But I can't join them. Theodor Yust offered me an invitation, but I guess I was pretty rude to him. And when, at last, I went back, ready to crawl and apologize, there was a scrawled piece of cardboard over the bronze nameplate; it said: Gone fishing.
I tried to lay it on the line with the Chief. I opened the door of the Plans room, and there he was with Baggott and Wayber, from Mason-Dixon. They were sitting there whittling out model ships, and so intent on what they were doing that they hardly noticed me. After a while the Chief said idly, "Bankrupt yet?" And moments passed, and Wayber finally replied, in an absentminded tone:
"Guess so. Have to file some papers or something." And they went on with their whittling.
So I spoke sharply to them, and the minute they looked up and saw me, it was like the Rockettes: The hands into the pockets, the paper being unwrapped, the gum into the mouth. And naturally I couldn't make any sense with them after that. So what are you going to do?
No! I can't!
Hazel hardly comes in to see me any more, even. I bawled her out for it—what would happen, I demanded, if I suddenly had to answer a letter. But she only smiled dreamily at me. "There hasn't been a letter in a month," she pointed out amiably. "Don't worry, though. If anything comes up, I'll be with you in a flash. This stuff isn't a habit with me, I can stop it any time, you. just say the word and ol' Hazel'll be there . . ."
And she's right because, when you get right down to it, there's the trouble. It isn't a habit.
So how can you break it?
You can stop Cheery-Gum any time. You can stop it this second, or five minutes from now, or tomorrow.
So why worry about it?
It's completely,voluntary, entirely under your control; it won't hurt you, it won't make you sick.
I wish Theodor Yust would come back. Or maybe I'll just cut my throat.
Some Joys under the Star
I once wrote a story called "The Plot to Kill Einstein." Horace Gold changed the title to "Target One" when he bought it, but he did publish it at a noteworthy time: it was on the stands the day that Einstein died. This story, about a comet, was on sale all through the hoo-hoh about Comet Kohoutek, and a dozen of my friends congratulated me, marveling at my prediction of a future event. This is what I call the "broken clock" method of predicting the future, from the old French saying: "Even a broken clock is right twice a day." The hits are noteworthy but, oh, the dozens and scores of misses!
In a few recognizable ways were Albert Novak—the man who stalked Myron Landau—and the Secretary of State alike, but they had this in common: they wanted. They each wanted something very badly and, as it happens, the thing that each wanted was not good by the general consensual standards of your average sensual man.
Let us start with the man who stalked Myron Landau or, more accurately, with Myron Landau himself. Myron also wanted, and what he wanted was his girl friend Ellen, with that masked desperation that characterizes the young man of seventeen who has never yet made out.
On this night of July in New York City the factors against Myron were inexperience, self-doubt, and the obstinacy of Ellen herself, but ranged on his side were powerful allies. Before him was the great welcoming blackness of Central Park, where anything might happen, and spread across the sky was a fine pretext for luring her into the place. So he bought her a strawberry milkshake in Rumpelmeyer's and strolled with her into the park, chatting of astronomy, beauty, and love.
"Are you sure it's all right?" asked Ellen, looking into the sodium-lit fringes of the undergrowth.
"Cripes, yes," said Myron, in the richly amused tone of a Brown belt in karate from one of the finest academies on the upper West Side, although in fact he had never gone into Central Park at night before. But he had thought everything out carefully and was convinced that tonight there was no danger. Or at any rate not enough danger to scare him off the prize. Overhead was the great beautiful comet that everybody was talking about and it was a clear night. There would be lots of people looking at the sky, he reasoned, and in any case where else could he take her? Not his apartment, with Grandma's ear to the living-room door, just itching for an excuse to come in and start hunting for her glasses. Not Ellen's place, not with her mother and sister remorselessly there. "You can't see the comet well from the middle of the street," he said reasonably, putting his arm around her and nodding to a handsome white-haired gentleman who had first nodded benevolently to them. "There's too much light and anyway, honestly, Ellen, we won't go in very far."
"I never saw a comet before," she conceded, allowing herself to be led down the path. In truth, the comet Ujifusa-McGinnis was not all that hard to see. It spread its tail over a quarter of the sky, drowning out Altair, Vega, and the stars around Deneb, hardly paled even by the lights of New York City. Even a thousand miles south, where NASA technicians were working around-the-clock shifts under the floodlights of the Vehicle Assembly Building, trying to get ready the launch of the probe that would plumb Ujifusa-McGinnis's mysteries, it dominated the sky.
Myron looked upward and allowed himself to be distracted for a moment by the spectacle, but quickly caught himself. "Ah," he said, creeping his fingers toward the lower slope of Ellen's breast, "just think, what you see is all gas. Nothing really there at all. And millions of miles away."
"It's beautiful," Ellen said, looking over her shoulder. She had thought she had heard a noise.
She had. The noise was in fact real. The foot of the handsome white-haired gentleman had broken a stick. He had turned off the flagstone path into the shelter of the dwarf evergreens and was now busy pulling a woman's nylon stocking over his white hair and face. He, too, had planned his evening carefully. In his right-hand coat pocket he had the woolen sock with half a pound of BBs knotted into the toe—that was for Myron. In Iris left-hand pocket he had the clasp knife with the carefully honed edge. That was for Ellen, first to make sure she didn't scream, then to make sure she never would. He had not known their names when he loaded his pockets and left his ranch house in Waterbury, Connecticut, to go in for an evening's sport to the city, but he had known there would be somebody.
He, too, looked up at the comet, but with irritation. In his Connecticut back yard, as he had shown it to his daughter, it had looked pretty. Here it was an unqualified nuisance. It made the night brighter than he wanted it although, he thought in all fairness, it was not as bad as a full moon.
It would not be more than five minutes, he calculated, before the boy would lead the girl in among the evergreens. But which way? If only they would choose his side of the path! Otherwise it meant he had to cross the walk. That was a small danger and a large annoyance, because it meant scuttling in an undignified way. Still, the fun was worth the trouble. It always had been worth it.
With the weighted sock now ready in his hand, the handsome white-haired gentleman followed them silently. He could feel the gleeful premonitory stirrings of sexual excitement in his private parts. He was as happy as, in his life, he ever was.
At a time approximately two thousand years earlier, when Jesus was a boy in Nazareth and Caesar Augustus was counting up his statues and his gold, a race of creatures resembling soft-shelled crabs on a planet of a star some two hundred light-years away became belatedly aware of the existence of the Great Wall of China.
Although it alone among the then existing works of Man was quite detectable in their telescopes, it was not surprising they had not noticed it before. It had been completed less than 250 years before, and most of that time had been lost in the creeping traverse of light from Earth to their planet. Also they had many, many planets to observe and not a great deal of time to waste on any one. But they expected more of their minions than that, and 10,000 members of a subject race died in great pain as a warning to the others to be more diligent.