Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II by William Tenn Read Free Book Online

"but keep it near you and look at it from time to time, and ask yourself, 'How could I, a gifted professional writer, come to write such a piece of shit?'"
    Well. I had to recover something for all that work, so I sent it around to the magazines with which I regularly dealt, from Galaxy on down, four-cents-a-word markets down to a half cent. They all bounced it, with comments ranging from the regretful to the pitying.
    I acquired a new agent, Henry Morrison. I showed him—and apologized for showing it to him—"Bernie the Faust." To my astonishment—he liked it. He liked it so much, he sent it to Playboy . To my further astonishment, A.C. Spectorsky, the editorial director of Playboy , also liked it.
    "The only problem," Henry Morrison told me over the phone, "is that Spec feels, as it stands, it's still too long for Playboy . If you can cut it down to, say, eighty-five hundred or nine thousand words, he'll definitely buy it."
    "I can't do it, Henry," I said. "There's no fat at all left in the piece. All there is is the humor basic to the story itself. No fat—just bone."
    "Good enough. I wouldn't ask you to damage the story. But, as your agent, I have to tell you that they're thinking of using it as what they call a front-of-the-book piece. That would mean five thousand dollars. I do have to tell you that."
    Then I must tell you who are reading this that the most money I had ever received up to then for a story was seven hundred dollars—and that was for something twenty-three thousand words long. Five thousand dollars! And remember, please, we are talking about the year 1962... I mean, five thousand dollars?
    "I don't care," my wife, Fruma, said to me. "With all the rejections, it's still a good story. You cut it up and tear it to pieces, and I swear I'll leave you."
    And she went to bed, I into my study to begin trying to cut. A word here, a sentence there, once in a while a short paragraph. But no block cuts that I could see—none of the necessary big deletions. I came to the end of the story with a hundred and ten words gone, and began again. A couple of words here, maybe a sentence or two there, a longish speech by a not-too-important character. Maybe the character himself? The talkative notarizing druggist shrank to three short appearances.
    When Fruma looked in on me next morning, the story was no longer twelve thousand, five hundred words long. Nor was it nine thousand words or eight thousand words long. It was a shade over five thousand, five hundred words.
    "Where did it all go to?" Fruma asked after reading. "All the good stuff is still there. It's even better now."
    I agreed. I pretty much still agree.
    Playboy bought it for five thousand dollars. It was reprinted in several best-of-the-year anthologies in the U.S. and in Britain. I'm still proud of my double- luftmensch story.
    The version printed here has had a couple of small cuts added—about five or six hundred words worth.
    Written 1960——Published 1963

BETELGEUSE BRIDGE
    You tell them, Alvarez, old boy; you know how to talk to them. This isn't my kind of Public Relations. All I care about is that they get the pitch exactly right with all the implications and complications and everything just the way they really are.
    If it hurts, well, let them yell. Just use your words and get it right. Get it all.
    You can start with the day the alien spaceship landed outside Baltimore. Makes you sick to think how we never tumbled, doesn't it, Alvarez? No more than a hop, skip and a jet from the Capitol dome, and we thought it was just a lucky accident.
    Explain why we thought it was so lucky. Explain about the secrecy it made possible, how the farmer who telephoned the news was placed in special and luxurious custody, how a hand-picked cordon of M.P.s paced five square miles off into an emergency military reservation a few hours later, how Congress was called into secret session and the way it was all kept out of the newspapers.
    How and why Trowson, my old