"The what?"
Larimore chuckled. "If that yarn had turned up in the slush-pile, it would have been bounced with a rejection slip. It's not good, Doc. You've got no reason to write that bad, even though you've not written me anything for a couple of years; you don't forget how. But this job sounds like the half-baked efforts of a man convinced that he could write but who lacks the basic fundamentals of story construction. Now—"
"What in the devil are you talking about?" demanded Hanson.
"Didn't you send me a yarn called The Black Slash?"
"I—" Hanson paused. Cautiously, he said: "By Edward Lomax?"
"Naturally. That's your pen name. It—"
"Wasn't the job timely?"
"Doc, you ought to know by now that every time something new and frightening comes up, my desk is bombarded with a million stories about it. The best get taken up. That streak of energy a couple of weeks ago has brought fourteen stories so far, and some of them were damned good. But yours—Say, Doc, how come you went to Venus? I thought that you weren't allowed space-flight?"
Hanson paused and shook his head. Edward Lomax was his pen name. It was the pen name supplied to Maculay in the explanation as to why Cliff was in disfavor in the eyes of his fictitious uncle. And it was sort of natural, too, that Maculay would try to write about this thing. But Maculay, either as the renowned Clifford Maculay, or young Cliff Maculay the black sheep, had never written a single line of fiction. Maculay's pedantic papers were full of equations, qualifications, cumbersome sentences, and inverted phrases—complete with the everlasting 'However' enclosed between commas.
Hanson laughed shortly.