The Man Who was not Terrance O’Grady
. . .comes to the point, I’m not entirely certain how to proceed. Well. Let’s try it this way, and we’ll adjust things as needed, as we go along.
CHAPTER ONE: In which the man who was not Terrance O’Grady had come quietly.
And that right there is the first line that started It All. Originally, I thought it was enough to support a novel; Steve insisted that it would support seven. Turns out we were both wrong.
It’s kind of interesting that I can remember bits that were written by Steve, and bits that were written by me — the first line being a case in that point — and lines that were fixed somewhere along the line, though I’m not always clear if one of us did the fixing or Del Rey took it in hand.
Now, giving the lie to my contention that I remember Everything — I don’t remember what the original 60 pages were. I remember that we were challenged to rewrite those pages into something “less cartoonish,” and I remember that we did not change the first line.
There’s a lot of setup going on in this chapter: the reader is assured that they’re in a science fiction novel — we have asteroid mining! we have trade imbalances and the names of other races: Yxtrang, Liaden, Terrans, rude turtles! We have desks imported from Earth, and cheesy-talking villains likewise. And,there appears to be a . . . device inside the head of the prisoner. What’s that about, anyway?
Regarding the prisoner, we’ve been told straight off who he’s not, and now the reader’s mission is to find out who he is. We’re soon to know that he’s not a pushover hand-to-hand, despite being a short, thin guy. We also find out that he fights dirty.
And as the chapter ends, though we’ve established that the little man is a ‘geek spy’ in addition to not being Terrance O’Grady, and we’re offered three choices of what kind of ‘geek’: Yxtrang, Liaden, turtle.
But we still don’t know who he is.
The walk down the alley, up the lift, and into Mr. Jager’s office was largely written Steve, with me hanging over his shoulder (sometimes literally, because I had never had to revise to editorial demand before and had no idea what to do). You may, by the way, take it as given that any expression by the Loop in this novel was written by Steve.
I remember Steve telling me to describe the desk, which memory insists had already been characterized as ‘beautiful.’ I remember, in fact, writing in the rare woods that had been imported from Earth. And I remember going down to the next paragraph and typing, “The man behind the desk was also imported from Earth, and he was not beautiful.” And I remember Steve laughing, and saying, “Good!”
Reading the whole scene in Mr. Jager’s office as it was published, which is not High Literature — Mr. Jager apparently read too many five cent spy novels — I’m really glad we were challenged to fix whatever the original words had been.
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CHAPTER TWO: Dripping, he kept to back streets, passing silently through the deepest shadows.
Once again with the cheap spy novels, but a guy’s gotta have an undocumented place to rest after blowing up a building, after all.
Steve wrote Mr. Not-O’Grady’s divesting himself of his disguise; I wrote the description of the man who arises from the disguise: no limp, no glasses, knives disposed, new set of papers in order, apparently sufficient money, since he doesn’t tell us he’ll be robbing a bank.
Mission accomplished, and he’s headed out, paying off the apartment in cash, burning the bogus papers and the leftover chemicals, spreading the used clothing in various alleyways, and we learn the name of the planet we’re on, and that there’s a spaceport.
I remember when we got the page proofs (we having not known enough to demand that we see the galleys) and somewhere in the walk away from the apartment, a complete random “flaming greaseape” appeared on the street. We were able to get that struck.
Right about here, we have an interesting development. The sound of gunfire. Does our ‘geek spy’ ignore it, like a sensible man?
He does not. He runs toward it.
Now what? says the reader.
That’s a pretty good firefight, if I say it myself. Steve wrote it.
And I felt a — spark, actually, when the red-haired woman comes back from trying to take down the guy who got away, checks on the man who saved her life, and says, “Awwww, damn.”
We immediately learn of the red-haired lady that she pays her debts. She does not leave the stranger lying unconscious in the alley. She takes him with her to her safe house, and such is her self-assurance, that I didn’t even ask why.
Arrived at the safe place, and her rescuer still unconscious, she opens his pouch, reads his papers, cusses some more, and returns the papers, and though we know there’s money in that pouch — she doesn’t take it.
I’ve always liked this scene, which, yes, I wrote. The reader gets more information, but what does it mean? A Middle River blade? What’s that? We also get a description of the red-haired woman, and the judgment of the man we know to be a professional that she’s formidable. So formidable, in fact, that he would have to kill her in order to assure his clean escape from her toils, and, to his own surprise, he’s ‘disinclined’ to do so.
The interaction shows that the red-haired woman is also a wiseguy — “Hi, there, Thrillseeker.” — and more than just formidable with a gun. She insists on the truth, and apparently, she gets it, winning for herself and also the patient reader — his name! What a relief.
And now what?
Having determined that he can take care of himself, she throws him out in order to pursue her own plans.
He leaves, and as he’s walking toward the infobooth, counting heads, and doing sums, he realizes that the woman’s enemies have found her.
There’s a phrase missing in this bit, BTW. There had been this: “Would she have sent him out to be her Trojan?” It was the wrong phrase, and whoever took it out was right to do so, but I missed it, and had to read the scene twice to make sure it wasn’t there.
Val Con is still debating with himself when one of the people after the red-haired woman accosts him, bringing him back into the dispute on her side.
Bad guys dispatched, Val Con and the lady (who, for all her insistence on the truth, hasn’t exactly been free with her name) pause to make peace between themselves, only to realize that there’s more trouble on the way, and leave.
Together.