Read Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II for Free Online Page B

admit it. But here's another one.
    I've dealt with that store, like I said. Their prices are the lowest in the neighborhood. And why is it, do you think, they can sell so cheap? There's only one answer: because they buy so cheap. They buy at the lowest prices; they don't give a damn about quality: all they want to know is, how much mark-up? I've personally sold them job-lots of electronic junk that I couldn't unload anywhere else, condemned stuff, badly wired stuff, stuff that was almost dangerous—it's a place to sell when you've given up on making a profit because you yourself have been stuck with inferior merchandise in the first place.
    You get the picture? It makes me feel rosy all over.
    There is Eksar out in space, the way I see it. He's fixed up his ship, good enough to travel, and he's on his way to his next big deal. The motors are humming, the ship is running, and he's sitting there with a big smile on his dirty face: he's thinking how he took me, how easy it was.
    He's laughing his head off.
    All of a sudden, there's a screech and a smell of burning. That circuit that's running the front motor, a wire just got touched through the thin insulation, the circuit's tearing the hell out of itself. He gets scared. He turns on the auxiliaries. The auxiliaries don't go on—you know why? The vacuum tubes he's using have come to the end of their rope, they didn't have much juice to start with. Blooie! That's the rear motor developing a short-circuit. Ka-pow! That's a defective transformer melting away in the middle of the ship.
    And there he is, millions of miles from nowhere, empty space all around him, no more spare parts, tools that practically break in his hands—and not a single, living soul he can hustle.
    And here am I, walking up and down in my nine-by-six office, thinking about it, and I'm laughing my head off. Because it's just possible, it just could happen, that what goes wrong with his ship is one of the half-dozen or so job-lots of really bad electronic equipment that I personally, me, Bernie the Faust, that I sold to that surplus store at one time or another.
    That's all I'd ask. Just to have it happen that way.
    Faust. He'd have Faust from me then. Right in the face, Faust. On the head, splitting it open, Faust.
    Faust he wants? Faust I'd give him!

AFTERWORD
    I have written stories like "Child's Play" and "The Flat-Eyed Monster" by, in effect, reading them for the first time as I wrote them—finding out with some fascination what happens on a given page only when I have completed the page. But for "Bernie the Faust," I used the technique of what I call mining for a story.
    Lester del Rey had told me of the newspaper reporter back in the Depression who had offered people a twenty-dollar bill for a dollar—and found no takers. We both felt there was a story there somewhere, and he told me that if I could do it, I was welcome to it.
    I made a number of tries at it, off and on, over several years, and, finally, in 1960, it began to take off. I wrote and wrote, page after page after page, trying to find out what the story wanted to say to me. I called the piece "The Giveaway Show," and when I finished the first draft, it was thirty-three thousand words long and it plunged in several different directions, like a maddened horse.
    But I had found the direction I liked, and I began again with the title, "Bernie the Faust."
    This version worked out to be twenty-five thousand words in length, which was too short for a novel and too long for a novelette, in other words, unsaleable according to the publishing conventions of science-fiction magazines of the day. After two months of rewriting, I had it down twelve thousand, five hundred words—a novelette. I sent it to my then agent, one of the most important general fiction agents of that time; she had told me she was going to sell me to Harper's and The New Yorker and points north; she sent it back to me by return post. "Don't just tear this up, Phil," she said,