Jokingly, Ragle said, "Well what do you expect from a bird who works in a grocery store?"

That seemed to nettle Vic. He glared at Ragle and murmured, "At least it's a real job."

"Meaning what?" Ragle said. But he knew what Vic meant. At least it was a salaried job, to which he set out every morning and returned home from every night. Not something he did in the living room. Not a puttering about with something in the daily newspaper... like a kid, Vic had said one day during an argument between them. Mailing in boxtops from cereal packages and a dime for his Magic Decoder Badge.

Shrugging, Vic said, "I'm not ashamed to work in a supermarket."

"That's not what you meant," Ragle said. For some obscure reason he savored these insults directed toward his preoccupation with the _Gazette_ contest. Probably because of an inner guilt at frittering his time and energies away, a wanting to be punished. So he could continue. Better to have an external source berating him than to feel the deep internal gnawing pangs of doubt and self-accusation.

And then, too, it gave him a kick that his daily entries earned him a higher net income than Vic's slavery at the supermarket. And he didn't have to spend time riding downtown on the bus.

Walking over beside him, Bill Black lowered himself, pulled up a chair, and said, "I wondered if you saw this, Ragle." He unfolded, in a confidential manner, a copy of the day's _Gazette_. Almost reverently he opened it to page fourteen. There, at the top, was a line of photos of men and women. In the center was a photo of Ragle Gumm himself, and under it the caption:

_Grand all-time winner in the Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next? contest, Ragle Gumm. National champion leading for two straight years, an all-time record_

The other persons shown were lesser greats. The contest was national, with newspapers participating in strings. No local paper could afford to pay the tab. Costs ran higher -- he had figured one day -- than the famous Old Gold contest of the mid-'thirties or the perennial "I use Oxydol soap _because_ in twenty-five words or less" contests. But evidently it built circulation, in these times when the average man read comic books and watched...