.

Turnbull approached the judge’s bench again. He said, “I would like to place in evidence these notes, the diary of the late Zebulon Harley. It was presented to my client by Harley himself last fall. I call particular attention to the entry for April sixth, nineteen seventeen, in which he mentions the entrance of the United States into the First World War, and records the results of a series of eleven pinochle games played with a personage identified as ‘Old Hank.’ With the court’s permission, I will read the entry for that day, and also various other entries for the next four years. Please note the references to someone known variously as ‘Jenkins’, ‘Hank Jenkins’ and-in one extremely significant passage-’Old Invisible: “

Wilson stewed silently during the slow reading of Harley’s diary. There was anger on his face, but he paid close attention, and when the reading was over he leaped to his feet.

“I would like to know,” he asked, “if the counsel for the plaintiff is in possession of any diaries after nineteen twenty?”

Turnbull shook his head. “Harley apparently never kept a diary, except during the four years represented in this.”

“Then I demand that the court refuse to admit this diary as evidence on two counts,” Wilson said. He raised two fingers to tick off the points. “In the first place, the evidence presented is frivolous. The few vague and unsatisfactory references to Jenkins nowhere specifically describe him as what he is-ghost, astral entity or what you will. Second, the evidence, even were the first point overlooked, concerns only the years up to nineteen twenty-one. The case concerns itself only with the supposed occupation of Harley Hall by the so-called Jenkins in the last twenty years-since ‘twenty-one. Clearly, the evidence is therefore irrelevant.”

“The reference to ‘Old Invisible’ is far from vague,” he said. “It is a definite indication of the astral character of my client. Furthermore, evidence as to the friendship of my client with the late Mr. Zebulon Harley before nineteen twenty-one is entirely relevant, as such a friendship, once established, would naturally be presumed to have continued indefinitely. Unless of course, the defense is able to present evidence to the contrary.”

There was a buzz of conversation in the courtroom while the judge looked over the diary, and then handed it to the clerk to be marked and entered.

But young Harley was recalcitrant. “Nix, “ he said, on his feet, pointing at the witness chair. “That thing’s got blood all over it! You don’t expect me to sit down in that large puddle of blood, do you?”

Judge Gimbel leaned over to look at the chair. The drip-drop trickle of blood from the apparition who’d been testifying had left its mark. Muddy brown all down the front of the chair. Gimbel found himself wondering how the ghost managed to replenish its supply of the fluid, but gave it up.

“I see your point,” he said. ‘Well, it’s getting a bit late anyhow. The clerk will take away the present witness chair and replace it. In the interim, I declare the court recessed till tomorrow morning at ten o’clock.”

Russell Harley noticed how the elevator boy’s back registered repulsion and disapproval, and scowled. He was not a popular guest in the hotel, he knew well. Where he made his mistake, though, was in thinking that the noxious bundle of herbs about his neck was the cause of it. His odious personality had a lot to do with the chilly attitude of the management and his fellow guests.

He made his way to the bar, ignoring the heads that turned in surprise to follow the reeking comet-tail of his passage. He entered the red-leather-and-chromium drinking room, and stared about for Lawyer Wilson.

And blinked in surprise when he saw him. Wilson wasn’t alone. In the booth with him was a tall, dark figure, with his back to Harley. The back alone was plenty for recognition. Nicholls!

Wilson had seen him. “Hello, Harley,” he said, all smiles and affability in the presence of the man with the money. “Come on and sit down. Mr. Nicholls dropped in on me a little while ago, so I brought him over.”

“Hello,” Harley said glumly, and Nicholls nodded. The muscles of his cheeks pulsed, and he seemed under a strain, strangely uncomfortable in Harley’s presence. Still there was a twinkle in the look he gave young Harley, and his voice was friendly enough-though supercilious-as he said:

“Ask him,” said Harley, pointing a thumb at Wilson as he slid his knees under the booth’s table and sat down. “He’s the lawyer. He’s supposed to know these things.”

Harley shrugged and craned his neck for the waitress. “Oh, I guess so....Rye and water!” He watched the girl appreciatively as she nodded and went off to the bar, then turned his attention back to Nicholls. “The trouble is,” he said, “Wilson may think he knows, but I think he’s all wet:’

“Let’s not bicker,” said Nicholls. “Suppose you answer my question. I have a stake in this, and I want to know. How’s the trial going?”

Wilson put on his most open-faced expression. “Frankly,” he said, “not too well. I’m afraid the judge is on the other side. If you’d listened to me and stalled till another judge came along-”

“I had no time to stall, “ said Nicholls. “I have to be elsewhere within a few days. Even now, I should be on my way. Do you think we might lose the case?”

Harley laughed sharply. As Wilson glared at him he took his drink from the waitress’ tray and swallowed it. The smile remained on his face as he listened to Wilson say smoothly:

“Hum.” Nicholls looked interestedly at his fingernails. “Perhaps I chose the wrong lawyer.”

“Sure you did.” Harley waved at the waitress, ordered another drink. “You want to know what else I think? I think you picked the wrong client, spelled s-t-o-o-g-e. I’m getting sick of this. This damn thing around my neck smells bad. How do I know it’s any good, anyhow? Far as I can see, it just smells bad, and that’s all.”

“It works,” Nicholls said succinctly. “I wouldn’t advise you to go without it. The late Hank Jenkins is not a very strong ghost-a strong one would tear you apart and chew up your herbs for dessert but without the protection of what you wear about your neck, you would become a very uncomfortable human as soon as Jenkins heard you’d stopped wearing it.”

He put down the glass of red wine he’d been inhaling without drinking, looked intently at Wilson. “I’ve put up the money in this,” he said. “I had hoped you’d be able to handle the legal end. I see I’ll have to do more. Now listen intently, because I have no intention of repeating this. There’s an angle to this case that’s got right by your blunted legal acumen. Jenkins claims to be an astral entity, which he undoubtedly is. Now, instead of trying to prove him a ghost, and legally dead, and therefore unfit to testify, which you have been doing, suppose you do this....”

And when he left them a bit later, and Wilson took Harley up to his room and poured him into bed, the lawyer felt happy for the first time in days.

Russell Joseph Harley, a little hung over and a lot nervous, was called to the stand as first witness in his own behalf.

“You are the nephew of the late Zebulon Harley, who bequeathed the residence known as Harley Hall to you?”

Wilson turned to the bench. “I offer this copy of the late Mr. Zebulon Harley’s will in evidence. All his possessions are left to his nephew and only living kin, the defendant.”

Turnbull spoke from his desk. “The plaintiff in no way disputes the defendant’s equity in Harley Hall.”

Wilson continued, “You passed part of your childhood in Harley Hall, did you not, and visited it as a grown man on occasion?”

“At any time, has anything in the shape of a ghost, specter or astral entity manifested itself to you in Harley Hall?”

“It was in nineteen thirty-eight. In September, some time-around the tenth or eleventh of the month.”

“Well, not since I was quite young. My parents moved to Pennsylvania in nineteen twenty...

“And since then-except for that one-day visit in nineteen thirty-eight-has any communication passed between your uncle and yourself?”

“‘No, I guess not. He was a rather queer duck-solitary. A little bit balmy, I think.”

“‘Well, you’re a loving nephew. But in view of what you’ve just said, does it sound surprising that your uncle never told you of Mr. Jenkins? He never had much chance to, did he?”

“He had a chance in nineteen thirty-eight, but he didn’t,” Harley said defiantly.

Gimbel began to look bored. He had anticipated something more in the way of fireworks. He said, “Has the defense any further witnesses?”

Wilson smiled grimly. “Yes, your honor,.. he said. This was his big moment, and he smiled again as he said gently, “I would like to call Mr. Henry Jenkins to the stand.”

In the amazed silence that followed, Judge Gimbel leaned forward. “‘You mean you wish to call the plaintiff as a witness for the defense?”

Gimbel grimaced. “Call Henry Jenkins,” he said wearily to the clerk, and sank back in his chair.

Turnbull was looking alarmed. He bit his lip, trying to decide whether to object to this astonishing procedure, but finally shrugged as the clerk bawled out the ghost’s name.

Turnbull sped do\VD the corridor, out the door. His voice was heard in the anteroom, then he returned more slowly. Behind him came the trickle of blood drops: Pat. HISS. Pat. HISS-

“One moment, “ said Gimbel, coming to life again. “I have no objection to your testifying, Mr. Jenkins, but the State should not be subjected to the needless expense of reupholstering its witness chair every time you do. Bailiff, find some sort of a rug or something to throw over the chair before Mr. Jenkins is sworn in:’

A tarpaulin was hurriedly procured and adjusted to the chair; Jenkins materialized long enough to be sworn in, then sat.

“Tell me, Mr. Jenkins,” he said, “just how many ‘astral entities’-I believe that is what you call yourself-are there?”

“As many, in other words, as there have been human beings to die by violence?”

Turnbull rose to his feet in sudden agitation, but the ghost neatly evaded the trap. “I don’t know. I only know there are billions.”

The lawyer’s cat-who-ate-canary smile remained undimmed. “And all these billions are constantly about us, everywhere, only remaining invisible. Is that it?”

“Oh, no. Very few remain on Earth. Of those, still fewer have anything to do with humans. Most humans are quite boring to us.”

Turnbull interrupted suddenly. “I would like to know the significance of these questions. I object to this whole line of questioning as being totally irrelevant.”

Wilson was a study in legal dignity. He retorted, “I am trying to elicit some facts of major value, your honor. This may change the entire character of the case. I ask your patience for a moment or two.”

“Counsel for the defense may continue,” Gimbel said curtly. Wilson showed his canines in a grin. He continued to the blood dripping before him. “Now, the contention of your counsel is that the late Mr. Harley allowed an ‘astral entity’ to occupy his home for twenty years or more, with his full knowledge and consent. That strikes me as being entirely improbable, but shall we for the moment assume it to be the case?”

“You heard me!” Wilson snapped. “Have you fingers, flesh-and-blood fingers, capable of making an imprint?”

“Why, no. I-” Wilson rushed on. “Or have you a photograph of yourself-or specimens of your handwriting-or any sort of material identification? Have you any of these?”

Wilson’s voice became harsh, menacing. “I mean, can you prove that you are the astral entity alleged to have occupied Zebulon Harley’s home. Was it you-or was it another of the featureless, faceless, intangible unknowns-one of the hundreds of thousands of them that, by your own admission, are all over the face of the earth, rambling where they choose, not halted by any locks or bars? Can you prove that you are anyone in particular?”

