“Hello, Mr. Lingley,” said Julian in an amiable tone.
Lingley’s complexion, which up to that moment had been florid, turned the color of an eggshell, and his tendentious manner went the way of the morning dew. He did not speak. Instead he reached across the desk and picked up the paper I was meant to sign. He folded it in thirds and tore it in two pieces. Then he pursed his lips in a sickly imitation of a smile. “I’m delighted—no—honored—to meet you, Captain Comstock. Unfortunately an urgent appointment calls me away—I cannot linger.” He turned to Hungerford. “I think our business is finished for today, John,” he said, and left the room in such a hurry that I was surprised the breeze didn’t pull the door shut after him.
Mr. Hungerford had yet to close his slackened jaw.
“And I recognize Theodore Dornwood,” Julian said, “our regiment’s civilian scribe. I’ve read some of your work, Mr. Dornwood. Or at least the work that was published under your name.”
“Yes!” Dornwood said in a strangled voice, which was not helpful. “No!”
“Shut up, Theo,” Mr. Hungerford said. “Captain Comstock, do you have a contribution to make to this discussion?”
“Not at all. It was only that my friend Adam seems to be having a hard time making himself understood.”
“I think we’ve overcome that difficulty,” Hungerford said. “As a responsible publisher I mean to correct any mistake that finds its way into print. Naturally I’m astonished to discover that Mr. Dornwood borrowed another man’s work without attribution. That error will be corrected.”
“Corrected in what way?” Julian inquired, before Dornwood could stammer out some version of the same question.
“We’ll print a notice in tomorrow’s Spark.”
“A notice! Excellent,” said Julian. “Still, there’s the matter of the thousands of pamphlets that have already been distributed under Mr. Dornwood’s name. If some profit or royalty has been paid to Mr. Dornwood by mistake—”
“Sir, there’s no problem in that department. I’ll have our accountants calculate the full amount and pay it to you directly.”
“To Mr. Hazzard, you mean.”
“I mean, of course, to Mr. Hazzard.”
“Well, that shows a Christian spirit,” said Julian. “Doesn’t it, Adam?”
“It’s almost contrite,” I said, not a little astonished myself.
“But it seems to me,” Julian went on, “though I’m no expert on the publishing business, you might be missing an opportunity, Mr. Hungerford, and a lucrative one, at that.”
“Please explain,” Hungerford said warily, while Dornwood cringed in his chair like a spanked child.
“We’ve established that Adam was the true author of The Adventures of Captain Commongold. Was it well-written, do you think?”
“The public has taken to it in a big way. We’ve gone into a third printing. That makes it well-written, by my definition. You say it was all your work, Mr. Hazzard?”
“All but the punctuation,” I said, glaring at Dornwood.
“Does that suggest anything to you, as a publisher?” Julian asked. “Adam is too modest to mention it, but he’s written more than just these matter-of-fact Adventures. He has a novel in progress. Your press prints novels as well as newspapers, doesn’t it, Mr. Hungerford?”
“We have a modest line of bound thrillers.”
Julian asked me if my novel could be considered “thrilling.”
“It has pirates in it,” I said.
“There you are, then! Adam is a proven best-seller, and he’s writing a book with pirates and other exciting persons in it—and here he is standing in your office!”
“I’ll have a contract drawn up,” Hungerford murmured.
“Mr. Hungerford is a canny businessman, Adam. He wants to publish your novel. Will the terms be generous, Mr. Hungerford?”
Hungerford quoted a colossal number, which he said was his standard rate for first-time novelists. I was quite taken aback, and probably turned as white in the face as Lawyer Lingley had when he recognized the President’s nephew. I could not speak. My toes and fingers were numb.
“Good,” Julian said. “But is Adam really a first-time novelist?—given the success of his previous work, I mean.”
Hungerford nodded woodenly and announced a number twice as cosmic. I might have fainted, if I had not had the desk to lean on.
“Is the number acceptable, Adam?”
I allowed that it was.
“As for Mr. Dornwood—” Julian began.
“He’ll be fired immediately,” Hungerford said.
“Please don’t do that! I’m sure Adam doesn’t want to punish Mr. Dornwood any further, now that the error had been corrected.”
“I guess that’s right,” I managed to say. “I won’t hold a grudge against any man. You can keep your job, Dornwood, for all of me. Although—”
Dornwood gave me a pleading look. He was no longer the smug Manhattanite. He might have been some condemned slave kneeling before a Pharaoh for clemency. It was an unusual sensation to hold another man’s fate in my hands. I could ask for his apology, I supposed. I supposed I could ask for his head, too, and Hungerford would have it delivered it to me on a china plate. But I’m not a vindictive person.
“I want your typewriter,” I said.
They say the typewriter was invented in 1870 or thereabouts. It has had many incarnations in the centuries since. It went out of production even before the End of Oil, and was re-introduced only recently. Modern typewriters are made by hand, by craftsmen who have studied innumerable rusty remains rescued from various Tips. They are expensive to buy, and costly to maintain. They’re also very heavy. Julian and I took turns carrying Dornwood’s typewriter down the street to a taxi stand.
“Say something,” Julian suggested, “or I’ll think you’ve lost your tongue.”
“I’m out of words entirely.”
“Unfortunate condition for a writer to be in.”
That brought me up short. Was I a writer, in the professional sense? I guessed I was. Hungerford and his lawyer had meant for me to sign a quit-claim this afternoon. Instead I had signed a contract to write a novel, and inked my name on a receipt for Theodore Dornwood’s writing machine. Probably those two items, the contract and the typewriter, were acceptable bona fides in the author’s trade.
I said to Julian, “I didn’t know you could do that.”
“Do what?”
“What you did at the Spark. Command obedience. Hungerford practically bowed to you.”
As long as I had known Julian I had known he was an Aristo. And I knew Aristos were meant to be respected and obeyed. But we had ignored that dictum as boys, and been forced to ignore it as soldiers, and agreed to ignore it as friends, and it was seldom topmost in my mind. I reminded myself that to a stranger, even a highly-placed businessman such as Mr. Hungerford, Julian was no more or less than a member of the family of the reigning President. No doubt Hungerford imagined that a word from Julian to his uncle would cause the Spark to be shut down and placed under a permanent Dominion sanction. That was the kind of power Deklan Conqueror was able to exercise.
By implication—at least in the mind of Hungerford and his lawyer—it was Julian’s power as well.
“It’s a handy thing,” Julian said as we maneuvered first the typewriter and then ourselves into an available cab, “to invoke the family name now and then.”
“It must be daunting to possess such power, and to wield it.”
“The power is all Deklan’s, I’m afraid.”
“Perhaps not all. You borrowed a little of it just now.”
“I don’t want it. The thought of it sickens me. The power to do good—that’s the power I’d like to wield,” said Julian.
“Anyone can do good in the world, Julian, to some degree.” Or so my mother had often told me, and the Dominion Reader for Young Persons concurred.