Pat Hobby sat in his office in the writers’ building and looked at his morning’s work, just come back from the script department. He was on a “polish job,” about the only kind he ever got nowadays. He was to repair a messy sequence in a hurry, but the word “hurry” neither frightened nor inspired him for Pat had been in Hollywood since he was thirty — now he was forty-nine. All the work he had done this morning (except a little changing around of lines so he could claim them as his own)— all he had actually invented was a single imperative¹ sentence, spoken by a doctor.

“Boil some water — lots of it.”

It was a good line. It had sprung into his mind full grown as soon as he had read the script. In the old silent days Pat would have used it as a spoken title and ended his dialogue worries for a space, but he needed some spoken words for other people in the scene. Nothing came.

“Boil some water,” he repeated to himself. “Lots of it.”

The word boil brought a quick glad thought of the commissary. A reverent² thought too — for an old-timer like Pat, what people you sat with at lunch was more important in getting along than what you dictated³ in your office. This was no art, as he often said — this was an industry.

“This is no art,” he remarked to Max Learn who was leisurely⁴ drinking at a corridor water cooler. “This is an industry.”

Max had flung him this timely bone of three weeks at three-fifty.

“Say look, Pat! Have you got anything down on paper yet?”

“Say I’ve got some stuff already that’ll make ’em —” He named a familiar biological function with the somewhat startling assurance that it would take place in the theater.

Max tried to gauge⁵ his sincerity⁶.

“Want to read it to me now?” he asked.

“Not yet. But it’s got the old

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