“Your honor!” Turnbull’s voice was almost a shriek as he found his feet at last. “My client’s identity was never in question!”

“It is now!” roared Wilson. “The opposing counsel has presented a personage whom he styles ‘Henry Jenkins: Who is this Jenkins? What is he? Is he even an individual-or a corporate aggregation of these mysterious ‘astral entities’ which we are to believe are everywhere, but which we never see? If he is an individual, is he the individual? And how can we know that, even if he says he is? Let him produce evidence-photographs, a birth certificate, fingerprints. Let him bring in identifying witnesses who have known both ghosts, and are prepared to swear that these ghosts are the same ghost. Failing this, there is no case! Your honor, I demand the court declare an immediate judgment in favor of the defendant!”

Judge Gimbel stared at Turnbull. “Have you anything to say?” he asked. “The argument of the defense would seem to have every merit with it. Unless you can produce some sort of evidence as to the identity of your client, I have no alternative but to find for the defense.”

For a moment there was a silent tableau. Wilson triumphant, Turnbull furiously frustrated.

“This thing has gone far enough, “ it said above the sizzle and splatter of its own leaking blood. “I believe I can present proof that will satisfy the court.”

Wilson’s face fell with express-elevator speed. Turnbull held his breath, afraid to hope.

There was no other sound in the courtroom as the voice said, “Mr. Harley, here, spoke of a visit to his uncle in nineteen thirty-eight. I can vouch for that. They spent a night and a day together. They weren’t alone. I was there.”

No one was watching Russell Harley, or they might have seen the sudden sick pallor that passed over his face.

The voice, relentless, went on. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have eavesdropped as I did, but old Zeb never had any secrets from me anyhow. I listened to what they talked about. Young Harley was working for a bank in Philadelphia at the time. His first big job. He needed money, and needed it bad. There was a shortage in his department. A woman named Sally-”

“Hold on!” Wilson yelled. “This has nothing to do with your identification of yourself. Keep to the point!”

But Turnbull had begun to comprehend. He was shouting, too, almost too excited to be coherent. “Your honor, my client must be allowed to speak. If he shows knowledge of an intimate conversation between the late Mr. Harley and the defendant, it would be certain proof that he enjoyed the late Mr. Harley’s confidence, and thus, Q.E.D., that he is no other than the astral entity who occupied Harley Hall for so long!”

Gimbel nodded sharply. “Let me remind counsel for the defense that this is his own witness. Mr. Jenkins, continue.”

“Shut up, damn you!” Harley yelled. He sprang upright. turned beseechingly toward the judge. “He’s twisting it! Make him stop! Sure, I knew my uncle had a ghost. He’s it. all right, curse his black soul! He can have the house if he wants it-I’ll clear out. I’ll clear out of the whole damned state!”

He broke off into babbling and turned about wildly. Only the intervention of a marshal kept him from hurtling out of the courtroom.

Banging of the gavel and hard work by the court clerk and his staff restored order in the courtroom. When the room had returned almost to normalcy, Judge Gimbel, perspiring and annoyed, said, “ As far as I am concerned, identification of the witness is complete. Has the defense any further evidence to present?”

“Nothing, your honor. I rest my case.” Gimbel plowed a hand through his sparse hair and blinked. “In that case,” he said, “I find for the plaintiff. An order is entered hereby that the defendant. Russell Joseph Harley, shall remove from the premises of Harley Hall all spells, pentagrams, talismans and other means of exorcism employed; that he shall cease and desist from making any attempts, of whatever nature, to evict the tenant in the future; and that Henry Jenkins, the plaintiff, shall be permitted to full use and occupancy of the premises designated as Harley Hall for the full term of his natural-ah-existence.”

“Don’t take it so hard,” said a mild voice behind Russell Harley. He whirled surlily. Nicholls was coming up the street after him from the courthouse, Wilson in tow.

Nicholls said, “You lost the case, but you’ve still got your life. Let me buy you a drink. In here, perhaps.”

He herded them into a cocktail lounge, sat them down before they had a chance to object. He glanced at his expensive wrist watch. “I have a few minutes,” he said “Then I really must be off. It’s urgent.”

He hailed a barman, ordered for all. Then he looked at young Harley and smiled broadly as he dropped a bill on the counter to pay for the drinks.

“Harley,” he said, “I have a motto that you would do well to remember at times like these. I’ll make you a present of it, if you like.”

Harley snarled and swallowed his drink without replying. Wilson said, “What gets me is, why didn’t they come to us before the trial with that stuff about this charmingly illicit client you wished on me? We’d have had to settle out of court.”

Nicholls shrugged. “They had their reasons,” he said “ After all, one case of exorcism, more or less, doesn’t matter. But lawsuits set precedents. You’re a lawyer, of sorts, Wilson; do you see what I mean?”

“Precedents?” Wilson looked at him slack-jawed for a moment; then his eyes widened

“I see you understand me.” Nicholls nodded. “From now on in this state-and by virtue of the full-faith-and-credence clause of the Constitution, in every state of the country-a ghost has a legal right to haunt a house!”

“Good lord!” said Wilson. He began to laugh, not loud, but from the bottom of his chest.

Harley stared at Nicholls. “Once and for all,” he whispered, “tell me -what’s your angle on all this?”

“Think about it a while,” he said lightly. “You’ll begin to understand.” He sniffed his wine once more, then sat the glass down gently

As I’ve mentioned before, I was never a reader of Weird Tales, and its type of fiction did not captivate me. In 1950, though, when “Legal Rites” finally appeared, Weird Tales was nearing the end of its thirty-year road and I’m rather glad I made its pages at least once before its end, even if only as half of a collaboration. It was the longest story in the issue and it received the cover.

“Legal Rites” and “The Little Man on the Subway” are the only pieces of fiction I ever wrote in collaboration, and I didn’t really enjoy the process. Later on in my career, I had occasion to collaborate on four or five non-fiction books and never really enjoyed that either, nor were any of the collaborations successful I’m essentially a loner and like to take full responsibility for what I write.

In the case of “Legal Rites” it seems to me that the beginning is mostly Pohl’s rewriting; the trial scene is mostly mine; the ending-I don’t remember.

Fantasy was not the only type of story I kept bullheadedly trying, over and over, without much success. Another type was the broadly farcical. I never sold either type to Campbell, but I at least sold the latter elsewhere.

Even while I was writing “Legal Rites,” I was working on another robot story, but a humorous one-or what I considered humor. I called it “Source of Power” and at least knew better than to waste time trying it on Campbell. I sent it directly to Thrilling Wonder, and when it was rejected there, I tried Amazing.

Amazing bought it on October 8, 1941-my first sale to that magazine since those exciting beginning days of the fall of 1938. When it appeared on the stands (two days after Pearl Harbor) in the February 1942. issue, I found that Amazing had retitled it “Robot AL-76 Goes Astray.”

Although “Robot AL-76 Goes Astray” was a “positronic robot” story, it didn’t really fit in with the other three I had thus far written. When I, Robot, my first collection of “positronic robot” stories, was put together, in 1950, I did not include “Robot AL-76 Goes Astray” in that volume. When, however, in 1964, The Rest of the Robots was put together, I felt honor-bound by the title, if nothing else, to include all the remaining robot stories published till then, and therefore “Robot AL-76 Goes Astray” was included.

August 1, 1941 (“Robot AL-76 Goes Astray” was then still working its slow way through the typewriter, because the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union distracted me) was another important day in my writing career. I went to see John Campbell that day and, not liking to come to him without an idea, I thought hard on the subway ride there.

The fate of “Pilgrimage” (soon to become “Black Friar of the Flame”) was still rankling, and I wanted to write another future-historical. I therefore suggested to him that I do a short story against the background of the slow fall of the Galactic Empire (something I intended to model quite frankly on the fall of the Roman Empire).

Campbell caught fire. We spent two hours together, and by the time it was over it was not going to be a short story at all, but an indefinitely long series of stories dealing with the fall of the First Galactic Empire and the rise of the Second.

I submitted the first story of the series, “Foundation,” to Campbell on September 8, 1941, and it was accepted on the fifteenth. It appeared in the May 1942 issue of Astounding.

Over the next eight years I was to write seven more stories of what came to be called the “Foundation” series, and these were finally collected into three volumes, Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation, which collectively were called The Foundation Trilogy.

Of all my science fiction, these books were most successful. First published in 1951, 1952, and 1953, respectively, they have been in print constantly as hard-covers ever since, despite the appearance of numerous soft-cover editions. And in 1966, at the 24th World Science Fiction Convention, in Cleveland, the “Foundation” series received a Hugo (science fiction’s equivalent of the Oscar) as the “Best All-Time Series.”

After “Foundation” I was ready to try a serious positronic robot story for the first time in half a year. This one, “Runaround, “ was submitted to Campbell on October 20, 1941, and he accepted it on the twenty-third. It appeared in the March 1942 issue of Astounding and was eventually included in I, Robot.

I then had to get to work at once on a sequel to “Foundation.” “Foundation” had been brought to an inconclusive ending on the assumption that a sequel would be forthcoming, and I had to come through. On November 17, the sequel, “Bridle and Saddle,” which was the second story of the “Foundation” series, was submitted to Campbell, and he accepted it the same day-a record in speed. What’s more, it was the longest story I had yet written-eighteen thousand words-and even though I received no bonus, the check, for $180, was the largest single check I had yet received. “Bridle and Saddle” was eventually included in Foundation.

Now, at last, I had a series of long stories going, together with my “positronic robot” series of short stories. I was feeling quite good.

On November 17, 1941, the day I submitted and sold “Bridle and Saddle,” Campbell told me his plan for starting a new department in Astounding, one to be called “Probability Zero.” This was to be a department of short-shorts, five hundred to one thousand words, which were to be in the nature of plausible and entertaining Munchausen-like lies. Campbell’s notion was that, aside from the entertainment value of these things, they would offer a place where beginners could penetrate the market without having to compete quite so hard with established writers. It would form a stairway to professional status.

This was a good idea in theory and even worked a little. Ray Bradbury, later to be one of the best-known and successful of all science fiction writers, broke into the field with a “Probability Zero” item in the July 1942 Astounding. Hal Clement and George 0. Smith also published in “Probability Zero” near the very start of their careers.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work enough. Campbell had to start the department going with professionals, hoping to let the amateurs carry on once they saw what it was Campbell wanted. There were, however, never enough amateurs who could meet Campbell’s standards even for short-shorts of an undemanding nature, and after twelve appearances of “Probability Zero” over a space of two and a half years, Campbell gave up.

