The Eye of Argon: The Scholar’s Ebook Edition

by Jim Theis

Smashwords Edition

ISBN-13 978-1-936771-09-7

ISBN 1-936-77109-8

To the best of the knowledge of the publisher, the procedures required to obtain a copyright at the time of The Eye of Argon’s original publication were not followed, and thus, the story was never copyrighted, and remains in the public domain to this day.

“One Fine Day in the Stygian Haunts of Hell: Being the Lore and Legend of the Fabled ‘Eye of Argon’” copyright 1987, 1997 by Darrell Schweitzer. Somewhat different versions of this essay appeared in Fantasy Review, Volume 10, No 6., Whole number 103, July/August 1987, and Windows of the Imagination: Essays on Fantastic Literature, 1998

“In Search of Jim Theis” copyright 2006 by Lee Weinstein. Slightly different versions of this essay appeared in The Wildside Press edition of The Eye of Argon, 2006, and in The New York Review of Science Fiction, 2005 and 2005.

Text by Roger MacBride Allen, comprising the introduction and the essay “A Drippingly Sincere Apology, Plus Obsessively Detailed Analysis” copyright 2011 Roger MacBride Allen.

FoxAcre Press

foxacre.com

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the authors.

Contents

The Scholar’s Ebook Edition of The Eye of Argon: A High-Speed Introduction

THE EYE OF ARGON

One Fine Day in the Stygian Haunts of Hell: Being the Lore and Legend of the Fabled “Eye of Argon” by Darrell Schweitzer

In Search of Jim Theis by Lee Weinstein

A Drippingly Sincere Apology (Plus Bonus Obsessive Analysis) from the Publisher Himself

Online Resources for The Eye of Argon

But Seriously, Folks

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The Scholar’s Ebook Edition of The Eye of Argon: A High-Speed Introduction

This Scholar’s Ebook Edition is one of two editions of The Eye of Argon from FoxAcre Press. The other is the Somewhat Official Competitive Reading Edition, which contains as near as possible to a reproduction of The Eye of Argon as it appeared when it was first released. The Somewhat Official Competitive Reading Edition is available as a free download. The simple instructions on how to get it are available at foxacre.com/argon. The Competitive Reading Edition does not include the essays and explanatory material included in this edition.

The Eye of Argon materialized somewhat mysteriously in the midst of science fiction fandom a bit more than thirty years ago. For decades, no one seemed to know what, exactly, it was, or where it had come from. In order to give some sense of that air of mystery, we hereby first present the story itself, without explanation, followed, in chronological order, by three essays.

The first, by Darrell Schweitzer, relates the early mythology and history of Argon.

The second, by Lee Weinstein, tells of the work by Mr. Weinstein and others to track down the true origins of this unique work.

It should be noted that these two essays are rooted in the time periods in which they were written. They include some out-of-date references which will be readily apparent to the reader. But each gives a fair sense of what was known and believed about The Eye of Argon at the time, and it was decided to leave them largely alone. The authors have restricted themselves to providing brief updates as postscripts to the essays.

The third, most recent essay, by myself, brings the history of the story’s gradual discover up to date. It then analyzes both the text and the appearance of the original document, seeking to tease out more information. I sought to probe some of the deeper meaning―and shallower lack of meaning―to be found in The Eye of Argon. My essay also includes links to various websites that have further information about Argon.

Roger MacBride Allen

THE EYE OF ARGON

by Jim Theis

The weather beaten trail wound ahead into the dust racked climes of the baren land which dominates large portions of the Norgolian empire. Age worn hoof prints smothered by the sifting sands of time shone dully against the dust splattered crust of earth. The tireless sun cast its parching rays of incandescense from overhead, half way through its daily revolution. Small rodents scampered about, occupying themselves in the daily accomplishments of their dismal lives. Dust sprayed over three heaving mounts in blinding clouds, while they bore the burdonsome cargoes of their struggling overseers.

“Prepare to embrace your creators in the stygian haunts of hell, barbarian”, gasped the first soldier.

“Only after you have kissed the fleeting stead of death, wretch!” returned Grignr.

A sweeping blade of flashing steel riveted from the massive barbarians hide enameled shield as his rippling right arm thrust forth, sending a steel shod blade to the hilt into the soldiers vital organs. The disemboweled mercenary crumpled from his saddle and sank to the clouded sward, sprinkling the parched dust with crimson droplets of escaping life fluid.

The enthused barbarian swilveled about, his shock of fiery red hair tossing robustly in the humid air currents as he faced the attack of the defeated soldier’s fellow in arms.

“Damn you,barbarian” Shrieked the soldier as he observed his comrade in death.

A gleaming scimitar smote a heavy blow against the renegade’s spiked helmet, bringing a heavy cloud over the Ecordian’s misting brain. Shaking off the effects of the pounding blow to his head, Grignr brought down his scarlet streaked edge against the soldier’s crudely forged hauberk, clanging harmlessly to the left side of his opponent. The soldier’s stead whinnied as he directed the horse back from the driving blade of the barbarian. Grignr leashed his mount forward as the hoarsely piercing battle cry of his wilderness bred race resounded from his grinding lungs. A twirling blade bounced harmlessly from the mighty thief’s buckler as his rolling right arm cleft upward, sending a foot of blinding steel ripping through the Simar-ian’s exposed gullet. A gasping gurgle from the soldier’s writhing mouth as he tumbl-ed to the golden sand at his feet, and wormed agonizingly in his death bed.

Grignr’s emerald green orbs glared lustfully at the wallowing soldier strugg-ling before his chestnut swirled mount. His scowling voice reverberated over the dying form in a tone of mocking mirth. “You city bred dogs should learn not to antagonize your better.” Reining his weary mount ahead, grignr resumed his journey to the Noregolian city of Gorzam, hoping to discover wine, women, and adventure to boil the wild blood coarsing through his savage veins.

The trek to Gorzom was forced upon Grignr when the soldiers of Crin were leashed upon him by a faithless concubine he had wooed. His scandalous activities throughout the Simarian city had unleashed throngs of havoc and uproar among it’s refined patricians, leading them to tack a heavy reward over his head. He had barely managed to escape through the back entrance of the inn he had been guzzling in, as a squad of soldiers tounced upon him. After spilling a spout of blood from the leader of the mercenaries as he dismembered one of the officer’s arms, he retreated to his mount to make his way towards Gorzom, rumoured to contain hoards of plunder, and many young wenches for any man who has the backbone to wrest them away.

-2-

Arriving after dusk in Gorzom,grignr descended down a dismal alley, reining his horse before a beaten tavern. The redhaired giant strode into the dimly lit hostelry reeking of foul odors, and cheap wine. The air was heavy with chocking fumes spewing from smolderingtorches encased within theden’s earthen packed walls. Tables were clustered with groups of drunken thieves, and cutthroats, tossing dice, or making love to willing prostitutes.

Eyeing a slender female crouched alone at a nearby bench, Grignr advanced wishing to wholesomely occupy his time. The flickering torches cast weird shafts of luminescence dancing over the half naked harlot of his choice, her stringy orchid twines of hair swaying gracefully over the lithe opaque nose, as she raised a half drained mug to her pale red lips.

Glancing upward, the alluring complexion noted the stalwart giant as he rapidly approached. A faint glimmer sparked from the pair of deep blue ovals of the amorous female as she motioned toward Grignr, enticing him to join her. The barbar-ian seated himself upon a stool at the wenches side, exposing his body, na ed save for a loin cloth brandishing a long steel broad sword, an iron spiraled battle helmet, and a thick leather sandals, to her unobstructed view.

“ Thou hast need to occupy your time, barbarian”,questioned the female?

“Only if something worth offering is within my reach.” Stated Grignr,as his hands crept to embrace the tempting female, who welcomed them with open willingness.

“From where do you come barbarian, and by what are you called?” Gasped the complying wench, as Grignr smothered her lips with the blazing touch of his flaming mouth.

The engrossed titan ignored the queries of the inquisitive female, pulling her towards him and crushing her sagging nipples to his yearning chest. Without struggle she gave in, winding her soft arms around the harshly bronzedhide of Grignr corded shoulder blades, as his calloused hands caressed her firm protruding busts.

“You make love well wench,”Admitted Grignr as he reached for the vessel of p potent wine his charge had been quaffing.

A flying foot caught the mug Grignr had taken hold of, sending its blood red contents sloshing over a flickering crescent; leashing tongues of bright orange flame to the foot trodden floor.

“Remove yourself Sirrah, the wench belongs to me;” Blabbered a drunken soldier, too far consumed by the influences of his virile brew to take note of the superior size of his adversary.

Grignr lithly bounded from the startled female, his face lit up to an ashen red ferocity, and eyes locked in a searing feral blaze toward the swaying soldier.

“To hell with you, braggard!” Bellowed the angered Ecordian, as he hefted his finely honed broad sword.

The staggering soldier clumsily reached towards the pommel of his dangling sword, but before his hands ever touched the oaken hilt a silvered flash was slicing the heavy air. The thews of the savages lashing right arm bulged from the glistening bronzed hide as his blade bit deeply into the soldiers neck, loping off the confused head of his senseless tormentor.

With a nauseating thud the severed oval toppled to the floor, as the segre-gated torso of Grignr’s bovine antagonist swayed, then collapsed in a pool of swirled crimson.

In the confusion the soldier’s fellows confronted Grignr with unsheathed cutlasses, directed toward the latters scowling make-up.

“The slut should have picked his quarry more carefully!” Roared the victor in a mocking baritone growl, as he wiped his dripping blade on the prostrate form, and returned it to its scabbard.

“The fool should have shown more prudence, however you shall rue your actions while rotting in the pits.”Stated one of the sprawled soldier’s comrades.

Grignr’s hand began to remove his blade from its leather housing, but retarded the motion in face of the blades waving before his face.

“Dismiss your hand from the hilt, barbarbian, or you shall find a foot of steel sheathed in your gizzard.”

Grignr weighed his position observing his plight, where-upon he took the soldier’s advice as the only logical choice. To attempt to hack his way from his pre-sent predicament could only warrant certain death. He was of no mind to bring upon his own demise if an alternate path presented itself. The will to necessitate his life forced him to yield to the superior force in hopes of a moment of carlessness later upon the part of his captors in which he could effect a more plausible means of escape.

“You may steady your arms, I will go without a struggle.”

“Your decision is a wise one, yet perhaps you would have been better off had you forced death,” the soldier’s mouth wrinkled to a sadistic grin of knowing mirth as he prodded his prisoner on with his sword point.

After an indiscriminate period of marching through slinking alleyways and dim moonlighted streets the procession confronted a massive seraglio. The palace area was surrounded by an iron grating, with a lush garden upon all sides.

The group was admitted through the gilded gateway and Grignr was ledalong a stone pathway bordered by plush vegitation lustfully enhanced by the moon’s shimmer-ing rays. Upon reaching the palace the group was granted entrance, and after several minutes of explanation, led through several winding corridors to a richly draped chamber.

Confronting the group was a short stocky man seated upona golden throne. Tapestries of richly draped regal blue silk covered all walls of the chamber, while the steps leading to the throne were plated with sparkling white ivory. The man upon the throne had a naked wench seated at each of his arms, and a trusted advisor seated in back of him. At each cornwr of the chamber a guard stood at attention, with upraised pikes supported in their hands, golden chainmail adorning their torso’s and barred helmets emitting scarlet plumes enshrouding their heads. The man rose from his throne to the dias surround-ing it. His plush turquois robe dangled loosely from his chunky frame.

The soldiers surrounding Grignr fell to their knees with heads bowed to the stone masonry of the floor in fearful dignity to their sovereign, leige.

“Explain the purpose of this intrusion upon my chateau!”

“Your sirenity, resplendent in noble grandeur, we have brought this yokel before you (the soldier gestured toward Grignr) for the redress or your all knowing wisdom in judgement regarding his fate.”

“Down on your knees, lout, and pay proper homage to your sovereign!” commanded the pudgy noble of Grignr.

“By the surly beard of Mrifk, Grignr kneels to no man!” scowled the massive barbarian.

“You dare to deal this blasphemous act to me! You are indeed brave strang-er, yet your valor smacks of foolishness.”

“I find you to be the only fool, sitting upon your pompous throne, enhanc-ing the rolling flabs of your belly in the midst of your elaborate luxuryand . . .” The soldier standing at Grignr’s side smote him heavily in the face with the flat of his sword, cutting short the harsh words and knocking his battered helmet to the masonry with an echo-ing clang.

The paunchy noble’s sagging round face flushed suddenly pale, then pastily lit up to a lustrous cherry red radiance. His lips trembled with malicious rage, while emitting a muffled sibilant gibberish. His sagging flabs rolled like a tub of upset jelly, then compressed as he sucked in his gut in an attempt to conceal his softness.

The prince regained his statue, then spoke to the soldiers surrounding Grignr, his face conforming to an ugly expression of sadistic humor.

“Take this uncouth heathen to the vault of misery, and be sure that his agonies are long and drawn out before death can release him.”

“As you wish sire, your command shall be heeded immediately,” answered the soldier on the right of Grignr as he stared into the barbarians seemingly unaffected face.

The advisor seated in the back of the noble slowly rose and advanced to the side of his master, motioning the wenches seated at his sides to remove themselves. He lowered his head and whispered to the noble.

“Eminence, the punishment you have decreed will cause much misery to this scum, yet it will last only a short time, then release him to a land beyond the sufferings of the human body. Why not mellow him in one of the subterranean vaults for a few days, then send him to life labor in one of your buried mines. To one such as he, a life spent in the confinement of the stygian pits will be an infinitely more appropiate and lasting torture.”

The noble cupped his drooping double chin in the folds of his briming palm, meditating for a moment upon the rationality of the councilor’s word’s, then raised his shaggy brown eyebrows and turned toward the advisor, eyes aglow.

“. . .As always Agafnd, you speak with great wisdom. Your words ring of great knowledge concerning the nature of one such as he ,” sayeth , the king. The noble turned toward the prisoner with a noticable shimmer reflecting in his frog-like eyes, and his lips contorting to a greasy grin. “I have decided to void my previous decree. The prisoner shall be removed to one of the palaces underground vaults. There he shall stay until I have decided that he has sufficiently simmered, whereupon he is to be allowed to spend the remainder of his days at labor in one of my mines.”

Upon hearing this, Grignr realized that his fate would be far less merciful than death to one such as he, who is used to roaming the countryside at will. A life of confinement would be more than his body and mind could stand up to. This type of life would be immeasurably worse than death.

“I shall never understand the ways if your twisted civilization. I simply defend my honor and am condemned to life confinement, by a pig who sits on his royal ass wooing whores, and knows nothing of the affairs of the land he imagines to rule!” Lectures Grignr ?

“Enough of this! Away with the slut before I loose my control!”

Seeing the peril of his position, Grignr searched for an opening. Crushing prudence to the sward, he plowed into the soldier at his left arm taking hold of his sword, and bounding to the dias supporting the prince before the startled guards could regain their composure. Agafnd leaped Grignr and his sire, but found a sword blade permeating the length of his ribs before he could loosed his weapon.

The councilor slumped to his knees as Grignr slid his crimsoned blade from Agfnd’s rib cage. The fat prince stood undulating in insurmountable fear before the edge of the fiery maned comet, his flabs of jellied blub-ber pulsating to and fro in ripples of flowing terror.

“Where is your wisdom and power now, your mag-jesty?” Growled Grignr.

The prince went rigid as Grignr discerned him glazing over his shoulder. He swlived to note the cause of the noble’s attention, raised his sword over his head, and prepared to leash a vicious downward cleft, but fell short as the haft of a steel rimed pike clashed against his unguarded skull. Then blackness and solitude. Silence enshrouding and ever peaceful reind supreme.

“Before me, sirrah! Before me as always! Ha, Ha Ha, Haaaa...”, nobly cackled.

-3-

Consciousness returned to Grignr in stygmatic pools as his mind gradually cleared of the cobwebs cluttering its inner recesses, yet the stygian cloud of char-coal ebony remained. An incompatible shield of blackness, enhanced by the bleak abscense of sound.

