"Un ... suc ... cess ... fully," said Manning Stern ruminatively. "Five martinis and the man can say unsuccessfully successfully. But I try to explain the Marx Brothers yet! Look, Holt. I've got a subversive orphan at home and she's undoubtedly starving. I've got to feed her. You come home and meet her and have potluck, huh?"
"Good. Fine. Always like to try a new dish."
Manning Stern looked at him curiously. "Now was that a gag or not? You're funny, Holt. You know a lot about everything and then all of a sudden you go all Man-from-Mars on the simplest thing. Or do you...? Anyway, let's go feed Raquel."
And five hours later Holt was saying, "I never thought I'd have this reason for being glad I sold a story. Manning, I haven't had so much fun talking to—I almost said 'to a woman.' I haven't had so much fun talking since—"
He had almost said since the agnoton came. She seemed not to notice his abrupt halt. She simply said "Bless you, Norb. Maybe you aren't a male-chauvinist. Maybe even you're.... Look, go find a subway or a cab or something. If you stay here another minute, I'm either going to kiss you or admit you're right about your stories—and I don't know which is worse editor-author relations."
Manning Stern committed the second breach of relations first. The fan mail on Norbert Holt's debut left her no doubt that Surprising would profit by anything he chose to write about.
She'd never seen such a phenomenally rapid rise in author popularity. Or rather you could hardly say rise. Holt hit the top with his first story and stayed there. He socked the fans (Guest of Honor at the Washinvention), the pros (first President of Science Fiction Writers of America), and the general reader (author of the first pulp-bred science fiction book to stay three months on the best seller list).
And never had there been an author who was more pure damned fun to work with. Not that you edited him; you checked his copy for typos and sent it to the printers. (Typos were frequent at first; he said something odd about absurd illogical keyboard arrangement.) But just being with him, talking about this, that and those.... Raquel, just turning sixteen, was quite obviously in love with him—praying that he'd have the decency to stay single till she grew up and "You know, Manningcita, I am Spanish; and the Mediterranean girls...."
But there was this occasional feeling of oddness. Like the potluck and the illogical keyboard and that night at SCWA....