The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

No true light yet showed in the window, but he could feel the dawn coming on, the softness of it brushing his neck hair like a whisper, and heard the stir of trees outside the screen of his open window. He sat staring at the paper before him, the Blue Horse page he had so painstakingly covered with his light slant strokes, and held his pen poised above it, ready to write the final line of his story.

Here was his keenest pleasure, writing down at last the sentence he had aimed at from the beginning. It was like drawing the line beneath a column of numbers and setting in the sum, a feeling not only of winding up but of full completion. He waited, savoring the moment, then inscribed the words: “Lixor looked at the lights in the sky and wondered if one of them would begin to move toward him.” And then, to prolong his satisfaction, he printed THE END below in tall, graceful capitals embellished with curls of flourish. Reverting to his careful script, he put down also his name: Arthur Strakl, Cherry Cove, North Carolina, September 12, 1936.

When he looked at his handiwork, his name seemed strange to him, out of place on this page full of exotic sights and notions, as homely alien as a worn tin thimble in a jeweler’s fancy display case. So he set about inking the postscript out, producing a shiny black rectangle where each word had stood. The page looked better, he thought, without this reminder of our world of familiar impressions and of a dispiriting time in a place that was all too local. Anyhow, he would see his name enough times when “The Marooned Aldebaran” was published.

If it was published.

His luck was not good. Only about three of ten of the stories that he wrote ever saw print, and then in so mutilated a fashion, so mangled by editorial obtuseness, that he felt a sad weariness when they did appear.

He went to his one bookcase and took up a copy of a recent Astounding Stories from an unread stack of similar pulp magazines. It was the August issue, and commenced The Incredible Invasion, a serial novel by Murray Leinster. Names familiar to habitues of this kind of literature were displayed: Weinbaum, Fearn, Schachner, Gallun, and Williamson. The cover illustration showed grim homi-noids in gleaming gray armor battling among themselves and menacing a brace of plucky young ladies in dapper short skirts. He supposed the armored men to be the Incredible Invaders. Arthur did not read invasion stories; he could not imagine that Earth, unfashionable and located far from its galactic center, would be a desirable prize.

We are, he reflected, a bunch of hicks. Why would anyone bother?

Opening the magazine, he flipped past the ads for self-education and selfmedication, but his attention was drawn to the announcement for a new character pulp, The Whisperer. “The Whisperer!—NOT a Chinaman!—NOT a modern Robin Hood!—NOT a myth or a ghost!—But—HE IS-a good two-fisted, hard-hitting AMERICAN cop who gets his man!”

Arthur sighed, thinking how he could never write a story about The Whisperer, how in fact he probably could never bring himself to read one. He had tried to write some of those stories about two-fisted cops, two-fisted cowboys, two-fisted orphans of the jungle male and female, but that talent was not in him—nor for flying aces, nor scientific detectives, nor steel-armed quarterbacks or boxers. Again it was a question of belief. He did not believe that human beings came from so predictable a toy box and he could not engage himself in heroic fantasies. To him those daydreams lacked imagination and verged upon braggartry. But he did not wish to condemn. Hard times now, and writers needed to stock groceries, and readers wished to enjoy the brief glimpses of triumph the pulp stories afforded.

But his own stories were not fashioned in that mode. He could write only these melancholy twilight visions of things distant in time and space, stories that seemed not entirely his, but gifts or visitations from a source at which he could not guess. His most difficult task was to find words for them; he was a shy man, naturally taciturn, and he considered himself unhandy with language. But when the stories came to him, the impulse to write them down was too strong to resist. The stories compelled him to write, to struggle with phrases in a way that felt incongruous to his personality. And so he wrote, stealing the hours from his bed, the strength from his body. Each stroke of the pen, every noun and comma and period, brought him closer to the beautiful release that he always felt, as he did now, upon completion of a tale.

That was the main thing, to finish, to tell the stories through to the end. He got not much money for them and what he received was always late in arriving, and little acclaim came his way, for the readers who wrote to the letter columns preferred the loud, brawny stories of superscience, with their whirling rays and burning cities, colliding suns and flaming rocket ships, to his delicate accounts of loneliness under the stars, his elegies for dying worlds and soulful perishing species. Of course, his stories as they appeared were mutilated so that readers could not form fair opinions about them, but Arthur suspected that even if they were published just as they came in their final drafts from his typewriter, with every nuance and adverb complete, readers still would prefer the yarns about genius engineers and iron-thewed swordsmen.