Grignr’s muddled brain reeled from the shock of the blow he had recieved to the base of his skull. The events leading to his predicament were slow to filter back to him. He dickered with the notion that he was dead and had descended or sunk, however it may be, to the shadowed land beyond the the aperature of the grave, but rejected this hypothesis when his memory sifted back within his grips. This was not the land of the dead, it was something infinitely more precarious than anything the grave could offer. Death promised an infinity of peace, not the finite misery of an inactive life of confined torture, forever concealed from the life bearing shafts of the beloved rising sun. The orb that had been before taken for granted, yet now cherished above all else. To be forever refused further glimpses of the snow capped summits of the land of his birth, never again to witness the thrill of plundering unexplored lands beyond the crest of a bleeding horizon, and perhaps worst of all the denial to ever again encompass the lustful excitement of caressing the naked curves of the body of a trim yound wench.

This was indeed one of the buried chasms of Hell concealed within the inner depths of the palace’s despised interior. A fearful ebony chamber devised to drive to the brinks of insanity the minds of the unfortunately condemned, through the inapt solitude of a limbo of listless dreary silence.

-3 1/2-

A tightly rung elliptical circle or torches cast their wavering shafts prancing morbidly over the smooth surface of a rectangular, ridged alter. Expertly chisled forms of grotesque gargoyles graced the oblique rim protruberating the length of the grim orifice of death, staring forever ahead into nothingness in complete ignorance of the bloody rites enacted in their prescence. Brown flaking stains decorated the golden surface of the ridge surrounding the alter, which banked to a small slit at the lower right hand corner of the altar. The slit stood above a crudely pounded pail which had several silver meshed chalices hanging at its sides. Dangling at the rimof golden mallet, the handle of which was engraved with images of twisted faces and groved at its far end with slots designed for a snug hand grip. The head of the mallet was slightly larger than a clenched fist and shaped into a smooth oval mass.

Encircling the marble altar was a congregation of leering shamen. Eerie chants of a bygone age, originating unknown eons before the memory of man, were being uttered from the buried recesses of the acolytes’ deep lings. Orange paint was smeared in generous globules over the tops of thw Priests’ wrinkled shaven scalps, while golden rings projected from the lobes of their pink ears. Ornate robes of lusciour purple satin enclosed their bulging torsos, attached around their waists with silvered silk lashes latched with ebony buckles in the shape of morose mis-shaped skulls. Dangling around their necks were oval fashoned medalions held by thin gold chains, featuring in their centers blood red rubys which resembled crim-son fetish eyeballs. Cushoning their bare feet were plush red felt slippers with pointed golden spikes projecting from their tips.

Situated in front of the altar, and directly adjacent to the copper pail was a massive jade idol; a misshaped, hideous bust of the shamens’ pagan diety. The shimmering green idol was placed in a sitting posture on an ornately carved golden throne raised upon a round, dvory plated dias; it bulging arms and webbed hands resting on the padded arms of the seat. Its head was entwined in golden snake-like coils hanging over its oblong ears, which tappered off to thin hollow points. Its nose was a bulging triangular mass, sunken in at its sides with tow gaping nos-trils. Dramatic beneath the nostrils was a twisted, shaggy lipped mouth, giving the impression of a slovering sadistic grimace.

At the foot of the heathen diety a slender, pale faced female, naked but for a golden, jeweled harness enshrouding her huge outcropping breasts, supporting long silver laces which extended to her thigh, stood before the pearl white field with noticable shivers traveling up and down the length of her exquisitely molded body. Her delicate lips trembled beneath soft narrow hands as she attemped to con-ceal herself from the piercing stare of the ambivalent idol.

Glaring directly down towards her was the stoney, cycloptic face of the bloated diety. Gaping from its single obling socket was scintillating, many fau-ceted scarlet emerald, a brilliant gem seeming to possess a life all of its own. A priceless gleaming stone, capable of domineering the wealth of conquering empires...the eye of Argon.

- 4 -

All knowledge of measuring time had escaped Grignr. When a person is de-prived of the sun, moon, and stars, he looses all conception of time as he had pre-viously understood it. It seemed as if years had passed if time were being measured by terms of misery and mental anguish, yet he estimated that his stay had only been

a few days in length. He has slept three times and had been fed five times since his awakening in the crypt. However, when the actions of the body are restricted its needs are also affected. The need for nourishmnet and slumber are directly proportional to the functions the body has performed, meaning that when free and active Grignr may become hungry every six hours and witness the desire for sleep every fifteen hours, whereas in his present condition he may encounter the need for food every ten hours , and the want for rest every twenty hours. All methods he had before depended upon were extinct in the dismal pit. Hence, he may have been imprisoned for ten minutes or ten years, he did not know, resulting in a disheartened emotion deep within his being.

The food, if you can honor the moldering lumps of fetid mush to that extent, was born to him by two guards who opened a portal at the top of his enclos-ure and shoved it to him in wooden bowls, retrieving the food and water bowels from his previous meal at the same time, after which they threw back the bolts on the iron latch and returned to their other duties. Since deprived of all other means of nourishment, Grignr was impelled to eat the tainted slop in order to ward off the paings of starvation, though as he stuffed it into his mouth with his filthy fingers and struggled to force it down his throat, he imagined it was that which had been spurned by the hounds stationed at various segments of the palace.

There was little in the baren vault that could occupy his body or mind. He had paced out the length and width of the enclosure time and time again and tested every granite slab which consisted the walls of the prison in hopes of find-ing a hidden passage to freedom, all of which was to no avail other than to keep him busy and distract his mind from wandering to thoughts of what he believed was his future. He had memorized the number of strides from one end to the other of the cell, and knew the exact number of slabs which made up the bleak dungeon. Numorous schemes were introduced and alternately discarded in turn as they succored to unravel to him no means of escape which stood the slightest chance of sucess.

Anguish continued to mount as his means of occupation were rapidly exhaus t-ed. Suddenly without no tive, he wasrouted from his contemplations as he detected a faint scratching sound at the end of the crypt opposite him. The sound seemed to be caused by something trying to scrape away at the grantite blocks the floor of the enclosure consisted of, the sandy scratching of something like an animal’s claws.

Grignr gradually groped his way to the other end of the vault carefully feeling his way along with his hands ahead of him. When a few inches from the wall, a loud, penetrating squeal, and the scampering of small padded feet reverberated from the walls of the roughly hewn chamber.

Grignr threw his hands up to shield his face, and flung himself backwards upon his buttocks. A fuzzy form bounded to his hairy chest, burying its talons in his flesh while gnashing toward his throat with its grinding white teeth;its sour, fetid breath scortching the sqirming barbarians dilating nostrils. Grignr grappled with the lashing flexor muscles of the repugnant body of a garganuan brownhided rat, striving to hold its razor teeth from his juicy jugular, as its beady grey organs of sight glazed into the flaring emeralds of its prey.

Taking hold of the rodent around its lean, growling stomach with both hands Grignr pried it from his crimson rent breast, removing small patches of flayed flesh from his chest in the motion between the squalid black claws of the starving beast. Holding the rodent at arms length, he cupped his righthand over its frothing face, contrcting his fingers into a vice-like fist over the quivering head. Retaining his grips on the rat, grignr flexed his outstretched arms while slowly twisting his right hand clockwise and his left hand counter clockwise motion. The rodent let out a tortured squall, drawing scarlet as it violently dug its foam flecked fangs into the barbarians sweating palm, causing his face to contort to an ugly grimace as he cursed beneath his braeth.

With a loud crack the rodents head parted from its squirming torso, send-ing out a sprinking shower of crimson gore, and trailing a slimy string of disjoint-ed vertebrae, snapped trachea, esophagus, and jugular, disjointed hyoid bone, morose purpled stretched hide, and blood seared muscles.

Flinging the broken body to the floor, Grignr shook his blood streaked hands and wiped them against his thigh until dry, then wiped the blood that had show-ered his face and from his eyes. Again sitting himself upon the jagged floor, he prepared to once more revamp his glum meditations. He told himself that as long as he still breathed the gust of life through his lungs, hope was not lost; he told him-self this, but found it hard to comprehend in his gloomy surroundings. Yet he was still alive, his bulging sinews at their peak of marvel, his struggling mind float-ing in a miral of impressed excellence of thought. Plot after plot sifted through his mind in energetic contemplations.

Then it hit him. Minutes may have passed in silent thought or days, he could not tell, but he stumbled at last upon a plan that he considered as holding a slight margin of plausibility. He might die in the attempt, but he knew he would not submit without a final bloody struggle. It was not a foolproof plan, yet it built up a store of renewed vortexed energy in his overwroughtsoul, though he might perish in the execution of the escape, he would still be escaping the life of infinite torture in store forhim. Either way he would still cheat the gloating prince of the succored revenge his sadistic mind craved so dearly.

The guards would soon come to bear him off to the prince’s buried mines of dread, giving him the sought after opportunity to execute his newly formulated plan. Groping his way along the rough floor Grignr finally found his tool in a pool of congealed gore; the carcass of the decapitated rodent; the tool that the very filth he had been sentenced too, spawned. When the time came for action he would have to be prepared, so he set himself to rending the sticky hulk in grim silence, search-ing by the touch of his fingertips for the lever to freedom.

-5-

“Up to the altar and be done with it wench;” ordered a fidgeting shaman as he gave the female a grim stare accompanied by the wrinkling of his lips to a mirth-ful grin of delight.

The girl burst into a slow steady whimper, stooping shakily to her knees and cringing woefully from the priest with both arms wound snake-like around the bulging jade jade shin rising before her scantily attired figure. Her face was redly inflamed from the salty flow of tears spouting from her glassy dilated eyeballs.

With short, heavy footfals the priest approached the female, his piercing stare never wavering from her quivering young countenance. Halting before the terrif-ied girl he projected his arm outward and motioned her to arise with an upward move-ment of his hand. the girl’s whimpering increased slightly and she sunk closer to the floor rather than arising. The flickering torches outlined her trim build with a weird ornate glow as it cast a ghostly shadow dancing in horrid waves of splendor over smoothly worn whiteness of the marble hewn altar.

The shaman’s lips curled back farther, exposing a set of blackened, decay-ing molars which transformed his slovenly grin into a wide greasy arc of sadistic mirth and alternately interposed into the female a strong sensation of stomach curdling nausea. “Have it as you will female;” gloated the enhanced priest as he bent over at the waist, projecting his ape-like arms forward, and clasped the female’s slender arms with his hairy round fists. With an inward surge of of his biceps he harshly jerked the trembling girl to her feet and smothered her salty wet cheeks with the moldy touch of his decrepid, dull red lips.

The vile stench of the Shaman’s hot fetid breath over came the nauseated female with a deep soul searing sickness, causing her to wrench her head backwards and regurgitate a slimy, orangewhite stream of swelling gore over the richly woven purple robe of the enthused acolyte.

The priest’s lips trembled with a malicious rage as he removed his callous paws from the girl’s arms and replaced them with tightly around her undulating neck, shaking her violently to and fro.

The girl gasped a tortured groan from her clamped lungs, her sea blue eyes bulging forth from damp sockets. Cocking her right foot backwards, she leashed it desperately outwards with the strength of a demon possessed, lodging her sandled foot squarely between the shaman’s testicles.

The startled priest released his crushing grip, crimping his body over at the waist overlooking his recessed belly; wide open in a deep chasim. His face flush-ed to a rose red shade of crimson, eyelids fluttering wide with eyeballs protruding blindly outwards from their sockets to their outmost perimeters, while his lips quivered wildly about allowing an agonized wallow to gust forth as his breath billowed from burning lungs. His hands reached out clutching his urinary gland as his knees wobbled rapidly about for a few seconds then buckled, causing the ruptur-ed shaman to collapse in an egg huddled mass to the granite pavement, rolling help-lessly about in his agony.

The pathetic screeches of the shaman groveling in dejected misery upon the hand hewn granite laid pavement, worn smooth by countless hours of arduous sweat and toil, a welter of ichor oozing through his clenched hands, attracted the purturb-ed attention of his comrades from their foetid ulations. The actions of this this re-bellious wench bespoke the creedence of an unheard of sacrilige. Never before in a lost maze of untold eons had a chosen one dared to demonstrate such blasphemy in the face of the cult’s idolic diety.

The girl cowered in unreasoning terror, helpless in the face of the em-blazoned acolytes’ rage; her orchid tusseled face smothered betwixt her bulging bosom as she shut her curled lashed tightly hoping to open them and find herself awakening from a morbid nightmare. yet the hand of destiny decreed her no such mercy, the antagonized pack of leering shaman converging tensely upon her prostrate form were entangled all too lividly in the grim web of reality.

Shuddering from the clamy touch of the shaman as they grappled with her supple form,hands wrenching at her slender arms and legs in all directions, her bare body being molested in the midst of a labyrnth of orange smudges, purpled satin, and mangled skulls, shadowed in an eerie crimson glow; her confused head reeled then clouded in a mist of enshrouding ebony as she lapsed beneath the protective sheet of unconsiousness to a land peach and resign.

-6-

“Take hold of this rope,” said the first soldier, “and climb out from your pit, slut. Your presence is requested in another far deeper hell hole.”

Grignr slipped his right hand to his thigh, concealing a small opaque object beneath the folds of the g-string wrapped about his waist. Brine wells swelled in Grignr’s cold , jade squinting eyes, which grown accustomed to the gloom of the stygian pools of ebony engulfing him, were bedazzled and blinded by flickerer-ing radiance cast forth by the second soldiers’s resin torch.

Tightly gripped in the second soldier’s right hand, opposite the inter-mittent torch, was a large double edged axe, a long leather wound oaken handled transfixing the center of the weapon’s iron head. Adorning the torso’s of both of the sentries were thin yet sturdy hauberks, the breatplates of which were woven of tightly hemmed twines of reinforced silver braiding. Cupping the soldiers’ feet were thick leather sandals, wound about their shins to two inches below their knees. Wrapped about their waists were wide satin girdles, with slender bladed poniards dangling loosely from them, the hilts of which featured scarlet encrusted gems. Resting upon the manes of their heads, and reaching midway to their brows were smooth copper morions. Spiraling the lower portion of the helmet were short, up-curved silver spikes, while a golden hump spired from the top of each basinet. Beneath their chins, wound around their necks, and draping their clad shoulders dangled regal purple satin cloaks, which flowed midway to the soldiers feet.

hand over hand, feet braced against the dank walls of the enclosure, huge Grignr ascended from the moldering dephs of the forlorn abyss. His swelled limbs, stiff due to the boredom of a timeless inactivity, compounded by the musty atmosture and jagged granite protuberan against his body, craved for action. The opportunity now presenting itself served the purpose of oiling his rusty joints, and honing his dulled senses.

He braced himself, facing the second soldier. The sentry’s stature was was wildly exaggerated in the glare of the flickering cresset cuppex in his right fist. His eyes were wide open in a slightly slanted owlish glaze, enhanced in their sinister intensity by the hawk-bill curve of his nose andpale yellow pique of his cheeks.

“Place your hands behind your back,” said the second soldier as he raised his ax over his right shoulder blade and cast it a wavering glance. “We must bind your wrists to parry any attempts at escape. Be sure to make the knot a stout one, Broig, we wouldn’t want our guest to take leave of our guidance.”

Broig grasped Grignr’s left wrist and reached for the barbarians’s right wrist. Grignr wrenched his right arm free and swilveled to face Broig, reach- beneath his loin cloth with his right hand. The sentry grappled at his girdle for the sheathed dagger, but recoiled short of his intentions as Grignr’s right arm swept swept to his gorge. The soldier went limp, his bobbing eyes rolling beneath fluttering eyelids, a deep welt across his spouting gullet. Without lingering to observe the result of his efforts, Grignr dropped to his knees. The second soldier’s axe cleft over Grignr’s head in a blze of silvered ferocity, severing several scarlet locks from his scalp. Coming to rest in his fellow’s stomach, the iron head crashed through mail and flesh with splintering force, spilling a pool of crimsoned entrails over the granite paving.

Before the sentry could wrench his axe free from his comrade’s carcass, he found Grignr’s massive hands clasped about his throat, choking the life from his clamped lungs. With a zealous grunt, the Ecordian flexed his tightly corded biceps, forcing the grim faced soldier to one knee. The sentry plunged his right fist into Grignr’s face, digging his grimy nails into the barbarians flesh. Ejaculating a curse through rasping teeth, grignr surged the bulk of his weight foreard,bowling the beseiged soldier over upon his back. The sentry’s arms collapsed to his thigh, shuddering convulsively; his bulging eyes staring blindly from a bloated ,cherry red face.