On November 17, however, he was just beginning, and he wanted me to do a “Probability Zero” for him. I was delighted that he considered me to be at that stage of virtuosity where he could order me to do something for him according to measure. I promptly sat down and wrote a short-short called “Big Game.” On November 24, 1941, I showed it to Campbell. He glanced over it and, rather to my astonishment, handed it back. It wasn’t what he wanted.

I wish I could remember what “Big Game” was about, for I thought enough of it to try submitting it to Collier’s magazine (an over-awing slick) in 1944-and it was, of course, rejected. The title, however, recalls nothing to my mind, and the story now no longer exists.

I tried a second time and did a humorous little positronic robot story called “First Law.” I showed it to Campbell on December 1, and he didn’t like that, either. This time, though, I kept the story. Thank goodness, I had finally learned that stories must be carefully saved for eternity, however many times they are rejected, and however firmly you imagine they are retired. “Big Game” was the eleventh of my stories to disappear, but it was also the last.

In the case of “First Law” there came a time when a magazine that did not exist in 1941 was to ask me for something. The magazine in question was Fantastic Universe, whose editor, Hans Stefan Santesson, asked me for a story at rates that would have been fine in 1941 but that by the mid-1950s I was reluctant to accept. I remembered “First Law,” however, and sent it in. Santesson took it and ran it in the October 1956 issue of Fantastic Universe, and, eventually, I included it in The Rest of the Robots.

I tried a third time with a short-story called “Time Pussy,” which I wrote on the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941, finishing it just before the radio went crazy with the news of Pearl Harbor. I brought it in to Campbell the next day (life goes on!), and this time he took it, but “not too enthusiastically,” according to my diary.

Time Pussy

This was told me long ago by old Mac, who lived in a shack just over the hill from my old house. He had been a mining prospector out in the Asteroids during the Rush of ‘37, and spent most of his time now in feeding his seven cats.

The old miner looked at me and scratched his chin. “Well,” he said, “they reminds me o’ my leetle pets on Pallas. They was something like cats-same kind of head, sort o’-and the cleverest leetle fellers y’ ever saw. All dead!”

I felt sorry and said so. Mac heaved a sigh. “Cleverest leetle fellers,” he repeated. “They was four-dimensional pussies.”

“Four-dimensional, Mr. Mac? But the fourth dimension is time.” I had learned that the year before, in the third grade.

“So you’ve had a leetle schooling, hey?” He took out his pipe and filled it slowly. “Sure, the fourth dimension is time. These pussies was about a foot long and six inches high and four inches wide and stretched somewheres into middle o’ next week. That’s four dimensions, ain’t it? Why, if you petted their heads, they wouldn’t wag their tails till next day, mebbe. Some 0 the big ones wouldn’t wag till day after. Fact!”

Mac went on: “They was the best leetle watchdogs in all creation, too. They had to be. Why, if they spotted a burglar or any suspicious character, they’d shriek like a banshee. And when one saw a burglar today, he’d shriek yesterday, so we had twenty-four hours’ notice every time.”

“Cross my heart! Y’ want to know how we used to feed them? We’ d wait for them to go to sleep, see, and then we’d know they was busy digesting their meals. These leetle time pussies, they always digested their meals exactly three hours before they ate it, on account their stomachs stretched that far back in time. So when they went to sleep, we used to look at the time, get their dinner ready and feed it to them exactly three hours later.”

He had lit his pipe now and was puffing away. He shook his head sadly. “Once, though, I made a mistake. Poor leetle time pussy. His name was Joe, and he was just about my favorite, too. He went to sleep one morning at nine and somehow I got the idea it was eight. Naturally, I brought him his feed at eleven. I looked allover for him, but I couldn’t find him.”

“Well, no time pussy’s insides could be expected to handle his breakfast only two hours after digesting it. Its too much to expect. I found him finally under the tool kit in the outer shed. He had crawled there and died of indigestion an hour before. Poor leetle feller! After that, I always set an alarm, so I never made that mistake again.”

There was a short, mournful silence after that, and I resumed in a respectful whisper: “You said they all died, before. Were they all killed like that?”

Mac shook his head solemnly. “No! They used to catch colds from us fellers and just die anywhere from a week to ten days before they caught them. They wasn’t too many to start with, and a year after the miners hit Pallas they wasn’t but about ten left and them ten sort o’ weak and sickly. The trouble was, leetle feller, that when they died, they went all to pieces; just rotted away fast. Especially the little four-dimensional jigger they had in their brains which made them act the way they did. It cost us all millions o’ dollars.”

“Y’ see, some scientists back on Earth got wind of our leetle time pussies, and they knew they’d all be dead before they could get out there next conjunction. So they offered us all a million dollars for each time pussy we preserved for them.”

“Well, we tried, but they wouldn’t keep. After they died, they were just no good any more, and we had to bury them. We tried packing them in ice, but that only kept the outside all right. The inside was a nasty mess, and it was the inside the scientists wanted.

“Natur’lly, with each dead time pussy costing us a million dollars, we didn’t want that to happen. One of us figured out that if we put a time pussy into hot water when it was about to die, the water would soak all through it. Then, after it died, we could freeze the water so it would just be one solid chunk o’ ice, and then it would keep.”

“We tried and we tried, son, but we just couldn’t freeze the water fast enough. By the time we had it all iced, the four-dimensional jigger in the time pussy’s brain had just corrupted away. We froze the water faster and faster but it was no go. Finally, we had only one time pussy left, and he was just fixing to die, too. We was desperate-and then one of the fellers thought o’ something. He figured out a complicated contraption that would freeze all the water just like that -in a split second.

“We picked up the last leetle feller and put him into the hot water and hooked on the machine. The leetle feller gave us a last look and made a funny leetle sound and died. We pressed the button and iced the whole thing into a solid block in about a quarter of a second.” Here Mac heaved a sigh that must have weighed a ton. “But it was no use. The time pussy spoiled inside 0’ fifteen minutes and we lost the last million dollars.”

I caught my breath. “But Mr. Mac, you just said you iced the time pussy in a quarter of a second. It didn’t have time to spoil.”

“That’s just it, leetle feller,” he said heavily. “We did it too doggoned fast. The time pussy didn’t keep because we froze that hot water so derned fast that the ice was still warm!”

The most unusual thing about this small item is that it was not published under my own name. Campbell wanted one item in that first “Probability Zero” to appear to be by a non-professional, just to encourage the newcomers he hoped would try to break in. He had three entries in that first department and the other two were by L. Sprague de Camp and Malcolm Jameson. Both were longer-established and (despite “Nightfall”) more renowned than I. As low man, it was up to me to use a pseudonym and pretend to be a newcomer.

I saw Campbell’s point and, just a little sullenly, agreed. I used the name George E. Dale. It is the only time I ever used a pseudonym in the magazines. In later years I used the pseudonym Paul French on a series of six teen-age science fiction novels for reasons that are another story altogether. That was a special case, and in 1971 and 1972 those six novels appeared as paperbacks under my own name. Now “Time Pussy” appears here under my own name, and the record is at last absolutely clean.

The reasons were twofold. In the first place, Pearl Harbor put the United States in the war the day I wrote “Time Pussy,” and those first two months after the debacle were too disastrous and heartbreaking to allow much in the way of fiction composing.

If that in itself weren’t enough, the time had come to try, once again, the qualifying examinations that would, or would not, grant me permission to do research. I very much felt myself to be dangling over the abyss. A second failure to pass would probably mean an end for me at Columbia. Consequently, during those hours when I wasn’t working in my father’s candy store or hanging over the radio, I had to be studying. There was time for nothing else at all.

Hedging my bets rather desperately, I registered for graduate work at New York University, just in case I did not pass once again. After I took my qualifying examinations, at the end of January 1942, I actually attended a few classes at N.Y.U. while waiting for the results to be announced. -but I won’t keep you in suspense. On Friday, the thirteenth of February, the results were announced. I had passed, this time.

During the interval between the taking of the qualifying examinations and the annunciation, I managed to do “Victory Unintentional.” This was a positronic robot story that was a sequel to “Not Final!” which had not been a positronic robot story. obviously I was trying to ride the series notion all I could, in the hope of surer sales.

I submitted it to Campbell on February 9, 1942, and if I thought Campbell would find himself unable to reject a series story, I was roundly disabused. Nor was he so impressed by “Nightfall” and by my “Foundation” series as to find himself incapable of making the rejection a severe one.

On February 13. the very day of my passing into the sacred list of those permitted to do research toward their Ph.D., my spirits were somewhat dashed when I received “Victory Unintentional?” back with a cryptic rejection, which consisted of the following, in toto, “CH₃C₂CH₂CH₂SH.” Campbell very well knew that this was the formula for “butyl mercaptan, “ which gives the skunk its smell, and I very well knew it, too, and Campbell very well knew I knew.

Oh, well! I managed to sell it anyway, to Super Science Stories under its post-Pohl editor, on March 16, 1942, and it appeared in the August 1942 issue of that magazine. Though I did not include it in I, Robot, I did include it, of necessity, in The Rest of the Robots.

After that, though, there came another dry period, the longest I was ever to experience. Once “Victory Unintentional” was finished, fourteen months (I) were to pass before I turned back to the typewriter. It was not the conventional “writer’s block,” of course, for that I have never experienced. Rather, it was the coming of a vast, triple change in my life.

The first change was the fact that I was now beginning chemical research in earnest under Professor Charles R. Dawson. Research is a full-time job and I still had to work it around, somehow, my duties in my father’s candy store, so there was bound to be very little time for writing.

Then, as though that weren’t enough, a second change took place simultaneously

In January 1942 I joined an organization called ‘The Brooklyn Writers’ Club,” which had sent me a postcard of invitation. I took the invitation to be a recognition of my status as a “writer” and I couldn’t possibly have refused.

The first meeting I attended was on January 19, 1942. It turned out to be rather pleasant. I welcomed the chance to get my mind off the qualifying examinations and the war disasters (though I remember spending part of that first meeting discussing the possibility that New York might be bombed).

Most of the members of the club were no further advanced in the profession than I was; nor were any of them, aside from myself, science fiction writers. The chief activity consisted of reading from our own manuscripts so that criticism from the others might be invited. Since it was quickly discovered that I read “with expression, “ I became chief reader, a role I enjoyed(It was to be eight years yet before I discovered that I had a natural Hair for the lecture platform.)

On February 9, 1942, the third meeting I attended, there was present a young man, Joseph Goldberger, whom I had not met before. He was a couple of years older than I was. I did most of the reading that day and Goldberger was sufficiently impressed to suggest, after the meeting had adjourned, that the two of us, with our girls, go out on a double date and get to know each other. Embarrassed, I had to explain that I had no girl. With an expansive gesture, he said he would get one for me.

