ELVIS PRESLEY AND ROY ORBISON GIVE BENEFIT CONCERT FOR INJURED SPACE ALIEN.
I read that over. Shook my head and deleted it from the screen. After a moment's thought I typed SPACE ALIEN INJURED: ELVIS AND ROY GIVE BENEFIT CONCERT.
That was more like it. It scanned better. Just plain Roy added a fillip of mystery. Roy who? Rogers? Orbison? Blount, Jr." Aside from structure and style, I have this theory that people are more likely to believe things with a full colon--which is maybe why so many people had such a hard time swallowing all of Ronnie R's memory lapses in his memoirs and elsewhere.
One of my phones rang. Not the black phone that was my private line, or the red NONSNS (the name of my news agency, a major supplier to the supermarket tabloids) line. It was the headless Mickey Mouse phone. That could mean only one thing.
My country needed me.
Well, it could also mean that Dr. I. N. Epstein, head of a certain low profile government agency that I sometimes work for, was having trouble programming his VCR again. Although he is a former rocket scientist, Izzy is notoriously bad with machines. You might have said he had ten thumbs, machine-wise, except he lost three fingers of one hand to an ATM just a couple years ago.
I picked up the phone. "Hey Doc, having trouble taping the German Pleasure Channel again?"
I could almost see him blushing. I extracted my last pay increase by trapping him in his office and recounting the twisted details of my brief, ill-starred fling with Tristan Shout, the Singing Contortionist, until he met my demands.
"No, I'm not-" A weary sigh. "Bertha?"
I lit a fresh cigarette. It's a filthy habit, but it was the only way I could give up chewing tobacco. "What's up doc?"
Another sigh. "I have an assignment for you."
I smiled. It had been almost six weeks since my last assignment, and I was getting bored with cranking out several thousand words of whatever lunatic gibberish came into my head every day. The money was good, but there were times I worried about my sanity. I had enough copy written ahead to last until Bigfoot started doing Vidal Sassoon ads on TV.
"I don't know, Doc," I said, noisily shuffling some papers around on my desk. "I'm pretty busy."
"Well," he said after a moment's hesitation. "I suppose I could send Murtch..."
This was a fairly lame effort on Izzy's part to jerk my chain. Not only was Murtch a cretinous sexist Nazi pig with bad breath and a gun fetish, he was so dumb he couldn't find his own dick with both hands and a head start.
I let Izzy dangle a minute. A glance out the window showed me falling snow. The needle of the thermometer was pegged at 11º. Just about anywhere in the country was bound to be warmer than northern Minnesota in early March. Maybe I'd get a chance to work on my tan, and bag a nice young lifeguard to rescue me from those old winter blahs.
"What garden spot are you sending me to?"
"You'll take the assignment?"
His insistence that I agree to take the assignment before he told me the Event Location made my visions of a tropical paradise begin to frost over. But I needed a little action to keep from getting stale, and going on assignment had one other advantage: I could go off my diet.
"Yeah," I told him, "I'll take it."
"Great! You're going to Oregon. Gnatswarm, Oregon. To check out an incident of, quote, 'vegetative terrorism.'"
)
