Someone Like You

‘That’s exactly it, Mr Bohlen! That’s where the machine comes in. Listen a minute, sir, while I tell you some more. I’ve got it all worked out. The big magazines are carrying approximately three fiction stories in each issue. Now, take the fifteen most important magazines – the ones paying the most money. A few of them are monthlies, but most of them come out every week. All right. That makes, let us say, around forty big stories being bought each week. That’s forty thousand dollars. So with our machine – when we get it working properly – we can collar nearly the whole of this market!’

‘My dear boy, you’re mad!’

‘No sir, honestly, it’s true what I say. Don’t you see that with volume alone we’ll completely overwhelm them! This machine can produce a five-thousand word story, all typed and ready for despatch, in thirty seconds. How can the writers compete with that? I ask you, Mr Bohlen, how?’

At that point, Adolph Knipe noticed a slight change in the man’s expression, an extra brightness in the eyes, the nostrils distending, the whole face becoming still, almost rigid. Quickly, he continued. ‘Nowadays, Mr Bohlen, the hand-made article hasn’t a hope. It can’t possibly compete with mass-production, especially in this country – you know that. Carpets… chairs… shoes… bricks… crockery… anything you like to mention – they’re all made by machinery now. The quality may be inferior, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the cost of production that counts. And stories – well – they’re just another product, like carpets and chairs, and no one cares how you produce them so long as you deliver the goods. We’ll sell them wholesale, Mr Bohlen! We’ll undercut every writer in the country! We’ll corner the market!’

Mr Bohlen edged up straighter in his chair. He was leaning forward now, both elbows on the desk, the face alert, the small brown eyes resting on the speaker.

‘I still think it’s impracticable, Knipe.’

‘Forty thousand a week!’ cried Adolph Knipe. ‘And if we halve the price, making it twenty thousand a week, that’s still a million a year!’ And softly he added, ‘You didn’t get any million a year for building the old electronic calculator, did you, Mr Bohlen?’

‘But seriously now, Knipe. D’you really think they’d buy them?’

‘Listen, Mr Bohlen. Who on earth is going to want custom-made stories when they can get the other kind at half the price? It stands to reason, doesn’t it?’

‘And how will you sell them? Who will you say has written them?’

‘We’ll set up our own literary agency, and we’ll distribute them through that. And we’ll invent all the names we want for the writers.’

‘I don’t like it, Knipe. To me, that smacks of trickery, does it not?’

‘And another thing, Mr Bohlen. There’s all manner of valuable by-products once you’ve got started. Take advertising, for example. Beer manufacturers and people like tha

t are willing to pay good money these days if famous writers will lend their names to their products. Why, my heavens, Mr Bohlen! This isn’t any children’s plaything we’re talking about. It’s big business.’

‘Don’t get too ambitious, my boy.’

‘And another thing. There isn’t any reason why we shouldn’t put your name, Mr Bohlen, on some of the better stories, if you wished it.’

‘My goodness, Knipe. What should I want that for?’

‘I don’t know, sir, except that some writers get to be very much respected – like Mr Erie Gardner or Kathleen Norris, for example. We’ve got to have names, and I was certainly thinking of using my own on one or two stories, just to help out.’

‘A writer, eh?’ Mr Bohlen said, musing. ‘Well, it would surely surprise them over at the club when they saw my name in the magazines – the good magazines.’

‘That’s right, Mr Bohlen.’

For a moment, a dreamy, faraway look came into Mr Bohlen’s eyes, and he smiled. Then he stirred himself and began leafing through the plans that lay before him.

‘One thing I don’t quite understand, Knipe. Where do the plots come from? The machine can’t possibly invent plots.’

‘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.’