And so he did. On February 14. 1942 (Valentine’s Day and the day after I had passed my qualifying examinations) I met him at the Astor Hotel at 8:30 P.M. With him was his girl friend, and with her was her girl friend, Gertrude Blugerman, who was going to be my blind date. -I fell in love, and when I wasn’t thinking of research I was thinking of her.

With war, the job situation suddenly changed: technically trained men of all sorts were in demand.

Robert Heinlein, for instance, was an engineer who had been trained at Annapolis. His health had retired him from active service in the Navy and had kept him retired, but his Annapolis connections made it possible for him to work as a civilian engineer at the Naval Air Experimental Station of the u. S. Navy Yard in Philadelphia. He cast about for other qualified people he might persuade to join him there, particularly among his fellow science fiction writers.

He got L. Sprague de Camp to come to the N.A.E.S., and on March 30, 1942, I received a letter from the navy yard asking if I would consider joining them.

I am rather single-minded and, having labored toward my Ph.D. for a year and a half, I would not ordinarily have considered letting go for anything short of a major force. -but the major force was there. I was in love and I wanted to get married even more than I wanted my degree. It occurred to me that I could suspend work toward my Ph.D. with the full approval of the school, thanks to the war emergency, and that I could also get full permission to resume after the war. And by taking a job and postponing-merely postponing-my research, I could get married.

I went down to Philadelphia for an interview on April 10 and apparently met their requirements. I took the job, and on May 14, having left my father’s candy store at last and (at least as a worker) forever, I moved to Philadelphia. Fortunately, Philadelphia was only an hour and a half from New York by train (in those days, I couldn’t drive a car and, even if I could, I wouldn’t have been able to get the gasoline because of rationing). I was therefore back in New York every weekend.

By the twenty-fourth of the month I had persuaded Gertrude to agree to marry me, and on July 26 we were married.

During those months it did not bother me that I was doing no writing. I had too much to think of-first the war, then research, then the job, then the marriage.

Besides, in the years up to early 1942, I never thought of my writing as anything but a way to help out with my college tuition. It was fun; it was exciting; and such success as I managed to achieve was deeply satisfying-but it had been done to serve a purpose and that purpose had been served. I had no notion that writing could be my career; that it could ever possibly be my career.

My career was to be chemistry. All the time I was writing and selling stories, I was also slaving away at Columbia. Once I earned my Ph.D., I intended to make my living by doing chemical research for some large industry at some munificent salary such as a hundred dollars a week. (As the son of a candy-store keeper, brought up in the depression, I suffered dizzy spells if I tried to think of more than a hundred dollars a week, so I confined my ambitions to that.)

My Philadelphia job, to be sure, paid me only fifty dollars a week at the beginning, but a young couple could live on that, those days, with taxes very small, with an apartment costing $42.50 a month and dinner for two at a restaurant coming to two dollars (including tip).

It wasn’t the height of my dreams, but it was only a temporary war job, after all. Once the war was over, I would go back to my research and get my Ph.D. and a better job. Meanwhile, even a salary of $2,600 a year seemed to make it unnecessary for me to write. By my marriage day, I had written forty-two stories, of which twenty-eight had been sold (and three more were yet to sell).My total bachelor earnings over a space of four years had been $1,788.50 for those twenty-eight stories. This amounted to an average earning of just under $8.60 per week or $64 per story.

I never dreamed at that time that I could ever do much better. I had no intention of ever writing anything but science fiction or fantasy for the pulp magazines, which paid one cent a word at most-a cent and a quarter with bonus.

To make even the feeble fifty dollars a week that my job paid me would make it necessary for me to write and sell some forty stories a year, and, at that time, that didn’t seem conceivable to me.

It had been all right to labor at the typewriter to pay my way through school, when I had no other source of income, but for what purpose ought I to be writing now? And with a six-day, fifty-four hour week, and the excitement of a new marriage, who had time?

The very existence of science fiction seemed to fade. I had left my magazine collection in New York; I no longer saw Campbell regularly, or Pohl, or any of my science fiction cronies. I scarcely even read the current magazines as they came out.

I might have let science fiction die altogether, and my writing career with it, except that there were little reminders from the outside world, and little itchings inside me that meant (though I didn’t know it at the time) that writing was a great deal more to me than just a handy device to make a little spare cash.

I had hardly begun to work at the N.A.E.S., for instance, when the June 1942 issue of Astounding came out with my story “Bridle and Saddle.” And it made the cover.

It was quite beyond my power to resist the temptation to take a copy to work and show it around. I couldn’t help but feel the status I gained as a “writer.” Later that summer and fall, three other stories were published: “Victory Unintentional” and “The Imaginary” in the post-Pohl Super Science Stories and “The Hazing” in Thrilling Wonder Stories. Each kept the science fiction world alive for me.

And although my New York coterie of science fiction editors, writers, and readers were gone, I was left not entirely bereft.

Working with me at the N.A.E.S. were Robert Heinlein and L. Sprague de Camp, and I kept up a close social relationship with both. To be sure, each had quit writing for the duration but they were far more successful writers than I was and I hero-worshipped them. In addition, John D. Clark, who was an ardent science fiction fan and who had written and published a couple of stories in 1937, was living in Philadelphia at the time and we frequently saw one another. All three kept the science fiction atmosphere about me.

It was on January 5, 1943, though, that the real trigger came. On that day I received a letter from Fred Pohl to the effect that he was planning to rewrite “Legal Rites” and was going to try to sell it again. That was exciting. He wasn’t to succeed in selling the story for six more years, but of course I had no way of telling that. To me it seemed that another sale was in the offing and that I was an as-yet-active writer.

Besides, “Legal Rites” was a fantasy and I had never yet satisfied that long-standing desire to write and sell a fantasy to Unknown. Five times I had tried, and five times I had failed.

On January 13, quite suddenly, a week after the letter had come and fourteen months after my last-written story, the urge overwhelmed me. I sat down to write a fantasy called “ Author! Author!”

Quickly I found there was something lacking. It was the first time I had ever tried to write something for Campbell without conferences with him. I missed the inspiration that invariably came through talks with him; I missed his encouragement. In fact, I wasn’t sure that I could write at all without him. So the story limped and there were dry spells. I didn’t finish the first draft till March 5, and the final version wasn’t ready for mailing till April 4. 1943.

It had taken me nearly three months to write the story. To be sure, it was twelve thousand words long, but “Bridle and Saddle,” which was half again as long, had taken me only three weeks.

Perhaps if “ Author! Author!” had been rejected, it might have been a long time before I would have had the courage to try again. Fortunately, that was never put to the test. I mailed the story to Campbell on April 6, 1943 (the first time I ever mailed him a story instead of handing it to him), and on the twelfth the check of acceptance arrived. There was not even a revision requested, and what’s more, Campbell paid me a bonus for the first time since “Nightfall.” I received one and a quarter cents a word, or $150 in all. My sixth try at Unknown had succeeded.

It was the equivalent of three weeks’ pay at the N.A.E.S. for something that had taken me, off and on, three months. However, the three months’ work on” Author! Author!” had been of a totally different kind than the three weeks’ work at the N.A.E.S. would have been, and the receipt of the $150 check was infinitely more exciting than picking up a similar check, or even a larger one, earned in the course of a punch-the-time-clock job. (Yes, indeed, I punched a time clock at the N.A.E.S.)

As it happened, though, the happy excitement with which I greeted the sale was premature. I had scaled the heights of Unknown too late, and though I had the money, I didn’t have the magazine. Robert Heinlein brought me the sad news on August 2, less than four months after the sale.

Unknown had been having a difficult time of it. Sales weren’t high enough, and after its first two years of operation it had had to switch from monthly to bimonthly issues. Now the war had introduced a paper shortage and Street & Smith Publications decided to save what paper it could receive for the more successful Astounding and let Unknown go.

At the time I made my sale, there were only three more issues of Unknown fated to be issued and there was no room in any of them for” Author! Author!” The story remained in the vaults of Street & Smith indefinitely; a story sold, but not published; and the $150 check was deprived of most of its fun as a result.

There is, however, a happy ending. Twenty years later, Don Bensen of Pyramid Publications was publishing a paperback anthology of stories from Unknown, he asked me for an introduction. With glad nostalgia I complied, writing it on January 15, 1963, almost twenty years to the day after I had started writing the only story I ever sold to the magazine. In the course of the introduction, I referred to the sad story of my attempts to write for Unknown.

The 1960s were not the 1940s. In 1963, the mere mention of an existing Asimov story that had never been published produced excitement, and Bensen wrote to me within three days, asking to see the story. I dug out the manuscript (I saved them now, you see, even for twenty years) and sent it to him.

He asked permission to include it in a second anthology of Unknown stories (pointing out that it had been accepted by the magazine). I explained he would also need permission from Campbell and the publisher. They very kindly granted the permission, and in January 1964. twenty-one years after it was written, “ Author! Author!” was finally published and I finally-after a fashion, and glancingly-made Unknown.

Author! Author!

It occurred to Graham Dorn, and not for the first time, either, that there was one serious disadvantage in swearing you’ll go through fire and water for a girl, however beloved. Sometimes she takes you at your miserable word.

This is one way of saying that he had been waylaid, shanghaied and dragooned by his fiancée into speaking at her maiden aunt’s Literary Society. Don’t laugh! It’s not funny from the speaker’s rostrum. Some of the faces you have to look at!

To race through the details, Graham Dorn had been jerked onto a platform and forced upright. He had read a speech on “The Place of the Mystery Novel in American Literature” in an appalled tone. Not even the fact that his own eternally precious June had written it (part of the bribe to get him to speak in the first place) could mask the fact that it was essentially tripe.

And then when he was weltering, figuratively speaking, in his own mental gore, the harpies closed in, for lo, it was time for the informal discussion and assorted feminine gush.

-Oh, Mr. Dorn, do you work from inspiration? I mean, do you just sit down and then an idea strikes you-all at once? And you must sit up all night and drink black coffee to keep you awake till you get it down?

-Oh, yes. Certainly. (His working hours were two to four in the afternoon every other day, and he drank milk.)

-Oh, Mr. Dorn, you must do the most awful research to get all those bizarre murders. About how much must you do before you can write a story?

-About six months, usually. (The only reference books he ever used were a six-volume encyclopedia and year-before-last’s World Almanac.)

-Oh, Mr. Dom, did you make up your Reginald de Meister from a real character? You must have. He’s oh, so convincing in his every detail.

