Writing popular fiction

receiver and said, impatiently perhaps, "Hello?"
    "Simeon?" the distant voice asked. He pronounced it correctly—Sim—ee—on.
    It was Harry Kelly, sounding bedraggled and bewildered, two things he never was. I recognized his voice because it had been—in years past—the only sound of sanity and understanding in a world of wildly gabbling self-seekers and power mongers. I esped out and saw him standing in a room that was strange to me, nervously drumming his fingers on the top of a simulated oak desk. The desk was studded with a complex panel of controls, three telephones, and three tri-dimensional television screens for monitoring interoffice activity, the work space of someone of more than a little importance.
    Here, a new character is introduced, in circumstances that indicate a problem about to develop. Also, we get more evidence of the future setting: the control-studded desk and tri-dimensional televisions.
"What is it, Harry?"
    "Sim, I have another job for you. If you want it, that is. You don't have to take it if you're already wrapped up in something private."
    He had long ago given up his legal practice to act as my agent, and he could be counted on for at least one call a week like this. Yet there was a hollow anxiety in his tone which made me uncomfortable. I could have touched deeper into his mind, stirred through the pudding of his thoughts and discovered the trouble. But he was the one person in the World I would not esp for purely personal reasons. He had earned his sanctity, and he would never have to worry about losing it.
    In the no-nonsense fashion of category fiction, the relationship between these two characters is established. Also, with words like "hollow anxiety" and "uncomfortable," a tone of apprehension is slowly built.
"Why so nervous?" I asked. "What kind of job?"
    "Plenty of money," he said. "Look, Sim, I know how much you hate these tawdry little government contracts. If you take this job, you're not going to need money for a long while. You won't have to snoop through a hundred government heads a week."
    "Say no more," I said. Harry knew my habit of living beyond my means. If he thought there was enough in this to keep me living fat for some time to come, the buyer had just purchased his merchandise. All of us have our price. Mine just came a little steeper than most.
    "I'm at the Artificial Creation complex. We'll expect you in—say twenty minutes."
    "I'm on my way." I dropped the phone into its cradle and tried to pretend I was enthusiastic. But my stomach belied my true feelings as it stung my chest with acidic, roiling spasms. In the back of my mind, The Fear rose and hung over me, watching with dinner-plate eyes, breathing fire through black nostrils. The Artificial Creation building: the womb, my womb, the first tides of my life…
    I almost crawled back into bed and almost said the hell with it. The AC complex was the last place on Earth I wanted to go, especially at night when everything would seem more sinister, when memories would play in brighter colors. Two things kept me from the sheets: I truly did not enjoy the loyalty checks I ran on government employees to keep me in spending money, for I was not only required to report traitors, but to delineate the abnormal (as the government defined that word) private practices and beliefs of those I scanned, violating privacy in the most insidious fashion; secondly, I had just promised Harry I would be there, and I couldn't find a single instance when that mad Irishman had let
me
down.
    I cursed the womb which had made me, beseeching the gods to melt its plastic walls and short-circuit those miles and miles of delicate copper wires.
    I pulled on street clothes over pajamas, stepped into overshoes and a heavy coat with fur lining, one of the popular nordic models. Without Harry Kelly, I would most likely have been in prison at that moment—or in a preventive detention apartment with federal plain-clothes guards standing watch at the doors and windows. Which is only a more civilized way of saying the same thing: prison. When the staff of Artificial Creation discovered my wild talents in my childhood, the FBI attempted to "impound" me so that I might be used as a "national resource" under federal control for the "betterment of our great country and the establishment of a tighter American defense perimeter." It had been Harry Kelly who had cut through all that fancy language to call it what it was—illegal and immoral