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It was, Alfred decided, a kind of strong-medicine ceremony. Must be pretty
affecting to someone who was really involved in it personally.
Then, from either side, Cohen and Jones moved in swiftly to complete the last,
dramatic part of the ceremony.
They were very formal, but very thorough.
They stripped the culprit of his uniform.
Afterword
This is how I wrote this story:
In 1956, I broke up with a woman with whom I had been involved for the better
part of a year. But I knew she'd be back (she always came back), and I knew
we'd start all over again, as we so many times had. I therefore called all my
friends and told them that they had to arrange seven consecutive dates for me;
I wanted to see a new woman every day of the coming week hoping that I'd get
deeply committed to at least one of them.
Fruma, as she still likes to remind me, Fruma was Wednesday. Katherine MacLean
and the guy she was then living with, Dave Mason, told me they knew somebody I
would really like. They came up with Fruma.
After my first date with her on Wednesday night, I told Bob Sheckley who was
re-cently divorced and who was my closest friend at the time that I thought I
had found the woman of all women who should be my wife. Bob asked when I
planned to see her again.
"Saturday night," I told him.
"See if she has a friend," he said.
Well, Fruma did, and her friend's name was Ziva, and Bob and Ziva were married
a month after Fruma and me. We all lived in Greenwich Village, not forever
after, but most happily, about two or three blocks from each other.
And Bob and I went through a slump. Not a bad long one, but a very annoying
one nonetheless, and one more surprising to Bob than to me, because I wrote
spasmodically, when some strong idea turned me around, but Bob was a heavy
production man.
Bob and I talked to each other very intensively and very worriedly about how
to get out of the slump. One of the cures we thought about was to rent a
furnished room as a mutual office and add two items of furniture to it a
typewriter table and a heavy wooden chair with shackles permanently attached
to the chair. We would both arrive at the office at nine each morning, and one
of us would be shackled to the chair by the other. He would not be released,
no matter how he pleaded or what the excuse, until one p.m. or until he typed
four pages of good, publishable copy. Then the shackles would be opened and
the other would take his place, under the same conditions, until either five
p.m. or four typed pages of good copy would bring release. Of course, if the
four pages were typed early enough and the writer were still going strong, he
could go on and write as much as he wanted to, until his release time.
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We thought it was an excellent idea and were eager to try it. Unfortunately,
both Fruma and Ziva claimed to be horrified and begged us not to. Bob and I
muttered to each other about the unfortunate weakness of women, and tried to
think of something else.
What we settled on was this: The two of us would meet five mornings a week at
a neigh-borhood diner, each with our four pages of new copy in hand. Whoever
was late for the appointment or who didn't have his requisite four pages had
to pay five dollars into a fund handled by our wives. Whenever the fund grew
large enough, it would be used to buy theater tickets for all four of us.
It worked, it really worked well, at least for a time. I put more fives in
than Bob, be-cause, after all, I was born a month late and have never caught
up: I am frequently tardy for any and all appointments. But both of us were
writing again, and selling, and that was the whole point.
Then there was the morning I didn't have a good story in my head. I
desperately wrote four pages of something, anything, and hurried off to meet
Bob. He had his four pages, too, and they were very professional and very
good. But they also looked slightly familiar.
Of course, I realized! They were four pages from one of his first published
stories, a story I liked very much and remembered well. I accused him of
cheating. He broke down and admitted it, and paid the five dollars. I went
home with my four pages of nonsense, righteously angry.
I put the four pages in front of me, one thousand words of pure narrative
hook, and wondered if anything at all could be made of it. Yes, it turned out:
"Lisbon Cubed" could be made of it. (If you want to see just what the original
was pretty much like, count one thousand words from the beginning of the
story.)
My title, when it went to Horace Gold's Galaxy, was "The Fourth Power of
Lisbon." He, finding nothing else to change in the story although he did try
hard removed my title and substituted his. I've kept it for this edition: the
man is dead and deserves some sort of minor prose monument.
If you tell all this to Bob Sheckley, he will swear that it's not quite true;
it all happened the other way around, with me being the guilty party. Don't
listen to him.
But this is why I wrote this story:
I'm not sure why I write science fiction any more, except that, well, it's a
living, and, hell, it's where I made what reputation I have. But there are a
couple of responsibilities that I felt I had fifty years ago and at least one
of which I still feel very strongly today. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]