A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

The Penny-a-Wonder

The desk clerk received a call early that afternoon, asking if there was a “nice, quiet” room available for about six o’clock that evening. The call was evidently from a business office, for the caller was a young woman who, it developed, wished the intended reservation made in a man’s name, whether her employer or one of the firm’s clients she did not specify. Told there was a room available, she requested, “Well, will you please hold it for Mr. Edgar Danville Moody, for about six o’clock?” And twice more she reiterated her emphasis on the noiselessness. “It’s got to be quiet, though. Make sure it’s quiet. He mustn’t be disturbed while he’s in it.”

The desk man assured her with a touch of dryness, “We run a quiet hotel altogether.”

“Good,” she said warmly. “Because we don’t want him to be distracted. It’s important that he have complete privacy.”

“We can promise that,” said the desk clerk.

“Thank you,” said the young woman briskly.

“Thank you,” answered the desk man.

The designated registrant arrived considerably after six, but not late enough for the reservation to have been voided. He was young — if not under thirty in actuality, still well under it in appearance. He had tried to camouflage his youthful appearance by coaxing a very slim, sandy mustache out along his upper lip. It failed completely in its desired effect. It was like a make-believe mustache ochred on a child’s face.

He was a tall lean young man. His attire was eye-catching — it stopped just short of being theatrically flamboyant. Or, depending on the viewer’s own taste, just crossed the line. The night being chilly for this early in the season, he was enveloped in a coat of fuzzy sand-colored texture, known generically as camel’s-hair, with a belt gathered whiplash-tight around its middle. On the other hand, chilly or not, he had no hat whatever.

His necktie was patterned in regimental stripes, but they were perhaps the wrong regiments, selected from opposing armies. He carried a pipe clenched between his teeth, but with the bowl empty and turned down. A wide band of silver encircled the stem. His shoes were piebald affairs, with saddles of mahogany hue and the remainder almost yellow. They had no eyelets or laces, but were made like moccasins, to be thrust on the foot whole; a fringed leather tongue hung down on the outer side of each vamp.

He was liberally burdened with belongings, but none of these was a conventional, clothes-carrying piece of luggage. Under one arm he held tucked a large flat square, wrapped in brown paper, string-tied, and suggesting a picture-canvas. In that same hand he carried a large wrapped parcel, also brown-paper-bound; in the other a cased portable typewriter. From one pocket of the coat protruded rakishly a long oblong, once again brown-paper-wrapped.

Although he was alone, and not unduly noisy either in his movements or his speech, his arrival had about it an aura of flurry and to-do, as if something of vast consequence were taking place. This, of course, might have derived from the unsubdued nature of his clothing. In later life he was not going to be the kind of man who is ever retiring or inconspicuous.

He disencumbered himself of all his paraphernalia by dropping some onto the floor and some onto the desk top, and inquired, “Is there a room waiting for Edgar Danville Moody?”

“Yes, sir, there certainly is,” said the clerk cordially.

“Good and quiet, now?” he warned intently.

“You won’t hear a pin drop,” promised the clerk.

The guest signed the registration card with a flourish.

“Are you going to be with us long, Mr. Moody?” the clerk asked.

“It better not be too long,” was the enigmatic answer, “or I’m in trouble.”

“Take the gentleman up, Joe,” hosted the clerk, motioning to a bellboy.

Joe began collecting the articles one by one.

“Wait a minute, not Gertie!” he was suddenly instructed.

Joe looked around, first on one side, then on the other. There was no one else standing there. “Gertie?” he said blankly.

Young Mr. Moody picked up the portable typewriter, patted the lid affectionately. “This is Gertie,” he enlightened him. “I’m superstitious. I don’t let anyone but me carry her when we’re out on a job together.”

They entered the elevator together, Moody carrying Gertie.

Joe held his peace for the first two floors, but beyond that he was incapable of remaining silent. “I never heard of a typewriter called Gertie,” he remarked mildly, turning his head from the controls. “I’ve worn out six,” Moody proclaimed proudly. “Gertie’s my seventh.” He gave the lid a little love-pat. “I call them alphabetically. My first was Alice.”

Joe was vastly interested. “How could you wear out six, like that? Mr. Elliot’s had the same one in his office for years now, ever since I first came to work here, and he hasn’t wore his out yet.”

“Who’s he?” said Moody.

“The hotel accountant.”

“Aw-w-w,” said Moody with vast disdain. “No wonder. He just writes figures. I’m a writer.”

Joe was all but mesmerized. He’d liked the young fellow at sight, but now he was hypnotically fascinated. “Gee, are you a writer?” he said, almost breathlessly. “I always wanted to be a writer myself.”

Moody was too interested in his own being a writer to acknowledge the other’s wish to be one too.

“You write under your own name?” hinted Joe, unable to take his eyes off the new guest.

