Free Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II by William Tenn Page B

yellow paper that began falling apart as the years went by anyway—and anyway, in those days, who really believed that I'd ever see my oh-so-commercial fiction in my own collections, and in hard covers yet?
    The carbon copy did completely dissolve with time. And as for me, well, my memory is not so good these days. I can no longer remember exactly which three or four sentences Horace altered.
    So.
    So here is W. Tenn with a soupcon of Horace L. Gold thrown in.
    Written 1950——Published 1951

"WILL YOU WALK A LITTLE FASTER"
    All right. So maybe I should be ashamed of myself.
    But I'm a writer and this is too good a story to let go. My imagination is tired, and I'm completely out of usable plots; I'm down to the gristle of truth. I'll use it.
    Besides, someone's bound to blab sooner or later—as Forkbeard pointed out, we're that kind of animal—and I might as well get some private good out of the deal.
    Why, for all I know, there is a cow on the White House lawn this very moment...
    Last August, to be exact, I was perspiring over an ice-cold yarn that I never should have started in the first place, when the doorbell rang.
    I looked up and yelled, "Come in! Door's open!"
    The hinges squeaked a little the way they do in my place. I heard feet slap-slapping up the long corridor which makes the rent on my apartment a little lower than most of the others in the building. I couldn't recognize the walk as belonging to anyone I knew, so I waited with my fingers on the typewriter keys and my face turned to the study entrance.
    After a while, the steps came around the corner. A little man, not much more than two feet high, dressed in a green knee-length tunic, walked in. He had a very large head, a short pointed red beard, a long pointed green cap, and he was talking to himself. In his right hand, he carried a golden pencil-like object; in his left, a curling strip of what seemed to be parchment.
    "Now, you," he said with a guttural accent, pointing both the beard and the pencil-like object at me, "now you must be a writer."
    I closed my mouth carefully around a lump of air. Somehow, I noted with interest, I seemed to be nodding.
    "Good." He flourished the pencil and made a mark at the end of a line halfway down the scroll. "That completes the enrollment for this session. Come with me, please."
    He seized the arm with which I had begun an elaborate gesture. Holding me in a grip that had all the resiliency of a steel manacle, he smiled benevolently and walked back down my entrance hall. Every few steps he walked straight up in the air, and then—as if he'd noticed his error—calmly strode down to the floor again.
    "What—who—" I said, stumbling and tripping and occasionally getting walloped by the wall, "you wait, you—who— who —"
    "Please do not make such repetitious noises," he admonished me. "You are supposed to be a creature of civilization. Ask intelligent questions if you wish, but only when you have them properly organized."
    I brooded on that while he closed the door of my apartment behind him and began dragging me up the stairs. His heart may or may not have been pure, but I estimated his strength as being roughly equivalent to that of ten. I felt like a flag being flapped from the end of my own arm.
    "We're going up?" I commented tentatively as I swung around a landing.
    "Naturally. To the roof. Where we're parked."
    "Parked, you said?" I thought of a helicopter, then of a broomstick. Who was it that rode around on the back of an eagle?
    Mrs. Flugelman, who lived on the floor above, had come out of her apartment with a bagful of garbage. She opened the door of the dumbwaiter and started to nod good-morning at me. She stopped when she saw my friend.
    "Yes, parked. What you call our flying saucer." He noticed Mrs. Flugelman staring at him and jutted his beard at her as we went by. "Yes, I said flying saucer!" he spat.
    Mrs. Flugelman walked back into her apartment with the bagful of garbage and closed the door