He was a queer chap, in most ways. We didn’t know him very well, but we liked him and admired his stories. He’d done some wonderful tales of an imaginary planet — all carefully worked out.
He told Madison, “That happened to me.”
“What happened to you?” Madison asked.
“What you were suggesting — I once wrote about an imaginary world and then had to live on it,” Carrick answered.
Madison laughed. “I hope it was a more liveable place than the lurid planets on which I set my own yarns.”
But Carrick was unsmiling. He murmured, “I’d have made it a lot different — if I’d known I was ever going to live on it.”
Brazell, with a significant glance at Carrick’s empty glass, winked at us and then asked blandly, “Let’s hear about it, Carrick.”
Carrick kept looking dully down at his empty glass, turning it slowly in his fingers as he talked. He paused every few words.
“It happened just after I’d moved next to the big power station. It sounds like a noisy place, but actually it was very quiet out there on the edge of the city. And I had to have quiet, if I was to produce stories.
“I got right to work on a new series I was starting, the stories of which were all to be laid on the same imaginary world. I began by working out the detailed physical appearance of that world, as well as the universe that was its background. I spent the whole day concentrating on that. And, as I finished, something in my mind went click!