The Umbrella Man and Other Stories (3 page)

“We feed those in, sir. That’s no problem at all. Everyone has plots. There’s three or four hundred of them written down in that folder there on your left. Feed them straight into the ‘plot-memory’ section of the machine.”

“Go on.”

“There are many other little refinements too, Mr. Bohlen. You’ll see them all when you study the plans carefully. For example, there’s a trick that nearly every writer uses, of inserting at least one long, obscure word into each story. This makes the reader think that the man is very wise and clever. So I have the machine do the
same thing. There’ll be a whole stack of long words stored away just for this purpose.”

“Where?”

“In the ‘word-memory’ section,” he said, epexegetically.

Through most of that day the two men discussed the possibilities of the new engine. In the end, Mr. Bohlen said he would have to think about it some more. The next morning, he was quietly enthusiastic. Within a week, he was completely sold on the idea.

“What we’ll have to do, Knipe, is to say that we’re merely building another mathematical calculator, but of a new type. That’ll keep the secret.”

“Exactly, Mr. Bohlen.”

And in six months the machine was completed. It was housed in a separate brick building at the back of the premises, and now that it was ready for action, no one was allowed near it excepting Mr. Bohlen and Adolph Knipe.

It was an exciting moment when the two men—the one, short, plump, breviped—the other tall, thin and toothy—stood in the corridor before the control panel and got ready to run off the first story. All around them were walls dividing up into many small corridors, and the walls were covered with wiring and plugs and switches and huge glass valves. They were both nervous, Mr. Bohlen hopping from one foot to the other, quite unable to keep still.

“Which button?” Adolph Knipe asked, eyeing a row of small white discs that resembled the keys of a typewriter. “You choose, Mr. Bohlen. Lots of magazines to pick from—
Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Ladies’ Home Journal
—any one you like.”

“Goodness me, boy! How do I know?” He was jumping up and down like a man with hives.

“Mr. Bohlen,” Adolph Knipe said gravely, “do you realize that at this moment, with your little finger alone, you have it in your power to become the most versatile writer on this continent?”

“Listen Knipe, just get on with it, will you please—and cut out the preliminaries.”

“Okay, Mr. Bohlen. Then we’ll make it . . . let me see—this one. How’s that?” He extended one finger and pressed down a button with the name
TODAY’S WOMAN
printed across it in diminutive black type. There was a sharp click, and when he took his finger away, the button remained down, below the level of the others.

“So much for the selection,” he said. “Now—here we go!” He reached up and pulled a switch on the panel. Immediately, the room was filled with a loud humming noise, and a crackling of electric sparks, and the jingle of many tiny, quickly moving levers; and almost in the same instant, sheets of quarto paper began sliding out from a slot to the right of the control panel and dropping into a basket below. They came out quick, one sheet a second, and in less than half a minute it was all over. The sheets stopped coming.

“That’s it!” Adolph Knipe cried. “There’s your story!”

They grabbed the sheets and began to read. The first one they picked up started as follows: “Aifkjmbsaoegweztpplnvoqudskigt&,-fuhpekanvbertyuio lkjhgfdsazxcvbnm, peru itrehdjkg mvnb, wmsuy . . . ” They looked at the others. The style was roughly similar in all of them. Mr. Bohlen began to shout. The younger man tried to calm him down.

“It’s all right, sir. Really it is. It only needs a little adjustment. We’ve got a connection wrong somewhere, that’s all. You must remember, Mr. Bohlen, there’s over a million feet of wiring in this room. You can’t expect everything to be right first time.”

“It’ll never work,” Mr. Bohlen said.

“Be patient, sir. Be patient.”

Adolph Knipe set out to discover the fault, and in four days’ time he announced that all was ready for the next try.

“It’ll never work,” Mr. Bohlen said. “I know it’ll never work.”

Knipe smiled and pressed the selector button marked
READER’S DIGEST
. Then he pulled the switch, and again the strange, exciting, humming sound filled the room. One page of typescript flew out of the slot into the basket.

“Where’s the rest?” Mr. Bohlen cried. “It’s stopped! It’s gone wrong!”

“No sir, it hasn’t. It’s exactly right. It’s for the
Digest
, don’t you see?”

