Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

She continued turning pages, sighed, and touched her keyboard. The printer kicked out a fresh rejection. “Okay,” she said.

I was working on Make Straight the Path , an inspirational book by Adam Trent. It was pious and reassuring, loaded with anecdotes showing how the unbelievers get theirs. You wouldn’t believe how his other books had sold. Penguin would have loved to have him.

I stayed with it, resisting the temptation to look at Patterson’s epic. It resembled an epic. The manuscript obscured a coffee stain half a foot above the table. That made it official.

Now, lest you think I’m one of those editors who only cares how many copies can be moved, let me tell you that, while sales figures matter, it’s always been my ambition to discover a new writer. Well, okay, all editors feel that way. But that’s because we’re generous and compassionate. So when Myra got up and headed for the washroom, I took a look.

Patterson lived in New Hampshire.

I lifted the cover page and glanced at the opening lines. That night I hauled it down in the elevator, the whole twelve hundred pages, and took it home.

I read it on the train. Read during dinner at Milo’s. Read through the evening and took it to bed. In the summer of 2001, I went to the Army recruiting office with the young college student hero and cringed while he joined the Reserves. I rode with the UN inspectors while they played tag with Iraqi “escorts” and tried to surprise their hosts at suspect facilities. I sat in the councils of the president while his aides urged an attack on Saddam and constructed arguments they hoped the UN and the voters would buy.

The night got away from me, and I finally closed my eyes when the first light of dawn was hitting the curtains. I called Myra’s voice mail a couple hours later, letting her know I’d be late. Called again around nine to tell her I wouldn’t be in at all.

It wasn’t simply one more war novel. This one had that cliffhanging quality, yes. But it was vastly more. It owned the war. Through the eyes of its characters the reader saw how it had happened, came to grasp the inevitability of the conflict. He understood what it had meant to ride shotgun on the convoys or to go house to house in Fallujah. He experienced what it was to fight an enemy who wasn’t afraid to die. Who imagined killing to be a divine imperative.

I spent time with a group of insurgents, and came to understand what drove them. I carried stretchers through the burn wards of an Iraqi hospital when shattered bystanders were brought in. And finally I was with mothers in Ohio when the dread news came.

It had perspective, passion, fear, the determination of obviously flawed men and women in authority to get things right, the mounting frustration as those who had been liberated refused to throw roses.

I was holed up with it for six days. The outside world simply stopped until the last shots had been fired, and the fallout had begun to take its political toll.

It was a War and Peace for our time.

I had done better than find one more professional writer who could sell a few thousand copies of whatever. I had found a new Herman Wouk.

I finished late on a drizzly, cold evening, and sat staring out my apartment window at downtown Boston, thinking about Edward Patterson. On that night, only I, and Myra, knew who he was. Within a year, the whole world was going to know.

He lived in Laconia, at the foot of the White Mountains.

It was a quarter after ten. A bit late to be calling. On the other hand, this was a guy who, as far as I could determine, had never been published. I remembered my own reaction when the postcard had arrived from Guns and Ammo announcing my own first sale.

Myra, anticipating me, had gotten Patterson’s number from information and printed it neatly above the title. I made myself a scotch and soda and reached for the phone.

“ Wonderful, ” he said. “ Mr. Becker, that’s great. You’re actually going to publish it? ” He sounded younger than I’d expected.

“Yes, Mr. Patterson. Ed. Is it okay if I call you Ed ?”

“ Sure. Yes. Absolutely. Can you hold a second? ”

“Okay.”

He must have covered the phone. But I knew what was happening. He was passing the good news to his wife. Or girlfriend. Or whomever.

“ I’m back, ” he said.

“Good.”

“ Mr. Becker, you have no idea what this means to me. ”

“I can guess,” I said. “Ed, are you by any chance free to come into Boston tomorrow?”

He made a sound deep in his throat. “ I’m a teacher, ” he said. “ At the high school. ”

“Okay. How about Saturday?” We don’t usually open the office Saturday but in this case I was willing to make an exception.

“ I can do that, ” he said.

“Fine. I’ll have a contract ready, and we’ll celebrate by going to lunch.” The truth was that I wanted him signed and delivered before he found out how good The Long War was. If he realized what he had, I’d wind up having to deal with an agent. Or possibly even get caught in a bidding war with MacMillan.

He was maybe twenty-five. Tall, with a nervous smile. Light brown hair already beginning to thin. Sallow cheeks, pale skin, watery gray eyes behind bifocals. He wore a fatigue jacket and hauled a laptop in a stitched bag over one shoulder. Didn’t look much like Hemingway.

He turned the pages of the contract with long, thin fingers, not examining it, I thought, so much as admiring it. When he got to the advance, he stopped. “Twenty thousand dollars?” he asked.

I was about to say I’d be willing to go higher because I liked the book. I’d expected to go higher. But it was always best to start out with a conservative figure. You can always move up. “Seems like a lot,” he added.

“Well,” I said, trying to conceal my surprise, “Tempus believes in being generous.” It didn’t really matter. The book was going to make a ton, so there was no risk.

“It’s certainly very kind of you.” He smiled again. He looked like the kind of guy the other kids had picked on in the schoolyard. And I would never have believed him capable of the kind of rugged prose that informed The Long War .

I showed him where to sign, explained what we expected, that we’d want to be able to use his bio and likeness in promoting the book, that we might ask him to make a few guest appearances. I didn’t mention that he was signing over all TV and movie rights, that he was giving Tempus a healthy share of any foreign sales, that we would also collect seventy-five percent of book club rights. And of course there was the option clause. “Normally, Ed,” I told him, “we’d want to retain the right of first refusal on your next novel.”

“But—?” he said, suddenly looking worried.

“I want to be up front with you, Ed. Is there going to be a sequel?”

“A sequel?” His eyes clouded. “There’ll be another book.”

“Okay. Good enough. Tempus is willing to forego the option. We’d like instead to sign you to a three-book deal. Beyond The Long War .”

His eyes slid shut, and I was looking at the most beatific smile I’d ever seen. Paradise had arrived.

“We’re offering a seventy-five thousand dollar advance for the three.”

He put the glass down and stared at me. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t say anything,” I said. “Just sign on the line.” I showed him where.

I know what you’re thinking. But we do not try to take advantage of our authors. We were providing a major service for Ed Patterson. We were giving him a chance to launch a new career, to break away from his teaching job, to fulfill a lifelong dream. When you’ve been in this business for a while, you discover that it takes a lifelong dream to drive someone to write a novel. Especially a big one.