Barry N. Malzberg - Herovit's World

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Herovit's World

Barry N. Malzberg

For Lee Wright and Robert P. Mills

The sphere darted to the surface with an awful rush and as Mack Miller

regarded it he knew right away that he was dealing with something

absolutely new in the experience of the Survey Team with this sphere. He

was dealing, in fact, with something which was possibly so alien and bizarre

that it could defy the knowledge of anyone on Earth!

Nevertheless, he thought, as he proudly stepped forward to greet the

aliens, he would do the best he could. That was all that was ever asked of a

Surveyman. That was usually enough.

Would it be enough now? Or was it too late?

Kirk Poland: Survey Starlight

There's A Long Way Between Declining and Death.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Herovit's World

At the second annual cocktail party of the New League for

Science-Fiction Professionals, Jonathan Herovit finds himself accosted by

two angry readers who also despise his work. "You stink, Herovit. You've

been doing this damned crap for so long it molders, and you'd better get

yourself out of science fiction before we throw you out," the taller and

stronger of the readers says ... and, quite possibly drunk, hurls more than

half a glass of scotch and soda into Herovit's thin, querulous face; then,

realizing the apparent seriousness of the action, he apologizes suddenly

and backs away, his face now fallen to sadness, looking just like Mack

Miller's when the Team came across a seemingly insoluble problem. "But

then again ..." the boy says. "Well, then again, I guess everybody has a

right to live."

The other reader, a girl similarly dressed, touches Herovit by her vague

expression of concern. "You shouldn't take this too seriously, Mr. Herovit,"

she says. "Bill's just so involved with all of you writers and science fiction,

but the fact is that you are losing your grip just a little, don't you think?"

Then she leaves the room quickly, dragging the trembling Bill by the hand.

No one seems to have noticed this. All of the Science-Fiction

Professionals are off in corners with editors or antagonists, promoting

their careers, renewing old hatreds. Herovit takes a handkerchief from a

rear pocket, shakes it open in spurts, and begins careful work on the stain

which is already congealing rather thickly in places on his suit jacket.

After a time of hopeless patting, however, he decides to leave it be.

It is a symbolic stain. He will wear it as a badge. Events in the room

continue. Perhaps all of this occurred only in his mind or was otherwise

hallucinative. This is what comes of having been a science-fiction writer

for twenty years: it is difficult to take oneself altogether in earnest.

It is all typical of the kind of trouble he has been having recently and for

quite a while back. He finishes his drink, wondering exactly how in hell

readers were able to get into this party anyway. It was described in all of

the mailings as a meeting for only the most serious editors and writers in

the field, those who were central to science fiction and who, each in his

own way, were completely dedicated to its advancement.

That night, after the party, Herovit has a dream about the boy who

threw scotch in his face, and wakes from it in a series of terrified gasps,

realizing that it is the first real critical feedback he has received in many

years—or at least since two of his novels were reviewed favorably in the

monthly science-fiction department of a West Coast newspaper ("... also

sure to be on your favorite s-f buff's Christmas list would be these two

latest by the ubiquitous Kirk Poland ..."). He reaches for his wife beside

him, resolved to tell her what has happened to him and thus inaugurate a

serious discussion on this life which he has shaped, but he realizes at the

last moment as his fingers graze the girl beside him that he has been

engaging in casual adultery for many years and that the young fan, now

sleeping peacefully in his hotel bed, could react only with surprise or rage

if she awoke to find Jonathan Herovit groaning out confessions of

inadequacy into the small of her back. Word would quickly get around

certain circles that he was losing his grip.

Herovit rears in the bed and turns the other way. He resolves that over

the weeks to come he will carefully consider his place in the field, and if

things continue to look as bad as they do at this moment, he will most

definitely begin to think about considering the possibility of perhaps

getting temporarily out of the game. He will. He will. He sleeps.

