“Good thing he didn’t have an IBM typewriter,” the agent said.
” — and return to Ye Editor. Two weeks have gone by. Summer is ending. Ye Editor has, of course, fallen off the wagon any number of times, but has managed on the whole to remain pretty respectable. The days have gone their appointed rounds. At Cape Kennedy, they are getting ready to put a man on the moon. The new issue of Logon’s, with John Lindsay on the cover, is out on the stands, and selling miserably, as usual. I had put in a purchase order for a short story called The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet,’ by Reg Thorpe, first serial rights, proposed publication January 1970, proposed purchase price $800, which was standard then for a Logon’s lead story.
“I got a buzz from my superior, Jim Dohegan. Could I come up and see him? I trotted into his office at ten in the morning, looking and feeling my very best. It didn’t occur to me until later that Janey Morrison, his secretary, looked like a wake in progress.
“I sat down and asked Jim what I could do for him, or vice versa. I won’t say the Reg Thorpe name hadn’t entered my mind; having the story was a tremendous coup for Logan’s, and I suspected a few congratulations were in order. So you can imagine how dumbfounded I was when he slid two purchase orders across the desk at me. The Thorpe story, and a John Updike novella we had scheduled as the February fiction lead. RETURN stamped across both.
“I looked at the revoked purchase orders. I looked at Jimmy. I couldn’t make any of it out. I really couldn’t get my brains to work over what it meant. There was a block in there. I looked around and I saw his hot plate. Janey brought it in for him every morning when she came to work and plugged it in so he could have
fresh coffee when he wanted it. That had been the drill at Lagan’s for three years or more. And that morning all I could think of was, if that thing was unplugged, I could think. I know if that thing was unplugged, I could put this together.
“I said, ‘What is this, Jim?’
” I’m sorry as hell to have to be the one to tell you this, Henry,’ he said. ‘Lagan’s isn’t going to be publishing any more fiction as of January 1970.’ ”
The editor paused to get a cigarette, but his pack was empty. “Does anyone have a cigarette?”
The writer’s wife gave him a Salem.
“Thank you, Meg.”
He lit it, shook out the match, and dragged deep. The coal glowed mellowly in the dark.
“Well,” he said, “I’m sure Jim thought I was crazy. I said, ‘Do you mind?’ and leaned over and pulled the plug on his hot plate.
“His mouth dropped open and he said, ‘What the hell, Henry?’
” ‘It’s hard for me to think with things like that going,’ I said. ‘Interference.’ And it really seemed to be true, because with the plug pulled, I was able to see the situation a great deal more clearly. ‘Does this mean I’m pinked?’ I asked him.
” ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘That’s up to Sam and the board. I just don’t know, Henry.’
“There were a lot of things I could have said. I guess what Jimmy was expecting was a passionate plea for my job. You know that saying, ‘He had his ass out to the wind’?… I maintain that you don’t understand the meaning of that phrase until you’re the head of a suddenly nonexistent department.
“But I didn’t plead my cause or the cause of fiction at Lagan’s. I pleaded for Reg Thorpe’s story. First I said that we could move it up over the deadline — put it in the December issue.
“Jimmy said, ‘Come on, Henry, the December ish is locked up. You know that. And we’re talking ten thousand words here.’
” ‘Nine-thousand-eight,’ I said.
” ‘And a full-page illo,’ he said. ‘Forget it.’ – ” ‘Well, we’ll scrap the art,’ I said. ‘Listen, Jimmy, it’s a great story, maybe the best fiction we’ve had in the last five years.’