They were all standing around me now, Weinstein, Lamehd, Grey, Wang Hsi. They looked real friendly and real capable. I began to feel we were going to have one of the best sling-shots in—What did I mean one of the best? The best, mister, the best.
“Okay,” said Grey. “Wherever and whenever you want to, you start leading us— Pop.”
Afterword
There’s not much I have to say about “Down Among the Dead Men.” Horace L. Gold said he needed a novelette almost immediately for Galaxy, and most of all he wanted a space opera.
“You’ve never written a space opera, a real bangety-bang space opera,” he said. “Why not?”
“I don’t like them,” I told him. “I don’t like to read them, and I don’t like to write them. Science-fiction westerns: they’re kill-’em-on-Mercury-instead-of-Montana.”
Well, he explained, if—in spite of my bullshit fastidiousness—I managed to write one in the next week, he would give me a large bonus on the word rate and voucher the check through immediately.
As always, in those days, I could very much use the money; so I agreed to think about it. To my surprise, by the time I got home, I had an idea. I began writing.
It went fast. I completed the piece in a weekend.
Horace loved it, bought it. “It’s a real space opera,” he marveled, “but all the important action takes place completely offstage. A tour deforce!”