There are basically two things I want to cover in this second installment of my commentary on the editing I did for the Hub series. The first is to cover the material which I skipped over in Part I of my commentary, the question of "updating" the text. The other is to explain how and why I edited the novel Legacy which is the centerpiece of Volume 3.
Guy Gordon and I did a certain amount of "updating" all through the Hub series. But there was never very much of it, and most of that was multiple instances of the same thing. The most concentrated "updating" took place in Legacy. So I'll go through those instances in order to illustrate what was involved.
The following are the main instances in Legacy in which we "updated" the story. I'll give a brief commentary on each one, and then make some general remarks afterward.
"Ungh," Quillan said disgustedly. "You make it sound like the chick'sgirl's got built-in space drives. You can stop her, can't you?"
The term "chick" was changed to "girl" because it's an outdated slang expression. Ubiquitous in the 60s, when Schmitz wrote the novel, but rarely used today. It was not changed, by the way, because of any concerns over "political correctness." Lots of people object to the term "girl" being applied to a grown woman also. But, whether rightly or wrongly, that term is still in common usage and most closely approximates Schmitz's slang term. The change has no effect whatever on the story itself.
I might mention that there were two instances in the story "Lion Loose," which appears in this third volume, where Quillan also used the term "chick." In both instances, we changed the term to "girl." Worth noting, however, is that we did not at any time change Quillan's constant use of the term "doll," despite the fact that "doll" is probably just as dated a term as "chick."
Why the difference? Between "doll" really is an integral part of Quillan's personality. Unlike the term "chick," which he uses only occasionally, he uses the term "doll" almost every time he addresses a woman. Removing it, while it might have lessened a certain obsolescence, would have significantly altered his persona. Which removing his rare use of "chick" doesn't.
If not gabby, the Precol blonde was a woman of her word. Trigger had just started lunch when the office mail-tube receiver tinkled brightly at her.She reached in, took out a flat plastic carrier, snapped it open. The paper that unfolded itself in her handIt was her retransfer application. At the bottom of the form was stamped "Application Denied," followed by the signature of the Secretary of the Department of Precolonization, Home Office, Evalee.
Here, the issue is technological. At the time Schmitz wrote the novel, pneumatic tube delivery systems were the "tech rage" of the era. Today they are hardly ever used. Since the mechanism by which the message is delivered has no bearing on the story itself, Guy and I eliminated the glaring obsolescence by simply cutting the specific mention of it. After the cut, by default, the reader will simply assume that the transmission was somehow electronic.
"Cigarette?""No hard feelings, are there?" the Commissioner's over-muscled henchman inquired amiably.
Trigger glanced at him from the side. Not amiably."No, thanks."
"No hard feelings, are there?" He looked surprised.
"Yes," she said evenly. "There are."
He looked surprised.
The issue of smoking in the Schmitz stories was handled case by case. In most instances, we left it in. But this was an instance where the social obsolescence was glaring. Try offering a cigarette today to an unknown woman in an aircraft, and you are likely to get arrested. When I read it while editing the book, my reaction was to break into laughter.
The little exchange serves no function whatsoever in the story except providing the reader with what writers call an "audio-visual cue." Those are the multitude of little interjections which writers insert into dialogue in order to give the reader the illusion that "they are there." Without enough visual cues, dialogue reads like abstract discussions in a vacuum.
(Here too, by the way, social conventions change. Much fiction in the 19th century was characterized by page after page of pure dialogue with no clues whatsoever -- not even a mention of the speakers' names, often enough. But to a modern reader it's a bit jarring and hard to follow.)
In some instances, of course, the audio-visual cue is used to amplify the dialogue. That is typically done with mannerisms such as sighing, shrugging, etc. But, more often than not -- and this is the case here -- the specific cue is simply irrelevant to the story. Quillan could just as well have scratched his chin or leaned back in his seat.
Cutting it, in other words, has no effect on the story. It simply removes an unneeded obsolescent social convention. There was a time -- I'm old enough to remember it -- when offering someone a cigarette was considered polite. Today it would be considered rude and, especially in the context of being in an aircraft, can be jarring to a reader. It tends to break their concentration on the story itself. As I said, when I read it I started laughing.
Making this cut also required making the following one, somewhat later in the story:
Her mouth went dry suddenly.She turned her head to Quillan. "Major," she said, "I think I'd like that cigarette now."
He came over and lit one for her. Trigger thanked him and puffed. And she'd almost spilled everything, she was thinking. The paid-up reservation. Every last thing.
The problem here is not the smoking itself. In the context of a private meeting like this one it wouldn't necessarily seem obsolete. In several other instances in the Hub series -- such as when Telzey's father's lights up a cigarette in the privacy of his office -- we left it in.
The problem is continuity. How would Trigger know that Quillan was a smoker, if he hadn't offered her the cigarette in the aircraft?
I have no doubt, of course, that some Outraged Critic will claim that by making these two small cuts -- which obviously have no effect on the plot -- I have somehow grossly altered the characters of Quillan and Trigger. They will claim that the fact that both of them smoke -- which is portrayed elsewhere in the Hub series, by the way -- is vital to their personalities and must, presumably, be reinforced periodically in the readers' minds.
I'm not quite sure what the proper response to that charge should be. The first thing that comes to my mind is: "Get a life." That's rude, I know, but I find it hard to suffer fools gladly.
The only other "important" instance I can recall, in this third volume of the Hub series, where Guy and I made this kind of editorial change came in the story "Aura of Immortality." There, in two instances, Schmitz used the term "newshen" to refer to the young female reporter who appears in the first part of the story. (I'm not going to cite the passage here, because it's too long. Readers interested can look at "Aura," starting after the first line break.)
The term "newshen" is hopelessly obsolete -- again, I burst into laughter when I read it -- and so we simply changed it to "newscaster" or "reporter" -- both of which terms, by the way, were also used by Schmitz to refer to the same character.
One of my critics, in a debate online, made the accusation (three times, no less) that by making this change I was distorting the reader's perception of Telzey's perception of the reporter.
That criticism was pretty typical of what I encountered from the Outraged Critics. What it mainly exemplified -- as usual -- was that the critic had either never read the story or had forgotten it. First, because Telzey never appears in the story at all. Presumably, the critic meant to refer to Trigger. But, even then, the charge is absurd because the term "newshen" is not a term which appears as part of Trigger's viewpoint. In other words, it's not what Trigger thinks of the woman -- which might, indeed, tell you something about Trigger's character, however trivial. It is simply a third person narrator authorial expression.
Changing it, therefore, had no effect on either the plot or the character development. It simply smoothed over a narration which was awkwardly jarring because of the writer's use of now-outdated slang.
Okay, I'm going to stop there. There were a few instances in the first two volumes of the series where we make these kind "updating changes," but I'm not going to bother citing them specifically. There weren't many, and all of them were of the same nature as these in Volume 3.
What I hope readers can see are two things:
1. None of these changes have any effect whatever on the stories themselves. They are irrelevant both to the plot and to the character development. They simply represent obsolete terms or social conventions which, especially cumulatively, can have the effect of constantly reminding the reader how long ago these stories were written. If I had edited these volumes for scholars doing research on mid-20th century society, I would naturally have left them in. But I wasn't. I was editing them for a modern mass SF audience which, as a rule, tends to be put off by stories which are glaringly dated.
2. The nature of these editorial changes is what you might call purely "negative." There was no attempt, as you can see, to "jazz up" the stories by "modernizing" them. To give an example, had we wanted to "modernize" the story we would have changed the scene where Telzey plays robochess into a scene where she plays a video game using a joystick.
That kind of editorial manipulation, which is sometimes done, is something I consider illegitimate. It amounts to an attempt to graft a modern twig onto an old tree, which produces a hybrid. Whereas what we did is simply analogous to smoothing down the seat of a slightly age-roughened wooden chair with fine sandpaper. Nothing is changed, and no hybrid is created. We simply removed the possibility that a reader might get distracted from the stories by encountering a narrative splinter.
Now let's move on to what was, by far, the biggest editorial input which I had on the Hub series. That was my genuinely extensive editing of the novel Legacy.
By "extensive," I am not particularly referring to the amount of text which I cut, although that was not negligible. I cut about 3000 words from Schmitz's original version of Legacy. That constitutes well over half of all the text which was cut in the course of editing the 4-volume Hub series. On the other hand, Legacy is also (by far) the longest story in the series. The original version was about 76,000 words in length -- the only real novel in the series -- and I reduced it to about 73,000. In percentage terms, therefore, I cut 4% of the text. That hardly constitutes, by anyone's definition of the term, an "abridgement."
Still, the editing was extensive -- in qualitative if not quantitative terms. Because while the cuts constitute only 4% of the entire text, they are concentrated in a few chapters and do have, I think, a rather dramatic effect on those chapters.
I certainly hope so, because in the original version those chapters are just terrible. And they really hurt the novel as a whole. Legacy, despite the fact that it is in many ways the best story Schmitz ever wrote, has never had the popularity enjoyed by such Telzey tales as Goblin Night or the Lion Game, or the Nile Etland adventure recounted in the short novel The Demon Breed (appearing next April in Volume 4, The Hub: Dangerous Territory).
I am convinced -- and have been for thirty years -- that the reason for that is because of Schmitz's two big mistakes in the way he wrote the novel. Both of which mistakes can be readily fixed by good editing, and both of which exemplify exactly the same error: as he did a number of times in his writings, Schmitz overloaded the story with unneeded background exposition. The effect of those kinds of "expository lumps" are threefold:
1. They slow the pace of the story down -- badly -- when there is no reason to do so and every reason not to.
2. They confuse and fatigue the reader by forcing them to concentrate on material which is actually irrelevant to the story itself. It's much like the effect of trying to watch a movie while someone behind you is jabbering away on the personality of the movie director. A few people might find that interesting, but most will find it annoying and tiresome.
