The landlady smiled weakly. “Very well,” she said, holding out the key. “I’ll take the week’s rent in advance, if you don’t mind.”
When she left, de Laurier carefully locked the door, and then pulled up a chair in front of the window.
Yes, he thought. A fine view. A perfect view. Of course, the stands are on the other side, so they’ll probably have the platform facing that way. But that shouldn’t pose any problems. He’s a big man, a stocky man, probably quite distinctive even from behind. And those arc lights will be a big help.
Nodding in satisfaction, he rose and returned the chair to its normal place. Then he sat down to oil his guns.
It was quite cold out, but the stadium was packed nonetheless. The grandstands were crammed with people, and an overflow crowd had been permitted to drift out onto the field and squat in the grass at the foot of the platform.
The platform itself, draped in red, white, and blue, had been erected on the 50-yard line. American flags flew from staffs at both ends of the platform, with the speaker’s podium situated between them. Two harsh white spotlights converged on the rostrum, adding to the garish brilliance of the stadium’s own arc lights. The microphones had been carefully hooked up to the stadium’s loudspeaker system, and tested over and over again.
It was lucky that they were working, for the roar was deafening when the Prophet stepped up to the podium, and subsided only when he began to speak. And then the hush was sudden and complete, and the call of the Prophet rang out unchallenged through the night.
Time had not dimmed the fire that burned in the soul of the Prophet, and his words were white-hot with his anger and his conviction. They came loud and defiant from the platform, and echoed back and forth through the grandstands. They carried far in the clear, cold night air.
They carried to a dingy cold-water flat where Maxim de Laurier sat alone in the darkness, staring out his window. Leaning against his chair was a high-caliber rifle, well oiled and equipped with a telescopic sight.
On the platform, the Prophet preached the faith to the patriots and to the frightened. He spoke of Americanism, and his whiplike words flailed the Communists, the anarchists, and the long-haired terrorists who were haunting the streets of the nation.
Ah yes, thought de Laurier. I can hear the echoes. Oh, how I can hear the echoes. There was another who attacked the Communists and the anarchists. There was another who said he would save his nation from their clutches.
“—and Ah say to you good folks of Ohio that when Ah’m in charge, the streets of this country are going to be safe to walk on. Ah’m going to untie the hands of our policemen, and see that they enforce the laws and teach these criminals and terrorists a few lessons.”
A few lessons, thought de Laurier. Yes, yes. It fits, it fits. The police and the army teaching lessons. And such effective teachers. With clubs and guns as study aids. Oh, Mister Beauregard, how well it all fits.
“—and Ah say that when our boys, our fine boys from Mississippi and Ohio and everywhere else, are fighting and dying for our flag overseas, that we’ve got to give them all the support we can here at home. And that includes busting the heads of a few of these traitors who defile the flag and call for an enemy victory and obstruct the progress of the war. Ah say that it’s time to let ’em know how a patriotic, red-blooded American takes care of treason!”
Treason, thought de Laurier. Yes, treason was what he called it too, that other one so long ago. He said he would get rid of the traitors in the government, the traitors who had caused the nation’s defeat and humiliation.
De Laurier slid the chair back slowly. He dropped to one knee, and lifted the rifle to his shoulder.
“—Ah’m no racist, but Ah say that these people oughta—”
De Laurier’s face was chalk white, and the gun was unsteady in his hands. “So sick,” he whispered hoarsely to himself, “so very, very sick. But do I have the right? If he is what they want, can I have the right, alone, to overrule them in the name of sanity?”
He was trembling badly now, and his body was cold and wet with his sweat, despite the chilling wind from outside.
The Prophet’s words rang all around him, but he heard them no longer. His mind flashed back, to the visions of another Prophet, and the promised land to which he led his people. He remembered the echo of great armies on the march. He remembered the shriek of the rockets and the bombers in the night. He remembered the terror of the knock on the door. He remembered the charnel smell of the battlefield.
He remembered the gas chambers prepared for the inferior race.