Rising to his feet, Grignr shook the bllod from his eyes, ruffling his surly red mane as a brush fire swaying to the nightime breeze. Stooping over the spr sprawled corpse of the first soldier, Grignr retrieved a small white object from a pool of congealing gore. Snorting a gusty billow of mirth, he once more concealed th e tiny object beneath his loin cloth; the tediously honed pelvis bone of the broken rodent. Returning his attention toward the second soldier, Grignr turned to the task of attiring his limbs. To move about freely through the dim recesses of the castle would require the grotesque garb of its soldiery.

Utilizing the silence and stealth aquired in the untamed climbs of his childhood, Grignr slink through twisting corridors, and winding stairways, lighting his way with the confisticated torch of his dispatched guardian. Knowing where his steps were leading to, Grignr meandered aimlessly in search of an exit from the chateau’s dim confines. The wild blood coarsing through his veins yearned for the undefiled freedom of the livid wilderness lands.

Coming upon a fork in the passage he treaked, voices accompanied by clink-ing footfalls discerned to his sensitive ears from the left corridor. Wishing to avoid contact, Grignr veered to the right passageway. If aquested as to the purpose of his presence, his barbarous accent would reveal his identity, being that his attire was not that of the castle’s mercenary troops.

In grim silence Grignr treaded down the dingily lit corridor; a stalking panther creeping warily along on padded feet. After an interminable period of wander-ing through the dull corridors; no gaps to break the monotony of the cold gray walls, Grignr espied a small winding stairway. Descending the flight of arced granite slabs to their posterior, Grignr was confronted by a short haalway leading to a tall arched wooden doorway.

Halting before the teeming portal portal, Grignr restes his shaggy head sideways against the barrier. Detecting no sounds from within, he grasped the loop-ed metel handle of the door; his arms surging with a tremendous effort of bulging muscles, yet the door would not budge. Retrieving his ax from where he had sheathed it beneath his girdle, he hefted it in his mighty hands with an apiesed grunt, and wedging one of its blackened edges into the crack between the portal and its iron rimed sill. Bracing his sandaled right foot against the rougjly hewn wall, teeth tightly clenched, Grignr appilevered the oaken haft, employing it as a lever where-by to pry open the barrier. The leather wound hilt bending to its utmost limits of endurance, the massive portal swung open with a grating of snapped latch and rusty iron hinges.

Glancing about the dust swirled room in the gloomily dancing glare of his flickering cresset, Grignr eyed evidences of the enclosure being nothing more than a forgotten storeroom. Miscellaneous articles required for the maintainance of a castle were piled in disorganized heaps at infrequent intervals toward the wall opposite the barbarian’s piercing stare. Utilizing long, bounding strides, Grignr paced his way over to the mounds of supplies to discover if any articles of value were contained within their midst.

Detecting a faint clinking sound, Grignr sprawed to his left side with the speed of a striking cobra, landing harshly upon his back; torch and axe loudly clattering to the floor in a morass of sparks and flame. A elmwoven board leaped from collapsed flooring, clashing against the jagged flooring and spewing a shower of orange and yellow sparks over Grignr’s startled face. Rising uneasily to his feet, the half stunned Ecordian glared down at the grusome arm of death he had un-wittingly sprung. “Mrifk!”

If not for his keen auditory organs and lighting steeled reflexes, Grignr would have been groping through the shadowed hell-pits of the Grim Reaper. He had unknowingly stumbled upon an ancient, long forgotton booby trap; a mistake which would have stunted the perusal of longevity of one less agile. A mechanism, similar in type to that of a minature catapult was concealed beneath two collapsable sect-ions of granite flooring. The arm of the device was four feet long, boasting razor like cleats at regular intervals along its face with which it was to skewer the luckless body of its would be victim. Grignr had stepped upon a concealed catch which relaesed a small metal latch beneath the two granite sections, causing them to fall inward, and thereby loose the spiked arm of death they precariously held in .

Partially out of curiosity and partially out of an inordinate fear of be-coming a pincushion for a possible second trap, Grignr plunged his torch into the exposed gap in the floor. The floor of a second chamber stood out seven feet below the glare. Tossing his torch through the aperature, Grignr grasped the side of an adjoining tile, dropping down.

Glancing about the room, Grignr discovered that he had decended into the palace’s mausoleum. Rectangular stone crypts cluttered the floor at evenly placed in-tervals. The tops of the enclosures were plated with thick layers of virgin gold, while the sides were plated with white ivory; at one time sparkling, but now grown dingy through the passage of the rays of allencompassing mother time. Featured at the head of each sarcophagus in tarnished silver was an expugnisively carved likeness of its rotting inhabitant.

A dingy atmosphere pervaded the air of the chamber; which sealed in the enclosure for an unknown period had grown thick and stale. Intermingling with the curdled currents was the repugnant stench of slowly moldering flesh, creeping ever slowly but surely through minute cracks in the numerous vaults. Due to the em-balming of the bodies, their flesh decayed at a much slower rate than is normal, yet the nauseous oder was none the less repellant.

Towering over Grignr’s head was the trap he released. The mechanism of the miniaturized catapolt was cluttered with mildew and cobwebs. Notwithstand-ing these relics of antiquity, its efficiency remained unimpinged. To the right of the trap wound a short stairway through a recession in the ceiling; a concealed entrance leading to the mausoleum for which the catapult had obviously been erected as a silent, relentless guardian.

Climbing up the side of the device, Grignr set to the task of resetting its mechanism. In the e event that a search was organized, it would prove well to leave no evidence of his presence open to wandering eyes. Besides , it might even serve to dwindle the size of an opposing force.

Descending from his perch, Grignr was start-led by a faintly muffled scream of horrified desper-ation. His hair prickled yawkishly in disorganized clumps along his scalp. As a cold danced along the length of his spinal cord. No moral/mortal barrier, human or otherwise, was capable of arousing the numbing sensation of fear inside of Grignr’s smolder-ing soul. However, he was overwrought by the forces of the barbarians’ instinctive fear of the super-natural. His mighty thews had always served to adequately conquer any tangible foe., but the intang-ible was something distant and terrible. Dim horrifying tales passed by word of mouth over glimmering camp fires and skins of wine had more than once served the purpose of chilling the marrowed core of his sturdy limbed bones.

Yet, the scream contained a strangely human quality, unlike that which Grignr imagined would come from the lungs of a demon or spirit, making Grignr take short nervous strides advancing to the sarcophagus from which the sound was issuing. Clenching his teeth in an attempt to steel his jangled nerves, Grignr slid the en-graved slab from the vault with a sharp rasp of grinding stone. Another long drawn cry of terror infested anguish met the barbarian, scoring like the shrill piping of a demented banshee; piercing the inner fibres of his superstitious brain with primitive dread dread and awe.

Stooping over to espy the tomb’s contents, the glittering Ecordians nostrills were singed by the scorching aroma of a moldering corpse, long shut up and fermenting; the same putrid scent which permeated the entire chamber, though multi-plied to a much more concentrated dosage. The shriveled, leathery packet of crumbling bones and dried flacking flesh offered no resistance, but remained in a fixed position of perpetual vigilance, watching over its dim abode from hollow gaping sockets.

The tortured crys were not coming from the tomb but from some hidden depth below ! Pulling the reaking corpse from its resting place, Grignr tossed it to the floor in a broken, mangled heap. Upon one side of the crypt’s bottom was attach-ed a series of tiny hinges while running parallel along the opposite side of a convex railing like protruberance; laid so as to appear as a part of the interior surface of the sarcophagus.

Raising the slab upon its bronze hinges, long removed from the gaze of human eyes, Grignr percieved a scene which caused his blood to smolder not unlike bubbling, molten lava. Directly below him a whimpering female lay stretched upon a smooth surfaced marble altar. A pack of grasy faced shamen clustered around her in a tight circular formation. Crouched over the girl was a tall, potbellied priest; his face dominated by a disgusting, open mouthed grimace of sadistic glee. Suspended from the acolyte’s clenched right hand was a carven oval faced mallet, which he waved menacingly over the girl’s shadowed face; an incoherent gibberish flowing from his grinning, thick lipped mouth.

In the face of the amorphos, broad breated female, stretched out aluring-ly before his gaping eyes; the universal whim of nature filing a plea of despair inside of his white hot soul; Grignr acted in the only manner he could perceive. Giving vent to a hoarse, throat rending battle cry, Grignr plunged into the midst of the startled shamen; torch simmering in his left hand andax twirling in his right hand.

A gaunt skull faced priest standing at the far side of the altar clutched desperately at his throat, coughing furiously in an attempt to catch his breath. Lurching helplessly to and fro, the acolyte pitched headlong against the gleaming base of a massive jade idol. Writhing agonizedly against the hideous image, foam flecking his chalk white lips, the priest struggled helplessly - - -the victim of an epileptic siezure.

Startled by the barbarians stunning appearance, the chronic fit of their fellow, and the fear that Grignr might be the avantgarde of a conquering force dedicated to the cause of destroying their degenerated cult, the saman momentarily lost their composure. Giving vent to heedless pandemonium, the priests fell easy prey to Grignr’s sweeping arc of crimsoned death and maiming distruction.

The acolyte performing the sacrifice took a vicious blow to the stomach; hands clutching vitals and severed spinal cord as he sprawled over the altar. The disor anized priests lurched and staggered with split skulls, dismembered limbs, and spewing entrails before the enraged Ecordian’s relentless onslaught. The howles of the maimed and dying reverberated against the walls of the tiny chamber; a chorus of hell frought despair; as the granite floor ran red with blood. The entire chamber was encompassed in the heat of raw savage butchery as Grignr luxuriated in the grips of a primitive, beastly blood lust.

Presently all went silenet save for the ebbing groans of the sinking shaman and Grignr’s heaving breath accompanied by several gusty curses. The well had run dry. No more lambs remained for the slaughter.

The rampaging stead of death having taken of Grignr for the moment, left the barbarian free to the exploitation of his other perusials. Towering over his head was the misshaped image of the cult’s hideous diety - - - Argon. The fantastic size of the idol in consideration of its being of pure jade was enough to cause the senses of any man to stagger and reel, yet thus was not the case for the behemoth. he had paid only casual notice to this incredible fact, while riviting the whole of his attention upon the jewel protruding from the idol’s sole socket; its master-fully cut faucets emitting blinding rays of hypnotising beauty. After all, a man cannot slink from a heavily guarded palace while burdened down by the intense bulk of a squatting statue, providing of course that the idol can even be hefted, which in fact was beyond the reaches of Grignr’s coarsing stamina. On the other hand, the jewel, gigantic as it was, would not present a hinderence of any mean concern.

“Help me ... please ... I can make it well worth your while,” pleaded a soft, anguish strewn voice wafting over Grignr’s shoulders as he plucked the dull red emerald from its roots. Turning, Grignr faced the female that had lured him into this blood bath, but whom had become all but forgotten in the heat of the battle.

“You”; ejaculated the Ecordian in a pleased tone. “I though that I had seen the last of you at the tavern, but verilly I was mistaken.” Grignr advanced into the grips of the female’s entrancing stare, severing the golden chains that held her captive upon the altars highly polished face of ornamental limestone.

As Grignr lifted the girl from the altar, her arms wound dexterously about his neck; soft and smooth against his harsh exterior. “Art thou pleased that we have chanced to meet once again?” Grignr merely voiced an sighed grunt, returning the damsels embrace while he smothered her trim, delicate lips between the coarsing protrusions of his reeking maw.

“Let us take leave of this retched chamber.” Stated Grignr as he placed the female upon her feet. She swooned a moment, causing Grignr to giver her support then regained her stance. “Art thou able to find your way through the accursed passages of this castle? Mrifk! Every one of the corridors of this damned place are identical.”

“Aye; I was at one time a slave of prince Agaphim. His clammy touch sent a sour swill through my belly, but my efforts reaped a harvest. I gained the pig’s liking whereby he allowed me the freedom of the palace. It was through this means that I eventually managed escape of the palace . . . . it was a simple matter to seduce the sentry at the western gate. His trust found him with a dagger thrust his ribs,” the wench stated whimsicoracally.

“What were you doing at the tavern whence I discovered you?” asked Grignr as he lifted the female through the opening into the mausoleum.

“I had sought to lay low from the palace’s guards as they conducted their search for me. The tavern was seldom frequented by the palace guards and my identity was unknown to the common soldiers. It was through the disturbance that you caused that the palace guards were attracted to the tavern. I was dragged away shortly after you were escorted to the palace.”

“What are you called by female?”

“Carthena, daughter of Minkardos, Duke of Barwego, whose lands border along the northwestern fringes of Gorzom. I was paid as homage to Agaphim upon his thirty-eighth year,”husked the femme !

“And I am called a barbarian!” Grunted Grignr in a disgusted tone !

“Aye! The ways of our civilization are in many ways warped and distorted, but what is your calling,” she queried , bustily?

“Grignr of Ecordia.”

“Ah, I have heard vaguely of Ecordia. It is the hill country to the far east of the Noregolean Empire. I have also heard Agaphim curse your land more than once when his troops were routed in the unaccustomed mountains and gorges.”Sayeth she.

“Aye. My people are not tarnished by petty luxuries and baubles. They remain fierce and unconquerable in their native climes.” After reaching the hidden panel at the head of the stairway, Grignr was at a loss in regard to its operation. His fiercest heaves were as pebbles against burnished armour! Carthena depressed a small symbol included within the elaborate design upon the panel whereopen it slowly slid into a cleft in the wall. “How did you come to be the victim of those crazed shamen?” Quested Grignr as he escorted Carthena through the piles of rummage on the left side of the trap.

“By A aphim’s orders I was thrust into a secluded cell to await his pass-ing of sentence. By some means, the Priests of Argon acquired a set of keys to the cell. They slew the guard placed over me and abducted me to the chamber in which you chanced to come upon the scozsctic sacrifice. Their hell-spawned cult demands a sacrifice once every three moons upon its full journey through the heavens. They were startled by your unannounced appearance through the fear that you had been sent by Agaphim. The prince would surely have submitted them to the most ghastly of tor-tures if he had ever discovered their unfaithfulness to Sargon, his bastard diety. Many of the partakers of the ritual were high nobles and high trustees of the inner palace; Agaphim’s pittiless wrath would have been unparalled.”

“They have no more to fear of Agaphim now!” Bellowed Grignr in a deep mirthful tome; a gleeful smirk upon his face. “I have seen that they were delivered from his vengence.”

Engrossed by Carthena’s graceful stride and conversation Grignr failed to take note of the footfalls rapidly approaching behind him. As he swung aside the arched portal linking the chamber with the corridors beyond, a maddened, blood lust-ing screech reverberated from his ear drums. Seemingly utilizing the speed of thought, Grignr swiveled to face his unknown foe. With gaping eyes and widened jaws, Grignr raised his axe above his surly mein; but he was too late.

-7-

With wobbling knees and swimming head, the priest that had lapsed into an epileptic siezure rose unsteadily to his feet. While enacting his choking fit in writhing agony, the shaman was overlooked by Grignr. The barbarian had mistaken the siezure for the death throes of the acolyte, allowing the priest to avoid his sting-ing blade. The sight that met the priests inflamed eyes nearly served to sprawl him upon the floor once more. The sacrificial sat it grim, blood splattered silence all around him, broken only by the occasional yelps and howles of his maimed and butchered fellows. Above his head rose the hideous idol, its empty socket holding the shaman’s ifurbished infuriated gaze. His eyes turned to a stoney glaze with the realization of the pillage and blasphemy. Due to his high succeptibility following the siezure, the priest was transformed into a raving maniac bent soley upon reaking vengeance. With lips curled and quivering, a crust of foam dripping from them, the acolyte drew a long, wicked looking jewel hilted scimitar from his silver girdle and fled through the aperature in the ceiling uttering a faintly perceptible cere-monial jibberish.

-7 1/2 -

A sweeping scimitar swung towards Grignr’s head in a shadowed blur of motion. With Axe raised over his head, Grignr prepared to parry the blow, while gaping wideeyed in open mouthed perplexity. Suddenly a sharp snap resounded behind the frothing shaman. The scimitar, halfway through its fatal sweep, dropped from a quivering nerveless hand, clattering harmlessly to the stoneage. Cutting his screech short with a bubbling, red mouthed gurgle, the lacerated acolyte staggered under the pressure of the released spring-board. After a moment of hopeless struggling, the shaman buckled, sprawling face down in a widening pool of bllod and entrails, his regal purple robe blending enhancingly with the swirling streams of crimson.