“Pretty much so.” He enlarged on the reply. “Dan Moody. Ever read me?”

Joe was too innately naive to prevaricate plausibly. He scratched the back of his head. “Let me see now,” he said. “I’m trying to think.”

Moody’s face dropped, almost into a sulk. However in a moment it had cleared again. “I guess you don’t get much time to read, anyway, on a job like this,” he explained to the satisfaction of the two of them.

“No, I don’t, but I’d sure like to read something of yours,” said Joe fervently. “Especially now that I know you.” He wrenched at the lever, and the car began to reverse. It had gone up three floors too high, so intense had been his absorption.

Joe showed him into Room 923 and disposed of his encumbrances. Then he lingered there, unable to tear himself away. Nor did this have anything to do with the delay in his receiving a tip; for once, and in complete sincerity, Joe had forgotten all about there being such a thing.

Moody shed his tent-like topcoat, cast it onto a chair with a billowing overhead fling like a person about to immerse in a bath. Then he began to burst open brown paper with explosive sounds all over the room.

From the flat square came an equally flat, equally square cardboard mat, blank on the reverse side, protected by tissues on the front. Moody peeled these off to reveal a startling composition in vivid oil-paints. Its main factors were a plump-breasted girl in a disheveled, lavender-colored dress desperately fleeing from a pursuer, the look on whose face promised her additional dishevelment.

Joe became goggle-eyed, and remained so. Presently he took a step nearer, remaining transfixed. Moody stood the cardboard mat on the floor, against a chair.

“You do that?” Joe breathed in awe.

“No, the artist. It’s next month’s cover. I have to do a story to match up with it.”

Joe said, puzzled, “I thought they did it the other way around. Wrote the story first, and then illustrated it.”

“That’s the usual procedure,” Moody said, professionally glib. “They pick a feature story each month, and put that one on the cover. This time they had a little trouble. The fellow that was supposed to do the feature didn’t come through on time, got sick or something. So the artist had to start off first, without waiting for him. Now there’s no time left, so I have to rustle up a story to fit the cover.”

“Gee,” said Joe. “Going to be hard, isn’t it?”

“Once you get started, it goes by itself. It’s just getting started that’s hard.”

From the bulkier parcel had come, in the interim, two sizable slabs wrapped alike in dark-blue paper. He tore one open to extract a ream of white first-sheets, the other to extract a ream of manila second-sheets.

“I’m going to use this table here,” he decided, and planted one stack on one corner of it, the second stack on the opposite corner. Between the two he placed Gertie the typewriter, in a sort of position of honor.

Also from the same parcel had come a pair of soft house slippers, crushed together toe-to-heel and heel-to-toe. He dropped them under the table. “I can’t write with my shoes on,” he explained to his new disciple. “Nor with the neck of my shirt buttoned,” he added, parting that and flinging his tie onto a chair.

From the slender pocket-slanted oblong, last of the wrapped shapes, came a carton of cigarettes. The pipe, evidently reserved for non-occupational hours, he promptly discarded.

“Now, is there an ashtray?” he queried, like a commander surveying an intended field of action.

Joe darted in and out of several corners of the room. “Gee, no, the last people must have swiped it,” he said. “Wait a minute, I’ll go get—”

“Never mind, I’ll use this instead,” decided Moody, bringing over a metal wastebasket. “The amount of ashes I make when I’m working, a tray wouldn’t be big enough to hold it all anyway.”

The phone gave a very short ring, querulously interrogative. Moody picked it up, then relayed to Joe, “The man downstairs wants to know what’s holding you, why you don’t come down.”

Joe gave a start, then came down to his everyday employment level from the rarefied heights of artistic creation he had been floating about in. He couldn’t bear to turn his back, he started going backward to the door instead. “Is there anything else—?” he asked regretfully.

Moody passed a crumpled bill over to him. “Bring me back a — let’s see, this is a cover story — you better make it an even dozen bottles of beer. It relaxes me when I’m working. Light, not dark.”

“Right away, Mr. Moody,” said Joe eagerly, beating a hasty retreat.

While he was gone, Moody made his penultimate preparations: sitting down to remove his shoes and put on the slippers, bringing within range and adjusting the focus of a shaded floor lamp, shifting the horrendous work of art back against the baseboard of the opposite wall so that it faced him squarely just over the table.

Then he went and asked for a number on the phone, without having to look it up.

A young woman answered, “Peerless, good evening.”

He said, “Mr. Tartell please.”

Another young woman said, “Mr. Tartell’s office.”

He said, “Hello, Cora. This is Dan Moody. I’m up here and I’m all set. Did Mr. Tartell go home yet?”

“He left half an hour ago,” she said. “He left his home number with me, told me to give it to you; he wants you to call him in case you run into any difficulties, have any problems with it. But not later than eleven — they go to bed early out there in East Orange.”

