I made a desperate rush past the security cops, between the guard dogs, round the semiautomatic private secretary and through the weapon detector to cast myself on the carpet of his inner office, at the feet of Multabux Publishing's Editor-in-Chief, I.M. Cleptrex. The ash of his huge cigar flew out and landed in my upturned palm. I have it still.

"Priggleworth! That writer's in here again. Get her out," he commanded, trying to stride disdainfully away, but I had hold of his knee and I pressed my advantage.

"Please, Mr. Cleptrex, just look at my story. It's got romance, it's got action, it's got a happy ending that ties all the broken pieces together. You don't get a story like this every day."

"No, I get dozens of stories like that every day!" He started grabbing stacks of papers from his desk. "I get boy meets clone! I get girl meets alien! I get aliens run off with clones to a new dimension. I get colonies. I get empires. I get utopias on little islands of chicken bullion in the vac. I get so much stuff from you crazy writers, this whole building tilts to the side when my mail comes. But you don't send me what the people want!" With this he dumped the whole day's submissions on my head, so I lost my balance and was forced to let go. He sat down behind his desk, rubbing his knee.

"Just print one out of all the things I've sent you. Just one and if it doesn't sell I'll never send you a story again. I promise. No stories, no pen-names, no anonymous, no signed Isaac Asimov, nothing. Just run this." I pulled a sheaf of papers from my bosom. "You'll like it."

"If I rejected it, I don't like it."

"You're a busy man, Mr. Cleptrex," I wheedled. "I know your system. A machine opens the envelope, takes out the story and the return mail credits I send you, and then my letter and my self-addressed envelope get vaporized to power the machine. The story gets popped into one of your special light return envelopes that go cheaper than the one I sent you--I don't mind you pocketing the difference in postal credits, because it would be biting the hand I'm feeding to object--and in goes the rejection slip and then it comes to the reader, who takes a look and drops it in the mail all ready to go. But what if the reader goofs off and doesn't look first? I've thought it all over very carefully and that's the only thing that could have happened to this story."

He studied me, puffing slowly at his cigar. "How many stories have you sent here over the past five years, Miss--?"

"Miss Lavinia Garret. Over the past five years? I don't know...Christmas and New Years I don't send any--"

"So I could save money on readers and clerical help by paying you not to send things."

I drew myself up a little. "Humanity does not progress like that."

"Crazy people! I'm in a business with nothing but crazy people!" Jumping up excitedly, he banged his knee so he sat down again. "Now look, Miss Garret, every submission to Multabux is screened by a scientific process--"

"Scientific? A couple of underpaid hacks that drink all night spend the daytime tossing stories up in the air and whatever doesn't come down again you buy it?"

He chuckled. "No, indeed. What you describe is the old method, but here at Multabux each and every story is entered in our LitMaven program. We don't read them, we use statistics. LitMaven analyzes how you rack up against the best-sellers. Whether you use your one-syllable words in the same ratio as them to your three-syllable words. It counts the words with your q in them, it subtracts the words with your r in them, it multiplies the words with -- you get the drift. LitMaven's got patterns that correlate ninety-eight percent with how well a work has sold. So if we reject your story, that's final. I don't care if it's got romance. I don't care if it's got action. I don't care if it's the most beautiful thing since we stood upon this bank and shoal of time. It's not what the people want! Priggleworth!"

Before I could reply, the door opened to admit Cleptrex's semiautomatic secretary, an anxious face above a blinking, beeping mobile workstation on squeaky wheels who shooed me out, muttering, "Mr. Cleptrex has a guest now, Ms." Her wheels bumped over the papers on the floor. "Oh, dear. I stacked it up nice and it all came back down again."

Defeated, despairing and no closer than ever to getting the rent, I retreated to the outer office. People were straightening chairs, emptying ashtrays and leashing guard dogs so excitedly that I lingered, wondering what guest could be so important. Multabux's star author, Mr. Euphonius Babble, swept in surrounded by men and women with clipboards and briefcases.

"Don't take it," a man was telling him. "The serial rights alone are worth twice what they offered." He bumped into Priggleworth and hung his hat on her without looking.

"We'll have lunch with their lawyer next Tuesday--" someone began.

"Can't. There's that interview for the talk show--"

"Wednesday we promised the Senator--"

Mr. Babble waved his hands impatiently. "Interviews! Royalties! Screen adaptations! When will I get some peace and quiet for my artistic endeavours? And turn down that dreadful noise!" This was addressed to Priggleworth who, blinded by the hat, had crashed into the weapon detector and lodged there, motor grinding. Next, Mr. Babble turned to the publisher. "Oh, Cleptrex, come here, sweetheart. Let's go into your office and talk about literature. How did my last story grab you?"

"A money magnet as always, EB," effused Cleptrex, ushering him in. Noticing me, he shouted, "Out of here, you!"

