And to my horror, he gave me a slow, deliberate wink.

  No! Oh, no, it can’t be. He’s gone, he has to be gone!

  But for the first time it dawned on me, really dawned I mean, that the alien had truly been an alien, a creature I didn’t really know anything about. Hell, I didn’t even know what he looked like!

  Not that it mattered now. Feeling like someone caught in a nightmare, I watched the foal stagger his way over to the reporters. With one sharp, gleeful glance my way, he smiled at them, actually smiled. And in the next moment I knew it was all over.

  “So boys,” he said clearly, “have I got a story for your

  Printer’s Devils

  by Gregory Feeley

  Gregory Feeley is the author of a science fiction novel, The Oxygen Barons, as well as numerous stories and articles in American and British magazines. He wishes us to know that the following story “represents . . . his first attempt to be funny.”

  In the aching stupor of his fever’s second day, Cliff Penn found himself drifting past bizarre mental landscapes, inchoate memories prompted by the Golden Oldies channel his clock radio had been playing all afternoon. Too weak to rise and silence the plastic box, Penn let its low-fidelity stream wind through his consciousness, leaving deposits that strangely colored his efforts to turn his thoughts to the problems at hand:

  DADDY TAKES T-BIRD AWAY!

  “Fun” Still Possible, Singer Vows

  TEEN ANGEL “STILL CAN’T HEAR ME”

  Tearful Lover Goes Public After Séance Scam

  “CHAPEL IN THE PINES” DESTROYED IN STORM!

  Lightning Struck Again and Again and . . .

  DOG BARRED IN AKC SCANDAL

  Pedigreed Champ “Ain’t Nothing But . . .”

  Late in the afternoon the phone rang. The alacrity with which his phone machine cut in suggested that it had already fielded a few calls, which Penn couldn’t remember. He turned his head toward the living room as the radio noise softened—it was during the instrumental bridge in “Michelle”—and heard Louise’s voice crackle through the speaker.

  “Hey, Cliff, you still sick? We’ve really got some problems here. Call me tomorrow—tonight, if possible.

  “And change your outgoing message. Jee-zus.”

  Penn confusedly tried to recall his tape greeting while wondering what new problem had arisen, but McCartney’s resumed crooning scrambled any chance of pulling off this tricky maneuver. Had it been an actual emergency, he concluded by way of abandoning the effort, Louise would doubtless have shown up at his door.

  Ninety minutes later the doorbell buzzed.

  “You look like shit,” Louise observed when he got the door open. She brushed past him, leaving a folded newspaper in his arms. Penn shook it open, guessing by its size that it wasn’t the Tribune or even The Reader. The glassy stare of what appeared to be a newt gazed up at him beside a vertical caption that read: ALIENS SEED LAKES WITH ELVIS EMBRYOS.

  “This is awful,” he said, following her into the kitchen.

  “You’re damned right.” She was dumping wet coffee grounds into his crowded sink. “Manning had to edge those letters by hand before sending it to production.”

  Penn looked back at the headline. The 130-point letters, white on a gray field, lacked the black trim that would lend them the crisp immediacy they required. He thought muddily on this. “So this is just a proof, right? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “You didn’t think we’d go to press like that, do you?” Louise located the tiny bag of coffee in the freezer, began pouring them into the percolator cup, then stopped and gave him a disgusted look when she saw that the beans were unground. She pulled the grinder toward her, filled it, and depressed the button. The macerating whine bored into Penn’s consciousness like a dentist’s drill.

  “Louise, don’t scare me.” A wave of dizziness swept over him, and he sank into the kitchen chair

  “I want you scared.” Louise plugged in the assembled percolator, looked around for a second chair, and made a face. “I thought the page-imposition software would take care of that.”

  “Page imposition is something else entirely.” Writing for the Alert had given Louise a facility with terminology that Penn found unnerving: she needed only to sound authoritative. “I’ll be in to look at it tomorrow.”

  “I think you should come down tonight.” Louise had gone into the living room and found the beanbag chair. Penn rose with an effort and went after her. “They’ll be doing Mountain States and Pacific in about three hours.”