“I won’t have any trouble,” he said self-assuredly. “How long have I been doing this?”

“But this is a cover story. He’s very worried. We have to go to the printer by nine tomorrow — we can’t hold him up any longer.”

“I’ll make it, I’ll make it,” he said. “It’ll be on his desk waiting for him at eight thirty on the dot.”

“Oh, and I have good news for you. He’s not only giving you Bill Hammond’s rate on this one — two cents a word — but he told me to tell you that if you do a good job, he’ll see to it that you get that extra additional bonus over and above the word count itself that you were hinting about when he first called you today.”

“Swell!” he exclaimed gratefully.

A note of maternal instruction crept into her voice. “Now get down to work and show him what you can do. He really thinks a lot of you, Dan. I’m not supposed to say this. And try to have it down here before he comes in tomorrow. I hate to see him worry so. When he worries, I’m miserable along with him. Good luck.” And she hung up.

Joe came back with the beer, six bottles in each of two paper sacks.

“Put them on the floor alongside the table, where I can just reach down,” instructed Moody.

“He bawled the heck out of me downstairs, but I don’t care, it was worth it. Here’s a bottle opener the delicatessen people gave me.”

“That about kills what I gave you.” Moody calculated, fishing into his pocket. “Here’s—”

“No,” protested Joe sincerely, with a dissuading gesture. “I don’t want to take any tip from you, Mr. Moody. You’re different from other people that come in here. You’re a Writer, and I always wanted to be a writer myself. But if I could ever get to read a story of yours—” he added wistfully.

Moody promptly rummaged in the remnants of the brown paper, came up with a magazine which had been entombed there. “Here — here’s last month’s,” he said. “I was taking it home with me, but I can get another at the office.”

Its title was Startling Stories! — complete with exclamation point. Joe wiped his fingertips reverently against his uniform before touching it, as though afraid of defiling it.

Moody opened it for him, offered it to him that way. “Here I am, here,” he said. “Second story. Next month I’m going to be the lead story, going to open the book on account of doing the cover story.” He harked back to his humble beginnings for an indulgent moment. “When I first began, I used to be all the way in the back of the book. You know, where the muscle-building ads are.”

“ ‘Killing Time, by Dan Moody,’ ” Joe mouthed softly, like someone pronouncing a litany.

“They always change your titles on them, I don’t know why,” Moody complained fretfully. “My own title for that one was ‘Out of the Mouths of Guns.’ Don’t you think that’s better?”

“Wouldje—?” Joe was fumbling with a pencil, half afraid to offer it.

Moody took the pencil from Joe’s fingers, wrote on the margin alongside the story title: “The best of luck to you, Joe — Dan Moody,” Joe the while supporting the magazine from underneath with the flaps of both hands, like an acolyte making an offering at some altar.

“Gee,” Joe breathed, “I’m going to keep this forever. I’m going to paste transparent paper over it, so it won’t get rubbed off, where you wrote.”

“I would have done it in ink for you,” Moody said benevolently, “only the pulp paper won’t take it — it soaks it up like a blotter.”

The phone gave another of its irritable, foreshortened blats.

Joe jumped guiltily, hastily backed toward the door. “I better get back on duty, or he’ll be raising cain down there.” He half closed the door, reopened it to add, “If there’s anything you want, Mr. Moody, just call down for me. I’ll drop anything I’m doing and beat it right up here.”

“Thanks, I will, Joe,” Moody promised, with the warm, comfortable smile of someone whose ego has just been talcumed and cuddled in cotton-wool.

“And good luck to you on the story. I’ll be rooting for you!”

“Thanks again, Joe.”

Joe closed the door deferentially, holding the knob to the end, so that it should make a minimum of noise and not disturb the mystic creative process about to begin inside.

Before it did, however, Moody went to the phone and asked for a nearby Long Island number. A soprano that sounded like a schoolgirl’s got on.

“It’s me, honeybunch,” Moody said.

The voice had been breathless already, so it couldn’t get any more breathless; what it did do was not get any less breathless. “What happened? Ooh, hurry up, tell me! I can’t wait. Did you get the assignment on the cover story?”

“Yes, I got it! I’m in the hotel room right now, and they’re paying all the charges. And listen to this: I’m getting double word-rate, two cents—”

A squeal of sheer joy answered him.

“And wait a minute, you didn’t let me finish. If he likes the job, I’m even getting an extra additional bonus on top of all that. Now what do you have to say to that?”

The squeals became multiple this time — a series of them instead of just one. When they subsided, he heard her almost gasp: “Oh, I’m so proud of you!”

“Is Sonny-bun awake yet?”

“Yes. I knew you’d want to say good night to him, so I kept him up. Wait a minute, I’ll go and get him.”