One of the guard dogs lunged and caught my sleeve as I went through the door. When I yanked back, it tore to the elbow. EB's friends burst out laughing.

There were no dogs in the Multabux cafeteria, at least. Just the usual sound sensors that picked up your order from the acceleration of your heartbeat when you saw what you wanted on the menu, and the tellers that deducted from the Available side of your bank tape. I flicked the order screen to manual and stood wondering whether to splurge my last dollar on a cup of tea. Maybe I could get it with arsenic; save somebody the trouble of cleaning me off the street from a jump. But street cleaners have to make a living and my spattered corpse might mean business for one who would otherwise get laid off. I like to be useful.

While thinking thus, I happened to glance toward the door. Suddenly my life changed forever.

Strong? Handsome? I didn't notice. We had each other's names written in our eyes.

I stood up. He came toward me. Our hearts beat so fast the nearby menus picked up the noise and food started pouring out of the kitchen, piling up all around us and bankrupting our neighbors while we stared at each other in bliss. Workers came out of the back to shut off the menus and gather up the food that they could eat free, since it was computer error, all of them laughing and pointing at us and making merry in anticipation of their feast.

We stood gazing at each other until the back-to-work alarms rang, the chairs folded up automatically and the tables rose to give the littergitters a clear shot. The first vaporizer beams were beginning to come out when we noticed Priggleworth circling mournfully around the table where a plate of jellied ham still waited, quivering faintly in the wake of the cart's passing.

"Front wheel's out of whack. I can't get anywhere," the head sighed.

"Can't you get out of there?" I asked

"Oh, no. Not till evening. Too hard to get back in..." The rest was lost. Out in the hallway, a voice was already calling, "Priggleworth, where in tarnation--?"

"Shall I pass it to you?" I shouted, but Priggleworth was in apogee. I picked up the plate, ready to perch it on top of her CRT in the next orbit. Suddenly one of the vaporizer beams struck my ankle and I tripped, letting the jellied ham fly just as I.M. Cleptrex's massive bulk came forward to intercept it.

"Out! Out!" he roared.

As I fled, my new beloved spoke in a voice deep and soft as my debts paid in lamb's wool: "I get off at seven."

Though bruised, in tatters and still short on the rent, I danced all the way to the Metropolitan Re-materializing Transport Stop. Someone thought I was a street artist and tossed a coin in my direction, but someone else grabbed it.

I always ride Bulk Rate, so they beam me around in big chunks instead of a molecule at a time and the pieces never fit back together quite right. This time I came out with somebody else's fingers. Only later did I notice she'd kept the family signet my mother gave me, which I had meant to pawn for supper. Since I was going to meet my love, though, I didn't care about eating. That afternoon I wrote nine stories to send to Cleptrex, tying the previous record I had set the day my pet kitten got caught in a Cocktail-Matic and I wrote my Mouser Souser Series, but today's were all about love. Boy met girl. Girl met boy. Boy and girl cloned together. Clone met alien. Alien met clone. Clone and alien ran off to utopia on little cloud of claret in the vac. Boy met colony. Girl met empire. I bound them together and took them downtown.

Here goes nothing, I thought as I dropped my day's submissions into Cleptrex's enormous mail chute. I don't know how many rejection slips I've gotten from Multibux over the years; after furnishing my apartment with bundles of them glued together and upholstered, I began to throw them out. Once during some bad riots among the NoInfo on the outskirts, when deliveries were stopped, Multabux ran out of rejection slips and the Office Manager gave me a call and for a week I supplied my own rejections and got paid for it, too. I sent my mother a copy of the check.

Quitting time sounded. Employees at their desks behind all the street-level clearwalls were unwiring from their machines and removing the hairfine needles from their brains. Scanners rolled eyes and stretched fingers that had been responding only to computer-directed impulse.

"So it is you," a voice murmured.

There stood my beloved, the joy of my life, the heart of my being. I resolved to ask his name right off.

"I've wanted to meet her--you--for so long. I know every word you write. I LitMaven your stories."

"All of them?"

"Every day," he affirmed. "Even if I have to stay until midnight. I feel as though I know you better than I know myself. Before I met you, I was a poverty-stricken actor living from hand to mouth on clerical jobs and bit parts in commercials, dreaming of a starring role. Now I get a paycheck every week, and all day long I sit in my processor and feel beautiful words coursing through me. How can I thank you?" With that, he enfolded me in his arms and bestowed upon me a kiss I would have to describe in ten volumes to do it justice. Volume One is called "Rapture!" I have sent it to the book department of Multabux where, though I dare not tell my beloved, someone else is now no doubt processing it.

When we stopped kissing he said, "I know you've been unhappy lately. I can always tell when you're sad because s-words start gaining in frequency on your LitMaven analyses, all those s's like little sighs. Your Mouser Souser Series was a long despairing hiss. What is it?"

