"Yes, sir," Don said. Alis was very close and he was only half listening. "Any further orders, sir?"
"Just one, Don. Kiss her for me, too. Over to you."
"Yes, sir!" Don said. "Over and out."
RICHARD WILSON, a part-time novelist, is a full-time newsman for an international press service (Reuters). He is the author of two previous books and several dozen short stories in science-fiction magazines since 1940.
He finds time for his fiction writing at night and on week ends in the attic workroom of his century-old ex-farmhouse exactly 35 miles, as the odometer on his Volkswagen computes it, from Times Square.
Reviewers have not exactly compared his writing to those of some others who once labored in Reuters' 109-year-old vineyards, among them John Buchan and Edgar Wallace. But one New York Times critic praised "his whacky humor," which he said has "the bite of shrewd satire behind its madness," and the New York Herald-Tribune's man maintained that "there's not another male in the science-fiction field who can beat Wilson in the easy, intimate exposition of the private lives of the space-future."