More and more as he edges forty—now thirty-seven, nothing quite as it

used to be biologically and otherwise— Herovit feels like a main character

in one of his old serials for Tremendous Stories. Events press upon him;

utterly alien and bizarre forces impinge. His grip, like Mack Miller's, is

loosening through too many bad episodes. The very fabric of his existence

is rent; still, what else is there to do? His public depends upon him. He

must press on in order to resolve matters and bring a good report to

Headquarters.

The trouble is—he is beginning to admit that he has trouble—that the

characters in his serials always had machinery. In the hold, in some

abscess of the ship or available by plans to one of the engineers, was a

device which could be used to disperse the aliens once they got it going;

failing all else, the alien forces menacing old Mack (he wishes that he

could meet old Mack so that he, Jonathan Herovit, could kill him) would

turn out to have had benign motives from the start. It was simple: put it

together at 15,000 words and sell it to Steele; string it up to 60,000 and

go for the book rights. Or both. Why not? Usually both. You could always

get book rights on something Steele bought if you were willing to sink low

enough.

But Mack Miller's case—always remember this—is not his own. Herovit

can hardly use machinery to escape the circumstances surrounding, and

whatever the nature of those mysterious forces, they are hardly benign. (At

odd moments he can feel them clambering inside; benignity is not their

custom.) Nevertheless, like Mack Miller, he must press on, if for different

reasons.

Press on. He is one of the ten to fifteen most prolific science-fiction

writers in the country, with an audience of somewhere between seventy to

eighty thousand for the paperbacks—to say nothing of the magazines. How

many truly serious writers had that much of an audience? Did seventy

thousand read Stanley Elkin? Evan Connell? There they are, stuck in

hardcover—where ten thousand was a remarkable sale and paperback

came late, if ever— while Herovit is a mass-market writer. People read

him on buses and in public rest rooms. It could hardly be the fault of his

career that all of this was happening to him; rather, he must look

elsewhere, into the root causes. Still, it was hard to do this kind of job;

most of his characters were not at all introspective. Introspection would

only hold back the plot.

In his more surreal moments, Herovit feels that the West Side of the

city itself has become an alien planet, populated by archetypes or artifacts

speaking languages he does not know with gestures which can only terrify

... but he has a wife and now, damn it, a child; he is committed to

Manhattan since it is central to his life, to say nothing of his work, and he

pushes off these moments as neurasthenia. Once he had looked it up in a

medical dictionary. It was a great word. It gave dignity to his situation.

Herovit pushes on past page forty of his new Mack Miller Survey Team

novel, which Branham Books hopes to publish under his pseudonym of

Kirk Poland. Originally, he had wanted to write science fiction exclusively

under his own name, but John Steele, the venerable editor of Tremendous

Stories when Herovit broke in, had advised him that Jonathan Herovit

did not have the right sound for the image of the magazine being

developed, and it would be best to use a pseudonym with which the

engineers and disturbed adolescents who read Tremendous could fully

identify.

"You see, son, Jonathan Herovit sounds too urban, uh, too European

and cosmopolitan for this book," Steele had said, winking madly and

lifting his enormous arms toward the ceiling as he expanded his large

chest with cigarette smoke. "It has a very New-Yorkish type of ring, if you

follow what I'm trying to say here, and our magazine goes nationwide. We

even do nicely in the South, and then the Army picks up thousands of

copies for overseas distribution through regular channels."

Herovit—no fool he—guessed that he had gotten the implication. "Sure,"

he said, "I guess that we could shorten it, then, to something Germanic

like John Herr once I start selling. Or even—"

"Now what you want, son," Steele said, "is something which is

all-American." He had a very bad habit, Steele did, of continuing a line of

discussion no matter what the response, but this, Herovit had decided,

was one of the elements of the man's greatness. Why should John Steele

listen when his circulation was in the high sixties and everyone else's in

the low forties or worse? Sure he was being pushed a little by the newer

magazines like Thrilling or Thoughtful, but he was still the grand old man

of the field, always would be. "Maybe just a little trace of the peculiar on

the edges, something exotic, you know, but never threatening for the guys.

If you can't think up a good one on your own I'll decide for you like I've

done for a lot of the others, but first you'll have to sell me a yarn, of course.