“Mrifk! I thought I had killed the last of those dogs;” muttered Grignr in a half apathetic state.

“Nay Grignr. You doubtless grew careless while giving vent to your lusts. But let us not tarry any long lest we over tax the fates.The paths leading to free-dom will soon be barred. The wretch’s crys must certainly have attracted unwanted attention,” the wench mused.

“By what direction shall we pursue our flight? ,”

“Up that stair and down the corridor a short distance is the concealed enterance to a tunnel seldom used by others than the prince, and known to few others save the palace’s royalty. It is used mainly by the prince when he wishes to take leave of the palace in secret. It is not always in the Prince’s best interests to leave his chateau in public view. Even while under heavy guard he is often assaulted by hurtling stones and rotting fruits. The commoners have little love for him.” lectured the nerelady!

“It is amazing that they would ever have left a pig like him become their ruler. I should imagine that his people would rise up and crucify him like the dog he is.”

“Alas, Grignr, it is not as simple as all that. His soldiers are well paid by him. So long as he keeps their wages up they will carry out his damned wishes. The crude impliments of the commonfolk would never stand up under an onslaught of forged blades and protective armor; they would be going to their own slaughter,” stated Carthena to a confused, but angered Grignr as they topped the stairway.

“Yet how can they bear to live under such oppression? I would sooner die beneath the sword than live under such a dog’s command.” added Grignr as the pair stalked down the hall in the direction opposite that in which Grignr had come.

“But all men are not of the same mold that you are born of, they choose to live as they are so as to save their filthy necks from the chopping block.” Returned Carthena in a disgusted tone as she cast an appiesed glance towards the stalwart figure at her side whose left arm was wound dextrously about her slim waist; his slowly waning torch casting their images in intermingling wisps as it dangled from his left hand.

Presently Carthena came upon the panel, concealed amonst the other granite slabs and discernable only by the burned out cresset above it. “As I push the cres-set aside push the panel inwards.” Catrhena motioned to the panel she was refering to and twisted the cresset in a counterclockwise motion. Grignr braced his right shoulder against the walling, concentrating the force of his bulk against it. The slab gradually swung inward with a slight grating sound. Carthena stooped beneath Grignr’s corded arms and crawled upon all fours into the passage beyond. Grignr followed after easing the slab back into place.

Winding before the pair was a dark musty tunnel, exhibiting tangled spider webs from it ceiling to wall and an oozing, sickly slime running lazily upon its floor. Hanging from the chipped wall upon GrignR’s right side was a half mouldered corpse, its grey flacking arms held in place by rusted iron manacles. Carthena flinched back into Grignr’s arms at sight of the leering set in an ugly distorted grimmace; staring horribly at her from hollow gaping sockets.

“This alcove must also be used by Agaphim as a torture chamber. I wonder how many of his enemies have disappeared into these haunts never to be heard from again,” pondered the hulking brute.

“Let us flee before we are also caught within Agaphim’s ghastly clutches. The exit from this tunnel cannot be very far from here!” Said Carthena with a slight sob to her voice, as she sagged in Grignr’s encompasing embrace.

“Aye; It will be best to be finished with this corridor as soon as it is possible. But why do you flinch from the sight of death so? Mrift! You have seen much death this day without exhibiting such emotions.” Exclaimed Grignr as he led her trembling form along the dingy confines.

“---The man hanging from the wall was Doyanta. He had committed the folly of showing affections for me in front of Agaphim --- he never meant any harm by his actions!” At this Carthena broke into a slow steady whimpering, chokking her voice with gasping sobs. “There was never anything between us yet Agaphim did this to him! The beast! May the demons of Hell’s deepest haunts claw away at his wretched flesh for this merciless act!” she prayed.

“I detect that you felt more for this fellow than you wish to let on ... but enough of this, We can talk of such matters after we are once more free to do so.” With this Grignr lifted the grieved female to her feet and strode onward down the corridor, supporting the bulk of her weight with his surging left arm.

Presently a dim light was perceptibly filtering into the tunnel, casting a dim reddish hue upon the moldy wall of the passage’s grim confines. Carthena had ceased her whimpering and partially regained her composure. “The tunnel’s end must be nearing. Rays of sunlight are beginning to seep into ...”

Grignr clameed his right hand over Carthena’s mouth and with a slight struggle pulled her over to the shadows at the right hand wall of the path, while at the same time thrusting this torch beneath an overhanging stone to smother its flickering rays. “Be silent; I can hear footfalls approaching through the tunnel;” growled Grignr in a hushed tone.

“All that you hear are the horses corraled at the far end of the tunnel. That is a further sign that we are nearing our goal.” She stated!

“All that you hear is less than I hear! I heard footsteps coming towards us. Silence yourself that we may find out whom we are being brought into contact with. I doubt that any would have thought as yet of searching this passage for us. The advantage of surprize will be upon our side.” Grignr warned.

Carthena cast her eyes downward and ceased any further pursuit towards conversation, an irritating habit in which she had gained an amazing proficiency. Two figures came into the pairs view, from around a turn in the tunnel. They were clothed in rich luxuriant silks and rambling o on in conversation while ignorant of their crouch-ing foes waiting in an ambush ahead.

“...That barbarian dog is cringing beneath the weight of the lash at this very moment sire. He shall cause no more disturbance.”

“Aye, and so it is with any who dare to cross the path of Sargon’s chosen one.” said the 2nd man.

“But the peasants are showing signs of growing unrest. They complain that they cannot feet their families while burdened with your taxes.”

“I shall teach those sluts the meaning of humility! Order an immediate increase upon their taxes. They dare to question my sovereign authority, Ha-a, they shall soon learn what true oppression can be . I will ... “

A shodowed bulk leapt from behind a jutting promontory as it brought down a double edged axe with the spped of a striking thought. One of the nobles sagged lifeless to the ground, skull split to the teeth.

Grignr gasped as he observed the bisected face set in its leering death agonies. It was Agafnd! The dead mans comrade having recovered from his shock drew a jewel encrusted dagger from beneath the folds of his robe and lunged toward the barbarians back. Grignr spun at the sound from behind and smashed down his crimsoned axe once more. His antagonist lunged howling to a stream of stagnent green water, grasping a spouting stump that had once been a wrist. Grignr raised his axe over his head and prepaired to finish the incomplete job, but was detered half way through his lunge by a frenzied screech from behind.

Carthena leapt to the head of the writhing figure, plunging a smoldering torch into the agonized face. The howls increased in their horrid intensity, stifled by the sizzling of roasting flesh, then died down until the man was reduced to a blubbering mass of squirming, insensate flesh.

Grignr advance to Carthena’s side wincing slightly from the putrid aroma of charred flesh that rose in a puff of thick white smog throughout the chamber. Carthena reeled slightly, staring dasedly downward at her gruesome handywork. “I had to do it ... it was Agaphim ... I had to, “ she exclaimed!

“Sargon should be more carful of his right hand men.” Added Grignr, a smug grin upon his lips. “But to hell with Sargon for now, the stench is becoming bother-some to me.” With that Grignr grasped Carthena around the waist leading her around the bend in the cave and into the open.

A ball of feral red was rising through the mists of the eastern horizon, disipating the slinking shadows of the night. A coral stood before the pair, enclos-ing two grazing mares. Grignr reached into a weighted down leather pouch dangling at his side and drew forth the scintillant red emerald he had obtained from the bloated idol. Raising it toward the sun he said, “We shall do well with bauble,eh!”

Carthena gaped at the gem gasping in a terrified manner “The eye of Argon, Oh! Kalla!” At this the gem gave off a blinding glow, then dribbled through Grignr’s fingers in a slimy red ooze. Grignr stepped back, pushing Carthena behind him. The droplets of slime slowly converged into a pulsating jelly-like mass. A single open-ing transfixed the blob, forminf into a leechlike maw.

Then the hideous transgressor of nature flowed towards Grignr, a trail of greenish slime lingering behind it. The single gap puckered repeatedly emitting a ghastly sucking sound.

Grignr spread his legs into a battle stance, steeling his quivering thews for a battle royal with a thing he knew not how to fight. Carthena wound her arms about her protectors neck, mumbling, “Kill it! Kill!”While her entire body trembled.

The thing was almost upon Grignr when he buried his axe into the gristly maw. It passed through the blob and clanged upon the ground. Grignr drew his axe back with a film of yellow-green slime clinging to the blade. The thing was seeming-ly unaffected. Then it started to slooze up his leg. The hairs upon his nape stoode on end from the slimey feel of the things buly, bulk. The Nautous sucking sound became louder, and Grignr felt the blood being drawn from his body. With each hiss of hideous pucker the thing increased in size.

Grignr shook his foot about madly in an attempt to dislodge the blob, but it clung like a leech, still feeding upon his rapidly draining life fluid. He grasp-ed with his hands trying to rip it off, but only found his hands entangled in a sickly gluelike substance. The slimey thing continued its puckering ; now having grown the size of Grignr’s leg from its vampiric feast.

Grignr began to reel and stagger under the blob, his chalk white face and faltering muscles attesting to the gigantic loss of blood. Carthena slipped from Grignr in a death-like faint, a morrow chilling scream upon her red rubish lips. In final desperation Grignr grasped the smoldering torch upon the ground and plunged it into the reeking maw of the travestry. A shudder passed through the thing. Grignr felt the blackness closing upon his eyes, but held on with the last ebb of his rapidly waning vitality. He could feel its grip lessoning as a hideous gurgling sound erupted from the writhing maw. The jelly like mass began to bubble like a vat of boiling tar as quavers passed up and down its entire form.

With a sloshing plop the thing fell to the ground, evaporating in a thick scarlet cloud until it reatained its original size. It remained thus for a moment as the puckered maw took the shape of a protruding red eyeball, the pupil of which seemed to unravel before it the tale of creation. How a shapeless mass slithered from the quagmires of the stygmatic pool of time, only to degenerate into a leprosy of avaricious lust. In that fleeting moment the grim mystery of life was revealed before Grignr’s ensnared gaze.

The eyeballs glare turned to a sudden plea of mercy, a plea for the whole of humanity. Then the blob began to quiver with violent convulsions; the eyeball shattered into a thousand tiny fragments and evaporated in a curling wisp of scarlet mist. The very ground below the thing began to vibrate and swallow it up with a belch.

The thing was gone forever. All that remained was a dark red blotch upon the face of the earth, blotching things up. Shaking his head, his shaggy mane to clear the jumbled fragments of his mind, Grignr tossed the limp female over his shoulder. Mounting one of the disgruntled mares, and leading the other; the weary, scarred barbarian trooted slowly off into the horizon to become a tiny pinpoint in a filtered filed of swirling blue mists, leaving the Nobles, soldiers and peasants to replace the missing monarch. Long leave the king ! ! ! !

by Jim Theis

winner of the Jay T. Rikosh award for excellence!

One Fine Day in the Stygian Haunts of Hell: Being the Lore and Legend of the Fabled “Eye of Argon”

by Darrell Schweitzer

Dear typesetters, proofreaders, copyeditors, Noble Editor, everyone―the following passage is entirely sic. Please try to get it into print exactly as I’ve typed it:

The weather beaten trail wound ahead into the dust racked climes of the baren land which dominates large portions of the Horogolian empire. Age worn hoof prints smothered by the sifting sands of time shone dully against the dust splattered crust of earth. The tireless sun cast its parching rays of incandescense from overhead, half way through its daily revolution. Small rodents scampered about, occupying themselves in the daily accomplishments of their dismal lives. Dust sprayed over three heaving mounts in blinding clouds, while they bore the burdonsome cargoes of their struggling overseers.

“Prepare to embrace your creators in the stygian haunts of hell, barbarian, gasped the first soldier.

“Only after you have kissed the fleeting stead of death, wretch!” returned Grignr.

A sweeping blade of flashing steel riveted from the massive barbarians hide enameled shield as his rippling right arm thrust forth, sending a steel shod blade to the hilt into the soldiers vital organs. The disemboweled mercenary crumpled from his saddle and sank to the clouded sward, sprinkling the parched dust with crimson droplets of escaping life fluid.

The enthused barbarian swilveled about, his shock of fiery red hair tossing robustly in the humid air currents as he faced the attack of the defeated soldier’s fellow in arms.

“Damn you,barbarian” Shrieked the soldier as he observed his comrade in death.

Okay, you can start preefrooding, er, I mean proofreading normally now. Whew! I don’t think I could have taken much more of that, and I have this nagging fear that somehow my trusty Apple II GS computer[1] will become infected and henceforth only be able to spew out ... Argonese.

The above passage is the opening of one of the true underground classics of the fantasy field, “The Eye of Argon,” by an otherwise unknown writer, Jim Theis. Formerly the secret, wicked pleasure of professionals, who gathered furtively to read aloud from Xeroxes of the manuscript until all broke down into hopeless convulsions of laughter, it has surfaced in the fan world and become almost a standard feature at science-fiction conventions. Already a large body of what can only be called legend has grown up about this fabled tale. And so, before things get out of hand, purely in the interests of Truth, I have decided to go public on the whole matter.

I first heard about what might have been “The Eye of Argon” shortly after I entered fandom in the late 1960s. I did not know its title then, only that “some kid once sent in a Barsoomian imitation and pros have been passing it around for laughs ever since.” Whether that was even a rumor of the “Eye,” or something else entirely, I’ll never know, but over the years I continued to encounter vague references to a manuscript so badly written that it was, as Somtow Sucharitkul would put it, “totally awesome,” which had, indeed, achieved such dubious immortality.

And then, in the early ‘80s, George Scithers got hold of a copy. With typical, wicked humor, he put it in the “Must Read” basket of Amazing submissions, and everyone who had read it before me was careful to write only the vaguest comments on the attached card: unique, archetypal, etc.

And when I read it, I quickly realized that this was in all probability the fabled Flying Dutchman manuscript, which had been in circulation for nearly twenty years!

Some while later, at one of George’s Last Friday parties, I participated in my first “Eye of Argon” reading, as fans and professionals sat around in a circle, giving dramatic readings of as much of the manuscript as possible before hysterical laughter made further progress impossible. It takes a strong mind to get beyond a few paragraphs. Diane Duane must be an exceptionally iron-willed lady, because, as I remember it, she was unusually good at “Argon”-reading. Either that, or she’d had practice.

It was our little secret then, but in the intervening years the secret had come out. At Balticon a couple years later I attended my first “Eye of Argon” contest (although certainly not the first to be held), wherein people were challenged to read the thing aloud perfectly. Awards and ribbons were given out. I know there was a Purple Prose Award, and even a Cracked Egg (for the contestant who made the biggest fool of himself). Roger MacBride Allen read under a special challenge. He had agreed to read a whole page of “The Eye of Argon” in front of an audience. If he failed, he would then and there shave off his beard. He brought razor and shaving cream to prove his seriousness.

Roger escaped the event still bearded, but it was a near thing for a while there. He skipped a sentence, and the judges ruled that he had to go on with a further half-page, and, as a further handicap, that people in the audience could act out what he was reading. And so we did. I played a door at one point, and Roger loomed over us, striding from chair to chair to get where the action was (since he was obliged to watch this silliness without breaking up laughing). This was heroic stuff, worthy of the barbarian Grignr himself. And the beard survived.

The rest of the contest was less fun, because it was done by Strict Rules. I was eliminated quickly for skipping an adjective. Hell, I can’t read my own work word-for-word perfectly, and always have to ad-lib a bit in my readings. The people who got the farthest read . . . very . . . slowly . . . and . . . carefully . . . and . . . not . . . very . . . dramatically.

The “Eye” readings at George’s were much funnier because they were free-form: minor errors allowed, dramatization much easier, the sole disqualifying factor being the reader breaking down into uncontrollable laughter.

Now, isn’t it a tad cruel for all of us to be ridiculing some poor would-be scrivner’s magnum opus and making a public, ongoing spectacle out of it?

No. Life ain’t a bed of roses. You are responsible for what you write.

