On the way back to town, he thought again of Professor Cahier, and remembered, suddenly, a bushy-haired, nervous fellow named Lubin. The part of his mind that had pulled out the memory of those days before, apparently without purpose, kept forcing him back.

Herman Lubin, laughing and untoughened then; a balding, staccato-voiced desk chief now. Lubin, the ambitious . . .

“Thomas, you’re nuts. You’ll sit in that crummy little village all your life and maybe once or twice you’ll publish an editorial and they’ll shoot you an award—‘To the fighting editor of the Mouse Breath Bugle!’—and you’ll frame it and die happy. Stinko, Thomas. Small time. You’re too good a newspaperman for that.”

Tom’s hands began to perspire against the glossy dark plastic steering wheel, as he realized now why he had been remembering.

He mashed the accelerator pedal to the floor and kept it there for most of the length of the straight road. A few minutes later, in his office, he picked up the telephone and dialed long distance, noticing, with some annoyance, that his fingers had begun to tremble slightly.

Fifteen minutes later, after a series of crackling pauses, poor connections, and transfers, he was talking to the man he’d corresponded with often but had not actually seen in over twenty years.

Lubin’s greeting was loud. In the background, Tom could hear typewriters and other machines, and he had a quick, painful vision of the immense city room. “Chrissakes, man! You still got that houn-dawg accent? Jesus, I can’t believe it. Doesn’t anything change down there?”

Tom smiled, without mirth, without real bitterness, with admission, only, that he was talking to newspaper and that he wasn’t newspaper. “Well,” he said, “we did get a new door for the privy.”

The voice, distorted by distance, roared good-naturedly. “So,” Lubin said, “how the hell are you, anyway?”

“Okay, Herman.”

“Hard to tell, y’know. You Southroners all sound alike. Constipated. Ooop, hang on a second, Thomas—”

While Lubin made some improbably enormous and important decision, Tom wiped his forehead and looked around his shabby, cluttered little office. He looked at the framed awards on the wall. The mountain of ads on the desk. The gritty, unmopped, unswept board floor.

“Thomas?”

“Yes, here, Herman.”

“Sorry. Where were we? I know—you were about to tell me you’re fed up with all this country stuff and you want a job with me. Right?”

Tom half-lowered the receiver, feeling the sharp, childish chill, the accelerated tempo of his heartbeat; then, quickly, he said: “I don’t know, Herman; I don’t know how I’d work out as a copy boy.”

Again the roar. “Copy boy! Hell, man, I’m talking about something big. Really big. Night janitor! Right? Big. How’s the wife and kids?”

“Fine. Herman—listen, before this phone bill goes so damn high I’ll have to up my sub rates—”