He remembered his dingy little apartment, his dilapidated typewriter,
his collection of rejection slips, his nagging, flat-chested
wife--Suddenly he looked at Thejah Doris standing beside him with
heaving breast, anxiously watching the relentless approach of the Tarks.
Why a factual account indeed!
He concentrated. When he had the plot firmly fixed in his mind he
sat down at the table to write. A momentary crises arose. There was
no paper, no pen, not even a pencil. Then he remembered what Thejah
Doris had said about the wandering bards, and he began searching for a
drawer. Even Martian poets needed something to write on. Presently he
found one and pulled it out. Sure enough, it contained several sheets
of parchment-like paper, a long quill pen and a small vial of black
fluid.
The thunder of padded toat hooves was growing louder by the minute.
"Oh, my chieftain, what are we going to do!" Thejah Doris cried again.
"We're going to swap serials," Thon-Smith said, and began to write.
* * * * *
It was a fine bright morning. Harold Worthington Smith awoke late and
lay for a while watching the robins flitting among the branches of
the box elder outside his bedroom window. Then he got up and slipped
leisurely into his lounging robe. Yawning, he stepped across the hall
to his study. Below him in the kitchen his wife was humming happily,
and he could smell coffee perking, wheatcakes frying and sausage
sizzling.
He entered his study and walked over to the desk. He sat down. There
were three long thin letters lying beside his solid gold typewriter
where his wife had placed them. He opened them nonchalantly. The
first one was from _The Edgar Rice Burroughs Reader_ and contained a
check for $750.00, the second was from _Dead-Sea Bottom Stories_ and
contained a check for $2500.00, and the third was from _Red Planet
Stories_ and contained a check for $5000.00.