FSF, March 2009

by Spilogale Authors

  Feeling seasick, still incredulous, I thought, replace Cyril and replace Tony Boucher? Two of my personal writerly heroes? Migod, migod!

  "Well, what's the answer? Will you or won't you? We have to know before the next issue goes to bed."

  All I could manage was a nod. Cyril Kornbluth was dead. Gone. Out of the world. No more stories like “The Marching Morons” or “The Words of Guru.” I remember I kept nodding. Again and again and again. But why me, I had to ask—like the astute businessman I periodically daydreamed I was? How did they come to choose me to be up for this particular bat?

  "I asked around,” Mills explained. “And they told me that you and Cyril were pretty much the same kind of science-fiction big shots."

  Well. While the answer pleased the daylights out of me, it suggested immediately that I was dealing with someone who was rather naïve about the field I had been reading for twenty-five years and writing in professionally for over thirteen, managing editor though he might officially be of one of the finest magazines in that field. Nor was I too casually contemptuous: as I got to know the guy and worked with him, I was often asked about the “nymphs” who showed up at science-fiction conventions where he had never been. Mills, it turned out, for all of his present position, was no more than the merchandising and organizing side of science fiction, a managing editor type you would find doing pretty much the same work on any kind of magazine anywhere.

  And, on that level, he was pretty damn good. He was a real businessman, as I was to find out almost immediately.

  I asked about the salary, stipend, honorarium—"whatever it's called.” His answer made me gasp. I, after all, had been an editor at Popular Publications and had never imagined editorial compensation went that low. I said so.

  "This is a struggling magazine,” he replied. “Always has been. That's all we pay. So is the answer still yes, or isn't it?"

  Of course I shrugged, and nodded once more. Money was money, and especially to a newly married man, but taking over as the successor to Tony Boucher and Cyril Kornbluth was something else again. And it was The goddam Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, after all!

  The answer, I said, was still most definitely Yes.

  I really did intend to ask in the very next breath about things like what my title would be ... when I might expect a raise to something approaching a living wage....

  But Mills, as I said, was a real businessman, and I was not—I should say, am not. He walked over to a huge wooden rolltop desk in the corner of his office and opened the largest drawer on the right-hand side. It was a file drawer, I realized, as he reached in and took out a high pile of manuscripts, which he brought over to me and shucked into my arms.

  "We'll start with this,” he said. “Stuff Cyril never had a chance to look at. Tony's inventory. All the stories he bought and had trouble with. Look ‘em over and see what you can do about solving the problems."

  I glanced at the top paper-clipped story in the very heavy pile: “That Hell-Bound Train” by Robert Bloch. Definitely not one of my favorite authors. I carefully pulled out the manuscript and placed it on a little typing table near me. Then I put the rest of the pile on top of it.

  Bob Mills went back to his desk and began working on a publication schedule for the magazine. He obviously had nothing more to say. I picked up the pile of trouble stories and staggered out to my car.

  Fruma, when I got home to Brooklyn, found the whole thing hard to understand. She began a lot of sentences with, “You mean you didn't even ask—” and “You didn't even establish what they meant by—” She seemed to feel I had shown a deplorable lack of simple business savvy.

  "Hell,” I said to myself, as I lugged the huge pile of manuscripts into the room where I had built an eight-foot-high and thirteen-foot-long bookcase so that the place should serve as my study, “Hell, what does she know about the business of professional writing? She is only a copyeditor at Harper and Row, after all."

  But after I had read through a dozen or so stories, I was not so sure of what I myself knew about professional writing.

  It's not that the stories were bad: They all glittered in one way or another, written as they were by the biggest and best names in science fiction—any one of them worth a mention on the magazine cover. But each and every one had some terrible flaw—not too well hidden—that canceled out something important, from an important character's motivation to the plot line itself. And each terrible flaw was dreadfully difficult to identify in so many words; the overall effect after reading the piece was of a kind of spreading literary inkblot that made the story essentially unreadable, despite the familiar bright shine of the byline at the beginning.

