Lisbon Cubed

Afterword

This is how I wrote this story:

In 1956, I broke up with a woman with whom I had been involved for the better part of a year. But I knew she’d be back (she always came back), and I knew we’d start all over again, as we so many times had. I therefore called all my friends and told them that they had to arrange seven consecutive dates for me; I wanted to see a new woman every day of the coming week—hoping that I’d get deeply committed to at least one of them.

Fruma, as she still likes to remind me, Fruma was Wednesday. Katherine MacLean and the guy she was then living with, Dave Mason, told me they knew somebody I would really like. They came up with Fruma.

After my first date with her on Wednesday night, I told Bob Sheckley—who was recently divorced and who was my closest friend at the time—that I thought I had found the woman of all women who should be my wife. Bob asked when I planned to see her again.

“Saturday night,” I told him.

“See if she has a friend,” he said.

Well, Fruma did, and her friend’s name was Ziva, and Bob and Ziva were married a month after Fruma and me. We all lived in Greenwich Village, not forever after, but most happily, about two or three blocks from each other.

And Bob and I went through a slump. Not a bad long one, but a very annoying one nonetheless, and one more surprising to Bob than to me, because I wrote spasmodically, when some strong idea turned me around, but Bob was a heavy production man.

Bob and I talked to each other very intensively and very worriedly about how to get out of the slump. One of the cures we thought about was to rent a furnished room as a mutual office and add two items of furniture to it—a typewriter table and a heavy wooden chair with shackles permanently attached to the chair. We would both arrive at the office at nine each morning, and one of us would be shackled to the chair by the other. He would not be released, no matter how he pleaded or what the excuse, until one p.m.—or until he typed four pages of good, publishable copy. Then the shackles would be opened and the other would take his place, under the same conditions, until either five p.m. or four typed pages of good copy would bring release. Of course, if the four pages were typed early enough and the writer were still going strong, he could go on and write as much as he wanted to, until his release time.

We thought it was an excellent idea and were eager to try it. Unfortunately, both Fruma and Ziva claimed to be horrified and begged us not to. Bob and I muttered to each other about the unfortunate weakness of women, and tried to think of something else.

What we settled on was this: The two of us would meet five mornings a week at a neighborhood diner, each with our four pages of new copy in hand. Whoever was late for the appointment or who didn’t have his requisite four pages had to pay five dollars into a fund handled by our wives. Whenever the fund grew large enough, it would be used to buy theater tickets for all four of us.

It worked, it really worked well, at least for a time. I put more fives in than Bob, because, after all, I was born a month late and have never caught up: I am frequently tardy for any and all appointments. But both of us were writing again, and selling, and that was the whole point.

Then there was the morning I didn’t have a good story in my head. I desperately wrote four pages of something, anything, and hurried off to meet Bob. He had his four pages, too, and they were very professional and very good. But they also looked slightly familiar.

Of course, I realized! They were four pages from one of his first published stories, a story I liked very much and remembered well. I accused him of cheating. He broke down and admitted it, and paid the five dollars. I went home with my four pages of nonsense, righteously angry.

I put the four pages in front of me, one thousand words of pure narrative hook, and wondered if anything at all could be made of it. Yes, it turned out: “Lisbon Cubed” could be made of it. (If you want to see just what the original was pretty much like, count one thousand words from the beginning of the story.)

My title, when it went to Horace Gold’s Galaxy, was “The Fourth Power of Lisbon.” He, finding nothing else to change in the story—although he did try hard—removed my title and substituted his. I’ve kept it for this edition: the man is dead and deserves some sort of minor prose monument.

If you tell all this to Bob Sheckley, he will swear that it’s not quite true; it all happened the other way around, with me being the guilty party. Don’t listen to him.

But this is why I wrote this story:

I’m not sure why I write science fiction any more, except that, well, it’s a living, and, hell, it’s where I made what reputation I have. But there are a couple of responsibilities that I felt I had fifty years ago and at least one of which I still feel very strongly today.

It’s my duty—it really is my duty, being the kind of person I am and knowing and believing what I do—to prepare my fellow humans for what they will shortly be facing, at the most in one or two lifetimes. Whatever I write these days, satire, high or low drama, whatever, I ought to get them ready for the unsettling discovery that they and their species will soon no longer be Nature’s only child.

The universe is awfully big, and not only are we going out into it physically, we are splashing signals out in every direction that we think, we think, therefore we are, we are. Somebody (or somebodies) somewhere is abruptly going to be seen—or heard from. We will find that we have very smart siblings.

I pray most of all and first of all that we will not be mice alerting cats. Then I pray that they will not be too far ahead of us technologically; I do not want the U.N. Secretary General to play Montezuma to some galactic Cortez. And then I pray that we will be up to the challenge of living with intelligent creatures who come from a totally different evolution, that we will be able to enjoy and use totally different technologies, totally different art forms, totally different philosophical and religious systems. That we will appreciate the fact there are many, many other forms of intelligence—and that their highest forms must inevitably deal with what they too must call the tragedy of life.

And mostly to that end I write these comedies of space.

Written 1956 / Published 1958