Skeleton Crew

form or other. Mania... abnormality... irrationality... lunacy... insanity. For the mad person, reality has skewed. The whole person begins to reintegrate in that small room where the pistol is.

'But the rational part of me was still very much there. Bloody, bruised, indignant, and rather frightened, but still on the job. Saying: 'Oh, that's all right. Tomorrow when you sober up, you can plug everything back in, thank God. Play your games if you have to. But no more than this. No further than this.'

'That rational voice was right to be frightened. There's something in us that is very much attracted to madness. Everyone who looks off the edge of a tall building has felt at least a faint, morbid urge to jump. And anyone who has ever put a loaded pistol up to his head...'

'Ugh, don't,' the writer's wife said. 'Please.'

'All right,' the editor said. 'My point is just this: even the most well-adjusted person is holding on to his or her sanity by a greased rope. I really believe that. The rationality circuits are shoddily built into the human animal.

'With the plugs pulled, I went into my study, wrote Reg Thorpe a letter, put it in an envelope, stamped it, took it out and mailed it. I don't actually remember doing any of these things. I was too drunk. But I deduce that I did them because when I got up the next morning, the carbon was still by my typewriter, along with the stamps and the box of envelopes. The letter was about what you'd expect from a drunk. What it boiled down to was this: the enemies were drawn by electricity as well as by the Fornits themselves. Get rid of the electricity and you got rid of the enemies. At the bottom I had written, 'The electricity is fucking up your thinking about these things, Reg. Interference with brainwaves. Does your wife have a blender?' '

'In effect, you had started writing letters to the paper,' the writer said.

'Yes. I wrote that letter on a Friday night. On Saturday 'morning I got up around eleven, hung over and only blurrily aware of what sort of mischief I'd been up to the night before. Great pangs of shame as I plugged everything back in. Greater pangs of shame—and fear—when I saw what I'd written to Reg. I looked all over the house for the original to that letter, hoping like hell I hadn't mailed it. But I had. And the way I got through that day was by making a resolution to take my lumps like a man and go on the wagon. Sure I was.

'The following Wednesday there was a letter from Reg. One page, handwritten. Fornit Some Fornus doodles all over it. In the center, just this: 'You were right. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Reg. You were right. Everything is fine now. Reg. Thanks a lot. Reg. Fornitis fine. Reg. Thanks. Reg.' '

'Oh, my,' the writer's wife said.

'Bet his wife was mad,' the agent's wife said.

'But she wasn't. Because it worked.'

'Worked?' the agent said.

'He got my letter in the Monday-morning post. Monday afternoon he went down to the local powercompany office and told them to cut his power off. Jane Thorpe, of course, was hysterical. Her range ran on electricity, she did indeed have a blender, a sewing machine, a washer-dryer combination... well, you understand. On Monday evening I'm sure she was ready to have my head on a plate.

'But it was Reg's behavior that made her decide I was a miracle worker instead of a lunatic. He sat her down in the living room and talked to her quite rationally. He said that he knew he'd been acting in a peculiar fashion. He knew that she'd been worried. He told her that he felt much better with the power off, and that he would be glad to help her through any inconvenience that it caused. And then he suggested that they go next door and say hello.'

'Not to the KGB agents with the radium in their van?' the writer asked.

'Yes, to them. Jane was totally floored. She agreed to go over with him but she told me that she was girding herself up for a really nasty scene. Accusations, threats, hysteria. She had begun to consider leaving Reg if he wouldn't get help for his problem. She told me that Wednesday morning on the phone that she had made herself a promise: the power was the next-to-the-last straw. One more thing, and she was going to leave for New York. She was becoming afraid, you see. The thing had worsened by such degrees as to be nearly imperceptible, and she loved him, but even for her it had gotten as far as it could go. She had decided that if Reg said one strange word to the students next door, she was going to break up housekeeping. I found out much later that she had already asked some very circumspect questions about the procedure in Nebraska to effect an involuntary committal.'

'The poor woman,' the writer's wife murmured.

'But the evening was a smashing success,' the editor said. 'Reg was at his most charming... and according to Jane, that was very charming indeed. She hadn't seen him so much on in three years. The sullenness, the secretiveness, they were gone. The nervous tics. The involuntary jump and look over his shoulder whenever a door opened. He had a beer and talked about all the topics that were current back in those dim dead days: the war, the possibilities of a volunteer army, the riots in the cities, the pot laws.

'The fact that he had written Underworld Figures came up, and they were... 'author- struck' was the way Jane put it. Three of the four had read it, and you can bet the odd one wasn't going to linger any on his way to the library.' The writer laughed and nodded. He knew about that bit.

'So,' the editor said, 'we leave Reg Thorpe and his wife for just a little while, without electrical power but happier than they've been in a good long time—'

'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.