  The Weekly Alert had editions for different parts of the country, which varied mostly in their advertising. The only edition ever to use different covers was a short-lived Southern one, which had occasionally run headlines like Lost Confederate Stronghold Routs Tax Agents. “I don’t think new copy in the Classifieds page will strain the present system,” he said.

  Louise shrugged. “Suit yourself. I thought you might want to get in a few hours today, since hourly consultants don’t get sick time.”

  Penn winced. His year as a free-lancer, sans pension, sans benefits, had left him in the financial straits of an office temp. He would indeed not be paid for the last two days.

  “We’re talking a few lines of code,” he said. “I’ll find it tomorrow and fix it.”

  “Printer’s devils,” said Louise, studying her fingertips. One of them evidently had powdered coffee on it, for she licked it carefully.

  “Eh?” Following a conversation with Louise was like pursuing a speeding car that could swerve faster than you. “Isn’t that what they call those tiny programming errors?”

  “Glitches, they’re called glitches.” Louise was in the kitchen, rattling among the stacked cups. Penn realized he must have faded away for several seconds.

  “Printer’s devils were apprentice printers, back in the last century,” he called. Raising his voice made his sinuses ache.

  “And that’s what publishing software is, right? The menials who run copy to the editors, align the type, and check pagination?” Louise had returned with two steaming mugs, one of which she handed to Penn.

  “Um. In a way, perhaps.” Penn took a long sip. Louise had added milk generously, probably her way of reminding Penn that he lacked the grit of real newspapermen, but he was happy for it.

  “Printer’s Devils Haunt Newspaper Office,” she said.

  “Lingering spirits drift through morgue, crying, ‘Nixon Resigns!’ ”

  “Not bad,” he said, “but it won’t make the cover.”

  “Screw that,” she said. “I’m on salary.”

  Penn winced.

  Later that night, stuporous from too much sleep, Penn draped a blanket over his shoulders, sat down at his workstation, and loaded the Alert program. He got to the mode he called Headline Maker, typed in the headline Louise had brought, then maneuvered it into place. He hit P, then pushed his chair back on its rollers and pulled the emerging sheet from the laserjet.

  The page looked fine. This suggested that the problem lay in the way the software was interfacing with the printing system, which Penn could not investigate from home. Idly he entered a few more headlines, setting them up in different styles and point size.

  ROCK STAR PALS WITH WINO BULLFROG

  “Good Friend” Drinks Until Unintelligible

  ROLLER SKATER FLATTENED IN BUFFALO DISASTER

  Knuckle Down, Buckle Down, Rest Unidentifiable

  He put the last into nice three-dimensional letters that the Alert would never use, shifted it to a luridly cross-hatched German Gothic, then got out of the system. On a whim, he set the modem so that it could receive material from the office, then left the machine on. If he found himself unable to put in a full day, he could send stuff home ahead of him.

  Three aspirins and a glass of orange juice, and Penn was back in bed, shivering beneath a lasagna of blankets and quilts. He had turned down the radio during a mid-afternoon bathroom trip, but had forgotten that it clicked on automatically between eleven and twelve to lull him to sleep. Fitfully dozing by that hour, Penn found his dreams invaded by a coxcombed Elvis in his smoldering mid-twenties though attired in a sequined jumpsuit, asking hopefully whether his beloved ex was miserable in her solitude. Sitting near the stage, Penn couldn’t see the color of Elvis’s shoes, but made a joke to his unsmiling companion that the design of the jumpsuit looked like hound’s-tooth.

  The fever broke an hour later, leaving him drenched on the rock shore of consciousness. Sweating beneath his load of blankets, Penn wondered why he had been thinking of Elvis.

  Grossmere Publications occupied only two floors of a grimy building in a light industrial park, but Penn was required to show his digitized photo ID to the security guard in the lobby. “What would happen if some one you never knew came up with a valid-looking ID?” he once asked. He knew what happened when someone the guard knew perfectly well discovered he had left his ID at home.

  “Wave ’em in,” the guard replied laconically. At $5.30 an hour, he didn’t weigh factors when following his simple instructions.