The voice faded, then came back again. However, it seemed to be as unaccompanied as before. “Say something to Daddy. Daddy’s right here. Daddy wants to hear you say something to him.”

Silence.

“Hello, Sonny-bun. How’s my little Snooky?” Moody coaxed.

More silence.

The soprano almost sang, “Daddy’s going to do a big important job. Aren’t you going to wish him luck?”

There was a suspenseful pause, then a startled cluck like that of a little barnyard fowl, “Lock!”

The squeals of delight this time came from both ends of the line, and in both timbres, soprano and tenor. “He wished me luck! Did you hear that? He wished me luck! That’s a good omen. Now it’s bound to be a lulu of a story!”

The soprano voice was too taken up distributing smothered kisses over what seemed to be a considerable surface-area to be able to answer.

“Well,” he said, “guess I better get down to business. I’ll be home before noon — I’ll take the ten forty-five, after I turn the story in at Tartell’s office.”

The parting became breathless, flurried, and tripartite.

“Do a bang-up job now”/“I’ll make it a smasheroo”/“Remember, Sonny-bun and I are rooting for you”/“Miss me”/“And you miss us, too”/“Smack, smack”/“Smack, smack, smack”/“Gluck!”

He hung up smiling, sighed deeply to express his utter satisfaction with his domestic lot. Then he turned away, lathered his hands briskly, and rolled up his shirt sleeves.

The preliminaries were out of the way, the creative process was about to begin. The creative process, that mystic life force, that splurge out of which has come the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, the Fantasie Impromptu, the Bayeux tapestries, Romeo and Juliet, the windows of Chartres Cathedral, Paradise Lost — and a pulp murder story by Dan Moody. The process is the same in all; if the results are a little uneven, that doesn’t invalidate the basic similarity of origin.

He sat down before Gertie and, noting that the oval of light from the lamp fell on the machine, to the neglect of the polychrome cardboard mat which slanted in comparative shade against the wall, he adjusted the pliable lamp-socket so that the luminous egg was cast almost completely on the drawing instead, with the typewriter now in the shadow. Actually he didn’t need the light on his typewriter. He never looked at the keys when he wrote, nor at the sheet of paper in the machine. He was an expert typist, and if in the hectic pace of his fingering he sometimes struck the wrong letter, they took care of that down at the office, Tartell had special proofreaders for that. That wasn’t Moody’s job — he was the creator, he couldn’t be bothered with picayune details like a few typographic errors. By the same token, he never went back over what he had written to reread it; he couldn’t afford to, not at one cent a word (his regular rate) and at the pressure under which he worked. Besides, it was his experience that it always came out best the first time; if you went back and reread and fiddled around with it, you only spoiled it.

He palmed a sheet of white paper off the top of the stack and inserted it smoothly into the roller — an automatic movement to him. Ordinarily he made a sandwich of sheets — a white on top, a carbon in the middle, and a yellow at the bottom; that was in case the story should go astray in the mail, or be mislaid at the magazine office before the cashier had issued a check for it. But it was totally unnecessary in this case; he was delivering the story personally to Tartell’s desk, it was a rush order, and it was to be sent to press immediately. Several extra moments would be wasted between manuscript pages if he took the time to make up “sandwiches,” and besides, those yellow second-sheets cost forty-five cents a ream at Goldsmith’s (fifty-five elsewhere). You had to watch your costs in this line of work.

He lit a cigarette, the first of the many that were inevitably to follow, that always accompanied the writing of every story — the cigarette-to-begin-on. He blew a blue pinwheel of smoke, craned his neck slightly, and stared hard at the master plan before him, standing there against the wall. And now for the first line. That was always the gimmick in every one of his stories. Until he had it, he couldn’t get into it; but once he had it, the story started to unravel by itself — it was easy going after that, clear sailing. It was like plucking the edge of the gauze up from an enormous criss-crossed bandage.

The first line, the first line.

He stared intently, almost hypnotically.

Better begin with the girl — she was very prominent on the cover, and then bring the hero in later. Let’s see, she was wearing a violet evening dress—

The little lady in the violet evening dress came hurrying terrifiedly down the street, looking back in terror. Behind her—

His hands poised avariciously, then drew back again. No, wait a minute, she wouldn’t be wearing an evening dress on the street, violet or any other color. Well, she’d have to change into it later in the story, that was all. In a 20,000-word novelette there would be plenty of room for her to change into an evening dress. Just a single line would do it, anywhere along.

She went home and changed her dress, and then came back again.

Now, let’s try it again—

The beautiful red-head came hurrying down the street, looking back in terror. Behind her—

Again he got stuck. Yes, but who was after her, and what had she done for them to be after her for? That was the problem.

I started in too soon, he decided. I getter go back to where she does something that gets somebody after her. Then the chase can come in after that.

