Skeleton Crew

"The story runs a little long, and I'd like you to shorten it by about five hundred words, if you could. I would settle for a two-hundred-word cut, if it comes to that. We can always drop a cartoon.' Paragraph. 'Call, if you want.' My signature. And off the letter went, to Omaha."

"And you remember it, word for word like that?" the writer's wife asked.

"I kept all the correspondence in a special file," the editor said. "His letters, carbons of mine back. There was quite a stack of it by the end, including three or four pieces of correspondence from Jane Thorpe, his wife.

I've read the file over quite often. No good, of course. Trying to understand the flexible bullet is like trying to understand how a Mobius strip can have only one side. That's just the way things are in this best-of-all-possible worlds. Yes, I know it all word for word, or almost. Some people have the Declaration of Independence by heart."

"Bet he called you the next day," the agent said, grinning. "Collect."

"No, he didn't call. Shortly after Underworld Figures, Thorpe stopped using the telephone altogether.

His wife told me that. When they moved to Omaha from New York, they didn't even have a phone put in the new house. He had decided, you see, that the telephone system didn't really run on electricity but on radium. He thought it was one of the two or three best-kept secrets in the history of the modern world. He claimed—to his wife—that all the radium was responsible for the growing cancer rate, not cigarettes or automobile emissions or industrial pollution. Each telephone had a small radium crystal in the handset, and every time you used the phone, you shot your head full of radiation."

"Yuh, he was crazy," the writer said, and they all laughed.

"He wrote instead," the editor said, flicking his cigarette in the direction of the lake. "His letter said this: 'Dear Henry Wilson (or just Henry, if I may), Your letter was both exciting and gratifying. My wife was, if anything, more pleased than I. The money is fine... although in all honesty I must say that the idea of being published in Lagan's at all seems like more than adequate compensation (but I'll take it, I'll take it). I've looked over your cuts, and they seem fine. I think they'll improve the story as well as clear space for those cartoons. All best wishes, Reg Thorpe."

"Under his signature was a funny little drawing... more like a doodle. An eye in a pyramid, like the one on the back of the dollar bill. But instead of Novus Ordo Seclorum on the banner beneath, there were these words: Fornit Some Fornus."

"Either Latin or Groucho Marx," the agent's wife said.

"Just part of Reg Thorpe's growing eccentricity," the editor said. "His wife told me that Reg had come to believe in 'little people,' sort of like elves or fairies. The Fornits. They were luck-elves, and he thought one of them lived in his typewriter."

"Oh my Lord," the writer's wife said.

"According to Thorpe, each Fornit has a small device, like a flitgun, full of... good-luck dust, I guess you'd call it. And the good-luck dust—"

"—is called fornus," the writer finished. He was grinning broadly.

"Yes. And his wife thought it quite funny, too. At first. In fact, she thought at first—Thorpe had conceived the Fornits two years before, while he was drafting Underworld Figures—that it was just Reg, having her on. And maybe at first he was. It seems to have progressed from a whimsy to a superstition to an outright belief. It was... a flexible fantasy. But hard in the end. Very hard." They were all silent. The grins had faded.

"The Fornits had their funny side," the editor said. "Thorpe's typewriter started going to the shop a lot near the end of their stay in New York, and it was even a more frequent thing when they moved to Omaha. He had a leaner while it was being fixed for the first time out there. The dealership manager called a few days after Reg got his own machine back to tell him he was going to send a bill for cleaning the leaner as well as Thorpe's own machine."

"What was the trouble?" the agent's wife asked.

"I think I know," the writer's wife said.

"It was full of food," the editor said. "Tiny bits of cake and cookies. There was peanut butter smeared on the platens of the keys themselves. Reg was feeding the Fornit in his typewriter. He also 'fed' the loaner, on the off chance that the Fornit had made the switch."

"Boy," the writer said.

"I knew none of these things then, you understand. For the nonce, I wrote back to him and told him how pleased I was. My secretary typed the letter and brought it in for my signature, and then she had to go out for something. I signed it and she wasn't back. And then—for no real reason at all—I put the same doodle below my name. Pyramid. Eye. And 'Fornit Some Fornus.' Crazy. The secretary saw it and asked me if I wanted it sent out mat way. I shrugged and told her to go ahead.