  The doors of the freight elevator banged open directly onto the reception area, where a middle-aged secretary glanced up suspiciously before returning to her phone call. “No, I can’t connect you with any of the writers,” she was saying. “No, I can’t take a message, either. Our policy does not permit us to put calls through to our staff.”

  Penn leaned over and looked into the pigeonhole where memos and messages were left for casual employees. He pulled out a slip summoning him to the production manager.

  “Someone want to tell Angela about the UFO in his back yard?” he asked as she hung up.

  The woman shrugged. “Could have been her dentist,” she replied.

  Donald Rabin disliked Penn, who stood outside the hierarchy that governed business at Grossmere. Unlike temps (who were the lowest of the low), Penn’s absence from the organizational chart made him difficult to place; his hourly rate was not much lower than Rabin’s own, but he supervised nobody and could be dismissed without risk of Grossmere hearing from Worker’s Compensation. As such, his presence affronted Rabin, who disliked people anyway.

  “Your system’s giving me problems,” Rabin said as Penn came in. On Penn’s first day Rabin had warned him not to “give me problems.” Every complication or delay that happened in the office was routed through Rabin’s first person singular, a syntactical perspective Penn regarded as malignantly narcissistic.

  “I’m on it, Chief,” said Penn. “I’ll talk to Manning right now.”

  Rabin glowered at him, a truculent water buffalo who suspected provocation but couldn’t locate its source. As he opened his mouth, the phone rang. “What is it?” he demanded into it as Penn departed.

  Bert Manning, peering down over a draft table, saw Penn and straightened. “I know, Louise told me,” called Penn, forestalling discussion. He sat at the monitor and brought up the system, which unfolded at his command to disclose screens of serried code. As he studied its intricacies, his head began to throb.

  “Cliff? I’ve got a question.” Manning was standing behind him.

  Penn was staring at the screen. “Does this concern Headline Maker?”

  “No, it’s the Elephant Girl.”

  With a sigh, Penn saved his screen and got up. Tall and disheveled, Manning gave the impression of a man who had never got over a late growth spurt that had pushed his wrists beyond their cuffs and thrust his gleaming scalp up past his fringe of hair. He led Penn to his cubicle and, pointing in a manner that somehow permitted him to thrust out an elbow, indicated the problem.

  The Elephant Girl gazed out from Manning’s VGA monitor, more hapless than design intended. Her proboscis had been shaded on one side and given an arrestingly grainy texture, but the bridge of an unmistakably normal nose still showed between her sad-clown’s eyes.

  “I can put the trunk over it,” said Manning fretfully, “but I can’t erase it and leave the trunk where it is.”

  Penn picked up the mouse. “Watch,” he said. He had installed this system for a plastic surgeon last year. Deftly he removed the features between the waif’s eyes, then demonstrated the palette each window offered. “I take it you want her to look appealing except for the trunk?”

  “Of course.” Tentatively Manning took the mouse and restored a bit of eyebrow. “She’s had a rough life.”

  Penn left at 3:30, shivering in his ski jacket. “You know, you’re supposed to drink lots of fluids when you’re sick,”

  Louise had said as she watched him refill his mug, “but coffee’s a diuretic. You’re drying yourself out as surely as if you were drinking sea water.”

  “I seem to remember you writing that the problem with coffee was the Peruvian mountains where the beans were grown had been bombarded with radiation from sun spots.” Penn drank and grimaced.

  “Well, that too. Maybe you’ll wake up tomorrow with super powers.”

  Not likely. By the time he got home, Penn had swollen nodes under his arms and a throat that ached when he turned his head. The orange juice seared his flayed membranes, and the aspirins went down scratching like mountaineers sliding down a slope. The radio had turned itself on during the afternoon, out of apparent loneliness, and was waltzing through Easy Listening hits of recent years.

  “There never was a time

  Can this be true

  When I didn’t love

  Anyone but you . . .”

  Call a doctor, Penn thought as he crawled into bed. And for my friend the radio, a copy editor.

  It was dark when Penn awoke, and he steered to the bathroom by the blinking light of the fax. Returning through the living room, he stared at the sheet that hung like a dog’s tongue off the side of the table.

