INTRODUCTION

Nowadays I like to think of the device in this story as one of the Seven Infernals listed in the Compendium of Srem, but it started off with no pedigree.

I wrote “The Cleaning Machine” (now there’s a gripping title) in 1969 during medical school. I thought of it as a science-fiction horror story. I mean, it had a weird machine, so that made it sf, right? And bad things happened to people, so that made it horror, sort of. Whatever the genre, it was the best thing I’d written so far.

And I couldn’t give it away.

The story earned form-letter rejections from every sf and fantasy periodical I could find an address for. Only John W. Campbell (Yes! I sent a horror story to Analog! What was I thinking?) had the courtesy to tell me why it did not suit his editorial needs at that time. (He always told me why he was rejecting my stories, and I always will revere him for that. When he’d accept one, however, he sent only a check.)

He wrote: “It’s not a story because it doesn’t go anywhere. (The tenants did but the story doesn’t!) It’s a vignette.”

Cool. I’d written a vignette, whatever that was—sounded like those sugary things they serve at Café Du Monde in the French Quarter. But I still didn’t have a sale.

And Campbell was right, as usual. “The Cleaning Machine” didn’t work as science fiction, but I had faith in it. Vignette or not, I felt it was a decent piece of quiet horror. Trouble was, hardly anyone was publishing horror in 1969. I’d tried Joseph Payne Brennan’s Macabre—he liked it but wrote back that he was overstocked and not accepting new material.

But then in 1970 I stumbled on a pair of magazines Robert A. W. Lowndes was editing for Health Knowledge, Inc.: The Magazine of Horror and Startling Mystery Stories. Lowndes wrote informative editorials which he followed with reprints of hoary yarns from Weird Tales, Strange Tales, Argosy, and other Depression-era pulps. But he also published one new story per issue by newcomers with names like Stephen King and Greg Bear. Hey, if these nobodies could sell to Lowndes, so could I.

So I sent him “The Cleaning Machine”...and a few months later he wrote back to say he was taking it for Startling Mystery Stories. This was my second sale in a month; a few weeks earlier John Campbell had bought “Ratman” for Analog. The big difference was that Campbell had sent a $375 check on acceptance. Lowndes’s company paid on publication.

So I waited. Even though it was my second sale, “The Cleaning Machine” became my first published story, appearing March 1971 in Startling Mystery Stories #18—with my name on the cover, no less.

I had arrived!

Unfortunately, the check never did. Health Knowledge Inc. folded Startling Mystery Stories with that issue. I contend that this was pure synchronicity. “The Cleaning Machine” had nothing to do with the failure of the magazine.

Nothing.

But that’s not the end of the story. Fifteen years later I’m signing books at a convention and here comes a reader with the August 1971 issue of an illustrated sf magazine called Galaxy Mission. I ask him what he wants me to do with it. He says a signature on the title page of my story would be greatly appreciated. What story? I’ve never even heard of Galaxy Mission, let alone sold to it. So he opens to the only text piece in the issue, and there’s “The Cleaning Machine” (as "The Machine") under my byline.

The story I initially couldn’t give away had been pirated and reprinted within months of its first publication, and I still hadn’t seen a penny for it.

And people wonder why so many writers die drunk or mad.