I said, "Sweetheart, my special sunshine, those are simply stories." Then I saw that it was so. "I want to get published! I can't stand this stifling obscurity surrounded by unseen prose, this sinking unmissed into silence--" Speechlessly I sobbed out my sorrow. Suddenly I saw something. "Look!" I cried. "Priggleworth is stuck!" We ran to help her.

"Oh, I'll never get out," the head mourned. "Mr. Cleptrex spilled coffee on my keyboard and there's a short circuit." An arm twitched convulsively, trying to reach the shutoff switch but pulled back by an errant signal from the machine to her brain.

My beloved threw the shutoff and a stocky athletic woman's body began to emerge from the cart. As she removed the little needles to her brain, Priggleworth's face relaxed into a rounded softness, the eyes twinkling. Her legs, when she stood up, were strong and youthful.

"How do you keep such a slim figure sitting down all day?" I asked.

She showed me a set of pedals inside the cart. "I exercise. Well, just now I thought my end had finally come. How can I ever thank you?

"Miss Priggleworth, first I want you to meet Lavinia Garret, our most prolific writer."

"We've met," she said, shaking hands.

"Miss Priggleworth, how can I get Lavinia published?"

"Well, it's confidential--"

"Please help me," I burst in. "For years I've been writing and writing, and I'm wasting and waning from unappreciation. If you know anything, anything at all that can bring my goal even a micron closer, I implore you, tell me."

"All right, all right." Leaning over her cart, she tapped at the keyboard and a printout came pouring into my hands. I looked at the title. LitMaven. "With this as your guide, you can produce faultless stories. Vary your text by trial and error if you must, for this is statistical magic, wherein there are no rules. And never ever cling to false notions of meaning." With this she departed.

We rushed to the deserted Word Entry Department with the orphan story I had shown Cleptrex that morning, and all night we tapped away at the keyboards. The story opened:

We fled the planet Boreen without a thought of returning. My mom, auntie Jane and my two brothers-in-law were all that got out besides me. Dad had died years before in what seemed at the time to be an accident. And They had gotten my sisters.

Near sunrise, my love cried, "Eureka!"

"Don't curse, my most precious one. We'll find it soon."

"No, that means: I have it! I've found the perfect arrangement."

I read:

On the floor at South Dalmi, the altar-baths were burning. Palm fronds waved as the boaters saw all about the wide sea a red tide that blew before, waves still green with the slime of memory. And then the circle twisted.

He turned to me, his eyes shining. "Don't you get it, honey? This is what you really wanted to write! The program has taken all the irregularities out of it and made it perfect."

"Darling," I said. "I love you. You're the joy of my heart, the best thing I've seen in twenty-five years of hard looking. But this is gibberish."

"This is your soul, here! That's it. Your soul is here on this screen."

"No, my gemstone. My soul is in the story I wrote, and yours is in blending the words and the perceiver's heart, a true actor. My soul and your soul. Put them together, you get mush. Souls, like angels, never mingle." My love looked crestfallen. Later I learned his name was Angelo.

"Just submit it," he urged. "Send it to Mr. Cleptrex like this, and I guarantee it will be accepted."

"But it's meaningless."

"Remember what Miss Priggleworth said: Never cling to false notions of meaning."

I agreed at last. And then the circle twisted.

Two days later a strange new kind of notice arrived in my mail. I'm not the person who gets acceptance slips from Cleptrex, I thought. There must be some mistake. At the moment of Angelo's and my first kiss, when our spirits flew up twirling in spirals together, somebody must have sneezed from one of the upper windows and mine, blown off course, landed back in the wrong person. Someone out there must be me, with my magnetic attraction for rejection.

The issue with my story sold like time off in spray cans. I was discovered. People began collecting the joint products of my self and my darling and comparing me to some ancient bard named Joyce. Cleptrex bought a vacation planet where he invited me to live so I could write in peace among the waving fronds and he could destroy my manuscripts to protect their rarity.

So now I tap at a far distant keyboard, on the shores, ironically, of a sea still green with the slime of memory. Some days we see indigenous creatures wiggle their brave tiny bodies up the beach, but so far they have always gone back with the tide except for the one or two that Mr. Cleptrex feeds to his former bestselling author, Euphonius Babble, whom we keep as a household bootblack.

At times I miss the old life, when I sat on my rejection-slip furniture and wrote stories that made sense. But I always remember Miss Priggleworth's words, "Never cling to false notions of meaning," and if I forget her there is always Mr. Cleptrex, striding along the sand in his bathing suit, tearing up my manuscripts and smoking his big cigars, his voice booming to me over the alien waves: "I don't care if it's ugly, I don't care if it's beautiful. It's what the people want!"