  It was a cover for the Alert. The headline, properly edged this time, cried: SCHMUCK GIVES BIRTH TO NESSIE. The photo showed a man, face contorted in fear or pain as a coiling sea serpent (recognizable from a cover some months back) exploded out of his backside. The man, on closer view, was recognizably Penn.

  “Ha, ha.” Penn turned on the desk lamp and held the fax under its beam. The photograph was of newspaper quality, and bore no visible signs of digital tampering.

  He found the cordless phone and called the Alert to leave a message for Louise, but got tangled in the labyrinths of its voice mail system, which demanded that he punch in certain combinations but didn’t allow him time to return the phone to his ear before reciting the next set of instructions. Disoriented and frustrated, Penn stumbled back to bed and set the phone on the adjacent pillow, where he could reach it after resting a moment. Its jarring trill awoke him to streaming sunlight and a headache that speared him the instant he opened his eyes.

  “Penn?” He hadn’t found the phone yet, but his startled fumblings seemed to have switched it on. “What are you, dead or something?”

  “I think so.” He freed his hands of the sheets, found the phone under the headboard, and raised it upside down to his ear. “Who’s this?” His voice emerged an agonized croak, unwell past any chance of imposture.

  “Jesus Christ.” It was Hakluyt, Rabin’s assistant. “Did one of your enemies put a curse on you?”

  “What enemies?”

  “Huh. I’ll tell Dan you’re not coming in today. You freelancers get major medical?”

  “Wait—let me talk to Louise.”

  “Our policy does not permit us to put calls through to our staff.” Click.

  Louise showed up at seven with a pint of egg drop soup. “What the hell was that message you left me?” she demanded, pushing past him. “I couldn’t understand a word.”

  “I left a message?” Penn followed her into the living room.

  “Something about the cover. I brought you a copy, by the way.” She handed Penn a folded Alert. Penn glanced at the embryo cover bemusedly, then began to page idly through the issue. When he looked up, Louise was looking at the fax on the desk.

  “I gather you were talking about this.” Her mouth quirked as she held the fax to the light.

  Memory returned in a rush. How muddled could he be, to forget that? “I want to know who did it.”

  “Don’t be such a snot.” Louise lit up, inhaling with pleasure, then studied the fax. “Looks like the photo software works.”

  “Manning, or one of his staff. I’ll kill him.”

  “Just drink your soup.” She rustled through the paper bag and came up with a plastic spoon, which she tossed toward him. It landed on the open pages of the Alert, below a photo captioned, “Onlookers stare as holy statue weeps real tears.”

  “Look at this.” One of the crowd figures was Penn, mouth stupidly agape.

  Louise whistled as she lifted the page. Underneath, a follow-up story on the Siamese Triplets offered a one-column photo of the strange creature. Its middle head (the misshapen one that never spoke) now bore a supercilious expression that strikingly resembled Penn’s.

  “I’ll sue.” He found himself shaking, seized by a palsy that might have been indignation or illness. “It’s an open and shut case.”

  “A good way to get yourself blacklisted by your biggest client,” Louse remarked. “Let me look at this.”

  She took the remains of the paper from Penn. “I see a definite and two maybes,” she said at last. Penn, carefully sipping soup, wanted to see, but she lifted the paper beyond his grasp. “Get your ass in bed,” she said.

  Not asleep yet dreaming, Penn experienced an inversion in the thermoclines of thought, the dark chill of a nightmare ‘ whelming up into the warmer currents of languor. The formless threat was his persecutor, as Penn recognized even then, but it was also the specter of unemployability, an inky shape that combined professional failure with rent arrears and swarmed after him with directed malevolence. He came wholly awake with heart hammering, knowing the danger near but unable to move his limbs.

  Something was playing on his phone machine. He sat up, wild with surmise, then hobbled out of bed. At the door he could hear it: a discordant crash of music, two songs playing simultaneously, one of them “Love Me Tender.” By degrees the other grew louder, finally drowning out the love song. It was Blue Oyster Cult playing “Godzilla.”