3. It distracts the reader from focusing on what is at the heart of the story. Much as, to use my analogy, having someone jabbering in your ear about the movie director's personal quirks causes you to lose track of what's happening in the movie itself. As a result, the pace of the story is not only harmed, but the developing "tension" is harmed as well.
Okay. Enough with the abstractions. Let's get into the specifics. I think the best way for readers to follow what I did -- which was extensive and sometimes complex -- is to scan all the material below first. Don't dwell on it, just scan it. I will then explain the rationale after the text, and you can go back again if you wish and read it more thoroughly.
There were two major things which I cut from Legacy, which are found in different parts of the novel.
The first, and principal one, was the constant interjection of material concerning the tortuous background involving Dr. Azol and Geth Fayle's involvement in the disappearance of the key plasmoid -- as well as a lot of unnecessary exposition on the plasmoid itself. That material was concentrated in Chapters 6-9, but tended to metastasize like a tumor throughout the first two-thirds of the novel.
The second, which comes toward the end of the novel, was the excessive interjection of Trigger's personal background into the psychological discussion between she and Pilch.
I'm going to take these one at a time, starting with the Azol-Fayle-plasmoid business. By the way, readers will note instances where it appears that I added a fair amount of text of my own. With the exception of a few clauses, that's an optical illusion. If you look closely, you will see that the text is simply Schmitz's text elsewhere which I cut and moved to a more suitable location to maintain the continuity of the story through my editorial cuts.
I'm not giving you all of the material, because that would require quoting over half of the novel. I'm simply giving you those places where any important editing was done. So you'll be skipping over sections where the text was left unchanged.
Okay, here it is:
"In some way," Holati Tate said, "this little item here seems to be at the core of the whole plasmoid problem. Know what it is?"
Trigger looked at the little item with some revulsion. Dark green, marbled with pink streakings, it lay on the table between them, rather like a plump leech a foot and a half long. It was motionless except that the end nearest her shifted in a short arc from side to side, as if the thing suffered from a very slow twitch.
"One of the plasmoids obviously," she said. "A jumpy one." She blinked at it. "Looks like that 113. Is it?"
She glanced around. Commissioner Tate and Professor Mantelish, who sat in a armchair off to her right, were staring at her, eyebrows up, apparently surprised about something. "What's the matter?" she asked.
"We're just wondering," said Holati, "how you happen to remember 113, in particular, out of the thousands of plasmoids on Harvest Moon."
"Oh. One of the Junior Scientists on your Project mentioned the 112-113 unit. That brought it to mind. Is this 113?"
Chapter 6
When Trigger was brought to Commissioner Tate’s little private office and inquired with some heat what the devil was up, the tall grabber hadn't come into the office with her. He asked the Commissioner from the door whether he should get Professor Mantelish to the conference room, and the Commissioner nodded. The door closed and the two of them were alone.
"No," said Holati Tate. "But it appears to be a duplicate of it." HeCommissioner Tate was a mild-looking little man, well along in years, sparse and spruce in his Precol uniform. The small gray eyes in the sun-darkened, leathery face weren't really mild, if you considered them more closely, or if you knew the Commissioner.
"Have to fill you in on some of the background first, Trigger girl," he'd said, when she was brought to his little private office and inquired with some heat what the devil was up. The tall grabber hadn't come into the office with her. He asked the Commissioner from the door whether he should get Professor Mantelish to the conference room, and the Commissioner nodded. Then the door closed and the two of them were alone.
"I know it's looked odd," the CommissionerTate admitted, "but the circumstances have been very odd. Still are. And I didn't want to worry you any more than I had to."
Trigger, unmollified, pointed out that the methods he'd“Really? The methods you’ve used not to worry her hardly had been soothing.me have hardly been soothing,” said Trigger, unmollified.
"I know that, too," said the Commissioner. "But if I'd told you everything immediately, you would have had reason enough to be worried for the past two months, rather than just for a day or so. The situation has improved now, very considerably. In fact, in another few days you shouldn't have any more reason to worry at all." He smiled briefly. "At least, no more than the rest of us."
Trigger felt a bit dry-lipped suddenly. "I do at present?" she asked.
"You did till today. There's been some pretty heavy heat on you, Trigger girl. We're switching most of it off tonight. For good, I think."
"You mean some heat will be left?"
"In a way," he said. "But that should be cleared up too in the next three or fourdays. Anyway we can drop most of the mystery act tonight."
Trigger shook her head. "It isn't being dropped very fast!" she observed.
"I told you I couldn't tell it backwards," the Commissioner said patiently. "All right if we start filling in the background now?"
"I guess we'd better," she admitted.
"Fine," said Commissioner Tate. Hedays." Commissioner Tate got to his feet. "Then let's go join Mantelish."
"Why the professor?"
"He could help a lot with the explaining. If he's in the mood. Anyway he's got a kind of pet I'd like you to look at."
"A pet!" cried Trigger. She shook her head again and stood up resignedly. "Lead on, Commissioner!"
***
They joined Mantelish and his plasmoid weirdie in what looked like the dining room of what had looked like an old-fashioned hunting lodge when the aircar came diving down on it between two ice-sheeted mountain peaks. Trigger wasn't sure in just what section of the main continent they were; but there were only two or three alternatives -- it was high in the mountains, and night came a lot faster here than it did around Ceyce.
She greeted Mantelish and sat down at the table. He was a very big, rather fat but healthy-looking old man with a thick thatch of white hair and a ruddy face.
Then the Commissioner locked the doors and introduced her to the professor's pet.
"In some way," Holati Tate said, "this little item here seems to be at the core of the whole plasmoid problem. Know what it is?"
Trigger looked at the little item with some revulsion. Dark green, marbled with pink streakings, it lay on the table between them, rather like a plump leech a foot and a half long. It was motionless except that the end nearest her shifted in a short arc from side to side, as if the thing suffered from a very slow twitch.
"One of the plasmoids obviously," she said. "A jumpy one." She blinked at it. "Looks like that 113. Is it?"
She glanced around. Commissioner Tate and Professor Mantelish, who sat in a armchair off to her right, were staring at her, eyebrows up, apparently surprised about something. "What's the matter?" she asked.
"We're just wondering," said Holati, "how you happen to remember 113, in particular, out of the thousands of plasmoids on Harvest Moon."
"Oh. One of the Junior Scientists on your Project mentioned the 112-113 unit. That brought it to mind. Is this 113?"
"It's labeled 113-A," he said now. "Even"No," said Holati Tate. "But it appears to be a duplicate of it. It's labeled 113-A. Even the professor isn't certain he could distinguish between the two. Right, Mantelish?"
"That is true," said Mantelish, "at present." He was a very big, rather fat but healthy-looking old man with a thick thatch of white hair and a ruddy face. "Withoutpresent. Without a physical comparison--" He shrugged.
"What's so important about the critter?" Trigger asked, eying the leech again. One good thing about it, she thought -- it wasn't equipped to eye her back.
"It goes back to the time,""The plasmoid you mentioned earlier, Unit 112-113, has been stolen," the Commissionersaid, "when Mantelish and Fayle and Azol were conducting the first League investigation of the plasmoids on Harvest Moon. You recall the situation?"
"If you mean their attempts to get the things to show some signs of life, I do, naturally."
"One of them got lively enough for poor old Azol, didn't it?" Professor. Mantelish rumbled from his armchair.
Trigger grimaced. Doctor Azol's fate might be one of the things that had given her a negative attitude towards plasmoids. With Mantelish, and Doctor Gess Fayle, Azol had been the third of the three big U-League boys in charge of the initial investigation on Harvest Moon. As she remembered it, it was Azol who discovered that plasmoids occasionally could be induced to absorb food. Almost any kind of food, it turned out, so long as it contained a sufficient quantity of protein. What had happened to Azol looked like a particularly unfortunate result of the discovery. It was assumed an untimely coronary had been the reason he had fallen helplessly into the feeding trough of one of the largest plasmoids. By the time he was found, all of him from the knees on up already had been absorbed.
"I meant your efforts to get them to work," she said.
Commissioner Tate looked at Mantelish. "You. tell her about that part of it," he suggested.
Mantelish shook his head. "I'd get too technical," he said resignedly. "I always do. At least they say so. You tell her."
Butsaid. "We don't -- " But Holati Tate's eyesattention had shifted suddenly to the table. "Hey, now!" he said in a low voice.
Trigger followed his gaze. After a moment she made a soft, sucking sound of alarmed distaste.
"Ugh!" she remarked. "It's moving!"
"So it is," Holati said.
"Towards me!" said Trigger. "I think--"
"Don't get startled. Mantelish!"
Mantelish already was coming up slowly behind Trigger's chair. "Don't move!" he cautioned her.
"Why not?" said Trigger.
"Hush, my dear." Mantelish laid a large, heavy hand on each of her shoulders and bore down slightly. "It's sensitive! This is very interesting. Very."
Perhaps it was. She kept watching the plasmoid. It had thinned out somewhat and was gliding very slowly but very steadily across the table. Definitely in her direction.
"Ho-ho!" said Mantelish in a thunderous murmur. "Perhaps it likes you, Trigger! Ho-ho!" He seemed immensely pleased.
"Well," Trigger said helplessly, "I don't like it!" She wriggled slightly under Mantelish's hands. "And I'd sooner get out of this chair!"
"Don't be childish, Trigger," said the professor annoyedly. "You're behaving as if it were, in some manner, offensive."
"It is," she said.
"Hush, my dear," Mantelish said absently, putting on a little more pressure. Trigger hushed resignedly. They watched. In about a minute, the gliding thing reached the edge of the table. Trigger gathered herself to duck out from under Mantelish's hands and go flying out of the chair if it looked as if the plasmoid was about to drop into her lap.