And he wondered, and he listened, and his hands grew steady.
“If he had died early,” said Maximilian de Laurier alone to himself in the darkness, “how would they have known what horror they had averted?”
He centered the crosshairs on the back of the Prophet’s head, and his finger tightened on the trigger.
And the gun spoke death.
Norvel Arlington Beauregard, his fist shaking in the air, jerked suddenly and pitched forward from the platform into the crowd below. And then the screaming started, while the Secret Service men swore and rushed towards the fallen Prophet.
By the time they reached him, Maximilian de Laurier was turning the ignition key in his car and heading for the turnpike.
The news of the Prophet’s death rocked a nation, and the wail went up from all parts of the land.
“They killed him,” they said. “Those damn Commies knew that he was the man who could lick them, so they killed him.”
Or, sometimes, they said, “It was the niggers, the damn niggers. They knew that Beauregard was going to keep them in their places, so they killed him.”
Or, sometimes, “It was those demonstrators. Goddam traitors. Beau had ’em pegged for what they were, a bunch of anarchists and terrorists. So they killed him, the filthy scum.”
Crosses burned across the land that night, and all the polls turned sharply upward. The Prophet had become a Martyr.
And, three weeks later, Beauregard’s vice-presidential candidate announced on a nationwide television address that he was carrying on. “Our cause is not dead,” he said. “I promise to fight on for Beau and all that he stood for. And we will fight to victory!”
And all the people cheered and cheered.
A few hundred miles away, Maxim de Laurier sat in a hotel room and watched, his face a milk-white mask. “No,” he whispered, choking on the words. “Not this. This wasn’t supposed to happen. It’s wrong, all wrong.”
And he buried his head in his hands, and sobbed, “My God, my God, what have I done?” And then he was still and silent for a long time. When he rose at last his face was still pale and twisted, but a single dying ember burned still in the ashes of his eyes. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe I can still—”
And he sat down to oil his gun.
TWO
THE FILTHY PRO
You never forget the first time you do it for money.
I became a filthy pro in 1970, during the summer between my senior and graduate years at Northwestern University. The story that turned the trick for me was “The Hero,” which I’d originally written for creative writing my junior year, and had been trying to sell ever since. Playboy had seen it first, and returned it with a form rejection slip. Analog sent it back with a pithy letter of rejection from John W. Campbell, Jr., the first, last, and only time I got a personal response from that legendary editor. After that “The Hero” went to Fred Pohl at Galaxy …
… where it vanished.
It was a year before I realized that Pohl was no longer the editor at Galaxy, that the magazine had changed both publisher and address. When I did, I retyped the story from my carbon—yes, I had finally started to use the stuff, hurrah—and sent it out to Galaxy’s new editor, Ejler Jakobsson, at Galaxy’s new address …
… where it vanished again!
Meanwhile, I had celebrated my graduation from Northwestern, though I still had a year of post-g
raduate study looming ahead of me. Medill offered a five-year program in journalism; at the end of the fourth year you received a Bachelor’s degree, but you were encouraged to return for the fifth year, which included a quarter’s internship doing political reporting in Washington, D.C. At the end of the fifth year, you received a Master’s.
After graduation I returned to Bayonne, and my summer job as a sportswriter/public relations man for the Department of Parks and Recreation. The city sponsored several summer baseball leagues, and my job was to write up the games for the local papers, the Bayonne Times and Jersey Journal. There were half a dozen leagues, for different age groups, with several games going on every day at different fields around the city, so there was no way for me to actually cover the action. Instead I spent my days in the office, and after every game the umps would bring me a box score. I’d use those as the basis for my stories. So I spent four summers working as a baseball writer, and never saw a game.
By that August, “The Hero” had been at Galaxy for a year. I decided, instead of writing a query letter, to phone the magazine’s offices in New York City and inquire about my lost story. The woman who answered was brusque and unfriendly at first, and when I mumbled something about inquiring after a manuscript that had been there for a long time, she told me Galaxy could not possibly keep track of all the stories it rejected. I might have given up right there, but somehow I managed to blurt out the title of the story.