This time it began. “Few people yet know thatarevolutionary-newcurehasbeendiscoveredwhichmaywellbringpermanentreliefto-sufferersofthemostdreadeddiseaseofourtime . . . ” And so on.

“It’s gibberish!” Mr. Bohlen shouted.

“No sir, it’s fine. Can’t you see? It’s simply that she’s not breaking up the words. That’s an easy adjustment. But the story’s there. Look, Mr. Bohlen, look! It’s all there except that the words are joined together.”

And indeed it was.

On the next try a few days later, everything was perfect, even the punctuation. The first story they ran off, for a famous women’s
magazine, was a solid, plotty story of a boy who wanted to better himself with his rich employer. This boy arranged, so that story went, for a friend to hold up the rich man’s daughter on a dark night when she was driving home. Then the boy himself, happening by, knocked the gun out of his friend’s hand and rescued the girl. The girl was grateful. But the father was suspicious. He questioned the boy sharply. The boy broke down and confessed. Then the father, instead of kicking him out of the house, said that he admired the boy’s resourcefulness. The girl admired his honesty—and his looks. The father promised him to be head of the Accounts Department. The girl married him.

“It’s tremendous, Mr. Bohlen! It’s exactly right!”

“Seems a bit sloppy to me, my boy!”

“No sir, it’s a seller, a real seller!”

In his excitement, Adolph Knipe promptly ran off six more stories in as many minutes. All of them—except one, which for some reason came out a trifle lewd—seemed entirely satisfactory.

Mr. Bohlen was now mollified. He agreed to set up a literary agency in an office downtown, and to put Knipe in charge. In a couple of weeks, this was accomplished. Then Knipe mailed out the first dozen stories. He put his own name to four of them, Mr. Bohlen’s to one, and for the others he simply invented names.

Five of these stories were promptly accepted. The one with Mr. Bohlen’s name on it was turned down with a letter from the fiction editor saying, “This is a skilful job, but in our opinion it doesn’t quite come off. We would like to see more of this writer’s work . . . ” Adolph Knipe took a cab out to the factory and ran off another story for the same magazine. He again put Mr.
Bohlen’s name to it, and mailed it immediately. That one they bought.

The money started pouring in. Knipe slowly and carefully stepped up the output, and in six months’ time he was delivering thirty stories a week, and selling about half.

He began to make a name for himself in literary circles as a prolific and successful writer. So did Mr. Bohlen; but not quite such a good name, although he didn’t know it. At the same time, Knipe was building up a dozen or more fictitious persons as promising young authors. Everything was going fine.

At this point it was decided to adapt the machine for writing novels as well as stories. Mr. Bohlen, thirsting now for greater honours in the literary world, insisted that Knipe go to work at once on this prodigious task.

“I want to do a novel,” he kept saying. “I want to do a novel.”

“And so you will, sir. And so you will. But please be patient. This is a very complicated adjustment I have to make.”

“Everyone tells me I ought to do a novel,” Mr. Bohlen cried. “All sorts of publishers are chasing after me day and night begging me to stop fooling around with stories and do something really important instead. A novel’s the only thing that counts—that’s what they say.”

“We’re going to do novels,” Knipe told him. “Just as many as we want. But please be patient.”

“Now listen to me, Knipe. What I’m going to do is a
serious
novel, something that’ll make ’em sit up and take notice. I’ve been getting rather tired of the sort of stories you’ve been putting my name to lately. As a matter of fact, I’m none too sure you haven’t been trying to make a monkey out of me.”

“A monkey, Mr. Bohlen?”

“Keeping all the best ones for yourself, that’s what you’ve been doing.”

“Oh no, Mr. Bohlen! No!”

“So this time I’m going to make damn sure I write a high class intelligent book. You understand that.”

“Look, Mr. Bohlen. With the sort of switchboard I’m rigging up, you’ll be able to write any sort of book you want.”

And this was true, for within another couple of months, the genius of Adolph Knipe had not only adapted the machine for novel writing, but had constructed a marvellous new control system which enabled the author to pre-select literally any type of plot and any style of writing he desired. There were so many dials and levers on the thing, it looked like the instrument panel of some enormous aeroplane.