But it stopped. For a few seconds it lay motionless. Then it gradually raised its front end and began waving it gently back and forth in the air. At her, Trigger suspected.
"Yipes!" she said, horrified.
The front end sank back. The plasmoid lay still again. After a minute it was still lying still.
"Show's over for the moment, I guess," said the Commissioner.
"I'm afraid so," said Professor Mantelish. His big hands went away from Trigger's aching shoulders. "You startled it, Trigger!" he boomed at her accusingly.
One of the things, Holati Tate said, which had not become public knowledge so far was that Professor Mantelish actually succeeded in getting some of the plasmoids on the Old Galactic base back into operation. One plasmoid in particular.
The reason the achievement hadn't been announced was that for nearly six weeks no one except the three men directly involved in the experiments had known about them. And during that time other things occurred which made subsequent publicity seem very inadvisable.
Mantelish scowled. "We made up a report to the League the day of the initial discovery," he informed Trigger. "It was a complete and detailed report!"
"True," Holati said, "but the report the U-League got didn't happen to be the one Professor Mantelish helped make up. We'll go into that later. The plasmoid the professor was experimenting with was the 112-113 unit."
He shifted his gaze to Mantelish. "Still want me to tell it?"
"Yes, yes!" Mantelish said impatiently. "You will oversimplify grossly, of course, but it should do for the moment. At a more leisurely time I shall be glad to give Trigger an accurate description of the processes."
Trigger smiled at him. "Thank you, Professor!" She took her second sip of the Puya. Not bad.
"Well, Mantelish was dosing this plasmoid with mild electrical stimulations," Holati went on. "He noticed suddenly that as he did it other plasmoids in that section of Harvest Moon were indicating signs of activity. So he called in Doctor Fayle and Doctor Azol."
The three scientists discovered quickly that stimulation of the 112 part of the unit was in fact producing random patterns of plasmoid motion throughout the entire base, while an electrical prod at 113 brought everything to an abrupt stop again. After a few hours of this, 112 suddenly extruded a section of its material, which detached itself and moved off slowly under its own power through half the station, trailed with great excitement by Mantelish and Azol. It stopped at a point where another plasmoid had been removed for laboratory investigations, climbed up and settled down in the place left vacant by its predecessor. It then reshaped itself into a copy of the predecessor, and remained where it was. Obviously a replacement.
There was dignified scientific jubilation among the three. This was precisely the kind of information the U-League -- and everybody else had been hoping to obtain. 112-113 tentatively could be assumed to be a kind of monitor of the station's activities. It could be induced to go into action and to activate the other plasmoids. With further observation and refinement of method, its action undoubtedly could be shifted from the random to the purposeful. Finally, and most importantly, it had shown itself capable of producing a different form of plasmoid life to fulfill a specific requirement.
In essence, the riddles presented by the Old Galactic Station appeared to be solved.
The three made up their secret report to the U-League. Included was a recommendation to authorize distribution of ten per cent of the less significant plasmoids to various experimental centers in the Hub -- the big and important centers which had been bringing heavy political pressure to bear on the Federation to let them in on the investigation. That should keep them occupied, while the U-League concluded the really important work.
"Next day," said Holati, "Doctor Gess Fayle presented Mantelish with a transmitted message from U-League Headquarters. It contained instructions to have Fayle mount the 112-113 unit immediately in one of the League ships at Harvest Moon and bring it quietly to Maccadon."
Mantelish frowned. "The message was faked!" he boomed.
"Not only that," said Holati. "The actual report Doctor Fayle had transmitted the day before to the League was revised to the extent that it omitted any reference to 112-113." He glanced thoughtfully at Mantelish. "As a matter of fact, it was almost a month and a half before League Headquarters became aware of the importance of the unit."
The professor snorted. "Azol," he explained to Trigger, "had become a victim of his scientific zeal. And I--"
"Doctor Azol," said the Commissioner, "as you may remember, had his little mishap with the plasmoid just two days after Fayle departed."
"And I," Mantelish went on, "was involved in other urgent research. How was I to know what that villain Fayle had been up to? A vice president of the University League!"
"Well," Trigger said, "what had Doctor Fayle been up to?"
"We don't know yet," Holati told her. "Obviously he had something in mind with the faked order and the alteration of the report. But the only thing we can say definitely is that he disappeared on the League ship he had requisitioned, along with its personnel and the 112-113 plasmoid, and hasn't shown up again."
"And that plasmoid unit now appears to have been almost certainly the key unit of the entire Old Galactic Station -- the unit that kept everything running along automatically there for thirty thousand years."
HeHolati glanced at Quillan. "Someone at the door. We'll hold it while you see what they want."
Chapter 7
The burly character who had appeared at the door said diffidently that Professor Mantelish had wanted to be present while his lab equipment was stowed aboard. If the professor didn't mind, things were about that far along.
Mantelish excused himself and went off with the messenger. The door closed. Quillan came back to his chair.
"We're moving the outfit later tonight," the Commissioner explained. "Mantelish is coming along -- plus around eight tons of his lab equipment. Plus his six special U-League guards."
"Oh?" Trigger picked up the Puya glass. She looked into it. It was empty. "Moving where?" she asked.
"Manon," said the Commissioner. "Tell you about that later."
Every last muscle in Trigger's body seemed to go limp simultaneously. She settled back slightly in the chair, surprised by the force of the reaction. She hadn't realized by half how keyed up she was! She sighed a small sigh. Then she smiled at Quillan.
"Major," she said, "how about a tiny little refill on that Puya -- about half?"
Quillan took care of the tiny little refill.
Commissioner Tate said, "By the way, Quillan does have a degree in subspace engineering and gets assigned to the Engineers now and then. But his real job's Space Scout Intelligence."
Trigger nodded. "I'd almost guessed it!" She gave Quillan another smile. She nearly gave 113-A a smile.
"And now," said the Commissioner, "we'll talk more freely. We tell Mantelish just as little as we can. To tell you the truth, Trigger, the professor is a terrible handicap on an operation like this. I understand he was a great friend of your father's."
"Yes," she said. "Going over for visits to Mantelish's garden with my father is one of the earliest things I remember. I can imagine he's a problem!" She shifted her gaze curiously from one to the other of the two men. "What are you people doing? Looking for Gess Fayle and the key unit?"
Holati Tate said, "That's about it. We're one of a few thousandhundred Federation groups assigned to the same general job.plasmoid project. Each group works at its specialties, and the information gets correlated." He paused. "The Federation Council -- they're the ones we're working for directly -- the Council's biggest concern is the very delicate political situation that's involved. They feel it could develop suddenly into a dangerous one. They may be right."
"In what way?" Trigger asked.
"Well, suppose that a key unit is lost and stays lost. Unit 112-113, to be precise. Suppose all the other plasmoids put together don't contain enough information to show how the Old Galactics produced the things and got them to operate."
"Somebody would get that worked out pretty soon, wouldn't they?"
"Not necessarily, or even probably, according to Mantelish and some other people who know what's happened. There seem to be too many basic factors missing. It might be necessary to develop a whole new class of sciences first. And that could take a few centuries."
"Well," Trigger admitted, "I could get along without the things indefinitely."
"Same here," the plasmoid nabob agreed ungratefully. "Weird beasties! But -- let's see. At present there are twelve hundred and fifty-eight member worlds to the Federation, aren't there?"
"More or less."
"And the number of planetary confederacies, subplanetary governments, industrial, financial and commercial combines, assorted power groups, etc. and so on, is something I'd hate to have to calculate."
"What are you driving at?" she asked.
"They've all been told we're heading for a new golden age, courtesy of the plasmoid science. Practically everybody has believed it. Now there's considerable doubt."
"Oh," she said. "Of course -- practically everybody is going to get very unhappy, eh?"
"That," said Commissioner Tate, "is only a little of it."
"Yes, the thing isn't just lost. Somebody's got it."
"Very likely."
Trigger nodded. "Fayle's ship might have got wrecked accidentally, of course. But the way he took off shows he planned to disappear -- a crack-up on top of that would be too much of a coincidence. So any one of umpteen thousands of organizations in the Hub might be the one that has that plasmoid now!"
"Including," said Holati, "any one of the two hundred and fourteen restricted worlds. Their treaties of limitation wouldn't have let them get into the plasmoid pie until the others had been at it a decade or so. They would have been quite eager..."
There was a little pause. Then Trigger said, "Lordy! The thing could even set off another string of wars--"
"That's a point the Council is nervous about," he said.
"Well, it certainly is amess. You would have thought the Federation might have had a Security Chief in on that first operation. Right there on Harvest Moon!"
"They did," he said. "It was Fayle."
"Oh! Pretty embarrassing."mess." Trigger was silent a moment. "Holati, could those things ever become as valuable as people keep saying? It's all sounded a little exaggerated to me."
The Commissioner said he'd wondered about it too. "I'm not enough of a biologist to make an educated guess. What it seems to boil down to is that they might. Which would be enough to tempt a lot of people to gamble very high for a chance to get control of the plasmoidprocess -- and we know definitely that some people are gambling for it."
"How do you know?"
"We'veprocess. We've been working a couple of leads here. Pretty short leads so far, but you work with what you can get." He nodded at the table. "We picked up the first lead through 113-A."
Trigger glanced down. The plasmoid lay there some inches from the side of her hand. "You know," she said uncomfortably, "old Repulsive moved again while we were talking! Towards my hand." She drew the hand away.
"I was watching it," Major Quillan said reassuringly from the end of the table. "I would have warned you, but it stopped when it got as far as it is now. That was around five minutes ago."
Trigger reached back and gave old Repulsive a cautious pat. "Very lively character! He does feel pleasant to touch. Kitty-cat pleasant! How did you get a lead through him?"
