True to type

By Arthur T. Harris
A machine can be loyal—even to a rascal. But writer Pascal Halmer courted a monstrous retribution.
This story not only achieves a quite remarkable suspension of disbelief in the supernatural. It poses a fascinating problem. If you went to sleep over a typewriter and woke up with an idea as terrifying as this staring you in the face could you remain calm about it. Seemingly Arthur T. Harris could—and did. But then, he didn't have a typewriter like Pascal Halmer's.
Pascal Halmer had a superficial talent. And he was smart. You'd never find him rewriting a theme that had appeared, say five or ten years before, in a popular monthly. He was too smart for that. But Halmer would haunt the second-hand magazine stalls, and buy a pile of fiction publications published ten to twenty years ago. Then, back in his dingy furnished room, he'd uncork a bottle of cheap brandy, roll a smoke and settle back to read.
Presently he would chuckle, rip out the sheets he had read, and do some pencil work on them. Then he'd seat himself before me and begin typing the pilfered plot, twisting it about in such a fashion that plagiarism would be extremely difficult to prove.
He'd change the locale, the sequence of events, all the names, retaining only the plot gimmick, the essence of the story.
Now I am not trying to pose a moral issue. For under the deft fingers of Pascal Halmer, I had, for the first time in my life, the feeling of creativeness, of originality of thought, aim and purpose.
Of course I too was a fraud. But, I told myself, nobody knew our secret . And we entertained just as many readers as the more creative writers in the business. All my life, I had been a hopeless drudge, used by bored typists in a little office where I was limited to legal papers, stencils for invoices and such.
Now I contributed to the pleasure of thousands of eager readers of escape fiction. Late in middle age I had found my niche in the creative world.