“Please God, when I find a man who can write don’t let him go all male-chauvinist on me! I’m a good editor,” said she with becoming modesty “(and don’t you ever forget it!), and I’m a good scientist. I even worked on the Manhattan Project—until some character discovered that my adopted daughter was a Spanish War orphan. But what we’re here to talk about is this consistent-scheme gimmick of yours. It’s all right, of course; it’s been done before. But where I frankly think you’re crazy is in planning to do it exclusively.”
Norbert Holt opened his briefcase. “I’ve brought along an outline that might help convince you . . .”
An hour later Manning Stern glanced at her watch and announced, “End of office hours! Care to continue this slugfest over a martini or five? I warn you—the more I’m plied, the less pliant I get.”
And an hour after that she stated, “We might get someplace if we’d stay someplace. I mean the subject seems to be getting elusive.”
“The hell,” Norbert Holt announced recklessly, “with editorial relations. Let’s get back to the current state of opera.”
“It was paintings. I was telling you about the show at the—”
“No, I remember now. It was movies. You were trying to explain the Marx Brothers. Unsuccessfully, I may add.”
“Un . . . sue . . . cess . . . fully,” said Manning Stern ruminatively. “Five martinis and the man can say unsuccessfully successfully. But I try to explain the Marx Brothers yet! Look, Holt. I’ve got a subversive orphan at home and she’s undoubtedly starving. I’ve got to feed her. You come home and meet her and have potluck, huh?”
“Good. Fine. Always like to try a new dish.”
Manning Stern looked at him curiously. “Now was that a gag or not? You’re funny, Holt. You know a lot about everything and then all of a sudden you go all Man-from-Mars on the simplest thing. Or do you? . . . Anyway, let’s go feed Raquel.”
And five hours later Holt was saying, “I never thought I’d have this reason for being glad I sold a story. Manning, I haven’t had so much fun talking to— I almost said ‘to a woman.’ I haven’t had so much fun talking period since—”
He had almost said since the agnoton came. She seemed not to notice his abrupt halt. She simply said, “Bless you, Norb. Maybe you aren’t a male-chauvinist. Maybe even you’re . . . Look, go find a subway or a cab or something. If you stay here another minute I’m either going to kiss you or admit you’re right about your stories—and I don’t know which is worse editor-author relations.”
Manning Stern committed the second breach of relations first. The fan mail on Norbert Holt’s debut left her no doubt that Surprising would profit by anything he chose to write about.
She’d never seen such a phenomenally rapid rise in author popularity. Or rather you could hardly say rise. Holt hit the top with his first story and stayed there. He socked the fen (Guest of Honor at the Washinvention), the pros (first President of Fantasy Writers of America), and the general reader (author of the first pulp-bred science fiction book to stay three months on the best-seller list).
And never had there been an author who was more pure damned fun to work with. Not that you edited him; you checked his copy for typos and sent it to the printers. (Typos were frequent at first; he said something odd about absurd illogical keyboard arrangement.) But just being with him, talking about this, that and those . . . Raquel was quite obviously in love with him—praying that he’d have the decency to stay single till she grew up and you know, Manningcita, I am Spanish; and the Mediterranean girls . . .
But there was this occasional feeling of oddness. Like the potluck and the illogical keyboard and that night at FWA . . .
“I’ve got a story problem,” Norbert Holt announced. “An idea, and I can’t lick it. Maybe if I toss it out to the lions . . .”
“Story problem?” Manning said, a little more sharply than she’d intended. “I thought everything was outlined for the next ten years.”
“This is different. This is a sort of paradox story, and I can’t get out of it. It won’t end. Something like this: Suppose a man in the remote year X reads a story that tells him how to work a time machine. So he works the time machine and goes back to the year X minus 2000—let’s say, for instance, now. So in ‘now’ he writes the story that he’s going to read two thousand years later, telling himself how to work the time machine because he knows how to work it because he read the story which he wrote because—”
Manning was starting to say “Hold it!” when Matt Duncan interrupted with “Good old endless-cycle gimmick. Lot of fun to kick around but Bob Heinlein did it once and for all in ‘By His Bootstraps.’ Damnedest tour de force I ever read; there just aren’t any switcheroos left after that.”
“Ouroboros,” Joe Henderson contributed.
Norbert Holt looked a vain question at him; they knew that one word per evening was Joe’s maximum contribution.
Austin Carter picked it up. “Ouroboros. The worm that circles the universe with its tail in its mouth. The Asgard Serpent, too. And I think there’s something Mayan. All symbols of infinity—no beginning, no ending. Always out by the same door where in you went. See that magnificent novel of Eddison’s, The Worm Ouroboros; the perfect cyclic novel, ending with its recommencement, stopping not because there’s a stopping place but because it’s uneconomical to print the whole text over infinitely.”
“The Quaker Oats box,” said Duncan. “With a Quaker holding a box with a Quaker holding a box with a Quaker holding a . . .”
It was standard professional shoptalk. It was a fine evening with