The cigarette was at an end, without having ignited anything other than itself. He started another one.

Now, let’s see. What would a beautiful, innocent, good girl do that would be likely to get somebody after her? She had to be good — Tartell was very strict about that. “I don’t want any lady-bums in my stories. If you have to introduce a lady-bum into one of my stories, see that you kill her off as soon as you can. And whatever you do, don’t let her get next to the hero too much. Keep her away from the hero. If he falls for her, he’s a sap. And if he doesn’t fall for her, he’s too much of a goody-goody. Keep her in the background — just let her open the door in a negligee when the big-shot gangster drops in for a visit. And close the door again — fast!”

He swirled a hand around in his hair, in a massage-like motion, dropped it to the table, pummeled the edge of the table with it twice, the way a person does when he’s trying to start a balky drawer open. Let’s see, let’s see... She could find out something that she’s not supposed to, and then they find out that she has found out, and they start after her to shut her up — good enough, that’s it! Now how did she find it out? She could go to a beauty parlor, and overhear in the next booth — no, beauty parlors were too feminine; Tartell wouldn’t allow one of them in his stories. Besides, Moody had never been in one, wouldn’t have known how to describe it on the inside. She could be in a phone booth and through the partition— No, he’d used that gambit in the July issue — in Death Drops a Slug.

A little lubrication was indicated here — something to help make the wheels go around, soften up the kinks. Absently, he picked up the bottle opener that Joe had left for him, reached down to the floor, brought up a bottle and uncapped it, still with that same one hand, using the edge of the table for leverage. He poured a very little into the tumbler, and did no more than chastely moisten his lips with it.

Now. She could get a package at her house, and it was meant for someone else, and—

He had that peculiar instinctive feeling that comes when someone is looking at you intently, steadfastly. He shook it off with a slight quirk of his head. It remained in abeyance for a moment or two, then slowly settled on him again.

The story thread suddenly dropped in a hopeless snarl, just as he was about to get it through the needle’s eye of the first line.

He turned his head, to dissipate the feeling by glancing in the direction from which it seemed to assail him. And then he saw it. A pigeon was standing utterly motionless on the ledge just outside the pane of the window. Its head was cocked inquiringly, it was turned profileward toward him, and it was staring in at him with just the one eye. But the eye was almost leaning over toward the glass, it was so intent — less than an inch or two away from it.

As he stared back, the eye solemnly blinked. Just once, otherwise giving no indication of life.

He ignored it and turned back to his task.

There’s a ring at the bell, she goes to the door, and a man hands her a package—

His eyes crept uncontrollably over to their extreme outer corners, as if trying to take a peek without his knowledge. He brought them back with a reprimanding knitting of the brows. But almost at once they started over that way again. Just knowing the pigeon was standing out there seemed to attract his eyes almost magnetically.

He turned his head toward it again. This time he gave it a heavy baleful scowl. “Get of~ of there,” he mouthed at it. “Go somewhere else.” He spoke by lip motion alone, because the glass between prevented hearing.

It blinked. More slowly than the first time, if a pigeon’s blink can be measured. Scorn, contempt seemed to be expressed by the deliberateness of its blink.

Never slow to be affronted, he kindled at once. He swung his arm violently around toward it, in a complete half circle of riddance. Its wing feathers erupted a little, subsided again, as if the faintest of breezes had caressed them. Then with stately pomp it waddled around in a half circle, brought the other side of its head around toward the glass, and stared at him with the eye on that side.

Heatedly, he jumped from his chair, strode to the window, and flung it up. “I told you to get off of there!” he said threateningly. He gave the air immediately over the surface of the ledge a thrashing swipe with his arm.

It eluded the gesture with no more difficulty than a child jumping rope. Only, instead of coming down again as the rope passed underneath, it stayed up! It made a little looping journey with scarcely stirring wings, and as soon as his arm was drawn in again, it descended almost to the precise spot where it had stood before.

Once more they repeated this passage between them, with identical results. The pigeon expended far less energy coasting around at a safe height than he did flinging his arm hectically about, and he realized that a law of diminishing returns would soon set in on this point. Moreover, he over-aimed the second time and crashed the back of his hand into the stone coping alongside the window, so that he had to suck at his knuckles and breathe on them to alleviate the sting.

He had never hated a bird so before. In fact, he had never hated a bird before.

He slammed the window down furiously. Thereupon, as though it realized it had that much more advance warning against possible armstrikes, the pigeon began to strut from one side to the other of the window ledge. Like a picket, enjoining him from working. Each time he made a turn, it cocked that beady eye at him.

He picked up the metal wastebasket and tested it in his hand for solidity. Then he put it down again, regretfully. He’d need it during the course of the story; he couldn’t just drop the cigarette butts on the floor, he’d be kept too busy stamping them out to avoid starting a fire. And even if the basket knocked the damned bird off the ledge, it would probably go over with it.

