know who they are, pick the one thousand, seven hundred and twenty-four top-income men of the ten thousand free-lance writers in this country and you have your men. The Diagonal Relationship is discovered on an average of three times a year by rising writers.”
“Writers,” I said. “Good God, why writers? Why not economists, psychologists, mathematicians-real thinkers?”
He said: “A writer’s mind is an awesome thing, Cor-win. What went into your discovery of The Diagonal Relationship?”
I thought a bit. “I’m doing a Civil War thing about Burnside’s Bomb,” I said, “and I realized that Grant could have sent in fresh troops but didn’t because Halleck used to drive him crazy by telegraphic masterminding of his campaigns. That’s a special case of The Answer-as I call it. Then I got some data on medieval attitudes toward personal astrology out of a book on ancient China I’m reading. Another special case. And there’s a joke the monks used to write at the end of a long manuscript-copying job. Liddell Hart’s theory of strategy is about half of the general military case of The Answer. The merchandizing special case shows clearly hi a catalog I have from a Chicago store that specializes hi selling strange clothes to bop-crazed Negroes. They all add up to the general expression, and that’s that.”
He was nodding. “Many, many combinations add up to The Diagonal Relationship,” he said. “But only a writer cuts across sufficient fields, exposes himself to sufficient apparently unrelated facts. Only a writer has wide-open associational channels capable of bridging the gap between astrology and, ah, ‘bop.’ We write in our different idioms” -he smiled at the T-shirted man-“but we are writers all. Wide-ranging, omnivorous for data, equipped with superior powers of association which we constantly exercise.”
“Well,” I asked logically enough, “why on earth haven’t you published The Diagonal Relationship? Are you here to keep me from publishing it?”
“We’re a power group,” said the plump man apologetically. “We have a vested interest in things as they are. Think about what The Diagonal Relationship would do to writers, Corwin.”
“Sure,” I said, and thought about it. “Judas Priest!” I said after a couple of minutes. He was nodding again. He said: “Yes. The Diagonal Relationship, if generally promulgated, would work out to approximate equality of income for all, with incentive pay only for really hard and dangerous work. Writing would be regarded as pretty much its own reward.”
“That’s the way it looks,” I said. “One-year copyright, after all…”
[Here occurs the first hiatus in the Corwin Papers. I suspect that three or jour are missing. The preceding and following papers, incidentally, come from a batch of six gross of fortune cookies which I purchased from the Hip Sing Restaurant Provision Company of New York City during the course of my investigations. The reader no doubt will wonder why I was unable to determine the source of the cookies themselves and was forced to buy them from middlemen. Apparently the reason is the fantastic one that by chance I was wearing a white shirt, dark tie and double-breasted blue serge suit when I attempted to question the proprietor of the Hip Sing Company. I learned too late that this is just about the unofficial uniform of U. S. Treasury and Justice Department agents and that I was immediately taken to be such an agent. “You T-man,” said Mr. Hip tolerantly, “you get cou’t ohdah, I show you books. Keep ve’y nice books, all in Chinese cha’ctahs.” After that gambit he would answer me only in Chinese. How he did it I have no idea, but apparently within days every Chinese produce dealer in the United States and Canada had been notified that there was a new T-man named Kornbluth on the prowl. As a last resort I called on the New York City office of the Treasury Department Field Investigations Unit in an attempt to obtain what might be called un-identifica-tion papers. There I was assured by Mr. Gershon O’Brien,
their Chinese specialist, that my errand was hopeless since the motto of Mr. Hip and his colleagues invariably was “Safety First.” To make matters worse, as I left his office I was greeted with a polite smile from a Chinese lad whom I recognized as Mr. Hip’s bookkeeper. CMK\ “So you see,” he went on as if he had just stated a major and a minor premise, “we watch the writers, the real ones, through private detective agencies which alert us when the first teaser appears hi a newspaper or on a broadcast or in local gossip. There’s always the teaser, Corwin, the rattle before the strike. We writers are like that. We’ve been watching you for three years now, and to be perfectly frank I’ve lost a few dollars wagered on you. In my opinion you’re a year late.”
“What’s the proposition?” I asked numbly. He shrugged. “You get to be a best-seller. We review your books, you review ours. We tell your publisher: Corwin’s hot-promote him. Advertise him.’ And he does, because we’re good properties and he doesn’t want to annoy us. You want Hollywood? It can be arranged. Lots of us out there. In short, you become rich like us and all you have to do is keep quiet about The Diagonal Relationship. You haven’t told your wife, by the way?” “I wanted to surprise her,” I said. He smiled. “They always do. Writers! Well, young man, what do you say?”
