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Campbell had been quite upset at my victory over him. "I just can't believe
you're that much better than I," he had said. It did me no good to tell him
how many people at the chess corner janitors, cabdrivers, even wandering
vagrants who played for quarters and half-dollars and whom you just had to
call chess bums could beat me with less skill but with their greater knowledge
of chess traps. He had walked out of the room, shaking his head and exhaling
in misery.
"His belief in his mental powers and the mental powers of his species is just
too impor-tant to him," Ted told me. "You've got to find some way of
suggesting that the aliens in 'Firewater' are not all that goddam good.
They're better in this way and that way, but not in everyway. Basically,
they're just different."
I wept, I cried, I tore my hair. "I lost the original hero of this story," I
said, "when I found out that there was more Hebster than Braganza in me. Then
I discovered that what I really had wanted to write about was what would
happen to our collective egos if we encoun-tered aliens who were not merely
technologically superior to us, but so superior biologi-cally and
psychologically that they just wanted to look at us and be amused by us. Now
you're telling me that I have to delete the point as well. Well, why write?
Why the hell write?"
Ted spread his hands. "Look, you can sure sell the piece to a lower-grade
pulpy market where half the readership will complain there's not enough action
in it. Or you can give John just a little bit of what he wants, of what he
must have to believe in himself and his fellows, and you wind up with what is
still a distinguished story and a cover story in what is undeniably the
absolutely best science-fiction magazine being published today."
"And I've written something dishonest. I've torn the theme out of my story."
"No, you haven't. You've just made it a shade less emphatic. And, look Phil:
you're just doing this for the first version, the first printing. When the
piece is anthologized and it will be and when you publish it in your own
collection and you will be able to one day you can see to it that the original
is printed. And you can tell the reader all about it at last."
Well, I never said that I am not easily corrupted. And that last argument of
Ted's did have a powerful effect on me. So I gave John Campbell the minimum
that seemed to satisfy him, and he published the story with a cover
illustration that I found delightful. The read-ership voted "Firewater" the
best of the year. And I? I never read John's magazine again.
I put the original manuscript, the one before any changes, in a manila folder,
along with all the correspondence on the story. I put it away for the future.
And somewhere, in one of my many moves (did not Ben Franklin say that three
removes were as bad as a fire?) I lost the folder, together with the original
and the correspondence.
Today? Oh, hell, do me something I now like the way the story reads exactly as
I have it here, exactly the way it was published in John Campbell's Astounding
in February 1952.
Written 1951 / Published 1952
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