Free The Children of Hamelin by Norman Spinrad Page A

Madison Avenue disguise (whom I copped some grass from now and then), and who was just sitting down as I planted my ass behind the old Royal electric typewriter.
    “Another day, another ten points, another twenty dollars,” Bruce said, putting on his steel-rimmed glasses. (A subtle note of defiance he had adopted when the Man, through Dickie, had decreed that his beard had to go.) What Bruce was referring to was the Dirk Robinson fee-reader point-count system, otherwise referred to as the Track Record. Each incoming manuscript was assigned a point-value by Nancy according to its length: one point for short story, five points for the average novel, eight points for a long novel, ten points for some cretin’s million-word life-work, and various intermediary point-counts for odd lengths. Each fee-reader had a weekly quota of fifty points and a base pay of $100. Therefore, each point was worth $2 to us. A real Stakhanovite could tear off as many as a hundred points in a week, especially if he had plenty of novels, and when one of us was hard up for bread, the general agreement was that he would get the bulk of that week’s juicy five-and-eight pointers. What, one might ask, was each point worth to Dirk Robinson, Inc.? Well, the agency charged $10 for a one-pointer, $35 for a five-pointer, $55 for an eight-pointer and like that, so we figured (figuring in Nancy’s salary, postage, stationery and etc.) that the Man made about $400 off an average week’s mixed bag that netted one of us peons $100. Or something like $1,200 a week total, $5,000 a month, maybe $60,000 a year. Not bad at all.
    Berkowitz moaned again, and dropped the manuscript he had been reading back on the untidy pile next to his typewriter. He fitted a letter-head sheet, a carbon, and an onion-skin second sheet (the Man did not miss a chance at saving a penny on the cheapest possible second sheets) into his typewriter and said: “The Mad Dentist promises us a novel by next week. I can’t take him anymore. A nice easy five points, maybe eight. Do I have a taker?”
     
    Berkowitz must be cracking up, I thought. The Mad Dentist was a long-time fee-writer whose thesis was that fluoridated drinking water was a Communist plot to destroy the American economy by ruining the dental industry. He had exposed this hideous plot in about a dozen articles, half a dozen short stories, a nonfiction book and a science fiction novel. All of which we had of course rejected as “showing considerable talent but not quite meeting the current demands of the marketplace.” I could tell what the new Dr. Owen F. Mannigan opus would be like without reading it; therefore it was an easy five-pointer; therefore Berkowitz had to be crazy for opting out.
    “I volunteer,” I therefore said.
    “Sold to Thomas Hollander and may the Lord have mercy upon your soul!” Berkowitz said with a sigh of ill-concealed relief that I did not like one little bit.
    “All right, Mannie,” I said, “what’s the kicker?”
    Berkowitz’s dark, perpetually-sour face lit up with a sadistic grin. “I quote from the latest letter from our beloved Mad Dentist,” he said. He took a yellow sheet of legal stationery from his “In” and began reading:
     
    ... since apparently the Bolshevik conspiracy to bankrupt the American dental industry has subverted the publishing industry as well, I have stolen a tactic from the handbook of the Communist Fluoridators and have cleverly disguised my latest expose of the Marxist-Leninist plot, titled, SUCK IT TO ‘EM!, as what I believe is referred to in the publishing trade as a novel of sexual passion—
     
    “Stop! Stop!” I screamed.
    “Jesus Christ,” Bruce said, “a sex novel!”
    Shit! That bastard Berkowitz!
    “Berkowitz,” I said, “this is an atrocity. You have violated the Geneva Convention. I shall complain to the Red Cross.”
    But before I could get any further in what I knew was a lost cause, Nancy dropped the doubled-sized Monday load of muck