profit by anything he chose to write about. She'd never seen such a phenomenally rapid rise in author popularity. Or rather you could hardly say rise. Holt hit the top with his first story and stayed there. He socked the fans (Guest of Honor at the Washinvention), the pros (first President of Science Fiction Writers of America), and the general reader (author of the first pulp-bred science fiction book to stay three months on the best seller list). And never had there been an author who was more pure damned fun to work with. Not that you edited him; you checked his copy for typos and sent it to the printers. (Typos were frequent at first; he said something odd about absurd illogical keyboard arrangement.) But just being with him, talking about this, that and those.... Raquel, just turning sixteen, was quite obviously in love with him—praying that he'd have the decency to stay single till she grew up and "You know, Manningcita, I am Spanish; and the Mediterranean girls...." But there was this occasional feeling of oddness. Like the potluck and the illogical keyboard and that night at SCWA.... "I've got a story problem," Norbert Holt announced there. "An idea, and I can't lick it. Maybe if I toss it out to the literary lions...." "Story problem?" Manning said, a little more sharply than she'd intended. "I thought everything was outlined for the next ten years." "This is different. This is a sort of paradox story, and I can't get out of it. It won't end. Something like this: Suppose a man in the remote year X reads a story that tells him how to work a time machine. So he works the time machine and goes back to the year X minus 2000—let's say, for instance, our time. So in 'now' he writes the story that he's going to read two thousand years later, telling himself how to work the time machine because he knows how to work it because he read the story which he wrote because—" Manning was starting to say "Hold it!" when Matt Duncan interrupted with, "Good old endless-cycle gimmick. Lot of fun to kick around, but Bob Heinlein did it once and for all in By His Bootstraps. Damnedest tour de force I ever read; there just aren't any switcheroos left." "Ouroboros," Joe Henderson contributed. Norbert Holt looked a vain question at him; they knew that one word per evening was Joe's maximum contribution.