"Mantelish brought it back to Maccadon with him, mainly becauseof its similarity to 113. He was curious because he couldn't even guess at what its function was. It was just lying there in a cubicle. So he did considerable experimenting with it while he waited for Gess Fayle to show up -- and League Headquarters fidgeted around, hoping to get the kind of report from Mantelish and Fayle that Mantelish it."
thought they'd already received. They were wondering where Fayle was, too. But they knew Fayle was Security, so they didn't like to get too nosy."
Trigger shook her head. "Wonderful! So what happened with 113-A?"
"Mantelish began to get results with it," the Commissioner said. "One experiment was rather startling. He'd been trying that electrical stimulation business. Nothing happened until he had finished. Then he touched the plasmoid, and it fed the whole charge back to him. Apparently it was a fairly hefty dose."
She laughed delightedly. "Good for Repulsive! Stood up for his rights, eh?"
"Mantelish gained some such impression anyway. He became more cautious with it after that. And then he learned something that should be important. He was visiting another lab where they had a couple of plasmoids which actually moved now and then. He had 113-A in his coat pocket. The two lab plasmoids stopped moving while he was there. They haven't movedsince."
"Like the Harvest Moon plasmoids when they stimulated 113?"
"Right.since. He thought about that, and then located another moving plasmoid. He dropped in to look it over, with 113-A in his pocket again, and it stopped. He did the same thing in one more place and then quit. There aren't that many moving plasmoids around. Those three labs are still wondering what hit their specimens."
She studied 113-A curiously. "A mighty mite! What does Mantelish make of it?"
"He thinks the stolen 112-113 unit forms a kind of self-regulating system. The big one induces plasmoid activity, the little one modifies it. This 113-A might be a spare regulator. But it seems to be more than a spare -- which brings us to that first lead we got. A gang of raiders crashed Mantelish's lab one night."
"When was that?"
"Some months ago. Before you and I left Manon. The professor was out, and 113-A had gone along in his pocket as usual. But his two lab guards and one of the raiders were killed. The others got away.Gess Fayle's defection was a certainty by then, and everybody was very nervous. The Feds got there fast, and dead-brained the raider. They learned just two things. One, he'd been mind-blocked and couldn't have spilled any significant information even if they had got him alive. The other item they drew from his brain was a clear impression of the target of the raid -- the professor's pal here."
"Uh-huh," Trigger said, lost in thought. She poked Repulsive lightly. "That would be Fayle and his associates then. Or somebody who knew about them. Did they want to kill it or grab it?"
The Commissioner looked at her. "Grab it, was the dead-brain report. Why?"
"Just wondering. Would make a difference, wouldn't it? Did they try again?"
"There've been five more attempts," he said.
"And what's everybody concluded from that?"
"They want 113-A in a very bad way. So they need it."
"In connection with the key unit?" Trigger asked.
"Probably."
"That makes everything look very much better, doesn't it?"
"Quite a little," he said. "The unit may not work, or may not work satisfactorily, unless 113-A is in the area. Mantelish talks of something he calls proximity influence. Whatever that is, 113-A has demonstrated it has it."
"So," Trigger said, "they"whoever stole 112-113 might have two thirds of what everybody wants, and you might have one third. Right here on the table. How many of the later raiders did you catch?"
"All of them," said the Commissioner. "Around forty. We got them dead, we got them alive. It didn't make much difference. They were hired hands. Very expensive hired hands, but still just that. Most of them didn't know a thing we could use. The ones that did know something were mind-blocked again."
"I thought," Trigger said reflectively, "you could unblock someone like that."
"You can, sometimes, Ififsometimes. If you're very good at it and if you have time enough. We couldn't afford to wait a year. They died before they could tell us anything."
There was a pause. Then Trigger asked, "How did you get involved in this, personally?"
"More or less by accident," the Commissioner said. "It was in connection with our second lead."
"That's me, huh?" she said unhappily.
"Yes."
"Why would anyone want to grab me? I don't know anything."
He shook his head. "We haven't found out yet. We're hoping we will, in a very few days."
"Is that one of the things you can't tell me about?"
"I can tell you most of what I know at the moment," said the Commissioner. "Remember the night we stopped off at Evalee on the way in from Manon?"
"Yes," she said. "That big hotel!"
Chapter 8
"About an hour after you'd decided to hit the bunk," Holati said, "I portaled back to your rooms to pick up some Precol reports we'd been setting up."
Trigger nodded. "I remember the reports."
"A couple of characters were working on your doors when I got there. They went for their guns, unfortunately. But I called the nearest Scout Intelligence office and had them dead-brained."
"Why that?" she asked.
"It could have been an accident -- a couple of ordinary thugs. But their equipment looked a little too good for ordinary thugs. I didn't know just what to be suspicious of, but I got suspicious anyway."
"That's you, all right," Trigger acknowledged. "What were they?"
"They had an Evalee record which told us more than the brains did. They were high-priced boys. Their brains told us they'd allowed themselves to be mind-blocked on this particular job. High-priced boys won't do that unless they can set their standard price very much higher. It didn't look at all any more as if they'd come to your door by accident."
"No," she admitted.
"The Feds got in on it then. There'd been that business in Mantelish's lab. There were similarities in the pattern. You knew Mantelish. You'd been on Harvest Moon with him. They thought there could be a connection."
"But what connection?" she protested. "I know I don't know anything that could do anybody any good!"
He shrugged. "I can't figure it either, Trigger girl. But the upshot of it was that I was put in charge of this phase of the general investigation. If there is a connection, it'll come out eventually. In any case, we want to know who's been trying to have you picked up and why."
She studied his face with troubled eyes.
"That's quite definite, is it?" she asked. "There couldn't possibly still be a mistake?"
"No. It's definite."
"So that's what the grabber business in the Colonial School yesterday was about..."
He nodded. "It was their first try since the Evalee matter."
"Why do you think they waited so long?"
"Because they suspected you were being guarded. It's difficult to keep an adequate number of men around without arousing doubts in interested observers."
Trigger glanced at the plasmoid. "That sounds," she remarked, "as if you'd let other interested observers feel you'd left them a good opening to get at Repulsive."
He didn't quite smile. "I might have done that. Don't tell the Council."
Trigger pursed her lips. "I won't. So the grabbers who were after me figured I was booby-trapped. But then they came in anyway. That doesn't seem very bright. Or did you do something again to make them think the road was clear?"
"No," he said. "They were trying to clear the road for themselves. We thought they would finally. The deal was set up as a one-two."
"As a what?"
"One-two. You slug into what could be a trap like that with one gang. If it was a trap, they were sacrifices. You hope the opposition will now relax its precautions. Sometimes it does -- and a day or so later you're back for the real raid. That works occasionally. Anyway it was the plan in this case."
"How do you know?"
"They'd started closing in for the grab in Ceyce when Quillan's group located you. So Quillan grabbed you first."
She flushed. "I wasn't as smart as I thought, was I?"
The Commissioner grunted. "Smart enough to give us a king-sized headache! But they didn't have any trouble finding you. We discovered tonight that some kind of tracer material had been worked into all your clothes. Even the flimsiest. Somebody may have been planted in the school laundry, but that's not important now." He looked at her for a moment. "What made you decide to take off so suddenly?" he asked.
Trigger shrugged. "I was getting pretty angry with you," she admitted. "More or less with everybody. Then I applied for a transfer, and the application bounced -- from Evalee! I figured I'd had enough and that I'd just quietly clear out. So I did -- or thought I did."
"Can't blame you," said Holati.
Trigger said, "I still think it would have been smarter to keep me informed right from the start of what was going on."
He shook his head. "I wouldn't be telling you a thing even now," he said, "if it hadn't been definitely established that you're already involved in the matter. This could develop into a pretty messy operation. I wouldn't have wanted you in on it, if it could have been avoided. And if you weren't going to be in on it, I couldn't go spilling Federation secrets to you."
"I'm in on it, definitely, eh?"
He nodded. "For the duration."
"But you're still not telling me everything?"
"There're a few things I can't tell you," he said. "I'm following orders in that."
Trigger smiled faintly "That's a switch! I didn't know you knew how."
"I've followed plenty of orders in my time," the Commissioner said, "especially when I thought they made sense. And I think these do."
Trigger was silent a moment. "You said a while ago that most of the heat was to go off me tonight. Can you talk about that?"
"Yes, that's all right." He considered. "I'll have to tell you something else again first -- why we're going to Manon."
She settled back in her chair. "Go ahead."
"Somebody got the idea that one of the things Gess Fayle might have done is to arrange things so he wouldn't have to come back to the Hub for a while. If he could set up shop on some outworld far enough away, and tinker around with that plasmoid unit for a year or so until he knew all about it, he might do better for himself than by simply selling it to somebody."
"But that would be pretty risky, wouldn't it?" said Trigger. "With just the equipment he could pack on a League transport."
"Not very much risk," said the Commissioner, "if he had an agreement to have an Independent Fleet meet him."
"Oh." She nodded.
"And by"By what is, at all events, an interesting coincidence," the Commissioner went on, "we've had word that an outfit called Vishni's Fleet hasn't been heard from for some months. Their I-FleetIndependent Fleet area is a long way out beyond Manon, butFayle could have made it there, at League ship speeds, in about twenty days. Less, if Vishni sent a few pilots to meet him and guide him out subspace. If he's bought Vishni's, he's had his pick of a few hundred uncharted habitable planets and a few thousand very expert outworlders to see nothing happens to him planetside. And Vishni's boys are exactly the kind of crumbspeople who would get involved in you could buy for a deal like that."a deal like this."
"You think they stole 112-113?" Trigger asked.
Holati shook his head. "Doesn't look as simple as that, because there were obviously some insiders involved. But I don't want to get into that here." He and Quillan exchanged a quick glance. The Commissioner hurried on.
