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did.
    Moreover, I reasoned, the trickiest part of getting a story published was finding an editor who would accept it. If you were an editor, that problem disappeared.
    So I cast about for a likely editorial job. The editor of Marvel and Dynamic was a likable man named Robert O. Erisman, and one day I asked him for a job as his assistant. No, thanks, he said, but why didn't I go across town to 205 East 42 Street, where Popular Publications had its offices? They were already one of the largest of the pulp chains, and he had heard they were thinking of expanding.
    So I took the crosstown trolley and called on Rogers Terrill, managing editor of the chain. He hired me. It was as simple as that.
    . . . Well, not really as simple as that. When I got the job so easily I took it as a natural tribute to my talent. It was only a lot later that I realized they would have hired Mothra or Og, Son of Fire, just about as readily right then, because they were very interested in expanding.
    Popular Publications was run by a man named Harry Steeger, an intimidatingly polished Princeton sort of person who skied and owned a yacht and entertained callers who conducted long phone conversations in idiomatic French. He had some fancy Princeton ideas. One of them was that he should pay writers a decent rate—a penny a word, sometimes even more.
    That may not seem like much now. The reason for that is that it wasn't really much even then. But all the same it was more than some other pulp publishers were paying. Steeger was under pressure from the other people involved in his empire to cut his costs by lowering his word rate.
    He didn't like to do this. What he did do was start a mythical other publishing company—it was called Fictioneers, Inc.—which would bring out a whole new line of pulps at a base word rate of half a cent. 205 East 42 happened to be the address of a building that went clear through the block and came out the other side. 210 East 43 was the address of the other entrance, and that became the official address of Fictioneers. The switchboard girl, Ethel Klock (dear, lovely lady who couldn't bowl for sour apples but kept us all company every Friday lunch hour at the alleys), was given a new telephone line, and was instructed under pain of death not to put through any calls to anybody connected with Popular Publications in the Fictioneers number. Well, that drove them all crazy. They tried. But it was tacky to call up an agent as Loren Dowst, editor of Fighting Aces, and buy some stories for Popular Publications at a penny a word, hang up and then call back a minute later as Ray P. Shotwell, editor of Battle Birds, and in a quavering assumed falsetto attempt to buy half-price stories for Fictioneers.
    What Fictioneers obviously needed was at least one or two real, flesh-and-blood, actual people to be editors; and I happened to hit the place at the right time.
    So there I was, nineteen years old from head to feet, and editor of two professional magazines. I had my name on the masthead. I was listed in the writers' market magazines.
    To be sure, Popular didn't pay me very much. It was $10 a week for the first six months or so. That wasn't so bad. They hired another editor at the same time, and he had to work three months for nothing before they raised him to $10 a week.
    The art director was a wonderful man named Alex Portegal, who doubled as a lending agency. You could get five dollars from Alex any time, provided that on payday you gave him back six.* And we needed it. Without Alex, I don't think any of us would have made it through the month, not even the senior editors who were making as much as $35.
    We weren't really expected to live on that kind of money. What we were expected to do was write stories and buy them from ourselves, and somehow piece together enough to survive.
    I did so. The King's Eye, from the February 1941 issue of Astonishing Stories, is one of them. At 5,900 words, at my premium rate of 3/4^f a word, it came