-He’s modeled after a very dear boyhood chum of mine. (Dom had never known anyone like de Meister. He lived in continual fear of meeting someone like him. He had even a cunningly fashioned ring containing a subtle Oriental poison for use just in case he did. So much for de Meister.)

Somewhere past the knot of women, June Billings sat in her seat and smiled with sickening and proprietary pride.

Graham passed a finger over his throat and went through the pantomime of choking to death as unobtrusively as possible. June smiled, nodded, threw him a delicate kiss, and did nothing.

Graham decided to pass a stern, lonely, woman-less life and to have nothing but villainesses in his stories forever after.

He was answering in monosyllables, alternating yesses and noes. Yes, he did take cocaine on occasion. He found it helped the creative urge. No, he didn’t think he could allow Hollywood to take over de Meister. He thought movies weren’t true expressions of real Art. Besides, they were just a passing fad. Yes, he would read Miss Crum’s manuscripts if she brought them. Only too glad to. Reading amateur manuscripts was such fun, and editors are really such brutes.

And then refreshments were announced, and there was a sudden vacuum. It took a split-second for Graham’s head to clear. The mass of femininity had coalesced into a single specimen. She was four feet ten and about eighty-five pounds in weight. Graham was six-two and two hundred ten worth of brawn. He could probably have handled her without difficulty, especially since both her arms were occupied with a pachyderm of a purse. Still, he felt a little delicate, to say nothing of queasy, about knocking her down. It didn’t seem quite the thing to do.

She was advancing, with admiration and fervor disgustingly clear in her eyes, and Graham felt the wall behind him. There was no doorway within armreach on either side.

“Oh, Mr. de Meister-do, do please let me call you Mr. de Meister. Your creation is so real to me, that I can’t think of you as simply Graham Dorn. You don’t mind, do you?”

“No, no, of course not,” gargled Graham, as well as he could through thirty-two teeth simultaneously set on edge. “I often think of myself as Reginald in my more frivolous moments.”

“Thank you. You can have no idea, dear Mr. de Meister, how I have looked forward to meeting you. I have read all your works, and I think they are wonderful.”

“I’m glad you think so.” He went automatically into the modesty routine. “Really nothing, you know. Ha, ha, ha! Like to please the readers, but lots of room for improvement. Ha, ha, ha!”

“But you really are, you know.” This was said with intense earnestness. “I mean good, really good. I think it is wonderful to be an author like you. It must be almost like being God.”

Sister didn’t get the whisper. She continued, “To be able to create living characters out of nothing; to unfold souls to all the world; to put thoughts into words; to build pictures and create worlds. I have often thought that an author was the most gloriously gifted person in creation. Better an inspired author starving in a garret than a king upon his throne. Don’t you think so?”

“What are the crass material goods of the world to the wonders of weaving emotions and deeds into a little world of its own?”

She seized his hand. “There’s only one little request. You might,” she blushed faintly, “you might give poor Reginald-if you will allow me to call him that just once-a chance to marry Letitia Reynolds. You make her just a little too cruel to him. I’m sure I weep over it for hours together sometimes. But then he is too, too real to me.”

And from somewhere, a lacy frill of handkerchief made its appearance, and went to her eyes. She removed it, smiled bravely, and scurried away. Graham Dorn inhaled, closed his eyes, and gently collapsed into June’s arms.

His eyes opened with a jerk. “You may consider,” he said severely, “our engagement frazzled to the breaking point. Only my consideration for your poor, aged parents prevents your being known henceforward as the ex-fiancée of Graham Dom.”

“Darling, you are so noble.” She massaged his sleeve with her cheek. “Come, I’ll take you home and bathe your poor wounds.”

“All right, but you’ll have to carry me. Has your precious, loveable aunt got an axe?”

“For one thing, she had the gall to introduce me as the brain-father, God help me, of the famous Reginald de Meister.”

“Let’s get out of this creep-joint. And get this. I’m no relative by brain or otherwise, of that character. I disown him. I cast him into the darkness. I spit upon him. I declare him an illegitimate son, a foul degenerate, and the offspring of a hound, and I’ll be damned if he ever pokes his lousy patrician nose into my typewriter again.”

They were in the taxi, and June straightened his tie. “ All right, Sonny, let’s see the letter.”

Graham snarled and flipped it out of his jacket pocket. “I’ve thought of inviting myself to his house for tea, the damned flintheart. He’s got a rendezvous with a pinch of strychnine.”

“You may rave later. What does he say? Hmm-uh-huh-’doesn’t quite come up to what is expected-feel that de Meister isn’t in his usual form-a little revision perhaps towards-feel sure the novel can be adjusted-are returning under separate cover-’ “

She tossed it aside. “I told you you shouldn’t have killed off Sancha Rodriguez. She was what you needed. You’re getting skimpy on the love interest.”

“You write it! I’m through with de Meister. It’s getting so clubwomen call me Mr. de Meister, and my picture is printed in newspapers with the caption Mr. de Meister. I have no individuality. No one ever heard of Graham Dom. I’m always: Dom, Dom, you know, the guy who writes the de Meister stuff, you know.”

“I am not jealous of my own character. Listen! I hate detective stories. I never read them after I got into the two-syllable words. I wrote the first as a clever, trenchant, biting satire. It was to blast the entire false school of mystery writers. That’s why I invented this de Meister. He was the detective to end all detectives. The Compleat Ass, by Graham Dom.

“So the public, along with snakes, vipers, and ungrateful children takes this filth to its bosom. I wrote mystery after mystery trying to convert the public”

“Oh, well.” He smiled wanly, and the great soul rose above adversity. “Don’t you see? I’ve got to write other things. I can’t waste my life. But who’s going to read a serious novel by Graham Dorn, now that I’m so thoroughly identified with de Meister?”

“A normal fiancée,” Graham said bitterly, “would want her future husband to write something really worthwhile and become a great name in literature.”

“Well, I do want you to, Graham. But just a little de Meister once in a while to pay the bills that accumulate.”

“Ha!” Graham knocked his hat over his eyes to hide the sufferings of a strong spirit in agony. “Now you say that I can’t reach prominence unless I prostitute my art to that unmentionable. Here’s your place. Get out I’m going home and write a good scorching letter on asbestos to our senile Mr. MacDunlap.”

“Do exactly as you want to, cookie,” soothed June. “And tomorrow when you feel better, you’ll come and cry on my shoulder, and we’ll plan a revision of Death on the Third Deck together, shall we?”

Publishers and editors are untouchables, of course. Theirs is a heritage of the outstretched hand and the well-toothed smile; the nod of the head and the slap of the back.

But perhaps somewhere, in the privacy of the holes to which authors scurry when the night falls, a private revenge is taken. There, phrases may be uttered where no one can overhear, and letters may be written that need not be mailed, and perhaps a picture of an editor, smiling pensively, is enshrined above the typewriter to act the part of bulls-eye in an occasional game of darts.

Such a picture of MacDunlap, so used, enlightened Graham Dom’s room. And Graham Dom himself, in his usual writing costume (street-clothes and typewriter), scowled at the fifth sheet of paper in his typewriter. The other four were draped over the edge of the wastebasket, condemned for their milk-and-watery mildness.

“Dear Sir-” and added slowly and viciously, “or Madam, as the case may be.”

He typed furiously as the inspiration caught him, disregarding the faint wisp of smoke curling upward from the overheated keys:

“You say you don’t think much of de Meister in this story. Well, I don’t think much of de Meister, period. You can handcuff your slimy carcass to his and jump off the Brooklyn Bridge. And I hope they drain the East River just before you jump.

“From now on, my works will be aimed higher than your scurvy press. And the day will come when I can look back on this period of my career with the loathing that is its just-”

Someone had been tapping Graham on the shoulder during the last paragraph. Graham twitched it angrily and ineffectively at intervals.

Now he stopped, turned around, and addressed the stranger in his room courteously: “Who the devilish damnation are you? And you can leave without bothering to answer. I won’t think you rude.”

The newcomer smiled graciously. His nod wafted the delicate aroma of some unobtrusive hair-oil toward Graham. His lean, hard-bitten jaw stood out keenly, and he said in a well-modulated voice:

Graham recovered. “I said, ‘glub,’ a little code word meaning which de Meister.”

“The de Meister,” explained de Meister, kindly. “My character? My detective?”

De Meister helped himself to a seat, and his finely-chiseled features assumed that air of well-bred boredom so admired in the best circles. He lit a Turkish cigarette, which Graham at once recognized as his detective’s favorite brand, tapping it slowly and carefully against the back of his hand first, a mannerism equally characteristic.

“Really, old man,” said de Meister. “This is really excruciatin’ly funny. I suppose I am your charcter, y’know, but let’s not work on that basis. It would be so devastatin’ly awkward.”

His mind was feverishly setting up alternatives. He didn’t drink, more, at the moment, was the pity, so he wasn’t drunk. He had a chrome-steel digestion and he wasn’t overheated, so it wasn’t a hallucination. He never dreamed, and his imagination-as befitted a paying commodity-was under strict control. And since, like all authors, he was widely considered more than half a screwball, insanity was out of the question.

Which left de Meister simply an impossibility, and Graham felt relieved. It’s a very poor author indeed who hasn’t learned the fine art of ignoring impossibilities in writing a book.

He said smoothly, “I have here a volume of my latest work. Do you mind naming your page and crawling back into it. I’m a busy man and God knows I have enough of you in the tripe I write.”

“But I’m here on business, old chap. I’ve got to come to a friendly arrangement with you first. Things are deucedly uncomfortable as they are.”

“Look, do you know you’re bothering me? I’m not in the habit of talking to mythical characters. As a general thing, I don’t pal around with them. Besides which, it’s time your mother told you that you really don’t exist.”

“My dear fellow, I always existed. Existence is such a subjective thing. What a mind thinks exists, does exist. I existed in your mind, for instance, ever since you first thought of me.”

Graham shuddered. “But the question is, what are you doing out of my mind? Getting a little narrow for you? Want elbow room?”

“Not at all. Rather satisfact’ry mind in its way, but I achieved a more concrete existence only this afternoon, and so I seize the opportunity to engage you face to face in the aforementioned business conversation. You see, that thin, sentimental lady of your society-”

“What society?” questioned Graham hollowly. It was all awfully clear to him now.

“The one at which you made a speech-” de Meister shuddered in his turn-”on the detective novel. She believed in my existence, so naturally, I exist.”

He finished his cigarette and flicked it out with a negligent twist of the wrist.