  Tony had obviously bought these stories for the names of the authors and—great, magazine-selling names though they were—had found the stories essentially unprintable as they stood—and been unable to explain to the writers exactly where they had gone wrong and what they might correct in a rewrite.

  Nor could I, I realized, as I came to the bottom of the pile and gingerly, miserably picked up the last one, “That Hell-Bound Train” by Robert Bloch.

  I had misjudged him terribly, I realized, as I read, entranced, or perhaps this was simply one of his very best stories. The piece gave me, from the beginning, a protagonist and a milieu as clear and special and colorful and wonderful as I had ever found in anything that made me sit up in sheer readerly enjoyment. It was good, damn good, delightfully good, deliciously good.

  (I still remember the song Bloch sang in the middle of one of his best paragraphs. “That was the train the drunks and the sinners rode—the gambling men and the grifters, the big-time spenders, the skirt-chasers, and all the jolly crew." I remember it today and occasionally sing that part of the story to myself.)

  And, yes, the story, like the rest, had a flaw. But it was a flaw that I could at least identify, point to, discuss, ask for development and/or change. Very simple stuff: it had no ending. None at all.

  Oh, it did have a conclusion. It did come to a stop. But there was none of what good old Aristotle called catharsis. There was nothing that summed up, that took the reader to a new and narrative-necessary place.

  I opened my portable Royal typewriter and began writing a letter to Bloch. Three hours and nine or ten crumpled missives later, I was still at it. You see, I am definitely not a fast typist (hunt and p-p-p-p-p-peck is basically the system I use), but that was not the problem.

  The problem was the years I had spent writing stories for the likes of editors like John Campbell of Astounding and Horace Gold of Galaxy. John loved to have a conference about the story before it was written, a conference in which he always attempted to take whatever was in the writer's mind and transmute it into something that he, John, might have done—if he were still a freelance writer and not a stuffy, check-paying editor. It maddened most writers and drove some of them (Bob Heinlein, for example) elsewhere to book publishers, or to other, cheaper, magazines in the field (thus, possibly Ray Bradbury, certainly Fred Brown).

  The alternative in high word rates for science fiction, Horace Gold of Galaxy, was somewhat worse, because it was delayed and therefore unexpected. Horace would accept a story from you, frequently burbling over its fine writing, and then change a sentence here, a sentence there, even adding a whole paragraph or two of his own composition to the piece before it appeared in print. That was why Ted Sturgeon always wrote STET in indelible pencil at the top of every left-hand margin and drew an unerasable line from that STET to the bottom of the page before he sold a story to Horace.

  I had taken an oath in blood, my very own cherry-colored fluid I must admit, never to be that kind of editor—if I ever, ever got the chance to exercise such a high office. And here, now, in the editorial letter to Robert Bloch, in my first note to an author suggesting a rewrite, I was damn well determined not to break or amend that promise in any way. I kept crumpling up pages that looked too demanding, I kept exing out lines that looked too much like my own creative work. />
  The end product, reached about three a.m., suggested five separate and utterly different approaches to an ending, not one of which, after many, many laboriously written changes, could be said to read at all like the written material of William Tenn—or, for that matter, his sisters or his cousins or his aunts.

  To this I added a final short paragraph, assuring Bloch that if he caught the spirit of any of the endings I suggested, he should feel free to come up with any last pages he really desired to write. All right, I said to myself as I reread the letter, what I was suggesting might sound like sheer wimpishness to Horace or John, but that was the kind of editor I planned to be. And to hell with them, I muttered savagely, remembering several stories of mine retouched or rewritten and (I had felt) ruined forever.

  But this led me to the question about Robert Bloch and how he might receive the request for rewrite—for a story for which he had already been paid! Would he react as Heinlein might, go into an absolute royal fury—or as Sturgeon would, the triple-distilled rage of the insulted master craftsman? Or even as I might—with a yelp of Gawdelpus, Horace Gold rides again?

