Bill Norton cringed. The editor yelled, "You call yourself an author? Hah! You don't know a word processor from a food processor!" and threw the manuscript at him. It came apart in midair and scattered. Bill bent down and picked up the sheets, then scuttled out the door hunched over, as if he expected the editor to throw more at him. Harry Trent, the editor of Stunning Stories, was known to have a temper, but Bill had never expected anything like this. The door slammed shut behind him. Bill paused, straightening up the mess that had once been his manuscript.

"No luck, huh?" said the receptionist. Bill shook his head. "That's a shame. I thought you might get somewhere, since this was one of his calm days. This your first time here?"

"Yeah. And my last, too, I guess. He's been rejecting my stories by mail for the last year, but the rejections sounded encouraging. I just sold a couple of stories to a small magazine, one of those half cent a word ones, you know?" The receptionist nodded and he continued, "so I thought a personal visit might get me enough advice to make a sale."

"Oh,oh. Bad move.I guess you didn't know ..."

"Know what?"

"Mr. Trent doesn't read the slushpile. His assistant does that, and _he_ never says _anything_ nasty. He's one of those offensively inoffensive people. I'm not surprised your rejections sounded encouraging. I'll bet Mr. Trent has never seen your stuff before today."

Bill stood there in shock. "Well, thanks for your help" he mumbled. He barely managed to get to Grand Central and onto the train to Poughkeepsie, and he almost missed changing trains at Croton.

But as he passed Cold Spring, his brain began to work again and he started thinking about Harry Trent's words. The idea of not being able to tell a word processor from a food processor had a certain appeal. He had put his wife's old food processor in the cellar when she wife got a new one, and he certainly _did_ know a lot about his word processor, with its CD-rom drive and on-line dictionary and thesaurus. And the optical reader he had picked up at a computer swap meet last year might be just what he needed. By the time he got home, Bill had his invention pretty well worked out.

It took two weeks to get the hardware hooked up, almost a month for the software. But finally he had the Open Source Artificial Intelligence program he had found on a web site turned into a Short Story Expert System. He fed six issues of Stunning Stories through the optical reader to build a data base for the program.

The question of what to use for raw material had bothered him. The Poughkeepsie Journal? The New York Times? No, the word mix wouldn't match, nothing but more copies of Stunning Stories would work. He put a spare copy into the food processor and hit the switch.

The roar of the food processor was loud in the small room. He watched the magazine dissolve into shreds, and the shreds find their way out the chute he had constructed. He watched the blinking light on the optical reader. He watched the light on the computer's hard disk blink as the program wrote its output to the disk. Finally the hopper was empty and the printer started up.

#

The story was terrific ... just the thing Stunning Stories published, and more! It was fresh, better than most of their recent stories. In fact, he thought, this was right up there with Stunning Stories' prize author, Asimac Isaamov. Even Harry Trent was going to have trouble rejecting this one! Bill typed a short cover letter and got it ready for mailing.

Then he remembered the advice one of the fellows at work had given him. He typed up a description of his invention to send to a patent attorney in Washington. He mailed both envelopes the next morning.

#

During the next month, he heard not a whisper from Harry Trent or Stunning Stories. At the end of the month, the patent attorney called. "They're moving unbelievably fast on this. Normally we'd have six months or a year, but it looks like they'll finish up in another month or less. And the rumor is that they're going to reject your application," he told Bill.

"Why? It should be patentable."

"I know, I agree with you. There's something funny going on, and I'm trying to find out what. Anyway, there's even worse news."

"There is? Worse?"

"You know that once you file, your claim is public record, and anybody can get a copy? Well, the Patent Office has been deluged by requests for your application. And a buddy in the electronics industry has told me there's been a run on the components of this thing. It looks like everyone has been building them on the strength of the rumor. As soon as it's rejected, they can legally use them, and you can bet they will!"

Finally, after a second month had passed with still no word from Stunning Stories, Bill got another call from his attorney. "Bill," he said, "your application has been rejected. Plain, flat, rejected. The examiner has labeled your machine totally unpatentable."

"Is there anything we can do? Anything at all?"

"Probably not. An appeal would cost ten, twenty, thirty thousand, and would lose. The grapevine says that the fix is in on this one, we can't beat it."

"Huh? What do you mean, the fix?"

"Look, don't spread it around, but the examiner's boss moonlights as an author. He's afraid if this one goes through, you'll have a monopoly and he won't sell any more stories. But we can't prove it, and I won't even try. Trying and failing would mean my job."

As the attorney hung up, Bill was in a state of shock. He didn't know what to do. Finally he decided he had better push his story before everyone else got their machines running. He quickly printed out another copy of his story and grabbed the train for the city.

#

At the office of Stunning Stories, the friendly receptionist recognized him. She got him in to see Harry Trent almost immediately. The editor didn't appear to remember throwing him out, he didn't recognize Bill's story from the description of it, he didn't seem to remember Bill at all. In desperation Bill handed him the copy of the story.

Trent read the first page, then looked up. "Oh, yeah. That piece of trash. I mailed out a rejection two days ago, you should be getting it."

"Rejected? Why? This is the first story written using my new Short Story Expert System, and it's lots better than what you've been publishing."

"Hey, Kid, don't look at the past! We have to keep up with the state of the art. Everybody has an SSES now, and yours just isn't the best. What is it built from?"

Bill started to list his components. As he got to "Acme Electric Food Processor" Trent interrupted. "I thought so. Not good enough. Take a look at this cover for next August's issue." Trent shoved a sheet of paper into his hand and hustled him out of the office.

The door slammed behind him. Bill looked down at the cover. Blazoned across it in large type was the legend "New story by Asimac Isaamov's Cuisinart(TM)."

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