“The logic,” declared Graham, “is inescapable. Now, what do you want and the answer is no.”

“Do you realize, old man, that if you stop writing de Meister stories, my existence will become that dull, wraithlike one of all superannuated fictional detectives. I’d have to gibber through the gray mists of Limbo with Holmes, Lecocq, and Dupin.”

Reginald de Meister’s eyes turned icy, and Graham suddenly remembered the passage on page 123 of The Case of the Broken Ashtray:

His eyes, hitherto lazy and unattentive, hardened into twin pools of blue ice and transfixed the butler, who staggered back, a stifled cry on his lips.

Evidently, de Meister lost none of his characteristics out of the novels he adorned.

De Meister said menacingly, “It would be better for you if the de Meister mysteries continue. Do you understand?”

Graham recovered and summoned a feeble indignation. “Now, wait a while. You’re getting out of hand. Remember: in a way, I’m your father. That’s right. Your mental father. You can’t hand me ultimatums or make threats. It isn’t filial. It’s lacking in the proper respect and love.”

“And another thing,” said de Meister, unmoved. “We’ve got to straighten out this business of Letitia Reynolds. It’s gettin’ deucedly borin’, y’know:’

“Now you’re getting silly. My love scenes have been widely heralded as miracles of tenderness and sentiment not found in one murder mystery out of a thousand. -Wait, I’ll get you a few reviews. I don’t mind your attempts to dictate my actions so much, but I’m damned if you’ll criticize my writing.”

“Forget the reviews. Tenderness and all that rot is what I don’t want. I’ve been driftin’ after the fair lady for five volumes now, and behavin’ the most insufferable ass. This has got to stop.”

“I’ve got to marry her in your present story. Either that, or make her a good, respectable mistress. And you’ll have to stop making me so damned Victorian and gentlemanly towards ladies. I’m only human, old man.”

De Meister grew severe. “Really, old chap, for an author, you display the most appallin’ lack of concern for the well-bein’ of a character who has supported you for a good many years.”

Graham choked eloquently. “Supported me? In other words, you think I couldn’t sell real novels, hey? Well, I’ll show you. I wouldn’t write another de Meister story for a million dollars. Not even for a fifty percent royalty and all television rights. How’s that?”

De Meister frowned and uttered those words that had been the sound of doom to so many criminals: “We shall see, but you are not yet done with me.”

Graham’s twisted face straightened out, and slowly-very slowly -he brought his hands up to his cranium and felt carefully.

For the first time in a long and reasonably ribald mental life, he felt that his enemies were right and that a good dry cleaning would not hurt his mind at all.

Graham Dorn shoved the doorbell with his elbow a second time. He distinctly remembered her saying she would be home at eight

Graham said plaintively, “It’s raining outside. Can’t I come in to dry?”

“If I’m not,” was the stiff reply, “then I’ve been turning down the frenzied advances of a hundred passion-stricken girls-beautiful ones, all of them-for no apparent reason.”

“Ah, but who listens to what I say? I’m just quaint that way. Look, I brought you posies.” He flourished roses before the peep-hole.

June opened the door. “Roses! How plebeian. Come in, cookie, and sully the sofa. Whoa, whoa, before you move a step, what have you got under the other arm? Not the manuscript of Death on the Third Deck?”

“You slobbered the plot all over me at MacDunlap’s silver anniversary party.”

“And are the people concerned real, earthy, unartificial, down-to-earth characters, speaking and thinking just like you and me? Is it a story of basic economic forces? Are the human characters lifted up and thrown down and whirled around, all at the mercy of the coal mine and mechanized industry of today?”

She nodded her head retrospectively. “I remember distinctly. First, you got drunk and were sick. Then you got better, and told me the first few chapters. Then I got sick.”

She approached the glowering author. “Graham.” She leant her golden head upon his shoulder and cooed softly. “Why don’t you continue with the de Meister stories? You get such pretty checks out of them.”

Graham writhed out of her grasp. “You are a mercenary wretch, incapable of understanding an author’s soul. You may consider our engagement broken.”

He sat down hard on the sofa, and folded his arms. “Unless you will consent to read the script of my novel and give me the usual story analysis.”

“It is not.” Graham pointed his finger indignantly. “It breathes a sweet and sentimental fragrance, as of an older day. I’ve got the review here that says it.” He fumbled in his wallet.

“Oh, bullfeathers. Are you going to start quoting that guy in the Pillsboro (Okla.) Clarion? He’s probably your second cousin. You know that your last two novels were completely below par in royalties. And Third Deck isn’t even being sold.”

“So much the better-Ow!” He rubbed his head violently. “What did you do that for?”

“Because the only place I could hit as hard as I wanted to, without disabling you, was your head. Listen! The public is tired of your corny Letitia Reynolds. Why don’t you let her soak her ‘gleaming golden crown of hair’ in kerosene and get familiar with a match?”

“Graham Dorn! I am not here to listen to insults. The mystery market today is swinging towards action and hot, honest love and you’re still in the sweet, sentimental stickiness of five years ago.”

“Well, change his character. Listen! You introduce Sancha Rodriguez. That’s fine. I approve of her. She’s Mexican, flaming, passionate, sultry, and in love with him. So what do you do? First he behaves the impeccable gentleman, and then you kill her off in the middle of the story.”

“Hmm, I see-You really think it would improve things to have de Meister forget himself. A kiss or so-”

June clenched her lovely teeth and her lovely fists. “Oh, darling, how glad I am love is blind! If it ever peeked one tiny little bit, I couldn’t stand it. Look, you squirrel’s blue plate special, you’re going to have de Meister and Rodriquez fall in love. They’re going to have an affair through the entire book and you can put your horrible Letitia into a nunnery. She probably be happier there from the way you make her sound.”

“That’s all you know about it, my sweet. It so happens that Reginald de Meister is in love with Letitia Reynolds and wants her, not this Roderiguez person.”

June got up, indulged in some deep-breathing and then said in a very calm voice, “Let’s start all over.”

She disappeared for a moment and returned with an aspirin. “your Reginald de Meister, from your books, told you, in person, he was in love with Letitia Reynolds?”

“Well, I’ll explain, June, the way he explained it to me. All characters really exist-at least, in the minds of the authors. But when people really begin to believe in them, they begin to exist in reality, because what people believe in, is, so far as they’re concerned, and what is existence anyway?”

June’s lips trembled. “Oh, Gramie, please don’t. Mother will never let me marry you if they put you in an asylum.”

“Don’t call me Gramie, June, for God’s sake. I tell you he was there, trying to tell me what to write and how to write it. He was almost as bad as you. Aw, come on, Baby, don’t cry.”

“I can’t help it. I always thought you were crazy, but I never thought you were crazy!”

“All right, what’s the difference? Let’s not talk about it, any more. I’m never going to write another mystery novel. After all-” (he indulged in a bit of indignation)-”when it gets so that my own character-my own character-tries to tell me what to do, it’s going too far...

June looked over her handkerchief. “How do you know it was really de Meister?”

“Oh, golly. As soon as he tapped his Turkish cigarette on the back of his hand and started dropping g’s like snowflakes in a blizzard, I knew the worst had come.”

The telephone rang. June leaped up. “Don’t answer, Graham. It’s probably from the asylum. I’ll tell them you’re not here. Hello. Hello. Oh, Mr. MacDunlap... She heaved a sigh of relief, then covered the mouthpiece and whispered horasely, “It might be a trap.”

“Hello, Mr. MacDunlap!...No, he’s not here....Yes, I think I can get in touch with him....At Martin’s tomorrow, noon.... I’ll tell him...With who?...With who???” She hung up suddenly.

Her great blue eyes got greater and bluer, “And Reginald de Meister is to dine with you...

“Oh, Gramie, don’t... Her eyes misted, “Don’t you see, Gramie, now they’ll put us both in an insane asylum-and Mr. MacDunlap, too. And they’ll probably put us all in the same padded cell. Oh, Gramie, three is such a dreadful crowd.”

Grew S. MacDunlap (that the S. stands for “Some” is a vile untruth spread by his enemies) was alone at the table when Graham Dorn entered. Out of this fact, Graham extracted a few fleeting drops of pleasure.

It was not so much, you understand, the presence of MacDunlap that did it, as the absence of de Meister.

MacDunlap looked at him over his spectacles and swallowed a liver pill, his favorite sweetmeat

“Aha. You’re here. What is this corny joke you’re putting over on me? You had no right to mix me up with a person like de Meister without warning me he was real. I might have taken precautions. I could have hired a bodyguard. I could have bought a revolver.”

“That,” returned MacDunlap with heat, “is libel. And what do you mean, he’s not real? When he introduced himself, I took three liver pills at once and he didn’t disappear. Do you know what three pills are? Three pills, the kind I’ve got (the doctor should only drop dead), could make an elephant disappear-if he weren’t real. I know.”

“In your mind, I know he exists. Your mind should be investigated by the Pure Food and Drugs Act.”

The several polite rejoinders that occurred simultaneously to Graham were dismissed almost immediately as containing too great a proportion of pithy Anglo-Saxon expletives. After all-ha, ha-a publisher is a publisher however Anglo-Saxony he may be.

Graham said, “The question arises, then, how we’re to get rid of de Meister.”

“Get rid of de Meister?” MacDunlap jerked the glasses off his nose in his sudden start, and caught them in one hand. His voice thickened with emotion. “Who wants to get rid of him?”

“God forbid,” MacDunlap said between shudders. “Next to him, my brother-in-law is an angel.”

“For my part, he has no business inside them. Since I started reading your manuscripts, my doctor added kidney pills and cough syrups to my medicines.” He looked at his watch, and took a kidney pill. “My worst enemy should be a book publisher only a year.”

“Then why,” asked Graham patiently, “don’t you want to get rid of de Meister?”

“Look! What other writer has a real detective? All the others are fictional. Everyone knows that. But yours-yours is real. We can let him solve cases and have big newspaper writeups. He’ll make the Police Department look silly. He’ll make-”

“That, “ interrupted Graham, categorically, “is by all odds the most obscene proposal I have ever had my ears manured with.”

“Name one thing it isn’t....Shh!” He kicked a near-fracture into Graham’s left ankle and rose to his feet with a convulsive smile, “MI. de Meister!”

“Sorry, old dear,” came a lethargic voice. “Couldn’t quite make it, you know. Loads of engagements. Must have been most borin’ for you.”

Graham Dom’s ears quivered spasmodically. He looked over his shoulder and reeled backward as far as a person could reel while in a sitting position. Reginald de Meister had sprouted a monocle since his last visitation, and his monocular glance was calculated to freeze blood.

