up the second feature.
“Here There Be Tygers”—My first-grade teacher in Stratford, Connecticut, was Mrs. Van Buren. She was pretty scary. I guess if a tiger had come along and eaten her up, I could have gotten behind that. You know how kids are.
“The Monkey”—I was in New York City on business about four years ago. I was walking back to my hotel after visiting my people at New American Library when I saw a guy selling wind-up monkeys on the street. There was a platoon of them standing on a gray blanket he’d spread on the sidewalk at the corner of Fifth and Forty-fourth, all bending and grinning and clapping their cymbals. They looked really scary to me, and I spent the rest of my walk back to the hotel wondering why. I decided it was because they reminded me of the lady with the shears... the one who cuts everyone’s thread one day. So keeping that idea in mind, I wrote the story, mostly longhand, in a hotel room.
“Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut”—My wife is the real Mrs. Todd; the woman really is mad for a shortcut, and much of the one in the story actually exists. She found it, too. And Tabby really does seem to be getting younger sometimes, although I hope I am not like Worth Todd. I try not to be.
I like this story a lot; it tickles me. And the old guy’s voice is soothing. Every now and then you write something that brings back the old days, when everything you wrote seemed fresh and full of invention. “Mrs. Todd” felt that way to me when I was writing it.
One final note on it—three women’s magazines turned it down, two because of that line about how a woman will pee down her own leg if she doesn’t squat. They apparently felt that either women don’t pee or don’t want to be reminded of the fact. The third magazine to reject it, Cosmopolitan, did so because they felt the main character was too old to interest their target audience.
No comment—except to add that Redbook finally took it. God bless ’em.
“The Jaunt”—This was originally for Omni, which quite rightly rejected it because the science is so wonky. It was Ben Bova s idea to have the colonists in the story mining for water, and I have incorporated that in this version.
“The Raft”—I wrote this story in the year 1968 as “The Float.” In late 1969 I sold it to Adam magazine, which—like most of the girlie magazines—paid not on acceptance but only on publication. The amount promised was two hundred and fifty dollars.
In the spring of 1970, while creeping home in my white Ford station wagon from the University Motor Inn at 12:30 in the morning, I ran over a number of traffic cones which were guarding a crosswalk that had been painted that day. The paint had dried, but no one had bothered to take the cones in when it got dark. One of them bounced up and knocked my muffler loose from the rotted remains of my tailpipe. I was immediately suffused with the sort of towering, righteous rage which only drunk undergraduates can feel. I decided to circle the town of Orono, picking up traffic cones. I would leave them all in front of the police station the next morning, with a note saying that I had saved numerous mufflers and exhaust systems from extinction, and ought to get a medal.
I got about a hundred and fifty before blue lights started to swirl around in the rearview mirror.
I will never forget the Orono cop turning to me after a long, long look into the back of my station wagon and asking: “Son, are those traffic cones yours?”
The cones were confiscated and so was I; that night I was a guest of the town of Orono, that crossword-puzzle favorite. A month or so later, I was brought to trial in Bangor District Court on a charge of petty larceny. I was my own attorney and did indeed have a fool for a client. I was fined two hundred and fifty dollars, which I of course did not have. I was given seven days to come up with it, or do thirty more days as a guest of Penobscot County. I probably could have borrowed it from my mother, but the circumstances were not easy to understand (unless you had a skinful of booze, that was).
Although one is now not supposed to ever use a deus ex