The facts, as I know them, are these: the Work was discovered by the late Thomas Scortia about 1970 in a fanzine, described to me second- or third-hand as “as badly illustrated and printed as it was written.” Another noted SF writer carefully typed the text out, painstakingly preserving its unique spelling, punctuation, and syntax. Xeroxes have been circulating ever since. Over the years, the reputation of “the worst story ever written” has continued to grow, as the pro community, then the fans, like that curiously “swilvelling” barbarian, have become “enthused.”

There may well be hundreds of copies in circulation by now. It has allegedly been circulated over computer nets.

My own copy, made from George Scithers’s, is twenty-two pages long, single-spaced, with spaces between the paragraphs. On page 20 there occurs a lacuna in the text, and a little note: PAGE MISSING. This is the classical, or California Manuscript of “The Eye of Argon.”

But there seem to be others. At a “bad writing” panel at a Unicon one year someone whipped out a copy and we panelists did impromptu readings. That manuscript was slightly different, and did not have the PAGE MISSING notation. Whether some later copier had just closed the gap, or there actually was additional material, I could not tell just then. To date, no scholar has collated the variant texts.

The tale is, obviously enough, sword and sorcery of the classic sort. After sundry swordfights, a tavern scene with its inevitable wenches (and more swordfights), Grignr (pronounced, traditionally, “Grig-nir”) is arrested, brought before a sneering, decadent ruler, and tossed into a dungeon. Subsequent adventures involve another wench, more swordfights, and an encounter with the hideous cult of Argon. The hero ends up with an all-devouring blob stuck on his arm. I suppose you could call it a cliffhanger of sorts:

Grignr began to reel and stagger under the blob, his hcalk white face and faltering muscles attesting to the gigantic loss of blood. Carthena slipped from Grignr in a death-like faint, a morrow chilling scream upon her red rubish lips. In final desperation Grignr grasped the smoldering torch upon the ground and plunged it into the reeking maw of the travestry. A shudder passed through the thing. Grignr felt the blackness closing upon his eyes... He could feels its rip lessing as a hideous gurgling sound erupted from the writhing maw. The jelly like mass began to pubble like a vat of boiling tar...

As things progress, the prose gets even more convoluted and strange. There is a wonderful, very popular passage in which the afore-said wench kicks an evil priest right in the “urinary gland.” Grignr evades peril after peril. On page 14 we’re told, “If not for his keep auditory organs and lightning steeled reflexed [sic], Grignr would have been groping through the shadowed hell-pits of the Grim Reaper.” The fabled Eye itself is that rarest of jewels, “a dull red emerald” which serves as, you guessed it, the cyclopean eyeball of the dread Idol of the aforementioned hideous cult of Argon. An actual description of this enormous statue strains our author’s verbal skills to the utmost:

The fantastic size of the idol in consideration of its being of pure ade [Sic--”ade” is perhaps a substance unknown to mineralogical science, or maybe just a typo for “jade.”-D.S. [2] was enough to cause the senses of any man to stagger and rece, yet thus was not the case for the behemoth. he had paid only casual notice to this incredible fact, while riveting the whole of his attention upon the jewel protruding from the idol’s eye socket; its masterfully cut faucets [Yes! Sic! Faucets!!--D.S.] emitting blinding rays of hypnotising beauty.

I repeat, should we really be making fun of this?

I repeat, too, hell yes. I point out the public in publication.

Were this a submitted manuscript, editors might save a few choice passages for their “funny file,” but it would never go further, since a certain professional confidence exists between the editor and the author of an unpublished manuscript. However, Mr. Theis apparently published this thing in a fanzine, and put his name on it, so it belongs to the Ages now.

Well, not exactly. Legally, it still belongs to Mr. Theis, whoever he is. Many fans have expressed a desire to republish the “Eye” or sell cassettes of the readings, or otherwise exploit it, but they can’t, because it is under the protection of Saint Copyright the Inviolate. First, to truly determine the history of this thing, someone will have to find and document the original publication. If the fanzine was in fact un-copyrighted and intended for general circulation rather than as a private letter-substitute (i.e., there’s a price on it), that would put the “Eye” in the public domain, but ripping it off would still be uncalled for. One does not pirate the work of living authors, copyrighted or not. [3]

Now, I mentioned some of the legends that have grown up around the “Eye.” The most persistent rumors are that it is actually the work of a famous pro, written as a parody, or that someone, somewhere has found the author and he still thinks the story is good.

As for the first rumor, don’t believe it. No literate person could write something so unmitigated-twenty-two single-spaced pages of such prose! My own theory is that it’s the work of a kid, about fifteen or so, who knew nothing about life, barbarians, or storytelling other than what he’d gleaned from comic books and sword & sorcery novels. Every single image in the story is utterly derivative and stereotyped. His overwriting, misspellings, and innocence of English usage are too relentless to be faked. I believe he wrote “The Eye of Argon” in all seriousness.

But what else is new? I wrote some stories nearly as bad when I was that age. So did a lot of people who are now widely-published, professional authors. On the plus side, this kid had a certain sense of structure, and an important writerly virtue--he persisted. He wrote a story in the neighborhood of 12,000 words. Before you completely dismiss him as being beyond the pale, stop and think how many people who say they “have wonderful ideas but no time to write them” will ever accomplish as much as Jim Theis did.

Now as for someone locating him, I am not convinced by that report either. It’s something many people want to believe, or would like to claim, but there is no proof.

I imagine the real Jim Theis is now in his thirties or early forties. He may well have even turned out to be a writer in some other field. I doubt he has the vaguest inkling of the immortality his juvenile effusion has achieved.

But I wish he would come forward and identify himself, and, good-naturedly, have a laugh along with the rest of us.

Note: an earlier version of this article appeared in the final issue of Fantasy Review, which was sadly ironic because, of course, it never got any feedback, from the elusive Mr. Theis or anyone else.

1997 UPDATE

As this book goes to press, the mystery of “The Eye of Argon” remains unsolved. When the second version of this essay appeared in a fanzine, I still got no response. Mr. Theis remains as elusive as ever, and the subject of the equivalent of “urban legends,” which tell how so-and-so contacted the author of “Eye,” who then disappeared again, etc.

The most tantalizing clue to come into my hands is a xerox of what purports to be the original pages of the fanzine in which “Eye” first appeared. All I can tell you is that the illustrations are crude little sketches, and that there are no ads, running heads, or other incidentals which would reveal anything at all about the source. Is it the source at all, or perhaps a later, unauthorized republication?

There do seem to be textual variants. There is no “page missing” gap. and some of me most beloved malapropisms, such as the gelatinous mass that “pubbles” up Grignr’s leg at the end, are not present. Alas, it merely “bubbles.”

Quite possibly, then, the text has been “improved” in transmission, as part of what anthropologists would call “the folk process.”

In the end, there is only the mystery ...

[1] An electronic device used extensively during the Late Devouring Period, which resembled a modern computer in many aspects, but would surely befuddle a 21st century user because it had NO HARD DRIVE. Mine was an extra souped-up version with a whopping 4 megabytes of memory, most of which was squandered on the desktop. While hopeless for higher functions, it actually ran a better word-processor than anything currently on the market and got through Y2K without a hiccup. Despite my fears of its endlessly spewing Argonese this marvelous device was actually 100% virus-proof, by the simple expedient of being too obsolete for anybody to bother to write a virus in its operating system. See also: MASTODON HIDE, CLAY TABLET, ORACLE BONES.

[2] Under intense magnification, the scanned image of the original reveals the faintest possible partial image of a “j” at this point in the text. It is entirely possible that the next copy through the mimeograph machine it would have been completely invisible. R.M.A. (ed).

[3] Mr. Theis has since passed away, and examination of the original fanzine performed since Mr. Schweitzer wrote this essay make it virtually certain that it bore no declaration of copyright, was not a private-letter substitute, and was in some cases sold for money, (though not much), all of which renders moot the question of respecting the wishes of a living author and puts the work in the public domain. R.M.A. (ed).

In Search of Jim Theis

By Lee Weinstein

The weather beaten trail wound ahead into the dust racked climes of the baren land which dominates large portions of the Norgolian empire.

Thus begins the tale, “The Eye of Argon,” which has become a hilarious staple of science fiction convention programming over the last several decades. Most regular attendees of conventions have at one time or another come across the program item known as the “Eye of Argon” reading. People sit in a circle and take turns reading from a photocopies of the story. The reader’s turn is over when he begins to laugh uncontrollably.

“The Eye of Argon,” with its malapropisms, typos and inimitable turns of phrase has earned a reputation as the apotheosis of bad writing.

The story itself, an 11,000-word novelette, is a sword and sorcery adventure featuring a Conanesque barbarian named Grignr who attempts to get the titular jewel, the eye of an idol. The story ends abruptly as Grignr is about to be engulfed by bubbling ooze.

The story is purported to be a naive work by an inexperienced would-be writer. But rumors have circulated to the present day that the story was written as a deliberate send-up by a professional. It is easy to see why. The word choices and mistakes seem to be just a bit too much over the top.

“Grignr’s emerald green orbs glared lustfully at the wallowing soldier struggling before his chestnut swirled mount.”

“Gaping from its single obling socket was scintillating, many fauceted scarlet emerald, a brilliant gem seeming to possess a life all its own.”

“Aye. My people are not tarnished by petty luxuries and baubles.”

The sentences often sound like they were constructed like the “Mad-Libs” game from Mad Magazine where the author fills in the blanks with the most inappropriate word choices possible.

The story of the origin of “The Eye of Argon,” which I first heard in the late 70’s, had always struck me as a bit questionable. I had originally heard, years ago, that Dorothy Fontana, of Star Trek fame, had come across a mimeographed fanzine containing the story, and found it so unintentionally funny that she felt compelled to retype it and distribute photocopies to her friends. It gradually spread through fandom by photocopies and word of mouth, the original source being lost and forgotten in the process.

I always wondered why she would have retyped it rather than making a photocopy. It also seemed a little suspicious that the original fanzine was not cited in the copies. There was simply the title and the author’s name, Jim Theis. It was possible that the fanzine was badly printed and therefore difficult to copy, and she may have simply not bothered to cite the source, but it all sounded a little too convenient as an explanation for TEoA’s origin.

Furthermore, in later years I heard other versions of the story. In one, the fanzine had been found by the late author, Thomas Scortia. He had given it to Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and she had retyped it. According to another version of the story, current on the internet, the manuscript had simply been found abandoned at on a table at a convention. The existence of various versions of the origin story coupled with the lack of any sort of documentation seemed to lend credence to the persistent rumors it had been deliberately written by a pro.

In 1987, the story saw its first formal publication. Hypatia Press in Eugene, Oregon, reprinted the story as a pamphlet. The cover proclaimed the pamphlet as number one in the “Socialogical [sic] Explorations series. This was complete with chapter titles (the passed-around photocopies merely had chapter numbers), and illustrations by Lynne Adams. Suspiciously, there was no information concerning the supposed original fanzine printing. Darrell Schweitzer told me he had received from Alan Newcomer of Hypatia Press, around this time, a photocopy which was supposed to have been reproduced from the original fanzine, including some artwork. I examined it, and strangely, there was again no citation for the mysterious fanzine.

Also in 1987, possibly inspired by the above pamphlet, Schweitzer wrote an article on the subject, which appeared in Fantasy Review, entitled “One Fine Day in the Stygian Haunts of Hell: Being the Lore and Legend of the Fabled ‘The Eye of Argon.’”

Schweitzer’s article outlines the origins of the story as being retyped by an unidentified pro who got a fanzine from Thomas Scortia, notes the existence of variant texts circulating throughout fandom, and mentions the rumors of the story having been written by a professional. He also mentions rumors of the author having been found, still believing that his story was a good one. At the end of the article, Schweitzer asks that the real Jim Theis come forward and identify himself. When the essay was reprinted in Schweitzer’s essay collection, Windows of the Imagination in 1997, he adds a note that he received no feedback from the publication of the essay, because there were no further issues of Fantasy Review. He also adds a 1997 update in which he says a reprint of the essay, which appeared in a fanzine, drew no response and that “urban legends” about Theis continued to circulate around fandom.

I strongly suspected that there was no fanzine, and that someone, possibly a professional, had concocted the story as a hoax, and that the various versions of who had found the story were folklore.

That changed when toward the end of October, 2002, I received an email, forwarded by a friend. The email claimed that the author of TEoA, Jim Theis, had been found. A little startled, I decided to find out once and for all where TEoA had come from.

The email I had received contained a link to the website of a British fan named Susan Stepney. Stepney had quite a tribute to the story on her website, including various versions that had been translated into foreign languages and back again.

She also mentioned that Jim Theis had been interviewed on an SF related radio talk show in Los Angeles called Hour 25. The catch was, the interview had taken place in 1984. But she said she had heard tapes of the interview.

According to Stepney, Theis had written the story when he was about 16. She also noted that he had gone on to be a writer and that there were other stories about Grignr.

I wondered how it was possible that the author of the infamous “Eye of Argon” had appeared on the radio in Los Angeles where he must have been heard by at least several hundred fans, and yet news of this was only now surfacing?

When I read it through more thoroughly, though, I found the statement that the interview might not actually have aired.

About a year or so earlier, I had scanned the internet for information on Theis and TEoA and found nothing but postings of the story itself.

Now I was curious. Had there really been such an interview? I found a website for the radio show and contacted the archivist by email.

Then I followed some links and discovered an interesting quote attributed to author Stephen Goldin. Goldin was quoted as saying that during a convention he had met a woman who told him she had turned the crank on the mimeo for the Ozark-area fanzine that contained the story.

This was interesting. The fanzine was still unnamed, but now I knew that it was supposed to have been in the Ozark area.

Nonetheless, there was no solid information. Just that an unnamed woman at an unnamed convention had helped to crank out an unnamed fanzine.

In searching about the web I found a website called Wulf’s “Eye of Argon” Shrine. The webmaster made the statement that for all the horrible writing, the story was actually well paced and plotted. He went on to say that, although he didn’t believe it himself, “at least one SF professional today claims that the story was a cunning piece of satire passed off as real fan fiction.”

There seemed to be little else on the web, aside from endless repostings of the story itself, one of which was done up as a Mystery Science Theater 3000 pastiche. I decided to contact Stephen Goldin. But first, I turned my attention to the Usenet groups.

And here I began to hit pay dirt. First I found a rumor that in the original fanzine, the story had appeared with illustrations by the author.

Then I found a question posted to the alt.sf lovers group asking if TEoA had been a deliberate attempt at a joke or was really an honest amateurish effort. The asker suspected the former because he believed one had to know what one was doing to write something so consistently funny. He also noted that no serious writer would use headings like “chapter 3 ½” or make reference to a “red emerald.”

There were two replies to his question. One was from a fan, who claimed to have seen the original mimeo and said he knew the people who had transcribed it into electronic format. However, he provided no solid information.

But the second response was from a fan named Rich Zellich who was involved in running Archon, the St. Louis regional convention. Since Archon is run by the Ozark Science Fiction Association, or its current descendant, this seemed to corroborate what Goldin had been told. Zellich said that not only was Jim Theis real, but that he was a regular attendee at the convention.

This was indeed news. I was about to email Mr. Zellich when I noticed the date on all three postings. They were all from 1991. This was old news. I would have to find out if Zellich was still at the same address. Somehow, it seemed, the mysterious Mr. Theis was still a regular con-goer a decade ago and yet was unknown to the rest of fandom, except as a byline on a widely circulated story. Even now, over a decade later.

I found the website for Archon, and discovered they had conveniently archived lists of guests for years past. I went back to the list for 1996, and sure enough, there was a Jim Theis listed.

I decided to look further on the newsgroups. I then came up with a posting from 1994 from a Richard Newsome. And here was the smoking gun. Here was the critical piece of information. According to Newsome, the story had originally appeared in a fanzine called Osfan, in issue 10. Here was the long missing citation. It was beginning to look as if the dubious sounding origin story of “Eye” had a kernel of truth to it after all.

Newsome followed this information up in another posting which contained a transcription of an interview with Theis published in Osfan 13 a few months later.

This is most of the interview as posted, with some material about local fan politics deleted:

OSFAN: What did you think of your story “Eye of Argon” in Osfan 10?

THEIS: I admit I did make a few mistakes. But then, I’m just 16 years old. The editing that was done to it did not help it. In the future, if I have anything published I would appreciate it if it were published as it was written.

OSFAN: Is there anything in “Eye of Argon” that you would have changed now that you have re-read it in Osfan 10?

