“Poor old Yops,” whispered Phrnnx. “I can almost see AIo’s point.”
“Yes,” replied the Professor. “There is only one thing that is worrying me.”
“What is worrying you?” asked Phrnnx.
24
With Friends Like These . . .
The Professor turned old eyes on him. They held irony, and they held musing.
“What,” he said, “are we going to do with them when there are no more Yops?”
25
Some Notes Concerning a Green Box
“With Friends Like These . . .” was my first published story, but my first professional sale wasn’t even conceived as a story.
In 1970 I discovered H. P. Lovecraft, Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Wilber Whateley, and the rest of the Necronomical world of HPL. I was so taken I sat down and composed a long pseudoietter to August Derleth, hoping he’d get a laugh (well, a smile, anyway) out of it.
Instead, back came a letter from the Wisconsin Prometheus declaring that if Fd cut about forty percent from my story (story . , . what story? What’s going on here?), he’d publish it in the next semiannual issue of The Arkham Collector.
Total payment was forty dollars. I never saw a finer work of art, a more impressive piece of draftsmanship, than that first check.
Sirs: I did not know what to do with these notes until a friend of mine suggested that I send them along to you, assuming, I suppose, that you might find them of some interest. They form an exceedingly odd story,
26
Some Notes Concerning a Green Box
one with which I am now not so sure I wish to be connected. I report them here as they occurred.
I do not as a rule frequent the facilities of the anthropology department, but an occasion made it necessary. Being a graduate student, I was able to obtain access to files which are kept from the eyes of careless undergraduates and casual visitors. It was in a far corner of the old manuscript-storage room that I first came across the box.