Walter Bradbury shook his head, finished his desert, mused, and then said:
"I think you've already written a novel."
"What?" I said, "and when?"
"What about all those Martian stories you've published in the past four years?" Brad replied. "Isn't there a common thread buried there? Couldn't you sew them together, make some sort of tapestry, half-cousin to a novel?"
"My god!" I said.
"Yes?"
"My god," I said. "Back in 1944, I was so impressed by Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, that I told myself I must try to write something half as good, and set it on Mars. I sketched out an outline of characters and events on the Red Planet, but soon lost it in my files!"
"Looks as if we've found it," said Brad.
"Have we?"
"We have," said Brad. "Go back to the YMCA and type me an outline of those two or three dozen Martian stories. Bring it in tomorrow. If I like what I see, I'll give you a contract and an advance."
Don Congdon, my best friend and literary agent, seated across the table, nodded.
"I'll be at your office by noon!" I said to Brad.
To celebrate I ordered a second desert. Brad and Don each had a beer.
It was a typical hot June night in New York. Air conditioning was still a luxury of some future year. I typed until 3 A.M., perspiring in my underwear as I weighted and balanced my Martians in their strange cities in the last hours before arrivals and departures of my astronauts.
At noon, exhausted but elated, I delivered the outline to Walter I. Bradbury.
"You've done it!" he said. "You'll get a contract and a check tomorrow."
I must have made a lot of noise. When I calmed down, I asked him about my other stories.
"Now that we're publishing your first 'novel,'" Brad said, "we can take a chance on your stories, even though such collections rarely sell. Can you think of a title that would sort of put a skin around two dozen different tales-?"
"Skin?" I said. "Why not The Illustrated Man, my story about a carnival barker whose tattoos sweat themselves alive, one by one, and act out their futures on his chest and legs and arms?"
"Looks as if I'll have to make out two advance checks," said Walter I. Bradbury.
I left New York three days later with two contracts and two checks totaling $1,500. Enough money to pay our $30-a-month rent for a year, finance our baby, and help with the down payment on a small tract house inland from Venice, California. By the time our first daughter was born in the autumn of 1949, I had fitted and fused all of my lost but now found Martian objects. It turned out to be not a book of eccentric characters as in Winesburg, Ohio, but a series of strange ideas, notions, fancies, and dreams that I had begun to sleep on and waken to when I was twelve.
The Martian Chronicles was published the next year, in the late spring of 1950.
Traveling east that spring, I did not know what I had done. Between trains in Chicago, I walked to the Art Institute to have lunch with a friend. I saw a crowd at the top of the Institute stairs and thought they were tourists. But as I started walking up, the crowd came down and surrounded me. They were not art lovers, but readers who had gotten early copies of The Martian Chronicles and had come to tell me just exactly what I had all-toounkowningly done. That noon encounter changed my life forever. Nothing was the same after that.
The list of What Ifs could go on forever. What if I hadn't met Maggie, who took a vow of poverty to marry me? What if Don Congdon had never written to become and remain my agent for forty-three years, starting in the same week that I married Marguerite?
And what if, soon after the publication of the Chronicles, I had missed being in a small Santa Monica bookshop when Christopher Isherwood stopped by.
Quickly, I signed and handed over a copy of my novel.
With an expression of regret and alarm, Isherwood accepted and fled.
Three days later, he telephoned.
"Do you know what you've done?" he said.
"What?" I said.