Starr wasn't like any editor I've known. He wasn't like an editor at all. He wasn't much like anybody I've known. Which puts him in a class all by himself. He was brown and thin and had peculiarly big eyes, like a grasshopper's.
He spent so much money getting started I figured he wasn't long for this racket. But he did have a knack and the first couple issues, while not wildly successful, went over well.
One morning he called me into his office. From the tone of that dry voice of his I knew I was in for it.
"What's all this?" he buzzed, rattling a manuscript in front of me. From the cheap yellow paper I knew it was the lead novelette of the forthcoming issue. Ric Planter was one of our top writers and also a very bad boy. Ric loved to put an editor on the spot, bless his little pointed head.
"Didn't he change that ending?" I asked. The tic in my left eye started up. I had never had this twitch until the first time I saw Starr. I think it was something about those eyes of his. Every time I looked at him....
"He changed it all right!" Starr hissed. "He turned the Kiriki into villains. When their benevolent plan to spread patterned contentment throughout the circle of outer planets was just taking hold he had the semi-civilized Green Ones rise up and destroy their power by smashing their means of telepathic communication."
"How could he do that?" I clucked.
"Supersonic wave interrupter of some kind."
I hadn't meant that, and somehow I couldn't help grinning. Trust Ric to latch on to the Kiriki vulnerable point. The Kiriki, as Starr had outlined them, were highly communal. Like our ants, only very much more advanced. They depended on this intricate pattern of inter-communication, mind with mind, for their very existence, since each Kiriki was by birth fitted to perform only one basic function in their communal society. Their ingenious "Army of Patterned Contentment" was helpless, when reduced by the adaptable Green Ones to individuals.
"Will you please stop laughing," Starr rasped. "This hack writer of yours has outraged the history of an ancient, noble race!"