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 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 slush pile. 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 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 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 Artificial Intelligence program he had found on the Internet 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.

.