After it was finished, I sat there for a while, debating whether I should hand it in. And thinking it over, I decided that the Barnacle had it coming to him, after the way he’d shot off his mouth.
So I threw it into the basket on the city desk and went back to write the Community Chest story.
The Barnacle never said a thing to me and I didn’t say a thing to him; you could have knocked my eyes off with a stick when the kid brought the papers up from the pressroom, and there was my brownie story spread across the top of page one in an eight-column feature strip.
No one mentioned it to me except Jo Ann, who came along and patted me on the head and said she was proud of me—although God knows why she should have been.
Then the Barnacle sent me out on another one of his wild-goose chases concerning someone who was supposed to be building a homemade atomic pile in his back yard. It turned out that this fellow is an old geezer who, at one time, had built a perpetual motion machine that didn’t work. Once I found that out, I was so disgusted that I didn’t even go back to the office, but went straight home instead.
I rigged up a block and tackle, had some trouble what with no one to help me, but I finally got the boat up on the blocks. Then I drove to a little village at the end of the lake and bought paint not only for the boat, but the cottage as well. I felt pretty good about making such a fine start on all the work I should do that fall.
The next morning when I got to the office, I found the place in an uproar.
The switchboard had been clogged all night and it still looked like a Christmas tree. One of the operators had passed out, and they were trying to bring her to.
The Barnacle had a wild gleam in his eye, and his necktie was all askew.
When he saw me, he took me firmly by the arm and led me to my desk and sat me down. «Now, damn you, get to work!» he yelled and he dumped a bale of notes down in front of me.
«What’s going on?» I asked.
«It’s that brownie deal of yours,» he yelled. «Thousands of people are calling in. All of them have brownies; they’ve been helped by brownies; some of them have even seen brownies.»
«What about the milk?» I asked.
«Milk? What milk?»
«Why, the milk they should set out for them.»
«How do I know?» he said. «Why don’t you call up some of the milk companies and find out?»
That is just what I did—and, so help me Hannah, the milk companies were slowly going crazy. Every driver had come racing back to get extra milk, because most of their customers were ordering an extra quart or so.
They were lined up for blocks outside the stations waiting for new loads and the milk supply was running low.
There weren’t any of us in the newsroom that morning who did anything but write brownie copy. We filled the paper with it—all sorts of stories about how the brownies had been helping people. Except, of course, they hadn’t known it was brownies helping them until they read my story.
They’d just thought that it was good luck.
When the first edition was in, we sat back and sort of caught our breath—although the calls still were coming in—and I swear my typewriter still was hot from the copy I’d turned out.
The papers came up, and each of us took our copy and started to go through it, when we heard a roar from J. H.’s office. A second later, J. H. came out himself, waving a paper in his fist, his face three shades redder than a brand-new fire truck.
He practically galloped to the city desk and he flung the paper down in front of the Barnacle and hit it with his fist. «What do you mean?» he shouted. «Explain yourself. Making us ridiculous!»
«But, J. H., I thought it was a good gag and—»
«Brownies!» J. H. snorted.
«We got all those calls,» said Barnacle Bill. «They still are coming in. And—»
«That’s enough,» J. H. thundered. «You’re fired!»
He swung around from the city desk and looked straight at me. «You’re the one who started it,» he said. «You’re fired, too.»
I got up from my chair and moved over to the city desk. «We’ll be back a little later,» I told J. H., «to collect our severance pay.»
He flinched a little at that, but he didn’t back up any.
The Barnacle picked up an ash tray off his desk and let it fall. It hit the floor and broke. He dusted off his hands. «Come on, Mark,» he said; «I’ll buy you a drink.»
We went over to the corner. Joe brought us a bottle and a couple of glasses, and we settled down to business.
Pretty soon some of the other boys started dropping in. They’d have a drink or two with us and then go back to work. It was their way of showing us they were sorry the way things had turned out. They didn’t say anything, but they kept dropping in. There never was a time during the entire afternoon when there wasn’t someone drinking with us. The Barnacle and I took on quite a load.
We talked over this brownie business and at first we were a little skeptical about it, laying the situation more or less to public gullibility. But the more we thought about it, and the more we drank, the more we began to believe there might really be brownies. For one thing, good luck just doesn’t come in hunks the way it appeared to have come to this town of ours in the last few weeks. Good luck is apt to scatter itself around a bit—and while it may run in streaks, it’s usually pretty thin. But here it seemed that hundreds—if not thousands—of persons had been visited by good luck.
By the middle of the afternoon, we were fairly well agreed there might be something to this brownie business. Then, of course, we tried to figure out who the brownies were, and why they were helping people.
«You know what I think,» said Barnacle. «I think they’re aliens. People from the stars. Maybe they’re the ones who have been flying all these saucers.»
«But why would aliens want to help us?» I objected. «Sure, they’d want to watch us and find out all they could; and after a while, they might try to make contact with us. They might even be willing to help us, but if they were they’d want to help us as a race, not as individuals.»
«Maybe,» the Barnacle suggested, «they’re just busybodies. There are humans like that. Psychopathic do-gooders, always sticking in their noses, never letting well enough alone.»
«I don’t think so,» I argued back at him. «If they are trying to help us, I’d guess it’s a religion with them. Like the old friars who wandered all over Europe in the early days. Like the Good Samaritan. Like the Salvation Army.»
But he wouldn’t have it that way. «They’re busybodies,» he insisted.
«Maybe they come from a surplus economy, a planet where all the work is done by machines and there is more than enough of everything for everyone. Maybe there isn’t anything left for anyone to do—and you know yourself that a man has to have something to keep him occupied, something to do so he can think that he is important.»
Then along about five o’clock Jo Ann came in. It had been her day off and she hadn’t known what had happened until someone from the office phoned her. So she’d come right over.
She was plenty sore at me, and she wouldn’t listen to me when I tried to explain that at a time like this a man had to have a drink or two. She got me out of there and out back to my car and drove me to her place. She fed me black coffee and finally gave me something to eat and along about eight o’clock or so she figured I’d sobered up enough to try driving home.
I took it easy and I made it, but I had an awful head and I remembered that I didn’t have a job. Worst of all, I was probably tagged for life as the man who had dreamed up the brownie hoax. There was no doubt that the wire services had picked up the story, and that it had made front page in most of the papers coast to coast. No doubt, the radio and television commentators were doing a lot of chuckling at it.