He picked up the phone, demanded the desk clerk so that he could vent his indignation on something human.

“Do I have to have pigeons on my window sill?” he shouted accusingly. “Why didn’t you tell me there were going to be pigeons on my window sill?”

The clerk was more than taken aback; he was stunned by the onslaught. “I — ah — ah — never had a complaint like this before,” he finally managed to stammer.

“Well, you’ve got one now!” Moody let him know with firm disapproval.

“Yes, sir, but — but what’s it doing?” the clerk floundered. “Is it making any noise?”

“It doesn’t have to,” Moody flared. “I just don’t want it there!”

There was a momentary pause, during which it was to be surmised the clerk was baffled, scrubbing the side of his jaw, or perhaps his temple or forehead. Then he came back again, completely at a loss. “I’m sorry, sir — but I don’t see what you expect me to do about it. You’re up there with it, and I’m down here. Haven’t — haven’t you tried chasing it?”

“Haven’t I tried?” choked Moody exasperatedly. “That’s all I’ve been doing! It free-wheels out and around and comes right back again!”

“Well, about the only thing I can suggest,” the clerk said helplessly, “is to send up a boy with a mop or broom, and have him stand there by the window and—”

“I can’t work with a bellboy in here doing sentinel duty with a mop or broom slung over his shoulder!” Moody exploded. “That’d be worse than the pigeon!”

The clerk breathed deeply, with bottomless patience. “Well, I’m sorry, sir, but—”

Moody got it out first. “ ‘I don’t see what I can do about it.’ ‘I don’t see what I can do about it’!” he mimicked ferociously. “Thanks! You’ve been a big help,” he said with ponderous sarcasm. “I don’t know what I would have done without you!” — and hung up.

He looked around at it, a resigned expression in his eyes that those energetic, enthusiastic irises seldom showed.

The pigeon had its neck craned at an acute angle, almost down to the stone sill, but still looking in at him from that oblique perspective, as if to say, “Was that about me? Did it have to do with me?”

He went over and jerked the window up. That didn’t even make it stir any more.

He turned and went back to his writing chair. He addressed the pigeon coldly from there. Aloud, but coldly, and with the condescension of the superior forms of life toward the inferior ones. “Look. You want to come in? Is that what it’s all about? You’re dying to come in? You won’t be happy till you do come in? Then for the love of Mike come in and get it over with, and let me get back to work! There’s a nice comfortable chair, there’s a nice plumpy sofa, there’s a nice wide bed-rail for a perch. The whole room is yours. Come in and have yourself a ball!”

Its head came up, from that sneaky way of regarding him under-wing. It contemplated the invitation. Then its twig-like little vermilion legs dipped and it threw him a derogatory chuck of the head, as if to say “That for you and your room!” — and unexpectedly took off, this time in a straight, unerring line of final departure.

His feet detonated in such a burst of choleric anger that the chair went over. He snatched up the wastebasket, rushed to the window, and swung it violently — without any hope, of course, of overtaking his already vanished target.

“Dirty damn squab!” he railed bitterly. “Come back here and I’ll—! Doing that to me, after I’m just about to get rolling! I hope you run into a high-tension wire headfirst. I hope you run into a hawk—”

His anger, however, settled as rapidly as a spent Seidlitz powder. He closed the window without violence. A smothered chuckle had already begun to sound in him on his way back to the chair, and he was grinning sheepishly as he reached it.

“Feuding with a pigeon yet,” he murmured deprecatingly to himself. “I’d better get a grip on myself.”

Another cigarette, two good hearty gulps of beer, and now, let’s see — where was I? The opening line. He stared up at the ceiling.

His fingers spread, poised, and then suddenly began to splatter all over the dark keyboard like heavy drops of rain.”

“For me?” the young woman said, staring unbelievably at the shifty-eyed man holding the package.

“You’re

One hand paused, then two of its fingers snapped, demanding inspiration. “Got to get a name for her,” he muttered. He stared fruitlessly at the ceiling for a moment, then glanced over at the window. The hand resumed.”

“You’re Pearl Dove, ain’t ya?”

“Why, yes, but I wasn’t expecting anything.”

(“Not too much dialogue,” Tartell always cautioned. “Get them moving, get them doing something. Dialogue leaves big blanks on the pages, and the reader doesn’t get as much reading for his money.”)

He thrust it at her, turned and disappeared as suddenly as he appeared...

Two “appeareds” in one line — too many. He triphammered the x-key eight times.

and disappeared as suddenly as he had showed up. She tried to call him back but he was no longer in sight. Somewhere out in the night the whine of an expensive car taking off came to her ears

He frowned, closed his eyes briefly, then began typing automatically again.

