They didn’t see.

“I think you would have to be really a writer or else very damned dogged to write a whole book. Books are long. You can’t just dash them off in odd moments like greeting card verse.”

“Or like cartoons,” Harry put in.

I ignored this. “But almost anyone,” I went on, “could write a chapter.”

“So?”

“And when you’ve got enough chapters,” I continued, “you’ve got yourself a book.”

“There are three of us,” Priss said.

“So?”

“So we would need twenty-one more newspapermen. Or cartoonists, or writers, or six-day bike racers or anything.”

“Not if we each write enough chapters.”

“You mean we each write a third of a book?”

“Well, yes, but a chapter at a time.”

“Of course it would be a chapter at a time, Rho. It would also be a page at a time, a sentence at a time, a word at a-”

I said, “No, you’re missing the point. One of us writes a chapter, then another writes one, then the third, and back and forth like that until a book results. That way nobody gets bogged down in the middle of a long lonely stretch of monotony.”

“Except the poor reader,” said Harry.

I ignored this, too. I finished my drink and rattled its ice cubes until Harry grunted to his feet and poured Scotch all over them. (The ice cubes, not his feet. Why do I keep doing that? Not even at the end of the first chapter and already I’m clicking along like the Bad Examples section of an eighth-grade grammar text.) I sipped my drink. Harry poured more for himself, and for Priss. Priss suggested that while he was up he throw a log on the fire. He said something inaudible, which was probably just as well, and threw a log on the fire.

I said, “I think it would be a lot of fun, actually. Not to say interesting and absorbing. Not to say potentially profitable, if we can find some clown to publish it.”