There’s an editor for you.
They’re all the same. At first they’re all honey and sweet talk, with those long alcoholic lunches and blue-sky conversation about million-copy printings while they wheedle you into signing the contract. Then they turn nasty. They want the actual book delivered. When they don’t get it, or when the censors say they can’t print it, then there isn’t any more sweet talk and all the conversation is about how the aediles will escort you to debtors’ prison.
So I took his advice. I knew where to go for ideas, and it wasn’t in London. No sensible man stays in London in the winter anyway, because of the weather and because it’s too full of foreigners. I still can’t get used to seeing all those huge rustic Northmen and dark Hindian and Arabian women in the heart of town. I admit I can be turned on by that red caste mark or by a pair of flashing dark eyes shining through all the robes and veils—suppose what you imagine is always more exciting than what you can see, especially when what you see is the short, dumpy Britain women like Lidia.
So I made a reservation on the overnight train to Rome, to transfer there to a hydrofoil for Alexandria. I packed with a good heart, not neglecting to take along a floppy sun hat, a flask of insect repellent, and—oh, of course—stylus and blank tablets enough to last me for the whole trip just in case a book idea emerged for me to write. Egypt! Where the world conference on the Olympians was starting its winter session… where I would be among the scientists and astronauts who always sparked ideas for new science-adventure romances for me to write… where it would be warm…
Where my publisher’s aediles would have trouble finding me, in the event that no idea for a new novel came along.
Chapter 2
On the Way to the Idea Place
No idea did.
That was disappointing. I do some of my best writing on trains, aircraft, and ships, because there aren’t any interruptions and you can’t decide to go out for a walk because there isn’t any place to walk to. It didn’t work this time. All the while the train was slithering across the wet, bare English winter countryside towards the Channel, I sat with my tablet in front of me and the stylus poised to write, but by the time we dipped into the tunnel the tablet was still virgin.
I couldn’t fool myself. I was stuck. I mean, stuck. Nothing happened in my head that could transform itself into an opening scene for a new sci-rom novel.
It wasn’t the first time in my writing career that I’d been stuck with the writer’s block. That’s a sort of occupational disease for any writer. But this time was the worst. I’d really counted on An Ass’ Olympiad. I had even calculated that the publication date could be made to coincide with that wonderful day when the Olympians themselves arrived in our solar system, with all sorts of wonderful publicity for my book flowing out of that great event, so the sales should be immense… and, worse than that, I’d already spent the on-signing advance. All I had left was credit, and not much of that.
Not for the first time, I wondered what it would have been like if I had followed some other career. If I’d stayed in the civil service, for instance, as my father had wanted.
Really, I hadn’t had much choice. I was born during the Space Tricentennial Year, and my mother told me the first word I said was “Mars”. She said there was a little misunderstanding there, because at first she thought I was talking about the god, not the planet, and she and my father had long talks about whether to train me for the priesthood, but by the time I could read she knew I was a space nut. Like a lot of my generation (the ones that read my books), I grew up on spaceflight. I was a teenager when the first pictures came back from the space probe to the Alpha Centauri planet Julia, with its crystal grasses and silver-leafed trees. As a boy I corresponded with another youth who lived in the cavern colonies on the Moon, and I read with delight the shoot-’em-ups about outlaws and aediles chasing each other around the satellites of Jupiter. I wasn’t the only kid who grew up space-happy, but I never got over it.
Naturally I became a science-adventure romance writer; what else did I know anything about? As soon as I began to get actual money for my fantasies I quit my job as secretary to one of the imperial legates on the Western continents and went full-time pro.
I prospered at it, too—prospered reasonably, at least—well, to be more exact, I earned a liveable, if irregular, income out of the two sci-roms a year I could manage to write, and enough of a surplus to support the habit of dating pretty women like Lidia out of the occasional bonus when one of the books was made into a broadcast drama or a play.
Then along came the message from the Olympians, and the whole face of science-adventure romans was changed forever.
It was the most exciting news in the history of the world, of course. There really were other intelligent races out there among the stars of the Galaxy! It had never occurred to me that it would affect me personally, except with joy.
Joy it was, at first. I managed to talk my way into the Alpine radio observatory that had recorded that first message, and I heard it recorded with my own ears:
Dit squab dit.
Dit squee dit squab dit dit.
Dit squee dit squee dit squab dit dit dit.
Dit squee dit squee dit squee dit squab wooooo.
Dit squee dit squee dit squee dit squee dit squab dit dit dit dit dit.
It all looks so simple now, but it took a while before anyone figured out just what this first message from the Olympians was. (Of course, we didn’t call them Olympians then. We wouldn’t call them that now if the priests had anything to say about it, because they think it’s almost sacrilegious, but what else are you going to call godlike beings from the heavens? The name caught on right away, and the priests just had to learn to live with it.) It was, in fact, my good friend Flavius Samuelus ben Samuelus who first deciphered it and produced the right answer to transmit back to the senders—the one that, four years later, let the Olympians know we had heard them.
Meanwhile, we all knew this wonderful new truth: we weren’t alone in the universe! Excitement exploded. The market for sci-roms boomed. My very next book was The Radio Gods, and it sold its head off.
I thought it would go on forever.
It might have, too… if it hadn’t been for the timorous censors.
I slept through the tunnel—all the tunnels, even the ones through the Alps—and by the time I woke up we were halfway down to Rome.
In spite of the fact that the tablets remained obstinately blank, I felt more cheerful. Lidia was just a fading memory, I still had twenty-nine days to turn in a new sci-rom and Rome, after all, is still Rome! The centre of the universe—well, not counting what new lessons in astronomical geography the Olympians might teach us. At least, it’s the greatest city in the world. It’s the place where all the action is.
By the time I’d sent the porter for breakfast and changed into a clean robe we were there, and I alighted into the great, noisy train shed.
I hadn’t been in the city for several years, but Rome doesn’t change much. The Tiber still stank. The big new apartment buildings still hid the old ruins until you were almost on top of them, the flies were still awful, and the Roman youths still clustered around the train station to sell you guided tours to the Golden House (as though any of them could ever get past the Legion guards!), or sacred amulets, or their sisters.