She looked at the package she had been left holding

He never bothered to consult what he had written so far — such fussy niceties were for smooth-paper writers and poets. In stories like the one he was writing, it was almost impossible to break the thread of the action, anyway. Just so long as he kept going, that was all that mattered. If there was an occasional gap, Tartell’s proofreaders would knit it together with a couple of words.

He drained the beer in the glass, refilled it, gazed dreamily at the ceiling. The wide, blank expanse of the ceiling gave his characters more room to move around in as his mind’s eye conjured them up.

“She has a boy friend who’s on the Homicide Squad,” he murmured confidentially. “Not really a boy friend, just sort of a brotherly protector.” (“Don’t give ’em sweethearts,” was Tartell’s constant admonishment, “just give ’em pals. You might want to kill the girl off, and if she’s already his sweetheart you can’t very well do that, or he loses face with the readers.”)

“She calls him up to tell him she has received a mysterious package. He tells her not to open it, he’ll be right over—” The rest was mechanical fingerwork. Fast and furious. The keys dipped and rose like a canopy of leaves shot through by an autumn wind.

The page jumped up out of the roller by itself, and he knew he’d struck off the last line there was room for. He pitched it aside to the floor without even glancing at it, slipped in a new sheet, all in one accustomed, fluid motion. Then, with the same almost unconscious ease, he reached down for a new bottle, uncapped it, and poured until a cream puff of a head burgeoned at the top of it.

They were at the business of opening the package now. He stalled for two lines, to give himself time to improvise what was going to be inside the package, which he hadn’t had an opportunity to do until now—

He stared down at it. Then his eyes narrowed and he nodded grimly.

“What do you make of it?” she breathed, clutching her throat.

Then he was smack up against it, and the improvisation had to be here and now. The keys coasted to a reluctant but full stop. There was almost smoke coming from them by now, or else it was from his ever-present cigarette riding the edge of the table, drifting the long way around by way of the machine.

There were always certain staples that were good for the contents of mysterious packages. Opium pellets — but that meant bringing in a Chinese villain, and the menace on the cover drawing certainly wasn’t Chinese—

He got up abruptly, swung his chair out away from the table, and shifted it farther over, directly under the phantom tableau on the ceiling that had come to a halt simultaneously with the keys — the way the figures on a motion picture screen freeze into immobility when something goes wrong with the projector.

He got up on the chair seat with both feet, craned his neck, peered intently and with complete sincerity. He was only about two feet away from the visualization on the ceiling. His little bit of fetishism, or idiosyncrasy, had worked for him before in similar stoppages, and it did now. He could see the inside of the package, he could see—

He jumped lithely down again, looped the chair back into place, speared avidly at the keys.

Uncut diamonds!

“Aren’t they beautiful?” she said, clutching her pulsing throat.

(Well, if there were too many clutches in there, Tartell’s hirelings could take one or two of them out. It was always hard to know what to have your female characters do with their hands. Clutching the throat and holding the heart were his own favorite standbys. The male characters could always be fingering a gun or swinging a punch at someone, but it wasn’t refined for women to do that in Startling Stories!)

“Beautiful but hot,” he growled.

Her eyes widened. “How do you know?”

“They’re the Espinoza consignment, they’ve been missing for a week.” He unlimbered his gun. “This spells trouble for someone.”

That was enough dialogue for a few pages — he had to get into some fast, red-hot action.

There weren’t any more hitches now. The story flowed like a torrent. The margin bell chimed almost staccato, the roller turned with almost piston-like continuity, the pages sprang up almost like blobs of batter from a pancake skillet. The beer kept rising in the glass and, contradictorily, steadily falling lower. The cigarettes gave up their ghosts, long thin gray ghosts, in a good cause; the mortality rate was terrible.

His train of thought, the story’s lifeline, beer-lubricated but no whit impeded, flashed and sputtered and coursed ahead like lightning in a topaz mist, and the loose fingers and hiccuping keys followed as fast as they could. Only once more, just before the end, was there a near hitch, and that wasn’t in the sense of a stoppage of thought, but rather of an error in memory — what he mistakenly took to be a duplication. The line:

Hands clutching her throat, Pearl tore down the street in her violet evening dress streamed off the keys, and he came to a lumbering, uneasy halt.

Wait a minute, I had that in in the beginning. She can’t keep running down the street all the time in a violet evening dress; the readers’ll get fed up. How’d she get into a violet evening dress anyway? A minute ago the guy tore her white blouse and revealed her quivering white shoulder.

He half turned in the chair (and none too steadily), about to essay the almost hopeless task of winnowing through the blanket of white pages that lay all around him on the floor, and then recollection came to his aid in the nick of time.

