He didn’t want to let it go. Wait three months? Impossible when he could get the answer now! But he couldn’t keep up with that car through the crowd while he was burdened with the suitcase and the armful of magazines. He looked about him wildly and saw that he was in front of a cigar store.
He darted in and put the suitcase and magazines down on a soft drink cooler near the entrance. He said, «Back in just a second. Thanks for watching these,» and ran out again before the man could protest.
Outside again he could go faster. He held his ground half a block behind the car and the motorcycles and even gained a little. They turned south on Third Avenue, west—just around the corner—on Thirty-seventh Street. And there was a big crowd gathered there. The motorcycles and the car stopped at the edge of the crowd.
The sphere that had floated above the car didn’t stop. It floated on and up, over the heads of the people. Up, up, to the open window.
It was Betty Hadley.
Keith Winton got to the edge of the crowd and stopped. No use pushing his way farther—he could see better here than closer in against the building. The cheering was tremendous.
Besides «Mekky,» he heard «Dopelle» and «Betty» in with the cheers. The sphere floated up until it was level with the open window, beside Betty Hadley’s shoulder. It paused there, hovering.
It spoke. This time, Keith knew instinctively, it was not speaking to him alone, as it had back there when it had first passed him. He knew somehow that the words he was hearing inside his head were echoing in the heads of all who stood there.
The cheering didn’t even stop. It didn’t have to, Keith realized. The words that formed inside his head, in that mechanical voice, were different in nature from the sounds that came through his ears. He could hear both at once and one didn’t interfere with the other.
«Friends,» said the voice, «I leave you now to bear a message from my master Dopelle to Miss Hadley. A private message, of course. I thank you for the courtesy you have shown. And, from my master, these words to all of you—‘The situation is still critical, and we must all do our best. But be of good cheer. There is hope for victory. We must win—we shall win!»
«Mekky!» the crowd roared. «Dopelle!» «Betty!» «Victory!» «Down With Arcturus!» «Mekky, Mekky, MEKKY!»
Betty Hadley, Keith saw, was smiling, her cheeks and throat flushed with embarrassment. Now she bowed once and withdrew her head and shoulders inside the window. The sphere floated in after her.
The crowd began to disperse.
Keith groaned. He tried to hurl a thought at the sphere but he knew it was too late. It wouldn’t pay any attention to him if it heard him, if it received the thought.
Well, it had warned him. If it had been inside his mind it must have known that he loved Betty and it had warned him not to follow. It would have saved him the despair and bitterness that he was feeling now.
It hadn’t meant much—not too much, that is—when Marion Blake had told him that Betty was engaged. As long as she wasn’t actually married there was hope for him, he’d thought. He’d hoped he could make her forget this dope Dopelle. But—what a chance!
Far more than anything he’d read about that magnificent hero, the exhibition he’d just seen had made him realize what a romantic celebrity Dopelle must be! «My master Dopelle,» the sphere had called him. And all New York was cheering him when he wasn’t even there.
What a chance he, Keith Winton, had to take away the fiancée of a guy like that!
He walked back moodily to the cigar store where he’d left his suitcase and magazines and apologized to the clerk for the manner of his leaving them.
The streets were beginning to empty when he came out of the cigar store. He realized it must be getting near dusk and that he must find a place to stay.
He hunted until he found an inexpensive little hotel where—for a hundred and twenty credits in advance—he took a room for a week.
In his room he picked up one of the pulp magazines. Now for the plan—and the voice that had been Mekky, the sphere, had told him to go ahead with his plan.
For awhile, a long while, he couldn’t really concentrate, Betty Hadley’s face with its aura of blonde hair, its smooth creamy skin and kissable red lips, kept getting in the way. Why hadn’t he had sense enough to obey the sphere’s orders not to follow it—and get himself in a mood like this, just when he had to be able to think hardest.
Thinking of the hopelessness of his ever getting Betty made what he was doing seem futile and useless. But after awhile, in spite of himself, he began to get interested in the magazines. And he began to see that his plan was really possible.
Yes, he thought he could make a living for himself writing—for some of these magazines, at any rate. Five years earlier, before he’d started working for Borden, Keith had done quite a bit of free-lancing. He’d sold a number of stories and he’d written several that hadn’t sold.
In fact, his batting average had been about fifty-fifty and—for a writer who wasn’t too prolific, and who had difficulty plotting—that hadn’t been too good. Besides, his stories hadn’t come easily. He’d had to sweat them out painfully. So, when a steady job at a fairly good wage had been offered him, he’d quit writing.
But now, with five years of editing under his belt, he thought he could do better at it than he had before. He could see now what a lot of his mistakes had been—laziness among them. And the laziness, at least, was curable.
Besides, this time he had plots to start with—the plots of all of the unsold stories he could remember. He thought he could do better with them now than he had five years ago, a lot better.
He went through magazine after magazine, skimming all the stories, reading some of them. It got dark and the black blankness of the mist-out pressed against the pane of his window but he kept reading.
One thing became increasingly obvious to him—he couldn’t and didn’t dare try to place stories in a setting with which he was as unfamiliar as he was with the world about him. He’d make mistakes, little mistakes, that would give him away, things that would show his unfamiliarity with the little details of life here.
Fortunately that left him two fields. From his reading of Wells’ Outline of History he knew that the differences here all dated from those vanishing sewing machines of 1903. On any story—adventure, love or what have you—-written as a costume piece and placed before 1903, he was on sure ground. Luck, too, he’d been a history major at college and was pretty familiar with the subject—particularly American history.
He noticed with satisfaction that the love and adventure magazines both carried a fair percentage of costume pieces—more than the love and adventure magazines of where he’d come from. Possibly because there was a wider difference here between life of a hundred or two hundred years ago and life of today, the settings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries seemed more romantic and interesting.
Even the love pulps—he was both surprised and satisfied to learn—carried historical stories, love tales put in Civil War, Revolutionary War and pioneer settings.
The other field he could tackle was, of course, pure fantasy. He’d bought only one fantasy magazine but he’d seen that there were others on the stands. And in pure fantasy—or semi-science-fiction adventures in far and non-existent galaxies—he couldn’t go wrong. Nor in stories of the distant future. As long as he avoided the present, the recent past and the near future, he’d be all right.
He finished his study of the magazines by ten o’clock and, from then until midnight, he sat at the little desk in his room, pencil in hand and paper before him, jotting down notes of all the stories he could remember having written and not sold. He was able to remember twenty stories.