There was a pregnant pause. “Wait a minute,” the woman said. “We bought that story.” (Years later, I discovered that the woman I was speaking to was Judy-Lynn Benjamin, later Judy-Lynn del Rey, who went on to found the Del Rey imprint for Ballatine Books). The story had been purchased months ago, she told me, but somehow the manuscript and purchase order had fallen behind a filing cabinet, and had only recently turned up again. (In some alternate universe, no one ever looked behind those files, and I’m a journalist today.)
I hung up the phone with a dazed look on my face, before heading off to my summer job. I must have floated, since I was far too high for my feet to touch the ground. Afterward, when neither contract nor check appeared, I began to wonder if the woman on the phone had misremembered. Perhaps there was some other story called “The Hero.” I developed a paranoid fear that Galaxy might go out of business before publishing my story, a fear that was inflamed when summer ended and I headed back to Chicago, still without a check.
It turned out that Galaxy had mailed the check and contract to the North Shore Hotel, the dorm I had vacated on graduating Northwestern that June. By the time it was finally forwarded to my summer address, I was back at school, but in a different dorm.
There was a check, though, and I did get my hands on it at last. It proved to be for $94, not an inconsiderable sum of money in 1970. “The Hero” appeared in the February 1971 issue of Galaxy, in the winter of my graduate year at Medill. Since I did not own a car, I made one of my friends drive me around to half the newsstands on the north shore, so I could buy up all the copies I could find.
Meanwhile, my college years were winding down. I breezed through the first two quarters of my graduate year in Evanston, then packed my bags for Washington and my internship on Capitol Hill. In a few months my real life would begin. I had been doing interviews and sending out job applications, and was looking forward to sorting through all the offers and deciding which of them I’d take. After all, I had graduated magna cum laude from the finest journalism school in the country, and would soon have a Master’s degree and a prestigious internership under my belt as well. I had lost a lot of weight my graduate year and bought new clothes to suit, so I arrived in D.C. the very picture of a hippie journalist, with my shoulder-length hair, bell bottoms, aviator glasses, and double-breasted pin-striped mustard-yellow sports jacket.
My internship was demanding, but exciting. The nation was in turmoil in the spring of 1971, and I was at the center of it all, walking the corridors of power, reporting on congressmen and senators, sitting in the Senate press gallery with real reporters. The Medill News Service had client newspapers all over the country, so a number of my stories actually saw print. The program was run by Neil McNeil, a hardnosed political reporter of the green-eyeshade school who would sit in his cubicle reading your copy, and roar your name whenever he came on something he didn’t like. My own name was roared frequently. “Too cute,” McNeil would scrawl atop my stories, and I’d have to rewrite them and take out everything but the facts before he’d pass them on. I hated it, but I learned a lot.
It was also in Washington that I attended my first actual science fiction convention, almost seven years after that first comicon. When I walked into the Sheraton Park Hotel in my burgundy bell bottoms and double-breasted pin-striped mustard-yellow sports jacket, the fellow behind the registration table was this bone-thin hippie writer, with a scraggy beard and long orange hair. He recognized my name [no one forgets the R.R.] and told me that he was Galaxy’s slush reader, the very fellow who’d fished “The Hero” out of the slush pile and pushed it on Ejler Jakobsson. So I suppose Gardner Dozois made me a pro and a fan both (though I have since wondered whether he was actually working on registration, or whether he just saw the table unattended and realized that if he sat there people would hand him money. Reading slush for Galaxy didn’t pay much, after all).
