He did, but how about dinner? Hadn’t been to the Mars Room for a coon’s age.
“Oh, Mars Room. Sure e*nough all right with me. Meet you in the bar at 7:30?” He would.
Well, he’d left himself wide open for that one. He’d be lucky to get off with a $30 tab. But it was a sure tear-sheet for the Chicago Chair people.
Farwell said to the intercom: “Get me a reservation for 8 tonight at the Mars Room, Grace. Dinner for two. Tell Mario it’s got to be a good table.”
He ripped the Kumfyseets first ad out of the typewriter and dropped it into the waste basket. Fifty a week from Chicago Chair less 30 for entertainment. Mr. Brady wasn’t going to like it; Mr. Brady might call him from New York about it to say gently: “Anybody can buy space, Jim. You should know by now that we’re not in the business of buying space. Sometimes I think you haven’t got a grasp of the big picture the way a branch manager should. Greenhough asked about you the other day and I really didn’t know what to tell him.” And Farwell would sweat and try to explain how it was a special situation and maybe try to hint that the sales force was some-tunes guilty of overselling a client, making promises that Ops couldn’t possibly live up to. And Mr. Brady would close on a note of gentle melancholy with a stinging remark or two “for your own good, Jim.”
Farwell glanced at the clock on his desk, poured one from his private bottle; Brady receded a little into the background of his mind.
“Mr. Angelo Libonari to see you,” said the intercom. “About employment.” “Send him in.” Libonari stumbled on the carpeting that began at the thres-
hold of Harwell’s office.,.- “I saw your ad,” he began shrilly, “your ad for a junior copywriter.”
“Have a seat.” The boy was shabby and jittery. “Didn’t you bring a presentation?”
He didn’t understand. “No, I just saw your ad. I didn’t know I had to be introduced. I’m sorry I took up your time—” He was on his way out already.
“Wait a minute, Angelo! I meant, have you got any copies of what you’ve done, where you’ve been to school, things like that.”
“Oh.” The boy pulled out a sheaf of paper from his jacket pocket. “This stuff isn’t very good,” ‘he said. “As a matter of fact, it isn’t really finished. I wrote it for a magazine, Integration, I don’t suppose you ever heard of it; they were going to print it but they folded up, it’s a kind of prose poem.” Abruptly he ran dry and handed over the wad of dog-eared, interlined copy. His eyes said to Farwell: please don’t laugh at me.
Farwell read at random: “—and then the Moon will drift astern and out of sight, the broken boundary that used to stand between the eye and the mind.” He read it aloud and asked: “Now, what does that mean?”
The boy shyly and proudly explained: “Well, what I was trying to bring out there was that the Moon used to be as far as anybody could go with his eyes. If you wanted to find out anything about the other celestial bodies you had to guess and make inductions—that’s sort of the whole theme of the piece—liberation, broken boundaries.”
“Uh-huh,” said Farwell, and went on reading. It was a rambling account of an Earth-Ganymede flight. There was a lot of stuff as fuzzy as the first bit, there-were other bits that were hard, clean writing. The kid might be worth developing if only he didn’t look and act so peculiar. Maybe it was just nervousness.
“So you’re specially interested in space travel?” he asked.
“Oh, very much. I know I failed to get it over in this; it’s all second-hand. I’ve never been off. But nobody’s really written well about it yet—” He froze.
His terrible secret, Farwell supposed with amusement, was that he hoped to be the laureate of space flight. Well, if he wasn’t absolutely impossible, Greenhough and Brady could
give him a try. Shabby as he was, he wouldn’t dare quibble about the pay.