The Wonder Effect Read Free Page B

least $6,175.50 for Shelters ... Foxy Framish and Little Joe
    Fliederwick . . . well, this is next year . . . nah, you sneak-punch ‘em a couple thousand missiles over the Pole and... needs a year in the minors.”
    “Hello, Denzer,” someone said. It was Maggie Frome, his assistant.
    “Hello, Maggie,” he said, and added automatically: “Who do you like in the All-Star game?”
    In a low, ferocious voice she muttered: “You can take the All-Star game, tie it up in a b-b-b-brassiere and dump it in a Civilian Shelter. I am sick of the subject. Both subjects.”
    He flushed at her language and protested: “Really, Maggie!”
    “Sorry,” she grunted, sounding as though she didn’t mean it. He contrasted her surly intransigence with his own reasoned remarks to the cab and tolerantly shook his head. Of course, he could have been taken the wrong way... He began to worry.
    They stepped off together at the Nature’s Way offices. Sales & Promotion was paralyzed. Instead of rows of talkers at rows of desks, phoning prospects out of city directories and high-pressuring them into subscriptions, the department was curdled into little knots of people cheerfully squabbling about the C.S.B. and the All-Stars. Denzer sighed and led the girl on into Transmission. The gang should have been tuning up the works, ready to ,shoot the next issue into seven million home facsimile receivers. Instead, the gang was talking All-Stars and C.S.B. It was the same in Typography, the same in Layout, the same in Editorial.
    The door closed behind them, isolating their twin office from the babble. Blessed silence. “Maggie,” he said, “I have a headache. Will you please work on the final paste-ups and cutting for me? There isn’t anything that should give you any trouble.”
    “Okay, Denzer,” she said, and retreated to her half of the office with the magazine dummy. Denzer felt a momentary pang of conscience. The issue was way overset and cutting it was a stinker of a job to pass on to Maggie Frome. Still, that was what you had assistants for, wasn’t it?
    He studied her, covertly, as she bent over the dummy. She was a nice-looking girl, even if she was a hangover from the administration of President Danton and his Century of the Common Woman. Maggie’s mother had been something of an integrationist leader in Sandusky, Ohio, and had flocked to Washington as one mote in Danton’s crackpot horde, bringing her subteenage daughter Maggie. No doubt there had been a father, but Maggie never mentioned him. The mother had died in a car crash that looked like suicide after Danton lost all fifty-four states in his bid for re-‘ election, but by then Maggie was a pert teenager who moved in with cousins in Arlington-Alex and she stayed on. Must just like Washington, Denzer thought. Not because of Female Integration, though. Danton’s Century of the Common Woman had lasted just four years.
    He winced a little as he remembered her coarseness of speech. She was round and brown-haired. You couldn’t have everything.
    Denzer leaned back and shut his eyes, the hubbub outside the office was just barely audible for a moment-some red-hot argument over the Gottshalk Committee’s Shelter Report or Fliederwick’s R.B.I. had swelled briefly to the shrieking stage-and then died away again. Heretically he wondered what the point was in getting excited over baseball or the building or nonbuilding of air-raid shelters capable of housing every American all the time. One was as remote from reality as the other.
    “Sorry, Denzer.”
    He sat up, banging his knee on his desk.
    “Lousy staff work, I’m afraid. Here’s the Aztec Cocawine piece and no lab verification on the test results.” She was waving red-crayoned galleys in his face.
    He looked at the scrawling red question-mark over the neat columns of type with distaste. Nature’s Way promised its seven million subscribers that it would not sell them anything that would kill them; or, at least, that if it