The Early Ayn Rand

His steps rang like gunshots in the sweet peace of the summer afternoon — and the summer afternoon on Dicksville's Main Street was very sweetly peaceful. There were almost no passersby, and those that did pass moved with a speed implying human life to be five hundred years long. The store windows were hot and dusty, and the doors wide open, with no one inside. A few old, overheated tomatoes were transforming themselves into catsup on the sidewalk in front of the Grocery Market. In the middle of Dicksville's busiest traffic thoroughfare a dog was sleeping in the sun, cuddled in a little depression of the paving. Laury was looking at it all and clenching his fists.

It was Laury McGee's twenty-third summer on earth and his first on the Dicksville Dawn. He had just had a significant conversation with his City Editor. This conversation was not the first of its kind; but it was to be the last.

"You," said City Editor Jonathan Scraggs, "are a sap!"

Laury looked at the ceiling and tried to give his face an expression intended to show that his dignity was beyond anything the gentleman at the desk might choose to say.

"One more story like that from you and I'll send you to wash dishes in a cafeteria — if they'll take you in!"

Laury could not help following with his eyes the Editor's powerful five fingers as they closed over his beautiful, neatly typed pages, crunched them with the crisp, crackling sound of a man chewing celery, and flung them furiously into an overflowing wastebasket; the pages that he had hoped would double the Dicksville Dawn's circulation with his name on the front page.

Laury was very sure of being perfectly self-possessed, but he bit his lips in a way that might have been called self-possession — in a bulldog.

"If you don't like it," he threw at the Editor, "it's your own fault, yours and your town's. No story is better than its material!"

"You aren't even a cub!" roared Jonathan Scraggs. "You're a pup, and a lousy one! Just because you were the star quarterback at college doesn't mean that you can be a reporter now! I still have to see you use your head for something besides as a show window to parade your good looks on!"

"It's not my fault!" Laury protested resolutely. "I've got nothing to write about! Nothing ever happens in this swamp of a town!"

"You're at it again, aren't you?"

"Since I've been here you've sent me on nothing but funerals, and drunken quarrels, and traffic accidents! I can't show my talent on such measly news! Get somebody else for your fleas' bulletins! Let me have something big, big!— and you'll see what's in my head besides good looks, which I can't help, either!"

"How many times have I told you that you've got to write about anything that comes along? What do you expect to happen? Dicksville is no Chicago, you know. Still, I don't think we can complain — things are pretty lively and the Dawn is doing nicely, and I can't say that much of the Dicksville Globe, for which the Lord be praised! You should be proud, young man, to work for Dicksville's leading paper."

"Yeah! Or for Dicksville's leading paper's wastebasket! But you'll learn to appreciate me, Mr. Scraggs, when something happens worthy of my pen!"

"If you can't write up a funeral, I'd like to see you cover a murder!... Now you go home, young man, and try to get some ideas into your head, if it's possible, which I doubt!"

Somebody had said that Laury's gray eyes looked like a deep cloudy sky behind which one could feel the sun coming out. But there was no trace of sun in his eyes when they stared straight at City Editor Jonathan Scraggs, and if there was anything coming behind their dark gray it looked more like a thunderstorm, and a serious one.

"Mr. Scraggs," he said slowly, ominously, "things are going to happen!"

"Amen!" answered Mr. Scraggs, and turning comfortably in his chair lit a cigar, then dropped his head on his breast and closed his eyes to enjoy the peace of the Dicksville afternoon, with the hot summer air breathing in through the open windows that needed a washing.

Laury took his coat from an old rack in a corner and looked fiercely at the room; no one had paid any attention to the conversation. The city room was hot and stuffy, and smelled of print, dust, and chewing gum. One walked as though in a forest on a thick carpet of fallen leaves cracking under the feet — a carpet of old, yellow newspapers, cigarette wrappers, bills, ads, everything that has ever been made out of paper. The walls were an art museum of calendars, drawings, cartoons, comic strips, pasted on the bare bricks and alternated by philosophical inscriptions such as "Easy on the corkscrew!" and "Vic Perkins is a big bum!" The dusty bottle of spring water on a shaking stand was hopelessly and significantly empty; water, after all, was not the only drink that had been used in the room.