We Are For The Cheque

I hand her the manuscript. She looks at it the way I looked at that chipped beef on toast I looked at during the last convention, and then she starts to hand it back to me, but then I shake my head and start to hand it back to her.

"For me," I say. "A gift. I've typed a lot, and then still more. I want the dough."

She is standing with her back to the great reddish-yellow neon sign of this bank, and it seems to me that light is streaming from her as it does from a cash register, that she is glowing, that she is luminous, that she is brilliant, that she is gleaming, that she is herself becoming a cash register.

"Mammon save you, Lady," I say quietly.

All of the words of the galaxy are whirling about me, around me, within me, through me, above me. I will type them all. I will take this contract and take what it pays, until I take another.

"Mammon save you," I say quietly. "Mammon save you, Lady."

I am alive. I am aglow. I am agog. I am typing at random. I am filling the pages. I am pouring into the trough. I am winning a Hugo, a Nebula, a Mars bar. I am going on and on and on and on and on. I am slaughtering the verb To Be in a great sacrifice.

"Mammon save you," I say quietly. "Mammon save you, Lady," I say quietly. Soon I will be saying it again.

-- From, "We Are For the Cheque," by Robert Silverberg.

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[Monday, August 31, 2020.]