By that time I had a second sale under my belt. Just a few weeks before, Ted White, the new editor at Amazing and Fantastic, had informed me that he was buying “The Exit to San Breta,” a futuristic fantasy that I’d written during the spring break of my senior year of college. (Yes, sad to say, when all my friends were down in Florida drinking beer with bikini-clad coeds on the beaches of Ft. Lauderdale, I was back in Bayonne, writing.) The story of my second sale was eerily similar to that of my first. Relying on the listings in Writer’s Market, I’d sent the story off to Harry Harrison at the address given for Fantastic, never to see it again. Only later did I learn that both the editor and address had changed, requiring me to retype the manuscript all over again and, well … I was starting to wonder if having your story lost in the mail was somehow a necessary prerequisite to selling it.
Galaxy had paid me my $94 on acceptance for “The Hero,” but Fantastic paid on publication, so I would not actually see the money for “The Exit to San Breta” until October. And when the check did come, it was only for $50. A sale is a sale, however, and your second time is almost as exciting as your first, in writing as in sex. One sale might be a fluke, but two sales to two different editors suggested that maybe I had some talent after all.
“The Exit to San Breta” was set in the Southwest, where I live at present, but at the time I wrote it I had never been west of Chicago. The story is all about driving and takes place entirely on highways, but at the time I wrote it I had never been behind the wheel of an automobile. (Our family never owned a car.) Despite its futuristic setting, “Exit” is a fantasy, which is why it appeared in Fantastic and not Amazing, and why I had not even bothered to send it to Analog or Galaxy. Inspired by example of Fritz Leiber’s “Smoke Ghost,” I wanted to take the ghost out of his mouldering old Victorian mansion and put him where a proper twentieth century ghost belonged … in a car.
Though the most horrible thing that happens in it is an auto accident, “The Exit to San Breta” might even be classified as a horror story. If so, my first two sales prefigured my entire career to come, by including all three of the genres I would write in.
Gardner Dozois was not the only writer at that Disclave. I met Joe Haldeman and his brother Jack as well, and George Alec Effinger (still called Piglet at that time), Ted White, Bob Toomey. All of them were talking about stories they were writing, stories they had written, stories that they meant to write. Terry Carr was the Guest of Honor; a fine writer himself, Carr was also the editor of Ace Specials and the original anthology Universe, and went out of his way to be friendly and helpful to all the young writers swarming about him, including me. No convention ever had a warmer or more
accessible guest.
I left Disclave resolved to attend more science fiction conventions … and to sell more stories. Before I could do that, of course, I would need to write more stories. Talking with Gardner and Piglet and the Haldemans had made me realize how little I had actually produced, compared to any of them. If I was serious about wanting to be a writer, I would need to finish more stories.
Of course, that was the summer when my real life was supposed to begin. I would soon be moving somewhere, working at my first real job, living in an apartment of my own. For months I had been dreaming of paychecks, cars, and girlfriends, and wondering where life would take me. Would I have time to write fiction? That was hard to say.
Well, life took me back to my old room in Bayonne. Despite all those interviews, letters, and applications, despite my degree and my internship and magna cum laude, I had no job.
It did look for a while as if I were going to get an offer from a newspaper in Boca Raton, Florida, and another from Women’s Wear Daily, but in the end neither place came through. I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t have worn the double-breasted pin-striped mustard-yellow sports jacket to that follow-up interview. Even Marvel Comics turned me down, as seemingly unimpressed by my Master’s as they were by my old Alley Award.
I did get an offer of sorts from my hometown paper, the Bayonne Times, but it was withdrawn when I asked about salary and benefits. “A beginner should get a job and experience,” the editor scolded me. “That should have been your first consideration.” (I got my revenge. The Bayonne Times ceased publishing that very summer, and both the editor and the guy he hired in place of me found themselves out of work. If I had taken the job, my “experience” would have lasted all of two weeks.)
Far from starting my real life in some exotic new city, with a salary and an apartment of my own, I found myself covering summer baseball for the Bayonne Department of Parks and Recreation once more. As if that were not wound enough, the Department of Parks had some nice salt to rub in. Because of budget cuts, they could only afford to hire me half-time. However, there were just as many games to write up as last summer, so I would be expected to do the same amount of work in half the time for half the pay.
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