THEIS: In fact, I have changed it. I went over it for an independent study for English in school. You know, like adjectives changed and places where sentences should be deleted; things of this type. Even so it is nothing to be proud of and yet it is. Because how many people have had their first story published at 16 -- even if it is in a fanzine or a club-zine? How many professional writers have written a complete story at so early an age? Even so, “Eye of Argon” isn’t great. I basically don’t know much about structure or composition.

OSFAN: Are you now working on structure, composition and grammar?

THEIS: Yes I am but it is difficult because I’m still in high school and must work on my writing in my spare time. Basically, these books on English composition haven’t taught me anything I didn’t know but they are showing me how to put them (composition, grammar, etc.) into a working order.

OSFAN: I am personally proud of your story for Osfan 10, in the sense that it is more than I could have done. Also, the fact that when they were kidding you about it, you took it so well. I think you should be given a pat on the back for such good sportsmanship. You showed real character.

THEIS: I didn’t know that. I mean, it was easier than showing bad character and inviting trouble.

Was this interview genuine? Or was it part of an elaborate put-on?

The ultimate answer would lie in Osfan 10 itself, if it indeed existed. Getting a hold of a possibly obscure 30 year-old fanzine might have proved to be a problem. But Temple University in Philadelphia houses the David Paskow Collection, a science fiction research collection which includes an enormous selection of fanzines. I checked their catalogue, and happily, they owned a copy of Osfan #10.

Meanwhile I received a reply from the archivist at the radio station. He essentially confirmed that he did have the interview somewhere, but he couldn’t put his hands on it at the moment, and that he wasn’t sure if he’d be posting it. But it was now a moot point.

I went to the Temple campus at the first available opportunity.

Osfan was the official fanzine of the Ozark Science Fiction Association and came out on a more or less monthly basis.

Osfan #10, is a mimeographed fanzine, the cover of which has a drawing of something that looks like a cross between an alligator and Barney the Dinosaur. Above it, in imitation gothic-style letting, is the word “Ghod.” Also on the cover are the words “The August 21st issue of the monthly publication of the Ozark Science Fiction Association. There was no year indicated anywhere, but according to the library catalog it was published in 1970. The postmark on it was dated 1971.

The contents are typical for a fanzine of the period. There are con reports, poetry, fan art, and local gossip. But my attention was immediately drawn to the last item listed on the table of contents: “The Eye of Argon” (novelette) by Jim Theis.

And there it was. The rumor that it was illustrated by the author was not true. There were some spot illos interspersed in the text, but they were by different artists and were not connected to the story.

As for the missing page at the end, alas, it was still missing. In fact, there were at least two pages missing. The last page of the issue I held, page 46, leaves off as Grignr warns his companion to be quiet as they sneak through a tunnel. The bubbling ooze doesn’t make its appearance until a couple of pages later.

I then took a look at Darrell Schweitzer’s photocopy which was supposed to have come from the original fanzine. The copy included a handwritten note across the top of the front page, which read: “Dear Quinn – Here is a piece of FINE writing we can enjoy – Tom”. Sure enough, it matched up, spot illo for spot illo with the Osfan text. The photocopy, however, went to page 48 and the bubbling ooze. The note seemed to confirm the story that it had been sent to Chelsea Quinn Yarbro from Thomas Scortia.

The issue also contained an article, by Jim Theis, giving an account of a party he had recently attended. Theis was an active fan at the time.

Meanwhile, while recounting my researching adventures to a friend, he told me that he had just been to an Archon about a month previously (2002). He told me that he had attended the “Eye of Argon” reading, and had heard an announcement there that Jim Theis had passed away.

I emailed Rich Zellich after all, and he confirmed the story. Theis had indeed passed away, although he didn’t have any details.

He referred me to a friend of Theis’s. I’ve emailed this person several times, but have never received a response.

But it was clear that Theis was a good sport about the whole thing, often attending the readings.

In any case, it was now clear that TEoA was a sincere effort by a 16 year old rather than a deliberate hoax. But there were a few questions remaining. There was still the matter of the variant versions of how the story came to be circulated in fandom.

This is what Chelsea Quinn Yarbro had to say in a personal communication of 9/9/03 to Darrell Schweitzer:

Tom Scortia sent me the fanzine pages as a kind of shared amusement, since both of us tended to look for poor use of language in stories. Don Simpson and I were still married then, and one of our entertainments was reading aloud to each other. This work was such a mish-mash that we took turns reading it to each other until we could bear no more….

About two weeks after the story arrived, we had a dinner party, mainly for MWA and book dealer friends, and Joe Gores got to talking about some of the really hideous language misuse he had seen in recent anthology submissions, and had brought along a few of the most egregious. I mentioned I had something that put his examples in the shade, and brought out “The Eye of Argon.” It was a huge hit. Tom Whitmore asked if he could make a copy of it, and I loaned it to him, and readings of it started to become a hideous entertainment. I never typed out a copy of it, but I am afraid I did start the ball rolling.

I contacted Stephen Goldin and asked about whether Dorothy Fontana had been involved. He sent the details in a personal communication of 9/9/03:

I first encountered TeoA while visiting Quinn’s house, and loved it so much I imposed on her to make a copy for me, which I took back home to Los Angeles. I saw to it that the story got read on as many occasions as possible, and my copy was getting pretty tattered. One year, for my birthday, Dorothy Fontana lovingly retyped and bound a copy for me (a very difficult job, since she attempted to retain all the original typos.) That’s how she came into the picture, but she by no means discovered it. The blame rests solely on Tom Scortia’s shoulders.

These communications cleared up the confusion surrounding how the copies of the story had become generally spread around fandom. But I was left with another, more troublesome question.. How was it possible that Mr. Theis and his story had begun to accrete layers of folklore and misinformation when in fact he had remained in fandom until quite recently?

There are other examples of such occurrances. For example, I have come across rumors circulating on Usenet groups that horror writer Thomas Ligotti does not exist. Some fans have theorized that Ligotti’s stories are by another writer who is using the name Ligotti as a disguise.

This is undoubtedly because Ligotti is a reclusive writer who never attends conventions or makes public appearances.

But Theis apparently remained active, attending local conventions and being interviewed on the radio.

But there is a more striking example outside of fandom. In the 1950’s there was a popular pin-up model named Bettie (or sometimes Betty) Page. She appeared in all manner of men’s magazines and nudie-cutie film loops. In 1957 she gave up her modeling career and suddenly dropped from sight. Her photos and films, however, steadily gained in popularity. Bettie became a cult figure of monumental proportions as the sixties segued into the seventies and eighties. There were Bettie posters, Bettie dolls, and Bettie magazines. But Bettie herself seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth.

Decades went by. Rumors circulated about her fate. Some thought she had been murdered. Others thought she had left the country. Periodically, there were Elvis-like Bettie sightings.

Then in 1992 a reporter managed to solve the mystery, and traced her whereabouts through a brother. It seemed that in the late 1957 Bettie had moved to Florida, joined an evangelical church, and became a born-again Christian. All the while her image had been rising to cult status, she herself had been traveling around the country attending bible colleges, and doing missionary work. At one point she was in the Billy Graham Crusade. For about 35 years the Bettie Page cult phenomenon had spread while Bettie Page herself had criss-crossed the country, each unaware of the other.

When she was finally found and contacted in the early 1992, she was totally astounded (and actually pleased!) that she had become an icon.

However, while Bettie Page story is written on a canvas that covers the entire United States and involves two separate sub-cultures that have little overlap, the Jim Theis story takes place in the presumably single subculture of science fiction fandom.

This I will have to leave to sociologists to figure out.

As for Theis’ intent in writing the story, I will again quote Stephen Goldin:

For years I heard debate about whether it was a deliberate parody or simply that bad. At a Westercon a few years ago I met a woman who’d known Jim Theis, and in fact turned the crank on the mimeo that printed the story. She said he was very earnest about it – and that there were more stories of Grignr the Ecordian!

Then there is the matter of the missing pages. It was unfortunate that the copy of Osfan #10 I found was missing even more than the standard circulating version, which ended on page 48 of Osfan 10 with the words, “the jelly like mass began to bubble like a vat of boiling tar as quivers passed up and down its entire form.” Surely there are complete issues of this fanzine out there somewhere.

Finally, after my research was all said and done, an item was brought to my attention that appeared in Ansible # 193. In it Dave Langford printed a report from Michael Swanwick saying:

I had a surprising conversation at Readercon with literary superstar Samuel R. Delany, who told me of how at an early Clarion the students and teachers had decided to see exactly how bad a story they could write if they put their minds to it. Chip himself contributed a paragraph to the round robin effort. Its title? “The Eye of Argon.”

I attempted to contact Mr. Delany by email, but received no response. Langford does add the note, however, that Delany was surely misremembering something. This is evidently the case.

I have no doubt that rumors will continue to circulate about sightings of Mr. Theis and the professional origins of the tale. During the TEoA reading at Philcon in December of 2003 I heard fans wondering aloud if the story was a hoax.

***

I originally ended the foregoing article with the following plea:

“… if anyone, anywhere has a complete copy of Osfan10, please speak up. Fandom is waiting to hear the exciting conclusion of “The Eye of Argon!”

That plea was soon to be answered.

Shortly after my article, appeared in NYSFR, I found a message on my answering machine. It was from a woman who identified herself as Melveta Walker of the Golden Library of the University of New Mexico. She wanted to know if I was the Lee Weinstein who had written the recent article in The New York Review of Science Fiction, and that if I were, would I please call them back and ask for Gene Bundy.

Curious, I called the number she had given me. Mr. Bundy was away for the Thanksgiving holiday, but I was informed by the graduate student who answered that Gene Bundy was the special collections librarian at the University and was in charge of the Jack Williamson collection, which she explained was the third largest collection of science fiction material in the world. Mr. Bundy had wanted me to contact him because he had the missing final page of “The Eye of Argon” and they were all quite excited about it. It was exciting news indeed, and the following Monday I spoke to Gene Bundy himself.

He told me they had just inventoried and re-housed their enormous collection of fanzines, and after reading my article, he had searched the collection and found a pristine copy of Osfan 10. The fanzine was bound with staples, and the final page had evidently been lost from most copies, but this particular copy, which had been owned by Jack Williamson, was intact. The library staff felt that finding the intact fanzine helped to justify the enormous amount of work put into maintaining the collection.

Mr. Bundy graciously sent me a photocopy of the missing final page which I have transcribed. It saw the light of day for the first time in 34 years at Philcon 2004 on Dec. 10th, when it was read aloud by the winner of the annual “Eye of Argon” reading at the end of the session.

At the end of the final page, following Theis’s byline, are the words “winner of the Jay T. Rikosh award for excellence.” Who Rikosh is or was or what the significance of the award was, I have no idea. [1]

A Google search revealed nothing. But “The Eye of Argon,” for better or worse, is now complete.

Unless, of course, someone decides to find out if Jim Theis had really written further tales of the adventures of Grignr the Barbarian.

Lee Weinstein

Philadelphia

[1] It has since come to light that Jay T. Rikosh was the artist whose illustrations graced the original text of “The Eye of Argon” in Osfan #10.

A Drippingly Sincere Apology (Plus Bonus Obsessive Analysis)

by

Roger MacBride Allen

Publisher of FoxAcre Press

Although the title of this article suggests that I’ll be making one apology, I think I need to go a bit further―not just one apology, but a whole raft of them. Let’s get started.

Turning immediately to the sad, awkward, semi-Brechtian element of the whole affair, my first apology is due to the author of The Eye of Argon, James F. Theis. The publicly-known substantive facts concerning Mr. Theis are scanty at best, and can be derived from the Social Security Death index and the publication date of the story. He was born August 9, 1953. He wrote Argon in 1970, at age sixteen, and it was published just a few days short of his seventeenth birthday. He died March 26, 2002 in Missouri at age forty-eight, cause of death not known.

It seems likely he was not aware of the odd sort of fame his work had earned for him until some years after the first digital version started to circulate, but he did know about it by 1984 at the latest when he was interviewed on the subject.

To have a dumb thing you did when you were a dumb kid be the thing for which you are remembered, have it be the only reason people are interested in you, must, at the very least, be off-putting.

The facts concerning Mr. Theis are so sketchy that just about any sort of narrative theme could be hung off them. To wit:

* Mr. Theis was barely aware of the whole hullaballoo and shrugged it off on the rare occasions when it came to his attention. At some unspecified time after writing Argon he concluded he would never write again, simply because he never felt like it, or got around to it. Maybe writing Argon got the writing bug out of his system, or showed him how hard a job it was.

* Mr. Theis was scarred for life, so humiliated by the ridicule that he swore never to write another word. His death at an early age from unknown causes was perhaps in some way connected to this most peculiar burden he was forced to carry.

* Mr. Theis was intensely ambivalent about the whole thing, glad of the attention, but mortified by the words on the page that were the source of the attention.

* Mr. Theis laughed off his youthful indiscretion, framing it in his own mind as part of the goofy clubhouse atmosphere of the science fiction group that published Osfan 10, the fanzine in which Argon appeared.

I suspect that, since real life is complicated, and since human beings are too, and since The Truth rarely boils down to just one answer to just one question, the real state of affairs was that he experienced all of the above reactions, and probably others as well.

To put it another way, there is at least a whisper of tragedy at the back of all the hoots and hollers of laughter that The Eye of Argon has produced over the years. EoA is, after all, someone’s ambitious attempt to accomplish something hard to do. However, it is, by any standard, a resounding failure—a failure so complete that many people over the years thought it must be a fake, a deliberate attempt to write the worst story in history.

A Salute to Failure

But, before laughing too hard, to be blunt about it―hell, you try it. As I have noted in other venues and contexts over the years, I have always gone back and forth between believing that writing a book is something that any damned fool could do, and concluding that writing good prose and a good story demands a combination of rare skills. Argon is, beyond question, evidence for the latter position.

Over the years, I have read over many a student manuscript. Some were good. Some should have been published. But a far larger number were a lot closer to the Eye of Argon end of the scale. However, the roughly 11,500 words of Argon represent about 10,000 more words of stick-to-it-tiveness than the vast majority of would-be-writers exhibit.

In fact, call the length of EoA equal to a new unit of measure I have just made up—the Grignr. [1] It has been said that a writer has to write a million words of bad prose in order to develop the skills to write good prose. That works out to 87 Grignrs. That might be high. Maybe you only need to do about five or ten Grignrs of writing to work your way up from bad to indifferent to acceptable to good. But that first Grignr is the hardest. And perhaps the worst. One could argue that Mr. Theis' only two mistakes were that he didn’t shove The Eye of Argon in a drawer, and that he didn’t immediately start writing something else.

And it’s not just wannabes who have problems. Speaking as an editor, I have, twice in the last year, read previously published books submitted to me by professional writers seeking to have them reissued by FoxAcre Press. I emphasize these were books that already been published. Both books had real merits. Both had serious flaws. In both cases, I believe, the flaws were produced in large part by the hurry-up-and-wait, stall-then-panic, don’t-spend -enough-money to-do-it- right but-act-surprised and find-someone-else-to-blame when-you-produce-a-money-losing-disaster culture that pervades far too much of publishing. By sheer chance, my notes regarding these professionally written and published books ran to almost exactly two Grignrs per title. My editorial notes on two other books I have just published worked out to about another Grignr each per title. I myself have received editorial notes on some of my books there were of roughly one Grignr in length.

Okay, part of what my generating editorial notes of a Grignr in length tells me is that I tend to write overly-detailed notes. But it also says that even the pros can muck things up enough that fixing the problems takes lots of work―work that doesn’t always get done.

I was once invited to blurb a book by a noted Big Name Author, as edited by one of the biggest Big Name Editors in the field. I received an advance reading copy in the mail. In other words, it was the book as it was after proofreading and editing and all the other quality-checking steps in the process, all of it done or overseen by the Big Name Editor.

Practically every fiction-writing class or manual or workshop or essay includes the urgent advice that the opener, the lead, is one of the most important parts of a story. It’s the front door and the welcome mat. Writers are urged to polish that opener, to use it as a means of setting the tone for all that will follow. Get the opener right, and you’re letting the reader know that he or she is in good hands. Get it wrong, and you are more or less telling the reader the rest will be even worse.

The first sentence on the first page of this book by a Big Name Author was, shall we say, every bit as undisciplined as anything in Argon.[2] The text that followed was likewise stilted, awkward, and about as wooden as the pulp used to make the paper it was printed on. The point is even pros can dig themselves into pretty deep holes, and that the process of getting published is no sure defense against error.