De Meister’s greeting was casual. “My dear Watson! So glad to meet you. Overjoyed deucedly.”

MacDunlap cackled, “That’s what I like. Jokes! Fun! Makes everything pleasant to start with. Now shall we get down to business?”

“Certainly. The dinner is on the way, I trust? Then I’ll just order a bottle of wine. The usual, Henry.” The waiter ceased hovering, Flew away, and skimmed back with a bottle that opened and gurgled into a glass.

De Meister sipped delicately, “So nice of you, old chap, to make me a habitué of this place in your stories. It holds true even now, and it is most convenient. The waiters all know me. Mr. MacDunlap, I take it you have convinced Mr. Dom of the necessity of continuing the de Meister stories.”

“Don’t mind him,” said MacDunlap. “He’s temperamental. You know these authors.”

“Don’t mind him,” said Graham. “He’s microcephalic. You know these publishers.”

“Look, old chappie. I take it MacDunlap hasn’t pointed out to you the unpleasanter side of acting stubborn.”

“My dear fellow, I say. I’m much more subtle than that. I can really haunt one in modem, up-to-date methods. For instance, have you ever had your individuality submerged?”

There was something familiar about that snicker. Graham suddenly remembered. It was on page 103 of Murder Rides the Range:

His lazy eyelids flicked down and up. He laughed lightly and melodiously, and though he said not a word, Hank Marslowe covered. There was hidden menace and hidden power in that light laugh, and somehow the burly rancher did not dare reach for his guns.

To Graham it still sounded like a nasty snicker, but he cowered, and did not dare reach for his guns.

“You see, Graham. Why play around with ghosts? Ghosts aren’t reasonable things. They’re not human! If it’s more royalties, you want-”

Graham fired up. “Will you refrain from speaking of money? From now on, I write only great novels of tearing human emotions.”

“In fact, to change the subject just a moment-” and Graham’s tone became surpassingly sweet, as the words got all sticky with maple syrup-”I have a manuscript here for you to look at.”

He grasped the perspiring MacDunlap by the lapel firmly. “It is a novel that is the work of five years. A novel that will grip you with its intensity. A novel that will shake you to the core of your being. A novel that will open a new world. A novel that will-”

“A novel that will blast the falseness of this world. A novel that pierces to the truth. A novel-”

“Look, supposing I read it tomorrow, or even the next day. I have to take my cough syrup now.”

“This,” said Graham, “is the first page. Why don’t you begin it? It will grip you instantly.”

MacDunlap read two paragraphs and said, “Is this laid in a coalmining town?”

Reginald de Meister tapped a cigarette carefully on the back of his hand in a subtle manner which Graham immediately recognized as betokening a sudden decision.

“That is all devastatin’ly borin’, you know. Not quite gettin’ to the point, you might say. Go ahead, MacDunlap, this is no time for half measures.”

MacDunlap girded his spiritual loins and said, “ All right Mister Dorn, with you it’s no use being nice. Instead of de Meister, I’m getting coal dust. Instead of the best publicity in fifty years, I’m getting social significance. All right, Mister Smartaleck Dorn, if in one week you don’t come to terms with me, good terms, you will be blacklisted in every reputable publishing firm in the United States and foreign parts.” He shook his finger and added in a shout, “Including Scandinavian.”

Graham Dorn laughed lightly, “Pish,” he said, “tush. I happen to be an officer of the Author’s Union, and if you try to push me around I’ll have you blacklisted. How do you like that?”

“Is that so? And maybe you don’t remember that in each case you write up, you casually mention de Meister’s notebooks on previous cases.”

“So he has them. Reginald, my boy, show Mister Dom your notebook of your last case. -you see that. That’s Mystery of the Milestones and it has, in detail, every incident in your book-and dated the year before the book was published. Very authentic.”

“Have you maybe got the right to copy his notebook and call it an original murder mystery?”

“Who says so? It’s in de Meister’s handwriting, as any expert can prove. And maybe you have a piece of paper, some little contract or agreement, you know, that gives you the right to use his notebooks?”

“Ah, but does the jury know? When I testify that I took three strong liver pills and he didn’t disappear, what twelve men will say he doesn’t exist?”

Graham Dorn turned desperately to de Meister. “You’re in on this, too. In my books I give you the keenest sense of honor. Is this honorable?”

“Home to write you a letter.” Graham’s brows beetled defiantly. “ And this time I’ll mail it. I’m not giving in. I’ll fight to the last ditch. And, de Meister, you let loose with one single little haunt and I’ll rip your head out of its socket and spurt the blood all over MacDunlap’s new suit.”

He stalked out, and as he disappeared through the door, de Meister disappeared through nothing at all.

MacDunlap let out a soft yelp and then took a liver pill, a kidney pill, and a tablespoon of cough syrup in rapid succession.

Graham Dorn sat in June’s front parlor, and having long since consumed his fingernails, was starting on the first knuckles.

June, at the moment, was not present, and this, Graham felt, was just as well. A dear girl; in fact, a dear, sweet girl But his mind was not on her.

It was concerned instead with a miasmic series of flashbacks over the preceding six days:

-Say, Graham, I met your side-kick at the club yesterday. You know, de Meister. Got an awful shock. I always had the idea he was a sort of Sherlock Holmes that didn’t exist. That’s one on me, boy. Didn’t know-Hey, where are you going?

-Hey, Dorn, I hear your boss de Meister is back in town. Ought to have material for more stories soon. You’re lucky you’ve got someone to grind out your plots ready-made-Huh? Well, goodbye.”

-Why, Graham, darling, wherever were you last night? Ann’s affair didn’t get anywhere without you; or at least, it wouldn’t have, if it hadn’t been for Reggie de Meister. He asked after you; but then, I guess he felt lost without his Watson. It must feel wonderful to Watson for such-Mister Dorn! And the same to you, sir!

-you put one over on me. I thought you made up those wild things. Well, truth is stranger than fiction, ha, ha!

-Police officials deny that the famous amateur criminologist Reginald de Meister has interested himself in this case. Mr. de Meister himself could not be reached by our reporters for comment. Mr. de Meister is best known to the public for his brilliant solutions to over a dozen crimes, as chronicled in fiction form by his so-called “Watson,” Mr. Grayle Doone.

Graham quivered and his arms trembled in an awful desire for blood. De Meister was haunting him-but good. He was losing his individuality, exactly as had been threatened.

It gradually dawned upon Graham that the monotonous ringing noise he heard was not in his head, but, on the contrary, from the front door.

Such seemed likewise the opinion of Miss June Billings, whose piercing call shot down the stairs and biffed Graham a sharp uppercut to the ear-drums.

“Hey, dope, see who’s at the front door, before the vibration tears the house down. I’ll be down in half an hour.”

Graham’s dull eyes stared, and then fired high, as an animal snarl burst from his lips. He took up that gorilla posture, so comforting to red-blooded American males at moments like this, and circled the slightly-confused detective.

“I,” explained Graham, “am not ill, but you will soon be past all interest in that, for I am going to bathe my hands in your heart’s reddest blood.”

“But I say, you’ll only have to wash them afterwards. It would be such an obvious clue, wouldn’t it?”

He thundered into action, bearing down upon the unfortunate de Meister like a bull elephant. De Meister faded to the left, shot out an arm and a foot, and Graham described a parabolic arc that ended in the total destruction of an end table, a vase of flowers, a fish-bowl, and a five-foot section of wall.

De Meister’s arms were whipcord lightning, as with sure, rapid thrusts, he rendered the two thugs helpless. Not by brute force, but by his expert knowledge of judo, he defeated them easily without hastening his breath. The thugs groaned in pain.

“I will stay here,” said Graham with dignity, “and contemplate the floor in profile view, until such time as it suits me or until such time as I find myself capable of moving a muscle. I don’t care which. And now, before I proceed to take further measures with you, what the hell do you want?”

Reginald de Meister adjusted his monocle to a nicety. “You know, I suppose, that MacDunlap’s ultimatum expires tomorrow?”

“Really,” de Meister sighed, “this is borin’ no end. You have made things comfortable for me in this world. After all, in your books you’ve made me well-known in all the clubs and better restaurants, the bosom friend, y’know, of the mayor and commissioner of police, the owner of a Park Avenue penthouse and a magnificent art collection. And it all lingers over, old chap. Really quite afIectin’.”

“It is remarkable,” mused Graham, “the intensity with which I am not listening and the distinctness with which I do not hear a word you say.”

“Still,” said de Meister, “there is no denyin’ my book world suits me better. It is somehow more fascinatin’, freer from dull logic, more apart from the necessities of the world. In short, I must go back, and to active participation. You have till tomorrow!”

“It is the old threat intensified. I’m going to rob you of every vestige of your personality. And eventually public opinion will force you to write as, to paraphrase you, de Meister’s Compleat Stooge. Did you see the name the newspaper chappies pinned on you today, old man?”

“Yes, Mr. Filthy de Meister, and did you read a half-column item on page ten in the same paper. I’ll read it for you: ‘Noted Criminologist in l-A. Will be inducted shortly draft board says.”‘

For a moment, de Meister said and did nothing. And then one, after another, he did the following things: removed his monocle slowly, sat down heavily, rubbed his chin abstractedly, and lit a cigarette after long and careful tamping. Each of these, Graham Dorn’s trained authorial eye recognized as singly representing perturbation and distress on the part of his character.

And never, in any of his books, did Graham remember a time when de Meister had gone through all four consecutively.

Finally, de Meister spoke. “Why you had to bring up draft registrations in your last book, I really don’t know. This urge to be topical; this fiendish desire to be up to the minute with the news is the curse of the mystery novel. A true mystery is timeless; should have no relation to current events; should-”

“You might at least have mentioned a deferred classification on some vital ground.”

Two strong men stood face to face (or would have, if Graham weren’t still horizontal) and neither flinched.

And the sweet, feminine voice of June Billings interrupted and snapped the tension:

“May I ask, Graham Dom, what you are doing on the floor. It’s been swept today and you’re not complimenting me by attempting to improve the job.”

“I am not sweeping the floor. If you looked carefully,” replied Graham gently, “you would see that your own adored fiancé is lying here a mass of bruises and a hotbed of pains and aches.”

“Friend! Ha!” And a mist came over his eyes. She was so young, so fragile to come into contact with hard, brutal facts of life. “This,” he muttered brokenly, “is Reginald de Meister.”

De Meister at this point broke a cigarette sharply in two, a gesture pregnant with the deepest emotion.

“How had you expected me to look?” asked de Meister, in soft, thrilling tones.

