Second, and perhaps more important, I had committed a basic sin of story-telling. At the beginning of the book I set up a red herring, an expectation in the reader’s mind which was never fulfilled. Algis Budrys told me just what I had done, and how to correct it.

All these things would normally be irrelevant. The moving word processor writes, and having writ, moves on. A book, once published, cannot be unwritten, and even if rewritten it will not normally be seen in print.

Enter Jim Baen, publisher of The Nimrod Hunt. In August or 1991, Jim called to say that he was going to reissue the book, with a new cover. Was I interested in changing, deleting, or adding anything?

Was I! Of course I was, and my task sounded easy: remove the red herring, restore the original subplot, and make the homage to Alfred Bester less intrusive.

Naturally, it didn’t work out like that. I am not the same writer I was six years ago. I finished by rewriting the whole novel to match my present tastes. Some passages grew, others shrank or disappeared, many became unrecognizable. I don’t think any page was left untouched. The one-week easy fix became the two-month concentrated effort. I found that I had produced a different book.

The Mind Pool is that book. If you have read The Nimrod Hunt, I invite you to compare the two. If you have not, I invite you to read the book that you are holding.

I hope the story is a success. If not, I’m not sure I want to know about it. It would be a real pain to have to write everything a third time.

Prologue: Cobweb Station

The first warning was no more than a glimmer of light. In the array of twenty-two thousand monitors that showed the energy balance of the solar system, one miniature diode had flicked on to register a demand overload.