That always comes first, doesn't it? I'm a little overstocked now but you're

certainly welcome to try. Anyone's welcome to try, got to keep on pushing

for the new blood," Steele had said and then sent Herovit—at that time

twenty-two and single—on his way from the gigantic chain of

pulp-magazine offices in which Steele's cubicle had been in an

insignificant place, wedged between the mailroom and a messenger's

comfort station.

Herovit had at the time been extremely anxious to break into science

fiction, so he had listened to everything Steele had to say. This was not

only a matter of achievement: he had just then been fired from a

probationary position with the New York City Department of Welfare, and

at this period in his life saw absolutely no way of generating the fast

income he needed unless he could work into the pulp market, which no

one knew was then on the verge of complete collapse.

Thus he had settled—too much pride to let Steele pick his name—on

Kirk Poland both because some kind of trouble in the damned Gomulka

government was making the newspapers at that time, and his landlord, a

creditor at that time, had been named Joe Poland. Under that

name—Kirk, not Joe this was—he had sold Steele his first novelette only a

month after their conference. Kirk was a good first name. Nothing

insoluble could ever happen to a man named Kirk once he put his mind to

things.

Subsequently, Herovit had sold five hundred and three additional

magazine pieces as well as ninety-two science-fiction novels, all of them by

Kirk, whom he had visualized from the start (perhaps in a dream,

although origins had never been his strong point) as a tall, thin guy, fairly

wiry, with devastating hands and huge sunken eyes. A guy who never had

trouble coming, be it fast or slow. Sex stuff, on the other hand, Kirk had

never been able to write; it gave him (or at least it gave Herovit) cold

sweats and a livid feeling of embarrassment—a sensation that his

mother-in-law, for instance, was inspecting copy over his shoulder as it

came from the typewriter. Now that the sex market is gone, and it is

entirely too late to crawl from under the pseudonym to find another

identity, however, Herovit regrets following Steele's suggestions so

unquestioningly. On his own, he might have been a fine writer.

But then again (and he reminds himself of this all the time), there are

many thousands, if not millions, of people who have tried and failed to

make full-time careers as writers, so he certainly has a lot to be thankful

for, even if he only made eleven thousand, four hundred dollars last year,

and only a very few sophisticated fans and readers in the field know that it

is he, Jonathan Herovit, who originated Mack Miller's Survey Team. Not

Kirk Poland. In seventeen years of professional writing, Kirk has received

exactly twelve fan letters and one sexual proposal from a woman who said

that she was forty-one years old but devoted to machinery and, thanks to

Process Training administered in the middle 1950's, still quite ready to go.

"Lothar, go down below and examine the table of elements. Check it out

thoroughly to find if tanamite can be found on it. Do this right away,

crewman," the Captain said determinedly in his quiet voice, Herovit now

writes and then comes again to a dead halt in this accursed ninety-third

novel. He must establish the physical-science basis for the plot at this

point. The thing to do—he has been this way so many times before; why

then is it bothering him so?—is type a long scene between the Captain and

his first mate, Lothar, both of them highly unsympathetic aliens,

explaining the mysterious substance that one hundred and fifty-nine

pages later will signal their doom ... but Herovit, looking at the

twenty-first page in the typewriter, realizes that he cannot do it. Not yet

again. Is there such a thing as tanamite or is it a fool's construct? Lothar

wondered idly as he then scurried off in loyal slave's fashion to do his

captain-master's bidding. He is not up to this really, not at all. He cannot

face one more line of exposition, nor is there any way in which he can take

either of these characters seriously, Lothar and the Captain being

individuals who under various names have already been included in at

least seventy-three full-length, never-before-published adventures.

Someday he would take his revenge upon the Captain and it would be

terrible, restoring the balance between them, but it could not be on this

expedition, Lothar feared, listening to the hum of those giant engines as

tirelessly they brought them ever closer to their destination and the

inevitable conflicts which awaited. He simply cannot do this kind of thing

any more.