"Now, what's been done is to hire a few of the other I-Fleets around there and set them and as many Space Scout squadrons as could be kicked loose from duty elsewhere to surveying the Vishni territory. Our outfit is in charge of that operation. And Manon, of course, is a lot better point from which to conduct it than the Hub. If something is discovered that looks interesting enough to investigate in detail, we'll only be a week's run away."
"So we've been ready to move for the past two weeks now, which was when the first reports started coming in from the Vishni area -- negative reports so far, by the way. I've kept stalling from day to day, because there were also indications that your grabber friends might be getting set to swing at you finally. It seemed tidier to get that matter cleared up first. Now they've swung, and we'll go."
He rubbed his chin. "The nice thing about it all," he remarked, "is that we're going there with the two items the opposition has revealed it wants. We're letting them know those items will be available in the Manon System henceforward. They might get discouraged and just drop the whole project. If they do, that's fine. We'll go ahead with cleaning up the Vishni phase of the operation."
"But," he continued, "the indications are they can't drop their project any more than we can drop looking for that key unit. So we'll expect them to show up in Manon. When they do, they'll be working in unfamiliar territory and in a system where they have only something like fifty thousand people to hide out in, instead of a planetary civilization. I think they'll find things getting very hot for them very fast in Manon."
"Very good," said Trigger. "That I like! But what makes you think the opposition is just one group? There might be a bunch of them by now. Maybe even fighting among themselves."
"I'd bet on at least two groups myself," he said. "And if they're fighting, they've got our blessing. They're still all opposition as far as we're concerned."
She nodded. "How are you letting them know about the move?"
"The mountains around here are lousy with observers. Very cute tricks some of them use -- one boy has been sitting in a hollow tree for weeks. We let them see what we want to. This evening they saw you coming in. Later tonight they'll see you climbing into the ship with the rest of the party and taking off. They've already picked up messages to tell them just where the ship's going." He paused. "But you've got a job to finish up here first, Trigger. That'll take about four days. So it won't really be you they see climbing into the ship."
"What!" She straightened up.
"We've got a facsimile for you," he explained. "Girl agent. She goes along to draw the heat to Manon."
Trigger felt herself tightening up slowly all over.
"What's this job you're talking about?" she asked evenly.
"Can't tell you in too much detail. But around four days from now somebody is coming in to Maccadon to interview you."
"Interview me? What about?"
He hesitated a moment. "There's a theory," he said, "that you might have information you don't know you have. And that the people who sent grabbers after you want that information. If it's true, the interview will bring it out."
Her mouth went dry suddenly.She turned her head to Quillan. "Major," she said, "I think I'd like that cigarette now."
He came over and lit one for her. Trigger thanked him and puffed. And she'd almost spilled everything, she was thinking. The paid-up reservation. Every last thing.
"I'd like to get itthis straight," she said. "What you're talking about sounds like it's a mind-search job, Holati."
"It's in that class," he said. "But it won't be an ordinary mind-search. The people who are coming here are top experts at that kind of work."
She nodded. "I don't know much about it... Do they think somebody's got to me with a hypno-spray or something? That I've been conditioned? Something like that?"
"I don't know, Trigger," be said. "It may be something in that line. But whatever it is, they'll be able to handle it."
Trigger moistened her lips. "I was thinking, you know," she said. "Supposing I'm mind-blocked."
He shook his head. "I can tell you that, anyway," he said. "We already know you're not."
Trigger was silent a moment. Then she said, "After that interview's over, I'm to ship out to Manon -- is that it?"
"That's right."
"But it would depend on the outcome of that interview too, wouldn't it?" Trigger pointed out. "I mean you can't really be sure what those people might decide, can you?"
"Yes, I can," he said. "This thing's been all scheduled out, Trigger. And the next step of the schedule for you is Manon. Nothing else."
She didn't believe him in the least. He couldn't know. She nodded.
"Guess I might as well play along." She looked at him. "I don't think I really hadhave much choice, diddo I?"
"Afraid not," he admitted. "It's one of those things that just havehas to be done. But you won't find it at all bad. Your companion, by the way, for the next three days will be Mihul."
"Mihul!" Trigger exclaimed.
"Right here," said Mihul's voice. Trigger swung around in her chair.
Mihul stood in a door which had appeared in the far wall of the room. She gave Trigger a smile. Trigger looked back at the Commissioner.
"I don't get it," she said.
"Oh, Mihul's in Scout Intelligence," he said. "Wouldn't be here if she weren't."
"Been an agent for eighteen years," Mihul said, coming forward. "Hi, Trigger. Surprised?"
"Yes," Trigger admitted. "Very."
"They brought me into this job," Mihul said, "because they figured you and I would get along together just fine."
Holati Tate brought her the drink and went on with the details. Trigger and he and a dozen or so of the first group of U-League investigators had been in what was now designated as Section 52 Ofof Harvest Moon. The Commissioner was by himself, checking over some equipment which had been installed in one of the compartments.After a while Doctor Azol joined him and told him Mantelish and the others had gone onto another section. Holati and Azolhad finished the check-uptogether and werewas about to leave the area to catch up with the group, when Holatiarea, when he saw Trigger lying on the floor in an adjoining compartment.
"You seemed to be in some kind of coma," he said. "We"I picked you up and put you into a chair by one of the survey screens, and werewas trying to get out a callon Azol's suit communicator to the ambulance boat when you suddenly opened your eyes. You looked at me and said, 'Oh, there you are! I was just going to go looking for you.'"
It was obvious that she didn't realize anything unusual had happened."Azol started to say something, but I stepped on his foot, and he caught on. In fact, he caught on so fast that I became a littlesuspicious of him."
"Poor Azol!" Trigger said.
"Poor nothing!" the Commissioner said cryptically. "I'll tell you about that some other time." He had cautioned Doctor Azol to say nothing to anybody until the incident had been clarified, in view ofthe stringent security precautions being practiced. "...supposedly being practiced," he amended. Then he'd returned to Manon Planet with Trigger immediately, where she was checked over by Precol's medical staff. Physically there wasn't a thing wrong with her.
The transmitter signaled for attention while she was studying the report. Holati Tate went off to answer it. The report was rather lengthy, and Trigger was still going over it when he got back. He sat down again and waited.
When she looked up finally, he asked, "Can you make much sense of it?"
"Not very much," Trigger admitted. "It just states what seems to have happened. Not how or why. Apparently they did get me to develop total recall of that knocked-out period in the last interview -- I even reported hearing youand Doctor Azol moving aroundand talking in the nextcompartment."
He nodded. "I remember enough of my conversation with Azol to be able to verify that part of it."
"Then,compartment. Then, some time before I actually fell down," said Trigger,she continued, "I was apparently already in that mysterious coma. Getting deeper into it. It started when I walked away from Mantelish's group, without having any particular reason for doing it. I just walked. Then I was in another compartment by myself and still walking, and the stuff kept getting deeper, until I lost physical control of myself and fell down. Then I lay there a while until you came down that aisle and saw me. And after you'd picked me up and put me in that chair -- Justjust like that, everything clears up! Except that I don't remember what happened and think I've just left Mantelish to go looking for you. I don't even wonder how I happen to be sitting there in a chair!"
The Commissioner smiled briefly. "That's right. You didn't."
Her slim fingers tapped the pages of the report, the green stone in the ring he'd given her to wear reflecting little flashes of light. "They seem quite positive that nobody else came near me during that period. And that nobody had used a hypno-spray on me or shot a hypodermic pellet into me -- anything like that -- before the seizure or whatever it was came on. How do you suppose they could be so sure of that?"
"I wouldn't know," Holati said. "But I think we might as well assume they're right."
"I suppose so. What it seems to boil down to is they're saying I was undergoing something like a very much slowed-down, very profound emotional shock -- source still undetermined, but profound enough to knock me completely out for a while. Only they also say that -- for a whole list of reasons -- it couldn't possibly have been an emotional shock after all! And when the effect left, it went instantaneously. That would be just the reverse to the pattern of an emotional shock, wouldn't it?"
"Yes," he said. "That occurred to me too, but it didn't explain anything to me. Possibly it's explained something to the Psychology Service."
"Well," Trigger said, "it's certainly all very odd. Very disagreeable, too!" She laid the report down on the arm of her chair and looked at the Commissioner. "Guess I'd better run now," she said. "But"See you around there was something you said before that made me wonder. There was really very little of Doctor Azol left after that plasmoid got through with him."
He nodded. "True."
"It wasn't Azol, was it?"
"No."
"Man, oh, man!" Trigger jumped up, bent over his chair and gave him a quick peck on an ear tip. "If I ask one more question, we'll be sitting here the next two hours. I'll run instead! See you around lunchtime, Commissioner!"lunchtime, Commissioner."
"Right, Trigger," he said, getting up.
He closed the door behind her and went back to the transmitter. He looked rather unhappy.
"Yes?" said a voice in the transmitter.
"She just left," Commissioner Tate said. "Get on the beam and stay there!"
"Incidentally," she said, "I did take the opportunity to apologize to Major Quillan for clipping him a couple this morning. I shouldn't have done that."
"He didn't seem offended," said Holati.
"No, not really," she agreed.
"And I explained to him that you had very good reason to feel disturbed."
"Thanks," said Trigger. "By the way, was he really a smuggler at one time? And a hijacker?"
"Yes -- very successful at it. It's excellent cover for some phases of Intelligence work. As I heard it, though, Quillan happened to scramble up one of the Hub's nastier dope rings in the process, and was broken two grades in rank."
"Broken?" Trigger said. "Why?"
"Unwarranted interference with a political situation. The Scouts are rough about that. You're supposed to see those things. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you do and go ahead anyway. They may pat you on the back privately, but they also give you the axe."