They were six inches apart now, eyes fixed with a mutual glue, and Graham yelled sharply. He sprang upright as memory smote him a nasty smite on the forehead.

A passage from Case of the Muddy Overshoe occurred to him. Likewise one from The Primrose Murders. Also one from The Tragedy of Hartley Manor, Death of a Hunter, White Scorpion and, to put it in a small nutshell, from every one of the others.

There was a certain fascination about de Meister that appealed irresistibly to women.

And June Billings was-as it had often, in Graham’s idler moments, occurred to him-a woman.

And fascination simply gooed out of her ears and coated the floor six inches deep.

“There is something I must discuss with MI. de Meister, man to man. I demand that you leave this room.”

“Hold on,” shouted Graham. “Don’t let him order you about. I demand that you stay.”

The two men faced each other. There was that in either pair of eyes that indicated a strong man brought to bay. There was stubborn, undying antagonism; no quarter; no compromise. It was exactly the sort of situation Graham Dom always presented his readers with, when two strong men fought for one hand, one heart, one girl.

Graham said, “You have convinced me, Reggie. Our public needs us. Tomorrow I shall begin another de Meister story. Let us shake hands and forget the past.”

De Meister struggled with his emotion. He laid his hand on Graham’s lapel, “My dear fellow, it is I who have been convinced by your logic. I can’t allow you to sacrifice yourself for me. There are great things in you that must be brought out. Write your coal-mining novels. They count, not I.”

“I couldn’t, old chap. Not after all you’ve done for me, and all you’ve meant to me. Tomorrow we start anew.”

“Graham, my-my spiritual father, I couldn’t allow it. Do you think I have no feelings, filial feelings-in a spiritual sort of way.”

“But if I stop writing, eventually you will stop existing. I can’t allow that.”

“Oh, that!” De Meister laughed with a careless elegance. “Things have changed since. So many people believe in my existence now that my grip upon actual existence has become too firm to be broken. I don’t have to worry about Limbo any more.”

“Oh.” Graham clenched his teeth and spoke in searing sibilants: “So that’s your scheme, you snake. Do you suppose I don’t see you’re stuck on June?”

“Look here, old chap,” said de Meister haughtily. “I can’t permit you to speak slightingly of a true and honest love. I love June and she loves me-I know it. And if you’re going to be stuffy and Victorian about it, you can swallow some nitro-glycerine and tap yourself with a hammer.”

“I’ll nitro-glycerine you! Because I’m going home tonight and beginning another de Meister story. You’ll be part of it and you’ll get back into it, and what do you think of that?”

“Nothing, because you can’t write another de Meister story. I’m too real now, and you can’t control me just like that. And what do you think of that?”

It took Graham Dom a week to make up his mind what to think of that, and then his thoughts were completely and startlingly unprintable.

That is, startling ideas occurred to him for great novels, emotional dramas, epic poems, brilliant essays-but he couldn’t write anything about Reginald de Meister.

Graham wept, cursed, tore his hair, and anointed his finger tips with liniment. He tried typewriter, pen, pencil, crayon, charcoal, and blood.

MacDunlap stumbled in, falling over the first drifts of torn paper directly into Graham’s arms.

“Don’t die there,” suggested Graham, courteously. “The management won’t permit me to drop human flesh into the incinerator.”

“Graham, my boy,” MacDunlap said, emotionally, “no more ultimatums! No more threats! I come now to appeal to your finer feelings, Graham-” he went through a slight choking interlude-”I love you like a son. This skunk de Meister must disappear. You must write more de Meister stories for my sake. Graham-I will tell you something in private. My wife is in love with this detective. She tells me I am not romantic. I! Not romantic! Can you understand it?”

MacDunlap stiffened. “Ah ha. You again. Dope! If only you ever stopped long enough to let your mind know what your typewriter was saying.”

“You insisted. Feminine trade.” Graham didn’t care any more. Women! He snickered bitterly. Nothing wrong with any of them that a block-buster wouldn’t fix.

MacDunlap hemmed. “Well, feminine trade. Very necessary. -but Graham, what shall I do? It’s not only my wife. She owns fifty shares in MacDunlap, Inc. in her own name. If she leaves me, I lose control. Think of it, Graham. The catastrophe to the publishing world.”

“Grew, old chap,” Graham sighed a sigh so deep, his toenails quivered sympathetically. “I might as well tell you. June, my fiancée, you know, loves this worm. And he loves her because she is the prototype of Letitia Reynolds.”

“Never mind. My life is ruined.” He smiled bravely and choked back the unmanly tears, after the first two had dripped off the end of his nose.

“Exactly,” said MacDunlap. He wrung Graham’s hand as if he were milking a cow. “You’ve got to write de Meister stories and get him back where, next to Hell, he most belongs. Right?”

MacDunlap caught the significance of the massed drifts of used paper on the floor. He held his head and groaned, “My corporation! My wife!”

MacDunlap looked up. “What about Death on the Third Deck, the novel I rejected three weeks ago?”

“Sure. That’s the story I mentioned his draft board in. The one that put him in l-A.”

“MacDunlap!” Graham Dorn jumped up, and grappled MacDunlap’s lapel. “Maybe it can be revised.”

Graham shook the lapel and everything thereto attached, “Say something, won’t you?”

MacDunlap wrenched away and took a tablespoon of cough syrup. He held his hand over his heart and patted it a bit. He shook his head and gestured with his eyebrows.

Graham shrugged. “Well, if you just want to be sullen, go ahead. I’ll revise it without you.”

He located the manuscript and tried his fingers gingerly on the typewriter. They went smoothly, with practically no creaking at the joints. He put on speed, more speed, and then went into his usual race, with the portable jouncing along merrily under the accustomed head of steam.

“It’s working,” he shouted. “I can’t write new stories, but I can revise old, unpublished ones.”

“Faster than thirty-five?” said Graham, sternly. “OPA [The Office of Price Administration was in charge of gasoline rationing at this period. Remember “A” stickers? D.R.B.] forbid! Five more minutes.”

“He’s always there. He’s been at her house every evening this week.” He spat out the fine ivory dust into which he had ground the last inch of his incisors. “But God help you if your secretary falls down on the job.”

Brakes screeched, and Graham’s soul cringed in sympathy with every molecule of rubber frictioned off the tires.

He rang the bell and burst in at the door. Reginald de Meister standing directly inside received the full impact of a pointing finger, and only a rapid backward movement of the head kept him from becoming a one-eyed mythical character.

“Reginald de Meister,” growled Graham, in sinister tones, “prepare to meet your doom.”

“And to what,” asked de Meister, “am I indebted for your dramatic but unilluminatin’ statement? Confusin’, don’t you know.” He lit a cigarette with a fine gesture and smiled.

June sniffed. She felt like a heroine out of a book, tom by her own emotions. Naturally, she was having the time of her life.

“To return to the subject, what is this all about?” asked de Meister, wearily.

“The revision,” continued Graham, “is at present in the hands of MacDunlap’s secretary, a girl on the style of Miss Billings, my fiancée that was. That is, she is a girl who aspires to the status of a moron, but has not yet quite attained it. She’ll believe every word. “

For the first time, Reginald de Meister shuddered. He caught his cigarette as it dropped. “She was killed by Sam Blake in the sixth chapter. She was in love with me. Really, old fellow, what messes you get me into.”

“Not half the mess you’re in now, old chap. Sancha Rodriguez did not die in the revision.”

“Die!” came a sharp, but clear female voice, “I’ll show him if I died. And where have you been this last month, you two-crosser?”

De Meister did not catch his cigarette this time. He didn’t even try. He recognized the apparition. To an unprejudiced observer, it might have been merely a svelte Latin girl equipped with dark, flashing eyes, and long, glittering fingernails, but to de Meister, it was Sancha Rodriguez-undead!

“Miss Rodriguez,” throbbed de Meister, charmingly, “how fascinatin’ to see you.”

“Mrs. de Meister to you, you double-timer, you two-crosser, you scum of the ground, you scorpion of the grass. And who is this woman?”

Mrs. de Meister,” said Reginald pleadingly, and turned helplessly to Graham Dom.

“Oh, you have forgotten, have you, you smooth talker, you low dog. I’ll show you what it means to deceive a weak woman. I’ll make you mince-meat with my fingernails.”

Reginald de Meister was up in a comer, and Mrs. de Meister shook her fists at him. “ Answer me?”

Mrs. de Meister disappeared right after him. June Billings collapsed into real tears.

Graham Dorn folded his arms and looked sternly at her. MacDunlap rubbed his hands and took a kidney pill.

“It wasn’t my fault, Gramie,” said June. “You said in your books he fascinated all women, so I couldn’t help it. Deep inside, I hated him all along. You believe me, don’t you?”

“A likely story!” said Graham, sitting down next to her on the sofa. “ A likely story. But I forgive you, maybe.”

MacDunlap said tremulously, “My boy, you have saved my stocks. Also, my wife, of course. And remember-you promised me one de Meister story each year.”

Graham gritted, “Just one, and I’ll henpeck him to death, and keep one unpublished story forever on hand, just in case. And you’re publishing my novel, aren’t you, Grew, old boy?”

“Then leave us now. There are matters of importance I must discuss with my fiancée.”

Ah, love, love, he mused, as he took a liver pill and followed it up by a cough-syrup chaser.

I might make two points about” Author! Author!” It seems to me that I was rather easier about handling romance in this story than in any previous one. Perhaps this is a reflection of the fact that it was the first story I ever wrote as a married man.

Secondly, there are the very dated references to rationing, the draft, and other social phenomena much on the mind of anyone living through World War II. I had warned Bensen of the existence of these references and of the inability of getting them out of the story by revision since they were integral to the plot. Bensen, however, shrugged them off and in his short introduction to the story said to the readers, “ And don’t worry about the references to the OPA and Selective Service-consider them as part of the historical setting, just as you would a bodkin or a furbelow in a story of an earlier time.”

Had I rested on the pink cloud of gratification that came with the sale of “ Author! Author!” for a few months, the death of Unknown might have disheartened me. It might have seemed to prove that I was not fated to reignite my career after all, and perhaps-again-everything would have turned out differently.

However, within three weeks of the sale I was at the typewriter again. The new story was “Death Sentence” and it was science fiction. Writing was still slow work; seven weeks to do a 7,200-word story. On June 29, 1943, however, I sent it off to Campbell, and on July 8, it was accepted-one and a quarter cents per word again.

This meant that when the news of Unknown’s demise arrived, it was cushioned by the fact that I already had another story written and sold.