It had grown dark. From the couch came a raspy voice: “You heard what the doc said about the ones that throw hi with us. I’m here to tell you that we got provisions for the ones that don’t.” I laughed at him. i “One of those guys,” he said flatly. “Surely a borderline case, Michael?” said the plump man. “So many of them are.”
If I’d been thinking straight I would have realized that “borderline case” did not mean “undecided” to them; it meant “danger-immediate action!”
They took it. The plump man, who was also a fairly big man, flung his arms around me and the wiry one ap-
preached in the gloom. I yelled something when I felt a hypodermic stab my arm. Then I went-mimb and stupid, My wife came running up the stairs. “What’s going on?” she demanded. I saw her heading for the curtain behind which we keep an aged hair-trigger Marlin .38 rifle. There was nothing wrong with her guts, but they attacked her where courage doesn’t count. I croaked her name a couple of times and heard the plump man say gently, with great concern: “I’m afraid your husband needs . . . help.” She turned from the curtain, her eyes wide. He had struck subtly and knowingly; there is probably not one writer’s wife who does not suspect her husband is a potential psychotic.
“Dear-” she said to me as I stood there paralyzed. He went on: “Michael and I dropped in because we both admire your husband’s work; we were surprised and distressed to find his conversation so … disconnected. My dear, as you must know I have some experience through my pastorate with psychotherapy. Have you ever -forgive my bluntness-had doubts about his sanity?” “Dear, what’s the matter?” she asked me anxiously. I just stood there, staring. God knows what they injected me with, but its effect was to cloud my mind, render all activity impossible, send my thoughts spuming after their tails. I was insane. [This incident, seemingly the least plausible part of Corwin’s story, actually stands up better than most of the narrative to one familiar with recent advances in biochemistry. Corwin could have been injected with lysergic acid, or with protein extracts from the blood of psychotics. It is a matter of cold laboratory fact such injections produce temporary psychosis in the patient. Indeed, it is on such experimental psychoses that the new tranquilizer drugs are developed and tested. CMK]
To herself she said aloud, dully: “Well, it’s finally come. Christmas when I burned the turkey and he wouldn’t speak to me for a week. The way he drummed his fingers when I talked. All his little crackpot ways-how he has to stay at the Waldorf but I have to cut his hair and save a
dollar. I hoped it was just the rotten weather and cabin fever. I hoped when spring came-” She began to sob. The plump man comforted her like a father. I just stood there staring and waiting. And eventually Mickey glided up in the dark and gave her a needleful too and
[Here occurs an aggravating and important hiatus. One can only guess that Corwin and his wife were loaded into the car, driven-Somewhere, separated, and separately, under false names, committed to different mental institutions.^! have recently learned to my dismay that there are states which require only the barest sort of licensing to operate such institutions. One State Inspector of Hospitals even wrote to me in these words: “. . . no doubt there are some places in our State which are not even licenced, but we have never made any effort to close them and I cannot recall any statute making such operation illegal. We are not a wealthy state like you up North and some care for these unfortunates is better than none, is our viewpoint here….” CMK]
three months. Their injections last a week. There’s always somebody to give me another. You know what mental hospital attendants are like: an easy bribe. But they’d be better advised to bribe a higher type, like a male nurse, because my attendant with the special needle for me is off on a drunk. My insanity wore off this morning and I’ve been writing in my room ever since. A quick trip up and down the corridor collected the cigarette papers and a tiny ball point pen from some breakfast-food premium gadget. I think my best bet is to slip these papers out in the batch of Chinese fortune cookies they’re doing hi the bakery. Occupational therapy, this is called. My own o.t. is shoveling coal when I’m under the needle. Well, enough of this. I shall write down The Answer, slip down to the bakery, deal out the cigarette papers into the waiting rounds of cookie dough, crimp them over and return to my room. Doubtless my attendant will be back by then and I’ll get another shot from him. I shall not struggle; I can only wait. THE ANSWER: HUMAN BEINGS RAISED TO SPEAK AN INDO-
IRANIAN LANGUAGE SUCH AS ^EJJGLISH HAVE THE FOLLOWING IN
[That is the end of the last of the Corwin Papers I have been able to locate. It should be superfluous to urge all readers to examine carefully any fortune cookie slips they may encounter. The next one you break open may contain what my poor friend believed, or believes, to be a great message to mankind. He may be right. His tale is a wild one but it is consistent. And it embodies the only reasonable explanation I have ever seen for the presence of certain books on the best-seller list. CMK\