"I see," she said. She smiled.
"Just how far did we get in bringing you up to date yesterday?" the Commissioner asked.
"The remains that weren't Doctor Azol," Trigger said.
If it hadn't been for the funny business with Trigger, Holati said, he mightn't have been immediately skeptical about Doctor Azol's supposed demise by plasmoid during a thrombosis-induced spell of unconsciousness. There had been no previous indications that the U-League's screening of its scientists, in connection with the plasmoid find, might have been strategically loused up from the start.
But as things stood, he did look on the event with very considerable skepticism. Doctor Azol's death, in that particular form, seemed too much of a coincidence. For, beside himself, only Azol knew that another person already had suddenly and mysteriously lost consciousness on Harvest Moon. Only Azol therefore might expect that the Commissioner would quietly inform the official investigators of the preceding incident, thus cinching the accidental death theory in Azol's case much more neatly than the assumed heart attack had done.
The Commissioner went on from there to the reflection that if Azol had chosen to disappear, it might well have been with the intention of conveying important information secretly back to somebody waiting for it in the Hub. He saw to it that the remains were preserved, and that word of what could have happened was passed on to a high Federation official whom he knew to be trustworthy. That was all he was in a position to do, or interested in doing, himself. Security men presently came and took the supposed vestiges of Doctor Azol's body back to the Hub.
"It wasn't until some months later, when the works blew up and I was put on this job, that I heard any more about it," Holati Tate said. "It wasn't Azol. It was part of some unidentifiable cadaver which he'd presumably brought with him for just such a use. Anyway, they had Azol's gene patterns on record, and they didn't jibe."
His desk transmitter buzzed and Trigger took it on an earphone extension.
"Argee," she said. She listened a moment. "All right. Coming over." She stood up, replacing the earphone. "Office tangle," she explained. "Guess they feel I'm fluffing off, now I'm back. I'll get back here as soon as it's straightened out. Oh, by the way."
"Yes?"
"The Psychology Service ship messaged in during the morning. It'll arrive some time tomorrow and wants a station assigned to it outside the system, where it won't be likely to attract attention. Are they really as huge as all that?"
"I've seen one or two that were bigger," the Commissioner said. "But not much."
"When they're stationed, they'll send someone over in a shuttle to pick me up."
The Commissioner nodded. "I'll check on the arrangements for that. The idea of the interview still bothering you?"
"Well, I'd sooner it wasn't necessary," Trigger admitted. "But I guess it is." She grinned briefly. "Anyway, I'll be able to tell my grandchildren some day that I once talked to one of the real eggheads!"
Okay. Are you utterly confused by now? Yeah, no kidding. All of that endless yabber-jabber about Dr. Azol and Geth Fayle and who-had-the-plasmoid-when and we'll-explain-that-in-a-moment (even though they never do) would confuse an expert on the Kabbalah. It's a tortuous, extremely slow-moving, constant bombarding of the reader with a mass of background material...
ALL OF WHICH IS UTTERLY IRRELEVANT TO WHAT THE STORY IS ABOUT.
This is not a novel about Dr. Azol and Geth Fayle. Neither of those characters appears even once on stage in the entire novel. (Geth Fayle, in fact, is already dead.) It's a novel about Trigger Argee and (to a lesser extent) Heslet Quillan. And if you go back and look closely at the material which I cut -- and then compare it to the rest of the novel -- you will discover that their story doesn't need any of it. NONE of it.
You don't have to take my word for this. The easiest way to doublecheck my claim is just to read the edited version of Legacy which appears in Volume 3. Just as you would any other novel. Then, when you're done, ask yourself a simple question: was I unable, at any point along the way, to follow the story because of missing information?
The answer is: no. Removing all of that unnecessary background material has no effect at all on either the plot or the development of the characters who actually figure in the novel.
No doubt it eliminates the reader's understanding of the character development of Dr. Fayle. Who cares? This book is not about him, and besides, he's dead.
At some point in the story, of course, the reader will want to have all the loose ends tied up. No problem. Schmitz did that more than adequately in the later scene in the novel where Lyad Ermetyne "confesses all." There, in a nifty and economical few pages, Schmitz summarized ALL of the information which the reader might need to know -- WHEN they need to know it. So what is the point of all that endless yabber-jabber in earlier chapters, which is the narrative equivalent of atherosclerosis?
Again, you don't have to take my word for it. Here, in its entirety -- including the editorial changes I made by reintroducing some material I'd cut earlier -- is the entire sequence:
He and the Commissioner started flipping out questions. The Ermetyne flipped back the answers. So far as Trigger could tell, there wasn't any stalling. Or any time for it.
***
Azol:Along with Mantelish, Doctors Gess Fayle and Azol had been the three big U-League boys in charge of the initial investigation on Harvest Moon. Doctor Azol had been her boy from the start. After faking his own Hedeath, he was now on Tranest. The main item in his report to her had been the significance of the 112-113 plasmoid unit. He'd also reported that Trigger Argee had become unconscious on Harvest Moon. They'd considered the possibility that somebody was controlling Trigger Argee, or attempting to control her, because of her connections with the plasmoid operations.
Gess Fayle: Lyad had been looking for Doctor Fayle as earnestly as everyone else after his disappearance. SheLyad had not been able to buy him.Gess Fayle. So far as she knew, nobody had been able to buy him. Doctor Fayle had appeared to intend to work for himself. Lyad was convinced he was the one who had actually stolen the 112-113 unit. He was at present well outside the Hub's area of space. He still had 112-113 with him. Yes, she could become more specific about the location -- with the help of star maps.
"Let's get them out," said Commissioner Tate.
They got them out. The Ermetyne presently circled a largish section of the Vishni Fleet's area. The questions began again.
113-A: Professor Mantelish had told her of his experiments with this, plasmoid--
There was an interruption here while Mantelish huffed reflexively. But it was very brief. The professor wanted to learn more about the First Lady's depravities himself.
--and its various possible associations with the main unit. But by the time this information became available to her, 113-A had been placed under heavy guard. Professor Mantelish had made one attempt to smuggle it out to her.
Huff-huff!
--but had been unable to walk past the guards with it. Tranest agents had made several unsuccessful attempts to pick up the plasmoid. She knew that another group had made similarly unsuccessful attempts. The Devagas. She did not yet know the specific nature of 113-A's importance. But it was important.
As for the rest of it...
Trigger: Trigger Argee might be able to tell them why Trigger was important. Doctor Fayle certainly could. So could the top ranks of the Devagas hierarchy. Lyad, at the moment, could not. She did know that Trigger Argee's importance was associated directly with that of plasmoid 113-A. This information had been obtained from a Devagas operator, now dead. Not Balmordan. The operator had been in charge of the attempted pickup on Evalee. The much more elaborate affair at the Colonial School had been a Tranest job. A Devagas group had made attempts to interfere with it, but had been disposed of.
Pluly: Lyad had strings on Belchik. He was afraid of the Devagas but somewhat more terrified of her. His fear of the Devagas was due to the fact that he and an associate had provided the hierarchy with a very large quantity of contraband materials. The nature of the materials indicated the Devagas were constructing a major fortified outpost on a world either airless or with poisonous atmosphere. Pluly's associate had since been murdered. Pluly believed he was next in line to be silenced.
Balmordan: Balmordan had been a rather high-ranking Devagas Intelligence agent. Lyad had heard of him only recently. He had been in charge of the attempts to obtain 113-A. Lyad had convinced him that she would make a very dangerous competitor in the Manon area. She also had made information regarding her activities there available to him.
So Balmordan and a select group of his gunmen had attended Pluly's party on Pluly's yacht. They had been allowed to force their way into the sealed level and were there caught in a black-light trap. The gunmen had been killed. Balmordan had been questioned.
The questioning revealed that the Devagas had found Doctor Fayle and the 112-113 unit, almost immediately after Fayle's disappearance. They had succeeded in creating some working plasmoids. To go into satisfactory operation, they still needed 113-A. Balmordan had not known why. But they no longer needed Trigger Argee. Trigger Argee was now to be destroyed at the earliest opportunity. Again Balmordan had not known why. Fayle and his unit were in the fortress dome the Devagas had been building. It was in the area Lyad had indicated. It was supposed to be very thoroughly concealed. Balmordan might or might not have known its exact coordinates. His investigators made the inevitable slip finally and triggered a violent mind-block reaction. Balmordan had died. Dead-braining him had produced no further relevant information.
The little drumfire of questions ended abruptly. Trigger glanced at her watch. It had been going on for only fifteen minutes, but she felt somewhat dizzy by now. The Ermetyne just looked a little more wilted.
After a minute, Commissioner Tate inquired politely whether there was any further information the First Lady could think of to give them at this time.
She shook her head. No.
Only Professor Mantelish believed her.
But the interrogation was over, apparently.
Voila. Everything the reader needs to know to tie up any loose ends -- all of it written by Schmitz very economically. The entire sequence is 875 words in length. The material which directly involves Geth Fayle and Doctor Azol is not more than 250 words -- about one page in print.
As opposed to the endless, slow-moving scenes in chapters 6-9 (and elsewhere) where the same information is dragged out over and again, in a context where it simply confuses and fatigues the reader. And for no purpose at all.
The other problem, by the way -- this is usually the byproduct of interjecting too much exposition where it isn't needed -- is that the heart of the story gets buried. There is a mystery in the story unfolding in the first half of the novel: why is Trigger acting so far out of character? But that real mystery is simply buried under the mass of material concerning the meaningless "mystery" of how the plasmoid got stolen in the first place. So the reader's interest in the story gets blunted twice over -- once by the tedium of the exposition, and then again by missing the genuine puzzle of the central character's actions.
I'm sure, by now, people are wanting to ask me: Well fine, Eric, but then why did Schmitz put it in?