I remember now! I moved the beginning around to the middle, and began with the package at the door instead. (It seemed like a long, long time ago, even to him, that the package had arrived at the door; weeks and weeks ago; another story ago.) This is the first time she’s run down the street in a violet evening dress, she hasn’t done it before. Okay, let her run.

However, logically enough, in order to get her into it in the first place, he X-ed out the line anyway, and put in for groundwork:

“If it hadn’t been for your quick thinking, that guy would have got me sure. I’m taking you to dinner tonight, and that’s an order.”

“I’ll run home and change. I’ve got a new dress I’m dying to break in.”

And that took care of that.

Ten minutes later (according to story time, not his), due to the unfortunate contretemps of having arrived at the wrong café at the wrong time, the line reappeared, now legitimatized, and she was duly tearing down the street, screaming, clutching her throat with her violet evening dress. (The “with” he had intended for an “in.”) The line had even gained something by waiting. This time she was screaming as well, which she hadn’t been doing the first time.

And then finally, somewhere in the malt-drenched mists ahead, maybe an hour or maybe two hours, maybe a dozen cigarettes or maybe a pack and a half, maybe two bottles of beer or maybe four, a page popped up out of the roller onto which he had just ground the words The End, and the story was done.

He blew out a deep breath, a vacuum-cleaner-deep breath. He let his head go over and rest for a few moments against the edge of the table. Then he got up from the chair, very unsteadily, and wavered over toward the bed, treading on the litter of fallen pages. But he had his shoes off, so that didn’t hurt them much.

He didn’t hear the springs creak as he flattened out. His ears were already asleep...

Sometime in the early morning, the very early early-morning (just like at home), that six-year-old of the neighbors started with that velocipede of his, racing it up and down in front of the house and trilling the bell incessantly. He stirred and mumbled disconsolately to his wife, “Can’t you call out the window and make that brat stay in front of his own house with that damn contraption?”

Moody struggled up tormentedly on one elbow, and at that point the kid characteristically went back into the house for good, and the ringing stopped. But when Moody opened his blurred eyes, he wasn’t sitting up at home at all; he was in a hotel room.

“Take your time,” a voice said sarcastically. “I’ve got all day.”

Moody swiveled his head, stunned, and Joe was holding the room door open to permit Tartell, his magazine editor, to glare in at him. Tartell was short, but impressive. He was of a great age, as Moody’s measurements of time went, a redwood-tree age, around forty-five or forty-eight or somewhere up there. And right now Tartell wasn’t in good humor.

“Twice the printers have called,” he barked, “asking if they get that story today or not!”

Moody’s body gave a convulsive jerk and his heels braked against the floor. “Gee, is it that late—?”

“No, not at all!” Tartell shouted. “The magazine can come out anytime! Don’t let a little thing like that worry you! If Cora hadn’t had the presence of mind to call me at my house before I left for the office, I wouldn’t have stopped by here like this, and we’d all be waiting around another hour down at the office. Now where is it? Let me have it. I’ll take it down with me.”

Moody gestured helplessly toward the floor, which looked as though a political rally, with pamphlets, had taken place on it the night before.

“Very systematic,” Tartell commented acridly. He surged forward into the room, doubling over into a sort of cushiony right-angle as he did so, and began to zigzag, picking up papers without let-up, like a diligent, near-sighted park attendant spearing leaves at close range. “This is fine right after a heavy breakfast,” he added. “The best thing I could do!”

Joe looked pained, but on Moody’s behalf, not Tartell’s. “I’ll help you, sir,” he offered placatingly, and started bobbing in turn.

Tartell stopped suddenly, and without rising, seemed to be trying to read, from the unconventional position of looking straight down from up above. “They’re blank,” he accused. “Where does it begin?”

“Turn them over,” Moody said, wearied with so much fussiness. “They must have fallen on their faces.”

“They’re that way on both sides, Mr. Moody,” Joe faltered.

“What’ve you been doing?” Tartell demanded wrathfully. “Wait a minute—!” His head came up to full height, he swerved, went over to Gertie, and examined the unlidded machine closely.

Then he brought both fists up in the air, each still clutching pinwheels of the sterile pages, and pounded them down with maniacal fury on both ends of the writing table. The noise of the concussion was only less than the noise of his unbridled voice.

“You damn-fool idiot!” he roared insanely, looking up at the ceiling as if in quest of aid with which to curb his assault-tempted emotions. “You’ve been pounding thin air all night! You’ve been beating the hell out of blank paper! You forgot to put a ribbon in your typewriter!”

Joe, looking beyond Tartell, took a quick step forward, arms raised in support of somebody or something.

Tartell slashed his hand at him forbiddingly, keeping him where he was. “Don’t catch him, let him land,” he ordered, wormwood-bitter. “Maybe a good clunk against the floor will knock some sense into his stupid — talented — head.”