Pete threw the letter on the kitchen table. "He doesn't believe me," he said bitterly.
"Would you, on someone's word alone?" Katherine said. "I'm still not sure I do, and I've seen your outline for myself."
"I suppose you're right," Peter admitted. "I guess I just think of Jim McGregor as slightly more than human. Well, by Christ, I can show him."
He turned on his heel and hurried into the study. He ran a fresh piece of paper into the typewriter. "Dear Jim," he wrote, "I realize I should have sent the enclosed with my first letter to you. I trust you will take my word that it was drafted some months ago. If you find it interesting, let me know. Yours, Pete Lundquist."
He looked at the letter for a moment, added a P.S.: "I don't know when I would have gotten around to writing from this skeleton. I have several ideas ahead of it, and one or two of them look like novels. But it would have happened eventually, I'm sure. You tell me what that story would have looked like."
This envelope was a lot fatter than the last one, but he sent it airmail too.
Three days later the telephone rang at 6:30 a.m. The unexpected noise made Pete cut himself shaving. Holding a piece of tissue to his chin, he got to the phone a split second ahead of his wife. Their eyes met in shared alarm; calls at odd hours generally spelled trouble.
"Mr. Peter Lundquist, please," the operator said.
"Speaking."
The woman's next words were a blessed relief: "I have a long-distance person-to-person call from a James McGregor in New York City."
"Yes, go ahead," Pete said, and mouthed to Katherine, "It's McGregor."
"Ho-ho! The game's afoot, Watson."
He waved her to silence. The editor's voice came on the line, raspy not just with distance but also from too many cigarettes: "That you, Pete?"
"I'm here." He had to stop himself from adding, "sir." So did most people who talked with McGregor.
"I'm only going to ask you once, and I expect a straight answer: Are you pulling my leg?"
Pete enjoyed a certain reputation as a practical joker, which at the moment he could have done without. "No," he said.
"All right, then. In a way, I was hoping you were. As is, how do you feel about meeting me in Los Angeles next week?"
"Why Los Angeles?" Pete was not at his best early in the morning, and the three-hour time difference from New York only made McGregor's advantage worse.
The Astonishing editor's sharp sniff showed he was holding on to his patience with both hands. "Because this Mark Gordian writes out of a post-office box in a town called Gardena. It took some work with a big atlas to find the place, but it's about fifteen miles south of L.A. I'd like to have a word with Gordian?don't you think you would too?"
Pete gulped. "Put like that, I suppose I would. Uh, Jim… what do you think is going on?"
"I don't know." McGregor sounded angry at the admission. "The first thing that occurs to me is telepathy, and I don't much fancy that for an explanation either."
"Why not? If anyone's been urging more basic research in extrasensory perception lately, it's you."
"Research, yes. But if Gordian picked this out of your brain, he stands to everyone else on Earth like the Empire State Building to a girl's dollhouse. I edit science fiction; I never planned on living it."
That Pete understood down to the ground. He had majored in engineering at college, and drew a very firm line between what was real and what wasn't. He shivered as the implications began to sink in. "If Gordian's a telepath, how do we know he's not reading our minds right now?"
"We don't," McGregor said. "And I have another question for you: If Gordian's a telepath, why is he reading your mind instead of Einstein's or Eisenhower's or Albert Schweitzer's? You'll be driving down to L.A., won't you?"
"I guess so," Pete said absently. He was still chewing on the more important query; in conversation as in his letters, McGregor had a gift for going right to the heart of an issue.
"Good. Pick me up at the airport, then. I'll be getting in at about a quarter past five on Friday evening?it's Trans World flight 107. If you've come up with any good answers, give 'em to me then."
"All right," Pete said. He was talking to a dead line.
Pete left with first light Thursday morning. By starting early, he got into Los Angeles before dark. The ride south along U.S. 101 was both hot and dull. Radio stations faded in and out as he drove. A little above Santa Barbara, the road came down to the Pacific. It was pretty enough to tempt Pete to stay on the Coast Highway the rest of the way, but he went back to 101 when it jogged inland again below Ventura and ran east toward the San Fernando Valley.
Sepulveda Boulevard led him south through the Sepulveda Pass and into the more built-up part of Los Angeles. None of the famous freeways was anywhere close; the nearest one, the Harbor, stopped just south of downtown, though his map showed its projected route all the way out to San Pedro.
He checked into a motel in a suburban district called Westchester, used the change from his ten-spot to buy a sandwich and Coke at the coffee shop down the street, then came back, took a shower, and went to sleep.
The six-lane tunnel that took Sepulveda under the airport's runways had only been open for a couple of months. Pete could see how much easier it made access to the facility. It had also allowed the runways to be lengthened.
The big silver DC-6 rolled to a stop about half an hour late. The enormous propellors spun themselves to silence. The people who filed off the plane looked weary, and no wonder; counting a forty-five-minute layover in St. Louis, they had been traveling for ten hours.
"Jim!" Pete called, striding forward to shake the editor's hand. As always, he was disappointed that James McGregor looked nothing like Kimball Kinnison. McGregor was in his early forties, of average height and build. His sandy crewcut was going gray above his ears, and his hair thinned at the temples. When younger, his face had been beaky; now craggy was a better word. Only his eyes seemed lensman-keen, and even then one had to look sharply, for he wore heavy, dark-framed glasses.
"Good to see you," McGregor said. They had met several times at conventions and other gatherings, and Pete had dropped into the Astonishing office once while in New York on other business. They argued for two hours. Pete lost, over and over, but the experience gave him notions for three new stories, all of which McGregor bought.
"Let's get my luggage," the editor said, "and some food, and a drink, and then back to wherever you're staying. I have some things to show you, now."
"Okay," Pete said, but disappointedly, "if you don't want to go down to Gardena first."
"What for? All we have to go on is a post-office box number, and the post office is closed."
Pete shook his head in chagrin at not having thought of that, but McGregor was already going on: "Unless, of course, he has a phone number in the local book. Worth a try, don't you think?" They were passing a bank of telephones on the way to the baggage claim area; McGregor found a chained phone book for the right part of town, pawed through its dog-eared pages. "Gordan… Gorden… Gordillo?so much for that. Well, we're no worse off."
"No," Pete said, still slightly stunned. The Astonishing editor could no more help throwing off ideas than a fissioning plutonium atom could help spitting neutrons, and the results were about as explosive.