The answer's simple. He put it in because writers screw up, now and then. And this particular screw-up, too much exposition, is probably the most common error committed by most SF writers, including very good and experienced ones.
The error is what you might call an "occupational hazard" of being a science fiction or fantasy writer. Writing F&SF poses a particular challenge which is not faced by most writers in most genres. Except for historical fiction, most non-SF/F writers don't have to worry about general background as such. By which I mean the overall setting, not the personal background of the characters. Literally -- what planet are we on?
(And even lots of historical writers don't have to deal with general setting. A modern audience is so familiar with the American West that a western writer does not, for instance, have to explain what a horse is, or a Colt revolver or how it works.)
Think, for a moment, how much of this kind of general background is automatically assumed in a mystery novel. The detective gets into his car. Does the writer have to explain what a car is? Nope. He goes to visit his friend the police lieutenant at the police station. Does the writer have to explain what a policeman is, or how high the rank of lieutenant is? Nope. And so on and so forth.
But science fiction and fantasy writers, unless they're writing a "near future" novel or the equivalent, do have to worry about it. They are not simply telling a story, they are simultaneously required to provide you with the entire setting in which the story takes place.
Doing this is tricky. Provide the reader with too little background information, and they can't follow the story. Too much, and the story starts getting buried under the information.
Either mistake is possible but, in practice, SF writers are far more likely to commit the second. Most SF writers -- and all good ones -- spend a lot of time thinking through their setting and its logic. The problem is that when they finally get down to actually writing the story, it is not easy for them to distinguish between the information which they had to figure out in order to make sure the background made sense, and what is actually needed by the reader to follow the story itself. So, usually unconsciously, they wind up putting in too much "just to be safe."
The ultimate problem is simply that by the time an SF writer gets down to writing the story, he or she is usually too close to it to be able to see clearly what background information is really needed and what isn't.
That's precisely why good editing can make such a difference. Because an editor, coming at the story fresh, is in a far better position than the writer to see what's really needed and what isn't in the way of background. Just because they haven't been involved in building the prop scenery, they can spot the unneeded extra lumber more easily. Standing in front of the scene, instead of behind it where the scenery is held together by all the lumber and hardware, they can tell the author which 2x4 is sticking out onto the stage and which facade has too much paint on it. They just intrinsically have a better perspective.
This is why, by the way -- like most authors I know -- I routinely accept at least 90% of the editorial changes proposed in my own novels. In probably 3/4 of the instances, I can't really see what the problem is. But unless it's something I feel really strongly about, which happens rarely, I will defer to my editor's judgment. Because I understand that he or she is more likely to spot something that I'm missing simply because I've lived with that story for too long.
I have no idea who edited A Tale of Two Clocks (the original title for Legacy) when it was published, almost 40 years ago. Nor do I care. Whoever it was, they did a mediocre job. That's putting it bluntly, but honestly. It's possible, of course, that the editor did spot this problem, brought it to Schmitz's attention, and Schmitz just got stubborn about it. But given the long history of the close working relationship between Schmitz and John Campbell -- and the fact that you almost never see this mistake in the Schmitz stories which Campbell edited -- I think that's unlikely. I can't prove it, of course, but I believe the editor just fell down on the job. And thereby did Schmitz a disservice.
All right, let's move on. The second major area where I did some major editing came in the following scenes. Again, I suggest the reader scan the material first, then read my commentary, and then (if you wish) go back and read it again.
The thing that had caught their attention was a quite simple process. It just happened to be a process the Psychology Service hadn't observed under those particular circumstances before.
"Here's what our investigators had the last time," Pilch said. "Lines and lines of stuff, of course. But there's a simple continuity which makes it clear.Your mother dies when you're six months old.Then there are a few nurses whom you don't like much. Good nurses but frankly much too stupid for you, though you don't know that, and they don't either, naturally. Next, you're seven years old -- a bit over -- and there's a mud pond on the farm near Ceyce where you spend all your vacations. You just love that old mud pond."
Trigger laughed. "A smelly old hole, actually! Full of froggy sorts of things. I went out to that farm six years ago, just to look around it again. But you're right. I did love that mud pond, once."
"Right up to that seventh summer," Pilch said. "Which was the summer your father's cousin spent her vacation on the farm with you."
Trigger nodded. "Perhaps. I don't remember the time too well."
"Well," Pilch said, "she was a brilliant woman. In some ways. She was about the age your mother had been when she died. She was very good looking. And she was nice! She played games with a little girl, sang to her. Told her stories. Cuddled her."
Trigger blinked. "Did she? I don't--"
"However," said Pilch, "she did not play games with, tell stories to, cuddle, etcetera, little girls who" -- her voice went suddenly thin and edged -- "come in all filthy and smelling from that dirty, slimy old mud pond!"
Trigger looked startled. "You know," she said, "I do believe I remember her saying that -- just that way!"
"You remember it," said Pilch, "now. You never saw her again after that summer. Your father had good sense. He didn't marry her, as he apparently intended to do before he saw how she was going to be with you. You went back to your old mud pond just once more, on your next vacation. She wasn't there. What had you done? You waded around, feeling pretty sad. And you stepped on a sharp stick and cut your foot badly. Sort of a self-punishment."
She skipped over a few pages of some record on her desk. "Now before you start asking what's interesting about that, I'll run over a few crossed-in items. Age twelve. There's that Maccadon animal like a dryland jellyfish -- a mingo, isn't it? -- that swallowed your kitten."
"The mingo!" Trigger said. "I remember that. I killed it."
"Right. You kicked it apart and pulled out the kitten, but he kitten was dead and partly digested. You bawled all day and half the night about that."
"I might have, I suppose."
"You did. Now those are two centering points. There's other stuff connected with them. No need to go into details. As classes -- you've stepped now and then on things that squirmed or squashed. Bad smells. Etcetera. How do you feel about plasmoids?"
Trigger wrinkled her nose. "I just think they're unpleasant things. All except--"
Oops! She checked herself.
"--Repulsive," said Pilch. "It's quite all right about Repulsive. We've been informed of that supersecret little item you're guarding. If we hadn't been told, we'd know now, of course. Go ahead."
"Well, it's odd!" Trigger remarked thoughtfully. "I just said I thought plasmoids were rather unpleasant. But that's the way I used to feel about them. I don't feel that way now."
"Except again," said Pilch, "for that little monstrosity on the ship. If it was a plasmoid. You rather suspect it was, don't you?"
Trigger nodded. "That would be pretty bad!"
"Very bad," said Pilch. "Plasmoids generally, you feel about them now as you feel about potatoes... rocks... neutral things like that?"
"That's about it," Trigger said. She still looked puzzled.
"We'll go over what seems to have changed your attitude there in a minute or so. Here's another thing--" Pilch paused a moment, then said, "Night before last, about an hour after you'd gone to bed, you had a very light touch of the same pattern of mental blankness you experienced on that plasmoid station."
"While I was asleep?" Trigger said, startled.
"That's right. Comparatively very light, very brief. Five or six minutes. Dream activity, etcetera, smooths out. Some blocking on various sense lines. Then, normal sleep until about five minutes before you woke up. At that point there may have been another minute touch of the same pattern. Too brief to be actually definable. A few seconds at most. The point is that this is a continuing process."
She looked at Trigger a moment. "Not particularly alarmed, are you?"
"No," said Trigger. "It just seems very odd." She added, "I got rather frightened when Commissioner Tate was first telling me what had been going on."
"Yes, I know."
Chapter 20
***
Pilch was silent for some moments again, considering the wall-screen as if thinking about something connected with it.
it. "Well, "Well, we'll drop that for now," she said finally. "Let me tell you what's been happening these months, starting with that first amnesia-covered blankout on Harvest Moon.The Maccadon Colonial School has sound basic psychology courses, so there won't be too much explaining to do. Theconnection between those incidents I mentioned and your earlier feeling of disliking plasmoids is obvious, isn't it?"
Trigger nodded.
"Good. When you got the first Service check-up at Commissioner Tate's demand, there was very little to go on. The amnesia didn't lift immediately -- not very unusual. The blankout might be interesting because of the circumstances. Otherwise the check showed you were in a good deal better than normal condition. Outside of total therapy processes -- and I believe you know that's a long haul -- there wasn't much to be done for you, and no particular reason to do it. So an amnesia-resolving process was initiated and you were left alone for a while."
"Actually something already was going on at the time, but it wasn't spotted until your next check. What it's amounted to has been a relatively minor but extremely precise and apparently purposeful therapy therapy, process.Your unconscious memories of those groupings of incidents I was talking about, along with various linked groupings, have gradually been cleared up. Emotion has been drained away, fixedevaluations have faded. Associative lines have shifted."
"Now that's nothing remarkable in itself. Any good therapist could have done the same thing for you, and much more rapidly. Say in a few hours' hard work, spread over several weeks to permit progressiveassimilation without conscious disturbances. The very interesting thing is that this orderly little process appears to have been going on all by itself. And that just doesn't happen. You disturbed now?"
Trigger nodded. "A little. Mainly I'm wondering why somebody wants me to not-dislike plasmoids."
"So am I wondering," said Pilch. "Somebody does, obviously. And a very slick somebody it is. We'll find out by and by. Incidentally, this particular part of the business has been concluded. Apparently, our somebody'somebody' doesn't intend to make you wild for plasmoids. It's enough that you don't dislike them."
Trigger smiled. "I can't see anyone making me wild for the things, whatever they tried!"
Pilch nodded. "Could be done," she said. "Rather easily. You'd be bats, of course. But that's very different from a simple neutralizing process like the one we've been discussing... Now here's something else. You were pretty unhappy about this business for a while. That wasn't somebody's'somebody's' fault. That was us. I'll explain."