  I knew little of Bloch; I regarded him as a fans’ fan, and not much else. This was before the great splash of the 1960s Hitchcock film Psycho and the publication a year or so before of the horror novel on which the film was based. All I had seen or noted of Bloch had been his authorship of a moderately funny little piece in one of the lower-grade science-fiction magazines, either Startling or Thrilling Wonder Stories, “The Seven Ages of Fan.” I had smiled at some of the stuff in the humorous fan protest, and dismissed it almost immediately to concentrate on a plumcake of a fantasy by an author I have always been quite fond of, Jack Vance.

  How would Bloch react to my most carefully written first editorial letter? Would it be as most professionals would to one about a story long ago completed and even long ago sold? Overt righteous anger and utterly flat refusal? That's what most writers I knew then would do.

  Not Robert Bloch. Almost by return mail, exactly four days later, there was a 9 X 12 envelope in the mail for me. It contained a rewrite of “That Hell-Bound Train,” including a brand-new, rewritten ending.

  And there was a scribbled note from Bloch himself, thanking me—oh, for the love of God and good literature!—actually thanking me for the five endings I had suggested and explaining in a long, almost undecipherable scrawl why he had chosen one and expanded gratefully upon that one.

  Expanded! He had even found a way to do a reprise of the lyrical passage I had particularly loved in the early part of the story: That was the train the drunks and the sinners rode—the gambling men and the grifters, the big-time spenders, the skirt-chasers, and all the jolly crew.

  I bore it off in triumph to Bob Mills, who read it rapidly and said “Okay. I think it's adequately publishable now,” and turned back right away to the publishing schedule he had spread out on his desk.

  But he sounded a lot happier, a year or so later, and wrote at much greater length in the letter he sent me after I had quit, announcing that the story was being awarded a Hugo as the Best Short Story of 1959.

  * * * *

  That Hell-Bound Train by Robert Bloch

  When Martin was a little boy, his daddy was a Railroad Man. Daddy never rode the high iron, but he walked the tracks for the CB&Q, and he was proud of his job. And every night when he got drunk, he sang this old song about That Hell-Bound Train.

  Martin didn't quite remember any of the words, but he couldn't forget the way his Daddy sang them out. And when Daddy made the mistake of getting drunk in the afternoon and got squeezed between a Pennsy tank-car and an AT&SF gondola, Martin sort of wondered why the Brotherhood didn't sing the song at his funeral.

  After that, things didn't go so good for Martin, but somehow he always recalled Daddy's song. When Mom up and ran off with a traveling salesman from Keokuk (Daddy must have turned over in his grave, knowing she'd done such a thing, and with a passenger, too!) Martin hummed the tune to himself every night in the Orphan Home. And after Martin himself ran away, he used to whistle the song softly at night in the jungles, after the other bindlestiffs were asleep.

  Martin was on the road for four-five years before he realized he wasn't getting anyplace. Of course he'd tried his hand at a lot of things—picking fruit in Oregon, washing dishes in a Montana hash-house, stealing hubcaps in Denver and tires in Oklahoma City—but by the time he'd put in six months on the chain gang down in Alabama he knew he had no future drifting around this way on his own.

  So he tried to get on the railroad like his daddy had and they told him that times were bad. But Martin couldn't keep away from the railroads. Wherever he traveled, he rode the rods; he'd rather hop a freight heading north in sub-zero weather than lift his thumb to hitch a ride with a Cadillac headed for Florida. Whenever he managed to get hold of a can of Sterno, he'd sit there under a nice warm culvert, think about the old days, and often as not he'd hum the song about That Hell-Bound Train. That was the train the drunks and the sinners rode—the gambling men and the grifters, the big-time spenders, the skirt-chasers, and all the jolly crew. It would be really fine to take a trip in such good company, but Martin didn't like to think of what happened when that train finally pulled into the Depot Way Down Yonder. He didn't figure on spending eternity stoking boilers in Hell, without even a Company Union to protect him. Still, it would be a lovely ride. If there was such a thing as a Hell-Bound Train. Which, of course, there wasn't.