Writing is a tough job.

And, while allowing that The Eye of Argon is unreadably bad, one could at least make the argument that there are some hints of talent faintly visible behind the smoggy clouds of scrambled syntax and incoherent sentences. Mr. Theis writes with an undeniable enthusiasm. None of his prose is boring. His imagery, while absurdly overdrawn and very often incomprehensible, is, to say the least, vivid.

It is not impossible to imagine some alternate universe where Mr. Theis did stick Argon in a drawer, shaking his head ruefully as he slid that drawer shut, and then set to work on something else. A universe where he persevered and wrote maybe ten or twenty or thirty more Grignrs of bad prose that gradually got better. A universe where he got his sentences under control, stopped endlessly rereading pastiches of Conan the Barbarian, and worked through his other weak spots, and became at least a semi-pro writer who good-naturedly accepted the ribbing over his embarrassing juvenilia (assuming he ever let it see the light of day) while autographing the copies of Analog or F&SF or Asimov’s that included one of his rare but eagerly awaited stories. Granted, it takes some real doing to imagine that universe—but we are, after all, dealing with the genre of speculative fiction. We’re entitled to speculate.

Let us praise Mr. Theis not only for writing, but for having the courage to put his work out there. I remember writing something or other when I was just about the age Mr. Theis was when he wrote Argon. I have no recollection of what it was, but I remember very clearly how scary it was to let it out there, even a tiny bit. Sitting in my bedroom one day, I handed it to my best friend, just to show him that I’d written something. And he sat there, right in front of me, and actually read it. It was terrifying. I’ve known endless wannabe writers who have been working on whatever-it-is for years, but still “aren’t ready” to show it to anyone. Mr. Theis had the nerve to hang his story out there for everyone to see—and not just total strangers or faceless editors, but all his friends in the Ozark Science Fiction Association.

He took chances―and, sad to say, failed catastrophically, failed beyond his wildest dreams, failed his way into a peculiar and unwanted sort of immortality. He failed so completely that forty-plus years later, his failure still inspires an eccentric sort of scholarship as science fiction and fantasy fandoms seeks to know more about what has become almost a founding legend of the field. But, failure or not―he tried. Many don’t

There is a whisper, too, of gallows humor, of better-you-than-me in the loud laughter that follows every reading of The Eye of Argon. Every person who has ever typed more than a few lines of prose has put an unintentional howler down on paper. Anything you put Out There (including this essay) offers someone Out There the chance to show just how wrong, stupid, and incompetent you are. The satisfaction of getting a dozen good reviews is easily overwhelmed by the frustrated angst produced by one marginally literate amateur critic (who is a likely a failed wannabe) using bad grammar to slag your work. Every writer has the secret—or not-so-secret—fear that his or her next work will be the next paragon of badness, the next legendarily failed piece of work—the next Eye of Argon.

So, Mr. Theis, hats off. You got out there. You tried. You took chances. I apologize for, and truly feel some ambivalence about, being one of the gang that gets a laugh out of your efforts.

Public Domain Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry

One thing that, so far as I understand it, I don’t have to apologize for is a violation of copyright. As I understand the copyright law as it pertains to the time and place and circumstances of The Eye of Argon’s publication, it was never in copyright in the first place. Today, the mere creation of a work causes it to be copyrighted. For works published in 1970, one actually had to follow a pretty simple procedure in order to protect the work, and the publication in which The Eye of Argon appeared apparently did not follow that procedure. It would be nifty if someone could produce a scan of the entire edition of Osfan 10. As I understand it, if the fanzine did not include a copyright notice, that would be game over, and the last shred of doubt would be gone, and it would firmly established beyond possible cavil that The Eye of Argon was in the public domain. As it stands now, with the odds at about 99% in favor of public domain, the author passed away, no sign of a literary heir or executor, and multiple copies of the text all over the Internet, I am coming down on the side of the text and illustrations being in the public domain.

If the author were still alive and had opinions about the use of his work, or if he had taken any steps to secure the copyright of his work during his lifetime, we’d all be bound to respect that, regardless of formal copyright status. Instead, Mr. Theis left Argon out there, available to all. There is no indication that, between 1984, the latest date he could have learned the work was circulating, and his death in 2002, that he took any steps to protect the work or prevent or protest its distribution.

And Now, Back to Our Story

I suppose this would be as good a point as any for bringing the story of EoA up to date. The previous essays in this book carried us through the early, or mythical period, and the later, or confirmatory period, where the basic facts regarding the author (such as his existence) were nailed down. We have now entered what might be styled the post-Argonian period: briefly put, through the wonders of the Internet, interested parties have managed to locate, scan, and post the original pages of The Eye of Argon, along with some other supporting documents. See the end of this essay for links to these documents. Kudos to all who took part in tracking down the text.

The scans of the originals I used to produce this edition and the companion (free) Somewhat Official Competitive Reading Edition (SOCRE) [3] were posted online by Dave Langford at ansible.co.uk. The SOCRE Argon replicates, as nearly as possible, the precise line-by-line appearance of the original edition—including the drawings. The overly interested reader is invited to do what I did: download the Ansible scans and study them far too closely.

Apologies and thanks are declared due and hereby rendered to Dave Langford and his website, as it was it was from there that I not only filched my copies of the scanned pages, but also snagged the original illustrations, as well as one of two versions of the digital text I used to produce the SOCRE Argon.

There are always loose ends that it would be nice to tidy up, but the mysteries surrounding the Origin of The Text must now be considered essentially solved―which frees up Argonic (Grignrian?) scholars to obsess over the actual text and glean whatever information they can from the clues in the document.

The Obsessive and Pointless Analysis of the Document Images

The scans at Ansible include a drawing that appears on the page before the start of EoA, and also include the back page of Osfan (which is the reverse side of the last page of the story). This back page likewise includes a drawing, along with an address block for purposes of mailing the fanzine. The drawing on the back cover is of a young woman in modern dress wearing glasses, and is obviously not related to EoA.

The value of this page is that it adds tremendously to the evidence of the genuineness of the fabled Lost Ending. As was discussed in Mr. Weinstein’s essay, the last page, the back page of the whole fanzine, was the most likely to tear away from the rest of the fanzine. It was for this simple reason that the end of the story was missing from the known copies.

Some claimed that the Lost Ending, as found on the Last Page, was a forgery, that it was too good (or, more accurately, not bad enough) to be part of the whole. One could argue the same for the typing on the Last Page―that, while no good, it is much better than what precedes it. But let us suppose that, by the end of the story, the person doing the typing―let us call this unknown person The Typist―was getting tired, and decided to take a break and come back to the task fresh. Maybe he or she started typing the last page but made so many mistakes on the first line he or she gave up and returned to it the next day.

If we compare the last-page typing to the typing on the first page of the story, rather than to the typing on the penultimate page, it is a lot closer in quality. The margins on the last page of the story are quite different from what has gone before, also suggesting it might have been done later. But the most obvious trait of The Typist is apparent on both first and last page, and on all the pages in between: a weak lower-case “g” much fainter than the other letters, appears again and again.

There is one last proof that this ending was no forgery. If one extracts the pages from the Ansible scans, converts them to image files, greatly enlarges them, and then uses the contrast and brightness controls of just about any image-viewing software, the staple holes on all the pages become visible. The holes on both the front and back of The Last Page are virtually invisible until they get this enhancement―and yet they match up perfectly with the holes on the other pages (and the holes are virtually invisible on many of those other pages).

Unless one posits that a Moriarty of Fannish Forgery has duped Dave Langford (or gasp! worse! unless Dave Langford is that Moriarty), and that said arch-criminal has produced forged scans that include details that confirm the document’s authenticity only when uncloaked, the Last Page and the Lost Ending are authentic.

Why I Left Stuff Out

Absent its forensic qualities, the reverse of the back page of Osfan is unrelated to EoA, and I have omitted it from the SOCRE Argon.

The drawing that precedes EoA in the Ansible scans bears the same signature (unfortunately, illegible in both cases [4]) as on the back-page drawing. It is of a nude woman of somewhat distorted and unlikely proportions [5] floating in mid-air in front of what might be a planet or perhaps a giant ball of string. A large rounded-rectangle area of dark shading or cross-hatching appears behind the planet or ball. The page has what appear to be three sets of staple holes along the right edge, indicating it is a left-hand, even-numbered page (though it bears no page number). These holes match up with all the other pages. There has been some suggestion that this drawing is related in some way to the story. I suspect that the drawing on this page, which faced the first page of Argon, was the graphic equivalent of THIS PAGE DELIBERATELY LEFT BLANK—something inserted to fill in a page when nothing else was handy.

Likely the editor of Osfan wanted EoA to start on a right-hand, odd-numbered page, and wanted something beside a blank on the left-hand page facing it—and/or the artist was eager to have the chance to do the drawing. My conclusion is that the nude-and-planet (or ball of string) had nothing to do with EoA, and so I have left it out of the SOCRE Argon.

It might well be that EoA was typed up separately from the rest of the fanzine, and merely dropped into the rest of the fanzine to fill out the issue. There is evidence to support this. The page numbers across the bottom of the pages are very slightly off-kilter from the text, suggesting that they were typed in later.

All this brings us to another apology that might or might not be due to Mr. Theis. Once again, it has to do with the typing of the manuscript. Explaining how will take a few paragraphs, so bear with me.

The Purpose of the SOCRE Argon

It starts with the project that caused me to look a little too hard at the Original Text. I decided to prepare the Somewhat Official Competitive Reading Edition (SOCRE) of The Eye of Argon. It is now available as a PDF file at foxacre.com/argon. In it, I have reproduced, word for word, line by line, page by page, the exact layouts of the original edition, including all the misplaced hyphens, bizarre indenting and crude illustrations.

Why did I do this thing? The de facto standard for a group reading of EoA in public is for a reader to get through an entire page, reading aloud, while not making any errors, but also while precisely duplicating the errors on the page, and, of course, without laughing. But how is the length of a page determined? Set your margins wide or narrow, choose a large or small typeface, and you can make the text on a page whatever length you want. And what of errors that could not appear in a simple text edition that ignored misplaced hyphens, and letters or whole words that were so faint as to be unreadable?

The SOCRE version of EoA levels the playing field by making sure every competition can use the same pages, and by making those pages as close as is practical to the original. It uses a typeface that is a reasonable facsimile of the typewriter text of the original, fades out the words and letters that are faded out, etc. True, some pages have more or fewer words, more or fewer distracting typos. Several pages have god-awful illustrations that cut the word count, but also make the words that are there harder to read. Who gets what page is more or less the luck of the draw. Life isn’t always fair—and neither is The Eye of Argon.

In order to prepare the SOCRE Argon, I had to examine the PDF of the original pages as provided by Dave Langford at ansible.co.uk in some detail.[6] I did not proofread the entire text (I couldn’t even bring myself to just plain read the entire text.) But, in the course of my work, new errors, errors that to the best of my knowledge had never before been documented, popped out at me. I began to spot patterns in the errors. And I came to the firm conclusion that The Typist, rather than The Writer, was responsible for many of the big laughs in EoA.

But were Typist and Writer the same person, or two different people displaying incompetence in two different skills? It is likely to remain an open question as to whether Mr. Theis did his own typing. I will leave it to scholars more obsessed than myself to compare the typed pages of EoA with the other surviving copies of Osfan from the pertinent period. The FBI might be able to determine if the same person used the same machine to do all the typing, but there are very few FBI agents active in fandom.

On the other hand, if Mr. Theis was the official Osfan typist, that explains how he was able to get EoA past the publication’s editor. Editors and publishers who can’t pay much—or anything at all—tend to have quite flexible standards, especially in regards to someone who has volunteered to do a lot of grunt work.

Leaving the forensic for the psychological, it is hard to imagine anyone but the author willingly taking on the task of typing out the full text of EoA. And yet, it is plain that there was some degree of collaboration. The illustrations (likewise reproduced in the SOCRE EoA) are not the work of Mr. Theis, but of a certain Jay T. Rikosh.

If I were forced to guess, I’d say it appears that the typing was done after the drawing on each page, with the possible exception of the strange little IYck creature on the bottom of page 38, and the drop-cap C at the top of page 47. It is impossible to know for sure.

It is also hard to tell if the illustrations actually have anything to do with the story. Perhaps the words were just typed onto ditto-masters onto which Mr. Rikosh had pre-doodled some unrelated images. The drawn-in drop-cap C on page 47 is the only illustration that can be definitely said to be related to the text of The Eye of Argon.

Will the Real Jay T. Rikosh Please Stand Up?

Disclaimer: Way back in the same Late Devouring Period referred to in a footnote in Mr. Schweiter’s [8] essay, the Beatles ruled. I was but a mere kid then, and got a bit caught up in the “Paul is Dead” rumor-mill—not taking it seriously, but having fun with the whole game of playing records backwards and looking for obscure symbols in the album covers. You had to be there. (My personal contribution was to point out that, in the song “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” the logical reason for Paul’s guitar to cry was because its owner was dead.) The following is decidedly in the same spirit of cheerfully loony theory-mongering.

We have seen that Jay T. Rikosh played some significant part in the saga of Argon’s creation . But who—and where—is Mr. Rikosh? A quick check of various sources on the Internet shows no one in the United States with the last name Rikosh. (The name does pop up in India and a few other spots, however.) Even if he had shuffled off this mortal coil, or just left the country, it seems at the very least unlikely that he would have left behind no relatives with the same name. I looked but found no listing for anyone with the last name Rikosh in the Social Security Death Index. In other words, there is no record of anyone with that last name ever dying in the United States. The more I thought about it, the more Jay T. Rikosh seemed like a made-up, joke name.

I pulled out the Scrabble letters and an Internet anagram-maker to see what anagrams I could come up with. (Hark Tis Joy, A Joky Shirt, His Joky Art, I Shot J R Yak, and about 94 more, some of which aren’t printable in something my kids might read.) I came close, but not close enough, to getting acceptable anagrams for variants of Jim Theis’s full name, James F. Theis―J Theis, Jay Theis, etc. But there are other ways besides anagrams to make a joke name―and no law says anagrams have to be exact. On the other hand, it is all too easy to force a meaning when none is there. You can use the dimensions of The Great Pyramid to prove anything.

It also struck me as odd that, in the aforementioned incoherent account of a fan party, everyone else was called by a first name or a fannish name on second reference, and pretty much everyone was mentioned more than once. Jay T. Rikosh was referred to only once, and by his full name, and in a context that could have been an in-joke reference. “I would have complained except that Jay T. Rikosh was doing such [sic] perfectly colorful job of it that I just sat back listening in awe.” Either Mr. Rikosh was just some annoying teenager who wanted his full name used, or (nudge-nudge, wink-wink) everyone reading the fanzine was expected to get the joke. Whatever the joke was.

There is a paragraph-long passage in the report mentioning a nameless “frolicsome little imp” who wanders in and annoys people without being seen. It is pretty easy to read this as Mr. Theis providing a tongue-in-cheek account of his own actions. In other words, he is pretending that he is someone else. If not once, why not twice?

As noted, it’s hard to believe that anyone else but the writer would willingly take on the task of typing up The Eye of Argon. This is a stretch, and I cheerfully accept that it contradicts some of my other theories, but might The Typist and The Writer be the same person as The Artist, Jay T. Rikosh?

Maybe there is a Jay T. Rikosh out there who managed to suppress every other record of his existence, but missed this one fanzine. Maybe that name is the pseudonym of someone else in the Ozark Science Fiction Association. Or maybe, just maybe, James F. Theis was Jay T. Rikosh.

As much as I like that fun and silly last theory, I think my preference would be for Mr. Rikosh to have an independent existence. Then, maybe, someone could track him down, and get his recollections of the whole affair recorded. Pray he’s out there somewhere....

Back to Our Story

Unless or until reliable witnesses surface, there can be no certain answers. Suffice to say that the typing of The Eye of Argon is nearly as bad as the writing, and, given the challenges of correcting anything on a ditto-master, one could make the case that fixing the typing would be almost as hard as fixing the writing. The lower-case g-key strikes, and, having not struck hard enough to make a legible impression, nonetheless moves on.