The trouble is (and he might as well face it; he will not be a

self-deceiving man) that he is falling apart. Through the clear and dark

portholes, shaped like abcissa, he could see the constellations of a different

galaxy, sense a thousand new suns and the adventures which would follow.

The thought of them filled him with humility and awe, low-rated as he

was. The psychic strain of production, the insularity of the field of science

fiction, and the difficulties in his own personal life have closed around him

within recent months; now Herovit is not so sure that he can take himself,

let alone his work, seriously. It was something to think about, the look of

those stars. Few had gazed upom them, fewer still would return to the

familiar galaxies to bear the tale. The novel which he is supposed to be

writing is number twenty-nine in the Survey Team Conqueror Series. For

this, his agent has negotiated a standard advance of two thousand dollars

as against four and six percent of paperback royalties, payable one

thousand upon signature and another thousand on delivery. He needs that

second thousand desperately and is already forty-five days late

(compulsively he counts everything) on the delivery, but he finds that the

very thought of plowing on with this novel, to say nothing of actually

finishing it, makes him quite ill. Twenty-one pages completed (of course

he never rewrites) and a month and a half late. This is pitiful, no doubt

about it.

This is pitiful. Truly pitiful, Lothar finds himself thinking and thinking then

for the twenty-ninth time that if only Colonial Survey had not been so

authoritarian he would have had his last slave-voyage several moons ago.

He hopes that this thinking is not an omen of worse things to come but

suspects that as always his mood is a good barometer of what will follow.

Heat sneezes in the pipes of Herovit's office. He hears his wife of a

decade again cursing their six-month-old daughter. Herovit can make out

some of the words. Lothar thought that he could make out some of the

words the Captain was saying in relation to his slave-status, and he tried to

block all of them out of his mind. He did not want to hear them.

He decides to leave the Captain, not to say Lothar, to their own devices

for a time. The bottle of scotch is on his desk. He drinks.

That night he tries again rather reluctantly but persistently to get

things started again in the sex department with his wife, but Janice turns

from him deftly, talking, inexhaustibly talking, as he tries to fondle her

breasts and finally, in disgust, quits.

"I won't have any of that," she says in a high voice, protecting herself,

"and who do you think you are anyway, Jonathan? I'm at the end of my

patience, you know. You can't ignore me during the day and treat me like

some kind of housekeeper—some kind of housekeeper, that was the word I

wanted to use, and you'd better not miss it— and then expect me to be

passionate on your demand, can you? Is this normal thinking? Do you

really think that you're being quite rational? You have some sensitivity left

in you, I hope, so you must think that I'm really quite stupid or that I've

got such lust for you that I can't resist, but that isn't a good way of looking

at it. I gave up everything for you and all that you can do is think that I'm

an object for your desires. I'm a slave without any pay, that's all I am!"

Since the pregnancy and subsequent birth of their daughter Natalie,

which forced Janice's resignation from the product division of a

second-rate public relations agency, she has been quite nervous and

hard-edged, and most of her conversation sounds like this. Janice was

never (Herovit, in his senescence, now admits everything) what one might

call an accessible or highly sympathetic figure, but now, in her discovered

role as the thirty-five-year-old mother of an ill-tempered, bottle-fed,

cereal-spitting infant, she seems to have collapsed into a set of attitudes

which were probably always waiting to absorb her. Also, she hates science

fiction. This is strange, considering that Herovit met her at a convention

fifteen years ago when she was chairlady of the Bronx Honor John Steele

Society and Steele himself was the guest of honor.

"You think about me only when you want something and you never

know I'm alive any other time," she says, rotating and shoving her

buttocks at Herovit... but not at all invitingly. Mack Miller would never

have to take this shit. Of course Mack Miller, at least on the record, had

never been laid yet, but if he had been laid you could be sure that he

would be in the dominant position.

