Alien Archives. Robert Silverberg

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       THE WAY TO SPOOK CITY

      Here’s a case where the author experienced more thrills and chills than his own protagonist in the course of writing one simple 18,000-word story. It is altogether possible that aliens were at work trying to prevent this one from ever seeing print.

      The saga began during the hot, dry summer of 1991, when I proposed to the editors of Playboy that I write a story of double the usual length of the stories I had done for them in the past. I was having increasing difficulty confining my Playboy stories to their top limit of 7,500 words or so. Long ago, I pointed out, the magazine had regularly run novellas, such stories as George Langelaan’s “The Fly,” Arthur C. Clarke’s “A Meeting with Medusa,” and Ray Bradbury’s “The Lost City of Mars.” What about reviving that custom and letting me write a long one now?

      The powers that be mulled over the idea and gave me a qualified go-ahead. I submitted an outline, and on September 10, 1991, we came to an agreement on the deal. Two days later the printer of my loyal computer, which I had been using for nearly a decade, declined to print a document. Somehow I jollied it into going back to work, and blithely got started on the story that was to become “The Way to Spook City” a day or two later, imagining I’d have the piece behind me before settling down to work on the upcoming winter novel. I promised to deliver it by mid-October so that it could be used in the August 1992 issue. But the printer trouble returned, and worsened, and on September 27—when I was forty pages into the story—the printer died completely. I was trying to print out my forty pages at the time, but what came out was this:

      “Everyone had been astonished when Nick announced he was going LIa kciN disiruprus oo, that he should be setting himself up for such a crazy LKthguoht eh nruter ot brawny young man Tom had become but of the soft-eyed LJs’kciN fo lla nehgt dna ,n” and then blank space, not another garbled word.

      No problem, you say. Get a new printer, hook it up, do the printout. But there was a problem. I had been something of a pioneer, as writers go, in the use of a computer for word-processing, and the computer I had been using all those years was now obsolete—incompatible, in fact, with any existing brand. The company that had made it was out of business, and no one then alive knew how to connect a modern printer to it. I did, of course, have a backup of my forty pages on a floppy disk; but my computer was a pre-MS-DOS model and its operating system could not communicate with then-modern machines. The texts on my computer were trapped in it forever, all my business records and the first half of “Spook City” among them. They could be brought up onscreen but they were inaccessible for purposes of printing.

      I needed to buy one of the newfangled MS-DOS computers and learn how to use it. And I contemplated the gloomy prospect of having to type “Spook City” and hundreds of other documents onto the new computer, one word at a time. It would take forever. What about my mid-October deadline?

      It was possible, at least, to rescue the unfinished story. The technician who had been servicing my old computer discovered that he still had one machine of that model in working order (more or less) in his San Francisco office. I gave him my backup disk; he printed out the forty pages of “Spook City” and faxed them to me. Later in the day I began keying the story into the only working computer in the house, which belonged to my wife Karen and was a perfectly standard DOS-based job. I also went out and bought a new computer myself, also, of course, a DOS machine compatible with hers.

      For the next ten days or so, while waiting for the new computer to arrive, I continued writing “Spook City” using my prehistoric manual typewriter, and entering each day’s typewritten work on Karen’s computer after her work-day was over. By October 4th I had 59 pages on disk. I decided to print them out and halt further work until my own new machine arrived.

      Karen’s computer wouldn’t print it.

      I didn’t know why.

      The text looked fine on screen, but when I gave the familiar print command I was told that the document was “corrupted” and couldn’t be sent on to the printer.

      Again? Was there a curse on this story?

      The backup disk was corrupted too. It began to look as though I had lost the nineteen pages I had written since the first computer glitch plus all the rewriting I had done on the original forty pages that the computer pro had rescued.

      “I’m pretty much in shellshock now,” I wrote Alice Turner of Playboy, “but what I suppose I’ll do is wait for the new computer to arrive, maybe by Wednesday, and then start putting the whole damn thing in once more, trying to reconstruct (though you never really can) the stuff I had been doing all this past week. I can see that I’m going to wind up earning about five cents an hour on this project even if everything goes perfectly the third time, which is by no means assured.”

      Enter a second savior that grim evening: our friend and neighbor Carol Carr, who showed up equipped with some program that allowed us to bring up on screen, page by page, the whole corrupted document, and print it. What came out, alas, was mostly babble: a Martian mix, miscellaneous random consonants (not vowels!) and numbers and keyboard symbols with an occasional intelligible phrase glaring out of the welter of nonsense. But that was better than nothing. The next day I told Alice Turner what Carol had achieved: “She spent hours waving magic wands in front of Karen’s computer and was able to coax out pages and pages of gibberish printout, which I am now reassembling, jigsaw-puzzle fashion, by locating recognizable passages, putting them into the proper order, and transcribing them by hand onto the old first СКАЧАТЬ