"Good to see you," McGregor said. They had met several times at conventions and other gatherings, and Pete had dropped into the Astonishing office once while in New York on other business. They argued for two hours. Pete lost, over and over, but the experience gave him notions for three new stories, all of which McGregor bought.

"Let's get my luggage," the editor said, "and some food, and a drink, and then back to wherever you're staying. I have some things to show you, now."

"Okay," Pete said, but disappointedly, "if you don't want to go down to Gardena first."

"What for? All we have to go on is a post-office box number, and the post office is closed."

Pete shook his head in chagrin at not having thought of that, but McGregor was already going on: "Unless, of course, he has a phone number in the local book. Worth a try, don't you think?" They were passing a bank of telephones on the way to the baggage claim area; McGregor found a chained phone book for the right part of town, pawed through its dog-eared pages. "Gordan… Gorden… Gordillo?so much for that. Well, we're no worse off."

"No," Pete said, still slightly stunned. The Astonishing editor could no more help throwing off ideas than a fissioning plutonium atom could help spitting neutrons, and the results were about as explosive.

Over dinner at the coffee shop near the motel, the talk had nothing to do with the mysterious Mark Gordian. Perhaps because he was tired, McGregor was full of sarcasm about the rioting in East Germany ("Which shows where the workers stand in the workers' paradise."), the unmanned Navajo guided bomber ("It'll be obsolete before it flies. Rockets are faster than jets."), and the way CBS and NBC has handled the televising of Queen Elizabeth's coronation ("Imagine sending P-51s to meet the British jet that brought the film to Canada. The RCAF has jets of their own, and got their film to the lab first and on the air first. Naturally?jets are faster than prop jobs.").

"It's still remarkable, having seen it the same day it happened," Pete insisted.

"Oh, no doubt. Me, though, I'll take one of Arthur Clarke's relay satellites, and see it the same minute it happens." The thing about McGregor, Pete thought, was that "good enough" would not do for him?he insisted on perfection. Sometimes he managed to wring it out of people, too.

Back at the motel, the editor unlocked the suitcase he had parked by the bed before going out to eat. He pulled out a fat manila folder. "What's in there?" Pete asked.

"A couple of manuscripts I've got from Gordian that I pulled out of the file. Look them over; I'd like to hear what you think of them." McGregor plainly had no intention of saying anything more for a bit; he sat in the motel room's shabby armchair puffing on an Old Gold while Pete sprawled full-length on the bed, reading.

"'The Hole Man,' eh?" Pete said. "That's a nice piece of work?gloomy, but nice."

McGregor only nodded and waited.

Pete felt flustered, as if facing a one-man oral exam committee without having studied. He nervously stacked the pages the editor had given him.

His fingers caught wrongness his eyes had missed. "Funny paper," he remarked; all four edges were rough, as if they had been torn off from perforations. "I've heard of typing paper sold in a roll, so you can run it into your typewriter continuously and rip off each sheet as you finish, but that would have smooth sides."

"So it would," McGregor said. "I don't understand this either, but I noticed it. Keep going."

After a few minutes, Pete said, "That's a high-quality ribbon he's using." He wasn't sure what made him notice that?probably a twinge of guilt at the decrepit state of his own.

"It's what they call a carbon film ribbon," McGregor explained. "They use them for legal documents and other things that might need to be photostatted. The things are hard to find and hideously expensive, because you can only go through them once. I've never had stories typed on them submitted before, I can tell you that."

"You've been researching this," Pete said accusingly.

"Guilty as charged. I can also tell you that one of New York's better detectives looked at some of these pages and couldn't match the typeface to anything in his collection. He was so surprised he didn't charge me."

"Curiouser and curiouser."

"Isn't it? The gumshoe did notice something I flat-out missed. You're not spotting it, but it's pretty obvious when it gets pointed out to you."

Pete stared without result at the pages in front of him. "All right, I give up. What is it?"

"Look at the right margin."

"My God! It's justified!" Pete felt like kicking himself for not noticing that right away. Every typescript he'd ever seen had a ragged right margin, but the pages of "The Hole Man" were so consistent and seemed so natural the way they were that their strangeness slipped by him.

"Very good," the Astonishing editor said. "Again, there's a gadget that will pull off the same stunt, but it's hard to come by?and why on Earth would you bother? The result's pretty, sure, but more trouble than it's worth."

"I'd say so." Pete sat up on the bed and took out a cigarette?he needed something to calm his nerves. He tapped the end of the Chesterfield on the nightstand to tamp down the tobacco; filtertips struck him as vaguely effeminate, and made the smoke taste like sawdust anyway. After a couple of deep drags, he said, "Whatever Gordian is, I don't think he's a telepath."

McGregor peered at him over the tops of his glasses. "Why's that?"

"It's not so much all this." He waved at the papers beside him. "This only helps confirm what I really decided on the drive down here?about 'Reactions,' I mean."

"How's that?"

"How would I put it? Something like this, maybe: there's more in the story you printed than I've thought of yet. The ideas, the world, even the names match, but the story has a depth of detail that I wouldn't begin to worry about until I actually started writing."

The editor steepled his fingertips. "And so? What conclusions do you draw?"

"Me? I'd rather not," Pete said, shaking his head. "I'd sooner believe in mind-reading."

For the first time, he saw McGregor angry at him. "If you reject the data, what do you work from then? A Ouija board, or the entrails of a sheep?"

"That's not fair," Pete protested. He felt himself flushing. "The whole thing is impossible."

"It is? Then why are we in Los Angeles?"

Pete had no good answer to that. McGregor got up and swatted him on the shoulder. "Nothing we can do about it at the moment, anyway. Maybe things will clear up when we meet Gordian. For now, though, I'd just as soon go to bed. I'm still running on East Coast time."

"Fair enough," Pete said, but he was a long time falling asleep.

"This is part of the fourth largest city in the country?" McGregor said incredulously as Pete passed the airport going south on Sepulveda.

"Well, actually, no," Pete answered. "According to that map on your lap, this is the sovereign city of El Segundo." There were streets and houses on the west side of Sepulveda; most of the east side was simply a field, brown under the summer sun and full of tumbleweeds.

"Mostly oilwells, from what I can see of it."

"It does look that way." Pete turned left onto El Segundo Boulevard. He drove for about a mile before coming on more houses. Then, just west of Hawthorne High School, the Chevy bumped over the streetcar tracks.

"Signs of life," McGregor said. "A few, anyway." About four miles later, Pete turned right on Vermont and headed south. The street was wide and looked as if it ought to be important, but it had a dirt center divider and there were good long stretches of field along it. It did, however, boast of a supermarket, a liquor store across the street, and a couple of large, garish buildings that identified themselves as "clubs." "Wonder what those are," McGregor said.