Mastering the Ditto-Master

What’s a ditto-master? More broadly, we should ask―how was EoA actually printed? For the answer, we have to go back to the pre-photocopy days of the mimeograph machine. For those who are too young to remember, or have blotted the experience out of their memories, a generalized description of how these interesting machines worked follows. I have no idea as to the precise details regarding the machine that Ofsan borrowed. (No one ever owned a mimeograph machine; you got the librarian or the science teacher or something to let you use the school machine while no one was looking.)

I should note at the outset that the classic ditto machine produced copies with slightly blurry purple type. The print on the original pages of Osfan is black and, if anything, a trifle crisper than the very slightly smeared-out type that my Weekly Quizzes had back in elementary school. This means that Osfan used some slightly different chemistry to produce its pages. [9] Even so, the mechanical procedure would be the same. It is possible, though unlikely, that some entirely different process was used to produce the fanzine in question—and we do have triple-layer hearsay that a person unknown claimed to have run the machine that produced EoA. I’d say the odds were 99% it was done on some form of a mimeograph.

You did the actual typing on what were called ditto-masters. A ditto-master was simply a two-ply sheet of paper, with the bottom sheet bearing a sort of ink on its upper surface, facing the bottom of the upper sheet. The ink would stick to the bottom of the upper sheet when you typed or wrote or drew on the upper side of the upper sheet. (It was not unlike carbon paper, except with the carbon side turned over―but comparisons to something else that no one knows about anymore would be fruitless.)

Whatever was typed or drawn on the upper side of the upper sheet would appear, reversed, on its bottom side. Once you were done typing or drawing or writing, the lower sheet was discarded. This left the reversed image on the back of the upper sheet exposed. This sheet was then clamped, with the back side exposed, to the drum of the ditto machine.

One either turned a crank by hand, or, on the fancy models, flipped a switch that started an electric motor. (As noted, Lee Weinstein reports that he found someone who knew someone who knew the person who turned the crank on the mimeograph that produced Osfan.)

The reversed sheet would spin around a drum. A solvent―ditto fluid―would be painted over the reverse side of the sheet, and, one sheet at a time, blank paper was fed through rollers that pressed the paper into contact with the ditto master and the slightly-dissolved ink on its surface. The page image, reversed again, back to its correct orientation, would be transferred to the blank paper.

No description of a mimeograph machine would be complete without a mention of the splendid, odd odor of a freshly printed page coming off the machine, still slightly damp with un-evaporated ditto fluid. Generation of school children shoved their faces into their Weekly Quizzes and inhaled deeply before setting to work. This might have affected their grades.

The only practical way to fix a mistake when using this Rube Goldberg contraption while typing was to note the error for later reference and skip past the problem area. Once you were done typing, you’d remove the page from the typewriter, turn over the ditto-master, and then either scrape off the ink, or paint it over with a sort of ur-Whiteout―ditto correction fluid―leaving a blank space on the final printed copies. There is plain evidence of precisely this process being used for the original version of EoA, ie, on pages 41 and 47.

It was in theory possible to fix mistakes while the sheet was still in the typewriter by rolling the sheet carefully forward in the typewriter platen, peeling the two sheets apart, scraping the mistake off the back of the top sheet, inserting a scrap piece of back sheet in between, rolling the whole thing back in, realigning the typewriter with the line of type, and then retyping. There is no immediately obvious evidence of anyone doing anything so sophisticated or painstaking for the Eye of Argon.

The point of all this is that it is entirely possible that I am as bad a typist as The Typist of The Eye of Argon. You, gentle reader, simply can’t tell that I am because (I just made my third mistake this paragraph) the auto-correct features of my handy-dandy word processor catches spelling errors, and I can fix every problem (fourth and fifth mistake, and sixth and seventh while typing the report of mistakes five and six) with ease. The Typist had no such options (eighth mistake and ninth and tenth and eleventh and twelfth and thirteenth and fourteenth while reporting eighth). (Fifteenth and sixteenth mistake corrected while reading the paragraph over, and so on.)

The spelling errors produced by not knowing how to spell, rather than by sloppiness or keys getting tangled up, are another matter, of course, as are the commas and hyphens and periods that pop up in all the wrong places, like so many typographic mushrooms on the ill-kept lawn of the typescript, but the point is that The Typist was working under very difficult circumstances―difficult, at least, for anyone who cared about doing things properly. There is, of course, very little internal evidence that The Typist did care.

It’s also worth noting that it is far easier to rewrite text on a computer. The sheer struggle that would be required to clean up the syntax made it far less likely that anyone was going to go back and polish the prose while typing up a ditto-master.

The Eyes Don’t Have It

This veers over into speculation, by more than just a bit, but the clumsy ditto-correction procedure I have described might explain why the people illustrated on pages 30 and 40 appear to have no eyes. The wizardy guy on page 30 is (pardon the expression) an open-and-shut-case: he has no eyes. The young lady on page 40 has some other odd points to her anatomy, suggesting that the artist didn’t know much about women, but honest, what I’ve studied most closely is her face―what there is of it. Either she has no eyes, and the spots in the center of her face are nostrils, or else she has no nose, and the spots are eyes.

A look at the other illustrations suggests that the artist couldn’t do eyes very well and knew it. The eyes seem overworked and (and this is going a fair piece) look to be the weakest elements of the portraits. Perhaps―perhaps―Mr. Rikosh scraped off or covered over the ditto ink for the eyes on pages 30 and 40, but never got around to redoing them.

To sum up, plainly, The Typist and The Artist both had trouble with the ditto-masters. Apologies, therefore, to The Writer, who might or might not be the same person as The Typist. We here in the future must bear in mind that some portion―perhaps ten to twenty percent, perhaps more―of the deep and abiding badness of The Eye of Argon was the result of bad typing, not of bad writing. [10] Furthermore, a moderately credible case could be made that Jay. T. Rikosh was responsible for a number of the outrages against syntax, grammar and spelling and God knows what else in EoA.

Apologies as well to the transcribers of earlier digital versions of The Eye of Argon. I did not seek to find new and undreamt of errors (“You make love well wench,”Admitted Grignr as he reached for the vessel of p potent wine his charge had been quaffing.), but there they were. Nor did I intend to find several false errors, introduced into earlier drafts of the digital text by previous transcribers, but there they were as well. Nor do I claim to have gotten everything right.

Again I note that I have not been able to bring myself to read this thing through from beginning to end. Loud praise for those who have. Again I say that I have not proofread it―but certain mistakes did come to light as I worked. Others have labored over this sausage of a story far more intently than I, and I mean no disrespect to their efforts. I won’t say that this edition of the work stands upon the shoulders of giants. It would more accurate to say it crouches somewhat uncertainly upon the shoulders of my fellow mildly-obsessed lunatics, who, along with myself, have spent far too much of their precious time on this turkey.

It is entirely possible that other, future, lunatics will compare the first draft of the SOCRE EoA with the original pages and discover further actual errors that should be included, or discover additional introduced errors that should be removed. I stand ready to accept and adopt all such updates and corrections. Just drop me a line at argon [at] foxacre.com

An Argonic Thought re Leibowitz

There is a splendid scene in the post-apocalyptic novel A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. that I am probably not remembering accurately—which, in a way, is sort of the point. After the collapse of civilization in the usual atomic war, new religious orders have sprung up, and, as in days of old, monks, friars and scribes of all kinds find themselves painstakingly reproducing, by hand, documents from the past—documents they don’t understand.

They are duplicating old copies of twentieth-century engineering drawings―blueprints. The scribes painstakingly fill in the huge areas of blue, instead of simply taking a white sheet of paper and using black ink to trace the white lines running through the blue areas. The scribes don’t understand that the blueprinting process was a quick and cheap way of making duplicates—sort of an even more ungainly mimeograph. Their copying procedure is an artifact of misunderstanding the blueprinting process, and not any part of the original creator’s intent. It is difficult to make a precise and meaningful copy of something you don’t understand.

I found myself thinking about those scribes as I carefully examined extreme and enhanced enlargements of the scans of the original version of EoA. What was the intent of The Typist who seems to have typed “outcropping beaasts” then backspaced to make it “outcropping breasts?” Was the confusion of beasts with breasts in some way Freudian? Was there some more basic psychological or physiological reaction produced by having to work up the nerve to type That Word? (These are teenage boys we’re talking about, after all—and likely socially inept ones at that—and, judging how the typo count seems to spike near other instances of it, That Word seems to have thrown The Typist for a loop. Judging by typo counts, words associated with related phenomena, such as “nipples” or “bust” also seemed to have distracted The Typist from his task.) Or was it just that the E key is next to the R key and The Typist’s finger slipped? Would it be fair to set the word down as “bereasts” or would that just be going for cheap laughs? [11] There were endless such choices.

I had to set some rules. If a letter was completely invisible, I sent it down as a blank space, even if it was easy to guess which letter was meant by looking at the surrounding letters. If it was even faintly discernible under high magnification, I decided that the infield fly rule as interpreted during night games after a rain delay applied, and set down the letter as the Typist intended, even if he didn’t actually strike the key hard enough for the letter to be easily legible. Even so, we must bear in mind that the faintest letters still visible might have vanished completely by the time the next copy of the page swooped through the solvent in the mimeograph machine. Thanks to this variability of fading, the text of Argon taken from one copy of the original fanzine might be different from the text derived from another.

Swinging back from the ridiculous to the sublime, at least one analysis of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works indicates that no two copies of the First Folio have exactly the same text. That is, every copy has a set of errors and corrections that are unique to it. Shakespeare’s done all right even without definitive texts of all his works. While we should strive for a definitive version of Argon, we must accept that it is likely a goal that will never be fully met, and that some passages will always be open to interpretation.

In closing, I’d like to apologize to my good friend, poker buddy during those times I am permitted in the United States [12] (he usually skins me alive) and friendly competitor, John Betancourt, grand pooh-bah of Wildside Press. Wildside sells a printed, bound, book edition of The Eye of Argon. Not wishing to step on Wildside’s toes too hard, my own FoxAcre Press does not publish such a tome. I hope doing it as an ebook isn’t imposing too much.

And so, with the sentiment Enough Already ringing in my ears, I close with one last drippingly sincere apology to you, gentle reader, for having dragged you through all this.

But then, on the other hand, you should have known what you were in for before you started reading.

Don’t let it happen again.

Roger MacBride Allen

Valentine’s Day, 2011

Mexico City, Mexico

[1] According to my rough calculations, the present essay is approximately .62 of a Grignr in length.

[2] Curious about whether that first sentence survived in the final version, I ordered a used copy of the book in question. The opening sentence is, as best I can tell, fully intact. I paraphrase it here. I substitute alternates for the composer’s name, the name of the music being played, the make and model of the car, and the geographic details. I do this in hopes of somewhat disguising the source. However, I have left the structure of the sentence and all the non-specific words as found. Here goes: The music from Heimlich's The Spheroids filled the interior of the cavernous Pierce-Arrow Humpty-Dumpty parked at the very end of the road at Cape Fear on the southern tip of North Carolina. Check for yourself, folks. That’s seven, count ‘em seven, prepositional phrases. The first sentence of Argon only has four. And, darn it, somehow I never quite got around to writing that blurb. Or reading past page 3.

[3] This Scholar’s Ebook Edition, for which I charge actual money, contains the full text of The Eye of Argon without any attempt at reproducing the layout, which would likely melt the circuits of the average ebook reading device. It also includes all these fine scholarly essays, which is why I have to charge actual money. The free Somewhat Official Competitive Reading Edition does not include any of this superb bonus verbiage, but does reproduce the layout of the original.

[4] It appears to read as two initials, possibly F.X. (Francis Xavier?) and a last name. Waginch? Wiyerich? Something that reads like a sneeze.

[5] Just to be clear, it’s not that she’s been drawn with the impossibly exaggerated proportions of, say, a Barbie-doll adolescent fantasy figure –just that her arms seem to have no bones, and end in flipper-like hands, and her shoulders aren’t quite right, etc.

[6] Just reproducing the scans of the original was a no-go for the SOCRE Argon because the originals were printed on colored paper—basically a different color for each sheet of paper. Would you want your printer churning out a full page of expensive ink to produce solid orange with some typing on it? The files are huge, and not suitable for printing. Even doing a bunch of Photoshop tricks would leave you with greyscale pages that would still be sucking up gallons of ink to print every bit of invisibly light grey background—and even a version made of such tidied-up black and white pages would be damned big. (I tested. One high-resolution page reduced to black and white was still larger than the whole SOCRE file as a PDF.) For those demented enough to care, the SOCRE edition includes a guide, indicating what color each page should be. You can go out and buy your own colored paper.

[7] These documents can be examined at http://spaghettilogic.org/the_eye_of_argon/.

[8] I feel no shame in recycling that joke. Darrell stole that gag from me, so I can steal it right back. On the other hand, I stole in from The Firesign Theatre’s I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus.

[9] Here the naked-lady-and-ball-of-string drawing becomes of interest. Most forms of ditto-master required you to use some implement that applies significant pressure, like a pen or typewriter key or a stylus. The lady-and-ball picture appears to have been done with a brush and ink, and not with a pen or stylus. (The drawing in Eye of Argon are clearly line drawings done with a pen or pen-like implement. The picture of the girl in modern dress on the back of the last page also appears to be a line drawing done with pen or pencil.) Obviously, a brush would not be able to produce enough pressure to make a usable ditto master. That would mean that the producers of the fanzine used some sort of process for transferring a drawing to a ditto master. However, that a given process was used on one page does not mean it was used on all the others, and as we shall see, the actual Argon pages show clear signs of being typed onto ditto-master sheets. This does somewhat strengthen the argument that the nude-with-ball image is not related to The Eye of Argon, but was produced quite separately.

[10] Here’s an idea to give you nightmares. Almost certainly, The Eye of Argon that we have was typed up onto the ditto master from some previous draft, and not composed on the fly. That means there is some earlier draft. Perhaps next week or next year or next century, some member of the Theis family will be flipping through some old papers and will come across the Ur-Argon. That would be enough to keep Argonic scholarship going for another forty years.

[11] In the end, I decided to go with the apparent intent of The Typist in this case, and set it down as “breasts”.

[12] Having been found guilty of being married to a member of the U.S. Foreign Service of the Department of State, I am currently serving a term of two to three years in Mexico City. I have drawn previous sentences in Brasilia, Brazil and Leipzig, Germany. If you ever have a chance to go to Brasilia, go to Rio de Janeiro instead. Except during the 2016 Olympics. Trust me, you don’t want to be in Rio then. In fact, it might be a good idea to avoid South America altogether during the affected period. On the other hand, you can get really good bratwurst in Leipzig. There are these guys with propane tanks strapped to their backs and grills strapped to their waists—I’m not making this up—who walk around the town, in effect grilling bratwurst in their laps. I called them Walking Bombs. But I digress.

Online Resources for The Eye of Argon

The FoxAcre Press Eye of Argon Page

http://www.foxacre.com/argon

includes links to the free Somewhat Official Competitive Reading Edition of The Eye of Argon. http://www.foxacre.com/argon plus a log of newly discovered errors—and corrections—to The Text, along with whatever else we find that ought to go there.

The Eye of Argon Page at Ansible.co.uk

Dave Langford’s Relentless Cataloging of All Things Argonian is at

http://ansible.co.uk/misc/eyeargon-intro.html

and

http://www.ansible.co.uk/writing/argon-timeline.html

Susan Stepney’s Eye of Argon Page

http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/sf/eyeargon/index.htm

Additional pages from the pertinent issue of Osfan can be viewed

at http://spaghettilogic.org/the_eye_of_argon/.

Or just search using the term “Eye of Argon” to find a bazillion other references on the web. Note: The above links are correct as of March 2011, but this is the Internet we’re talking about.

Things come and go, shift and move, appear and vanish.

But Seriously, Folks...

Now that you’ve read some of the very worst in fantasy and science fiction, stop by FoxAcre.com and browse through our titles—written by some of the very best authors in the field.

Brenda W. Clough

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Stanley Schmidt

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Lawrence Watt-Evans

and many more on the way! By the way, we’re branching out into other genres, quite literately from histories to mysteries. Come see what’s new.

And stop by www.foxacre.com/argon to learn more about the bizarre bit of work you’ve just staggered through. Links there will let you download the free Somewhat Official Competitive Reading Edition of The Eye of Argon as a PDF file suitable for printing, with every typo, cross-out and bad illustration lovingly duplicated.

www.foxacre.com