First, by depressing one of a series of master buttons, the writer made his primary decision; historical, satirical, philosophical, political, romantic, erotic, humorous or straight. Then, from the second row (the basic buttons), he chose his theme: army life, pioneer days, civil war, world war, racial problem, wild west, country life, childhood memories, seafaring, the sea bottom and many, many more. The third row of buttons gave a choice of literary style: classical, whimsical, racy, Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce, feminine, etc. The fourth row was for characters, the fifth for wordage—and so on and so on—ten long rows of pre-selector buttons.

But that wasn’t all. Control had also to be exercised during the actual writing process (which took about fifteen minutes per
novel), and to do this the author had to sit, as it were, in the driver’s seat, and pull (or push) a battery of labelled stops, as on an organ. By so doing, he was able continually to modulate or merge fifty different and variable qualities such as tension, surprise, humour, pathos, and mystery. Numerous dials and gauges on the dashboard itself told him throughout exactly how far along he was with his work.

Finally, there was the question of “passion.” From a careful study of the books at the top of the best-seller lists for the past year, Adolph Knipe had decided that this was the most important ingredient of all—a magical catalyst that somehow or other could transform the dullest novel into a howling success—at any rate financially. But Knipe also knew that passion was powerful, heady stuff, and must be prudently dispensed—the right proportions at the right moments; and to ensure this, he had devised an independent control consisting of two sensitive sliding adjustors operated by foot pedals, similar to the throttle and brake in a car. One pedal governed the per centage of passion to be injected, the other regulated its intensity. There was no doubt, of course—and this was the only drawback—that the writing of a novel by the Knipe methods was going to be rather like flying a plane and driving a car and playing an organ all at the same time, but this did not trouble the inventor. When all was ready, he proudly escorted Mr. Bohlen into the machine house and began to explain the operating procedure for the new wonder.

“Good God, Knipe! I’ll never be able to do all that! Dammit man, it’d be easier to write the thing by hand!”

“You’ll soon get used to it, Mr. Bohlen, I promise you. In a week or two, you’ll be doing it without hardly thinking. It’s just like learning to drive.”

Well, it wasn’t quite as easy as that, but after many hours of practice, Mr. Bohlen began to get the hang of it, and finally, late one evening, he told Knipe to make ready for running off the first novel. It was a tense moment, with the fat little man crouching nervously in the driver’s seat, and the tall toothy Knipe fussing excitedly around him.

“I intend to write an important novel, Knipe.”

“I’m sure you will, sir. I’m sure you will.”

With one finger, Mr. Bohlen carefully pressed the necessary pre-selector buttons:

Master button—
satirical

Subject—
racial problem

Style—
classical

Characters—
six men, four women, one infant

Length—
fifteen chapters.

At the same time he had his eye particularly upon three organ stops marked
power, mystery, profundity.

“Are you ready, sir?”

“Yes, yes, I’m ready.”

Knipe pulled the switch. The great engine hummed. There was a deep whirring sound from the oiled movement of fifty thousand cogs and rods and levers; then came the drumming of the rapid electrical typewriter, setting up a shrill, almost intolerable clatter. Out into the basket flew the typewritten pages—one every two seconds.
But what with the noise and the excitement and having to play upon the stops, and watch the chapter-counter and the pace-indicator and the passion-gauge, Mr. Bohlen began to panic. He reacted in precisely the way a learner driver does in a car—by pressing both feet hard down on the pedals and keeping them there until the thing stopped.

“Congratulations on your first novel,” Knipe said, picking up the great bundle of typed pages from the basket.

Little pearls of sweat were oozing out all over Mr. Bohlen’s face. “It sure was hard work, my boy.”

“But you got it done, sir. You got it done.”

“Let me see it, Knipe. How does it read?”

He started to go through the first chapter, passing each finished page to the younger man.

“Good heavens, Knipe! What’s this!” Mr. Bohlen’s thin purple fish-lip was moving slightly as it mouthed the words, his cheeks were beginning slowly to inflate.

“But look here, Knipe! This is outrageous!”

“I must say it’s a bit fruity, sir.”

“
Fruity
! It’s perfectly revolting! I can’t possibly put my name to this!”

“Quite right, sir. Quite right!”