Abruptly another thought struck him: Why a factual account?
He remembered his dingy little apartment, his dilapidated typewriter, his collection of rejection slips, his nagging, flat-chested wife—Suddenly he looked at Thejah Doris standing beside him with heaving breast, anxiously watching the relentless approach of the Tarks.
Why a factual account indeed!
He concentrated. When he had the plot firmly fixed in his mind he sat down at the table to write. A momentary crises arose. There was no paper, no pen, not even a pencil. Then he remembered what Thejah Doris had said about the wandering bards, and he began searching for a drawer. Even Martian poets needed something to write on. Presently he found one and pulled it out. Sure enough, it contained several sheets of parchment-like paper, a long quill pen and a small vial of black fluid.
The thunder of padded toat hooves was growing louder by the minute. "Oh, my chieftain, what are we going to do!" Thejah Doris cried again.
"We're going to swap serials," Thon-Smith said, and began to write.
It was a fine bright morning. Harold Worthington Smith awoke late and lay for a while watching the robins flitting among the branches of the box elder outside his bedroom window. Then he got up and slipped leisurely into his lounging robe. Yawning, he stepped across the hall to his study. Below him in the kitchen his wife was humming happily, and he could smell coffee perking, wheatcakes frying and sausage sizzling.
He entered his study and walked over to the desk. He sat down. There were three long thin letters lying beside his solid gold typewriter where his wife had placed them. He opened them nonchalantly. The first one was from The Edgar Rice Burroughs Reader and contained a check for $750.00, the second was from Dead-Sea Bottom Stories and contained a check for $2500.00, and the third was from Red Planet Stories and contained a check for $5000.00.
The phone rang. He picked it up. "HWS speaking."