Free The Paris Deadline by Max Byrd Page B

stopped at a shabby three-story building marked number 38, rue du Louvre. He peered at a modest polished brass sign, "N EW Y ORK H ERALD P ARIS E DITION ."
         "Upstairs is better," I told him, and pulled open the door.

                        Fourteen

    L IKE THE T RIB , THE P ARIS H ERALD had arranged its premises vertically—printing presses down in the basement, a spacious, well-lit composing room on the first floor, and next to it a number of smaller storage and mailing rooms. The editorial offices were just above the composing room, on a mezzanine with a wall of towering two-story windows in the grand French manner, looking directly down on the rainy parallelpipeds of les Halles.
         When we reached the top of the stairs I watched Shirer's startled reaction to the massive polished mahogany table that dominated the city room. This had apparently been built according to the exact specifications of the paper's legendary founder, Commodore James Gordon Bennet (title courtesy of the New York Yacht Club), a man of such spectacular eccentricity that he had been exiled from New York society for urinating on his fiancée's grand piano. The table had space for more than a dozen deskmen, each sitting beneath a dangling electric lightbulb. There was a U-shaped slot in the center of the table, reached by

lifting a flap, and the Managing Editor presided at the open end, facing the windows and the market.
         Or in the case of this morning, facing the top of the stairs and tamping tobacco into his pipe with his thumb.
         "The pipe is a good sign," I said, and presented Bill Shirer to Eric Hawkins with the odd feeling that they both might promptly vanish in a burst of smoke.
         Hawkins greeted us warily, probably because he disapproved of what he had once called my "habitual lack of seriousness." In any case Hawkins was an old hand at sizing up and putting off ambitious young newspapermen who wanted a job. Hawkins himself had come over from Manchester, England, in 1915, and stayed with the Herald through the whole four years of the War, during which time the Herald was reduced, like the Trib , to a single sheet of daily newsprint. He now ran a full-time staff of twenty-five or thirty journalists. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the business and no sense of humor whatsoever, being famously baffled by the American slang his reporters liked to slip into their stories (once changing, people claimed, "So's your old man!" to "Your father is also!").
         "If you came to see your friend Billings, he should be back in his lair," Hawkins told me, giving the last word a pleasant little North England burr. "Or he will be soon. Did you see this?"
         For the second time that day somebody showed me a paper. This one was that morning's Herald , folded over to a two-paragraph page four story about one Professor Robert L. Goddard of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, who had fired the world's first liquid-fuelled rocket back on March 16 and was now firing another one, bigger, better, farther. I looked down at the gray rain whipping endlessly back and forth across the striped awnings of les Halles and thought of a leaden sky filled with exploding rockets.
         "And nobody pays any attention," snorted Hawkins, who was something of a student of popular science. "Not even us—page four, no less. Of course he can't steer the damn things yet, he just

points them and fires, but they can already go for miles and miles."
         "The Germans pay attention," said Shirer, earning himself a quick, thoughtful Hawkins nod. "They have a full-scale rocket program. And the Russians too. Last month the Russians invited Goddard to speak at the Tsilovasky Institute."
         "Ah," said Hawkins wisely, "the Russians."
         "What he really needs to invent," Shirer said, "is a way to steer them."
         I left them puffing smoke at each other like a pair of locomotives and worked my way along the