"I'm sorry," he says mildly. He is not Mack Miller. Increasingly these

days he seems to be apologizing and, what is worse, meaning it. Herovit's

regrets and sense of culpability are real: he knows that he, and no one else,

has made his life. "I only thought that I might, uh, hold you, you know, like

that. Nothing else. I know that you're tired, what you're going through,

but of course, as you should know, I've kind of got problems myself and—"

"You don't know anything. You can't know anything if you think that I

care for your problems with that crap. Do you know what I'm going

through? Do you know what the bitch is doing to me?" Janice refuses to

call the baby by her name; it is always the bitch, the kid, the thing, or at

best, the infant—thus, Herovit supposes, depersonalizing the situation

somewhat and thus protecting her emotions. He does not know an awful

lot of psychology—that not being the strong point of his writings, which

focus on the hard sciences—but he can make an assumption or two, or so

he guesses.

"No," he says, not wanting the discussion which is now coming but

knowing with ten years' cunning that this discussion may be his only

pathway into her and that if he has any interest in his wife at all he must

discuss his way into sex. Hear her complaints one by one as a means of

penance in advance. "Tell me what she's doing to you. Did she do anything

bad to you today, for instance?"

"What do you care anyway? What difference does it make? I'm a fool to

think that you're even interested in any of this."

"But I am interested. I really am. She's our daughter, the two of us

together, right? It can't be one but both." These are certain ritual matters

to attend to before there is even the possibility of sex. Herovit sighs and

wishes, not for the first time, that he were a more industrious adulterer.

As it is, he is little more than a dilettante, a hobbyist, picking up scraps

where he may, but this is not the correct approach for the serious-minded.

Still, even at the level of science fiction, adultery can become very

expensive, so he may have less complaints than he thought.

"You. All day you're locked up like a rat in that office of yours, typing up

your crap and getting drunk. Mostly getting drunk, you're not even that

busy any more. I can't hear the typewriter most of the time; you think I

don't know what's going on in there? I'm aware of everything. But what do

you know of my life? Can you understand what this thing is costing me

every day now?"

"Oh yes," Herovit says. "Oh yes, I think I do. I do know what it's costing

you. It isn't easy, not easy for me either," looking through the ceiling, past

the screen of smoke from the cigarette he has been working on,

thinking—thinking somewhere there must be a glade, somewhere there

must be flowers, somewhere there must be animals bleating contentedly

throughout the night and ships whisking over the water. Somewhere at

this very moment such a place exists, and these things are happening

there or not at all, and I must get what comfort I can from the knowledge

that while they are there they count for something ... someone somewhere

is getting laid and it must be good.

Three stories beneath, a fire engine, sirens like imploded rockets,

staggers past, and the odors of the city sweep like moths to nibble over

him. What did he do to deserve this? All that he wanted was to make an

easy buck. Simple Jonathan Herovit to come to such an end as this as he

listens to his wife, listens to his wife, listens to his wife—

Talking.

In the morning his agent calls to say that the publisher is now

beginning to press hard for delivery of the overdue Survey Team novel and

that he (the agent that is, to say) also finds himself upset about the way

things are going with Herovit. What has happened to his career? Where is

the old sense of discipline? What does Herovit think: That just because he

has sold ninety-two novels the world now owes him a living? Mack Miller

would not have to take this shit; he would scream back at this old bastard

over the phone and tell him a few things, but Herovit, owing six hundred

dollars, merely listens. The world does not owe him a living. Perhaps he

should quit novel-writing if this is all the responsibility that he can show

in his late thirties. Get himself some kind of a job instead. Unless he is

unemployable, which is most likely the case by now.

Herovit's agent is named Morton Mackenzie. Morton is fifty and

represents more than half of the full-time science-fiction writers in the

country, but considers himself more famous as a result of a short article

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Herovit'sWorldBarryN.Malzberg©BarryN.Malzberg1973ForLeeWrightandRobertP.MillsThespheredartedtothesurfacewithanawfulrushandasMackMillerregardeditheknewrightawaythathewasdealingwithsomethingabsolutelynewintheexperienceoftheSurveyTeamwiththissphere.Hewasdealing,infact,withsomethingwhichwaspossiblysoali...

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