  At least Martin didn't think there was, until that evening when he found himself walking the tracks heading south, just outside of Appleton Junction. The night was cold and dark, the way November nights are in the Fox River Valley, and he knew he'd have to work his way down to New Orleans for the winter, or maybe even Texas. Somehow he didn't much feel like going, even though he'd heard tell that a lot of those Texas automobiles had solid gold hub-caps.

  No sir, he just wasn't cut out for petty larceny. It was worse than a sin—it was unprofitable, too. Bad enough to do the Devil's work, but then to get such miserable pay on top of it! Maybe he'd better let the Salvation Army convert him.

  Martin trudged along humming Daddy's song, waiting for a rattler to pull out of the Junction behind him. He'd have to catch it—there was nothing else for him to do.

  But the first train to come along came from the other direction, roaring toward him along the track from the south.

  Martin peered ahead, but his eyes couldn't match his ears, and so far all he could recognize was the sound. It was a train, though; he felt the steel shudder and sing beneath his feet.

  And yet, how could it be? The next station south was Neenah-Menasha, and there was nothing due out of there for hours.

  The clouds were thick overhead, and the field mists rolled like a cold fog in a November midnight. Even so, Martin should have been able to see the headlight as the train rushed on. But there was only the whistle, screaming out of the black throat of the night. Martin could recognize the equipment of just about any locomotive ever built, but he'd never heard a whistle that sounded like this one. It wasn't signaling; it was screaming like a lost soul.

  He stepped to one side, for the train was almost on top of him now. And suddenly there it was, looming along the tracks and grinding to a stop in less time than he'd believed possible. The wheels hadn't been oiled, because they screamed too, screamed like the damned. But the train slid to a halt and the screams died away into a series of low, groaning sounds, and Martin looked up and saw that this was a passenger train. It was big and black, without a single light shining in the engine cab or any of the long string of cars; Martin couldn't read any lettering on the sides, but he was pretty sure this train didn't belong on the Northwestern Road.

  He was even more sure when he saw the man clamber down out of the forward car. There was something wrong about the way he walked, as though one of his feet dragged, and about the lantern he carried. The lantern was dark, and the man held it up to his mouth and blew, and instantly
it glowed redly. You don't have to be a member of the Railway Brotherhood to know that this is a mighty peculiar way of lighting a lantern.

  As the figure approached, Martin recognized the conductor's cap perched on his head, and this made him feel a little better for a moment—until he noticed that it was worn a bit too high, as though there might be something sticking up on the forehead underneath it.

  Still, Martin knew his manners, and when the man smiled at him, he said, “Good evening, Mr. Conductor."

  "Good evening, Martin.”

  "How did you know my name?”

  The man shrugged. “How did you know I was the Conductor?”

  "You are, aren't you?”

  "To you, yes. Although other people, in other walks of life, may recognize me in different roles. For instance, you ought to see what I look like to the folks out in Hollywood.” The man grinned. “I travel a great deal,” he explained.

  "What brings you here?” Martin asked.

  "Why, you ought to know the answer to that, Martin. I came because you needed me. Tonight, I suddenly realized you were backsliding. Thinking of joining the Salvation Army, weren't you?”

  "Well—” Martin hesitated.

  "Don't be ashamed. To err is human, as somebody-or-other-once said. Reader's Digest, wasn't it? Never mind. The point is, I felt you needed me. So I switched over and came your way."

  "What for?"

  "Why, to offer you a ride, of course. Isn't it better to travel comfortably by train than to march along the cold streets behind a Salvation Army band? Hard on the feet, they tell me, and even harder on the eardrums."

  "I'm not sure I'd care to ride your train, sir,” Martin said. “Considering where I'm likely to end up."

  "Ah, yes. The old argument.” The Conductor sighed. “I suppose you'd prefer some sort of bargain, is that it?"