"Your investigators could have interfered with the little therapy process in a number of ways. That wouldn't have taught them a thing, so they didn't. But on your third check they found something else. Again it wasn't in the least obtrusive; in someone else they mightn't have given it a second look. But it didn't fit at all with your major personality patterns. You wanted to stay where you were."
"Stay where I was?"
"In the Manon System."
"Oh!" Trigger flushed a little. "Well--"
"I know. Let's go on a moment. We had this inharmonious inclination. So we told Commissioner Tate to bring you to the Hub and keep you there, to see what would happen. And on Maccadon, in just a few weeks, you'd begun working that moderate inclination to be back in the Manon System up to a dandy first-rate compulsion."
Trigger licked her lips. "I--"
"Sure," said Pilch. "You had to have a good sensible reason. You gave yourself one."
"Well!"
"Oh, you were fond of that young man, all right.Who wouldn't be? Wonderful-looking lug. I'd go for him myself -- till I got him on that couch, that is. But that was the first time you hadn't been able to stand a couple of months away from him. It was also the first time you'd started worrying about competition. You now had your justification. And we," Pilch said darkly, "had a fine, solid compulsion with no doubt very revealing ramifications to it to work on. justJust one thing wrong with that, Trigger. You don't have the compulsion any more."
"Oh?"
"You don't even," said Pilch, "have the original moderate inclination. Now one might have some suspicions there! But we'll let them ride for the moment."
She did something on the desk. The huge wall-screen suddenly lit up. A soft, amber-glowing plane of blankness, with a suggestion of receding depths within it.
"Last night, shortly before you woke up," Pilch said, "you had a dream. Actually you had a series ofeight dreams during the night which seem pertinent here. But the earlier ones were rather vague preliminary structures. In one way and another, their content is included in this final symbol grouping. Let's see what we can make of them."
A shape appeared on the screen.
Trigger started, then laughed.
"What do you think of it?" Pilch asked.
"A little green man!" she said. "Well, it could be a sort of counterpart to the little yellow thing on the ship, couldn't it? The good little dwarf and the very bad little dwarf."
"Could be," said Pilch. "How do you feel about the notion?"
"Good plasmoids and bad plasmoids?" Trigger shook her head. "No. It doesn't feel right."
"What else feels right?" Pilch asked.
"The farmer. The little old man who owned the farm where the mud pond was."
"Liked him, didn't you?"
"Very much! He knew a lot of fascinating things." She laughed again. "You know, I'd hate to have him find out -- but that little green man also reminds me quite a bit of Commissioner Tate."
"I don't think he'd mind hearing it," Pilch said. She paused a moment. "All right -- what's this?"
A second shape appeared.
"A sort of caricature of a wild, mean horse," Trigger said. She added thoughtfully, "There was a horse like that on that farm, too. I suppose you know that?"
"Yes. Any thoughts about it?"
"No-o-o. Well, one. The little farmer was the only one who could handle that horse. It was a mutated horse, actually -- one of the Life Bank deals that didn't work out so well. Enormously strong. It could work forty-eight hours at a stretch without even noticing it. But it was just a plain mean animal."
"'Crazy-mean,'" observed Pilch, "was the dream feeling about it."
Trigger nodded. "I remember I used to think it was crazy for that horse to want to go around kicking and biting things to pieces. Which was about all it really wanted to do. I imagine it was crazy, at that."
"You weren't ever in any danger from it yourself, were you?"
Trigger laughed. "I couldn't have got anywhere near it! You should have seen the kind of place the old farmer kept it when it wasn't working."
"I did," said Pilch. "Long, wide, straight-walled pit in the ground. Cover for shade, plenty of food, running water. He was a good farmer. Very high locked fence around it to keep little girls and anyone else from getting too close to his useful monster."
"Right,"said Trigger. She shook her head. "When you people look into somebody's mind, you look!"
"We work at it," Pilch said. "Let's see what you can do with this one."
Trigger was silent for almost a minute before she said in a subdued voice, "I just get what it shows. It doesn't seem to mean anything?"
"What does it show?"
"Laughing giants stamping on a farm. A tiny sort of farm. It looks like it might be the little green man's farm. No, wait. It's not his! But it belongs to other little green people."
"How do you feel about that?"
"Well -- I hate those giants!" Trigger said. "They're cruel. And they laugh about being cruel."
"Are you afraid of them?"
Trigger blinked at the screen for a few seconds. "No," she said in a low, sleepy voice. "Not yet."
Pilch was silent a moment. She said then, "One more."
Trigger looked and frowned. Presently she said, "I have a feeling that does mean something. But all I get is that it's the faces of two clocks. On one of them the hands are going around very fast. And on the other they go around slowly."
"Yes," Pilch said. She waited a little. "No other thought about those clocks? justJust that they should mean something?"
Trigger shook her head. "That's all."
Pilch's hand moved on the desk again. The wall-screen went blank, and the light in the little room brightened slowly. Pilch's face was reflective.
"That will have to do for now," she said. "Trigger, this ship is working on an urgent job somewhere else. We'll have to go back and finish that job. But I'll be able to return to Manon in about ten days, and then we'll have another session. And I think that will get this little mystery cleared up."
"All of it?"
"All of it, I'd say. The whole pattern seems to be moving into view. More details will show up in the ten-day interval; and one more cautious boost then should bring it out in full."
Trigger nodded. "That's good news. I've been getting a little fed up with being a kind of walking enigma."
"Don't blame you at all," Pilch said, sounding almost exactly like Commissioner Tate. "Incidentally, you're a busy lady at present, but if you do have half an hour to spare from time to time, you might just sit down comfortably somewhere and listen to yourself thinking. The way things are going, that should bring quite a bit of information to view."
Trigger looked doubtful. "Listen to myself thinking?"
"You'll find yourself getting the knack of it rather quickly," Pilch said. She smiled. "Just head off in that general direction whenever you find the time, and don't work too hard at it. Are there any questions now before we start back to Manon?"
Trigger studied her a moment. "There's one thing I'd like to be sure about," she said. "But I suppose you people have your problems with Security too."
"Who doesn't?" said Pilch. "You're secure enough for me. Fire away."
"All right," Trigger said."Commissioner Tate told me people like you don't work much with individuals."
"Not as much as we'd like to. That's true."
"So you wouldn't have been working with me if whatever has been going on weren't somehow connected with the plasmoids."
"Oh, yes, I would," said Pilch. "Or old Cranadon. Someone like that. We do give service as required when somebody has the good sense to ask for it. But, obviously, we couldn't have dropped that other job just now and come to Manon to clear up some individual difficulty."
"So I am involved with the plasmoid mess?"
"You're right in the middle of it, Trigger. That's definite. In just what way is something we should be able to determine next session."
Pilch turned off the desk light and stood up. "I always hate to run off and leave something half finished like this," she admitted, "but I'll have to run anyway. The plasmoids are nowhere near the head of the Federation's problem list at present. They're just coming up mighty fast."
Again, we see the same problem: way too much background information for the needs of the story. Which, as before, has the main effect of slowing down the pace of the story badly -- right at the point of the novel where we're building toward the dramatic climax, when the pace should be picking up.
There's nothing wrong, in and of itself, with having slow-paced scenes in a novel. In fact, as a rule a novel will benefit from it. Unless it is done almost perfectly, novels which are fast-paced from beginning to end can be just as fatiguing to a reader as novels which move like molasses.
But three things must happen, in a slow-paced scene. First, the material itself should be interesting. Second, it should be necessary for the story. Third, it should come at the right place in the story.
You could argue, I suppose, that all the material which I cut is interesting in its own right. I dunno. Me, I think it's pretty boring. But what should be obvious is that it fits neither of the other criteria.
The matter of "place" is clear enough. At this stage of the novel, we are entering the "final moments" -- and Schmitz has done a very good job of building up the dramatic tension in the preceding chapters. This is no time to dissipate that gathering tension with a slow-moving talk session unless the material covered is absolutely critical.
Well? What about that?Is the material covered in the stuff I cut critical?
Of course not. In fact, it's completely pointless.
Think about it. What is happening here? It's very simple. There is a mystery to be cleared up. Trigger has been behaving very oddly. Part of that oddness -- a subtle thing which Pilch has spotted -- is that Trigger is no longer repelled by plasmoids.
Almost all of the material I cut does absolutely nothing except explain -- at great length -- why Trigger found plasmoids repellent in the first place.
For Pete's sake! This is a meaningless "mystery." It's no mystery at all, in fact. Recall, back near the beginning of the novel, Trigger's first introduction to Repulsive:
Trigger looked at the little item with some revulsion. Dark green, marbled with pink streakings, it lay on the table between them, rather like a plump leech a foot and a half long. It was motionless except that the end nearest her shifted in a short arc from side to side, as if the thing suffered from a very slow twitch.
Of course Trigger finds plasmoids repulsive! They look like big leeches. Who doesn't find leeches repulsive?
What's happened is that Trigger's reaction -- common to 99% of the human race -- has been over-explained by Schmitz. Way over-explained. And the reason he did it is simply because he was too close to the story. He'd spent so much time and effort thinking through the logic of Trigger's behavior (and Repulsive's) that he simply lost sight of the fact that a lot of it was now unnecessary stage-setting intruding into the play.
The only way this would not be true would be if the material interjected was somehow relevant in a different manner. But in fact it isn't. There might be an interesting tale to be told -- somewhere else -- about Trigger's childhood, and her father's girlfriend, and her feelings about kittens and horses. But it's completely irrelevant to this novel and just gets in the way.
Okay. That's the end of my commentary on the editing which I did for the 4-volume Hub series. I'm not going to have any comments on the fourth volume of the series, because Guy and I did no editing in that volume beyond assembling the stories, proof-reading them, and (probably -- I don't honestly remember) removing excessive exclamation points and making a few other such minor changes.
Eric Flint