“The name,” Joe Carlin said bitterly, “is sucker. My name, Amby.” He knew now that he should have asked what FKIP paid for cutting a platter. “I shouldn’t have taken fifty dollars for granted.”

Ambrose Carver was aghast. “You expected fifty dollars? Fifty?”

“I didn’t expect to work for nothing.”

“But fifty dollars....” Amby bleated in horror.

“I thought there was big money in radio.”

“Sure there’s big money. Does Jack Benny work for peanuts? Use your head. Does Edgar Bergen work for three cheers? Does—”

“I did.”

Amby mopped his face with an agitated hand. “Wouldn’t I like to see you make a fortune? Don’t I get half?”

“Not a fortune. Fifty dollars.”

“But what for?” Amby began to squeal.

“Didn’t I rehearse a show? Didn’t I cut a platter? Isn’t there a scale?”

“Did I say there wasn’t? But where? Here? You think it’s here?”

Suddenly Joe was bewildered, uncertain. “What does that mean, Amby?”

And, just as suddenly, Amby put the agitated handkerchief away and became brisk. “Joe, it’s time somebody wised you up. We can’t talk on the street. Let’s go to Munson’s.”

Munson’s main floor fountain was three deep with the lunch-hour rush. Eventually Amby spotted a table for two.

“Look, Joe. At Hickville you pay a quarter to see a movie. It costs you a buck to see that same movie at the Music Hall, New York. Why? I’m telling you. Because New York is New York. Big time. Tops. Show business has only a few big-time spots—New York, Chicago, Hollywood, and Los Angeles. That’s where almost all the sponsored chain shows originate. Sure there’s an established scale. But get this, Joe: the scale’s only for New York, Chicago, and the coast. Every place else is small time. In show business, small time pays small time. That’s how it’s always been.”

Joe’s coffee cooled, unnoticed. Disillusionment crushed him. “Suppose the I Want Work platter gets a sponsor?”

“Maybe you get five dollars; maybe three dollars. It’s only a bit.”

“What if I’m on a five-a-week sustaining?”

“Nothing changes. It’s a sustaining show, isn’t it? You get experience.”

A nerve in Joe’s cheek twitched. “Isn’t that generous?”

Amby pleaded. “Listen, Joe. Your curtain’s only going up. Some day you crash the big time. Then you wear diamonds. You stick with a good agent, and he gets you big time. I’ve told you about John Royal of N.B.C. A great friend of mine. A pal. When I take you to New York, Royal listens.”

“Take me to New York now.”

Amby gulped coffee. “Sure Royal listens. Because he’s a great pal of mine he might give you a low-down. He’d say: ‘Joe, you’re not ready; you need more experience.’ So what? You’d come back here where you could get experience. That’s why small-time radio pays in experience; you can’t get it any place else. Didn’t Colonel Stoopnagle come out of an upstate New York station? Ambrose Carver’s your agent, Joe, and Ambrose Carver’s telling you.”

“Suppose I go on a five-a-week commercial?”

“Now you’re talking something else. That means a sponsor. Five dollars a show.”

Joe’s finger drew a slow diagram on the table. “Sonny Baker was on a commercial five-a-week. He also had two once-a-week commercials. How much did he earn?”

“Maybe thirty-five dollars.”

Joe stood up. “And he’s what the Journal calls a local radio star. Lucille Borden and Archie Munn have been around a long time. They worked to-day for nothing. If that’s radio, you can have it.”

Amby’s hand went up to the foppish little mustache. “You’re not quitting, Joe,” he said softly. “To-day you cut your first platter. You heard the playback. You’re not going to forget listening to your own voice. Come back to FKIP.”

“What for?”

“To look around a studio; to see another mike.” Amby picked up the check. “You’re not quitting, Joe. You can’t.”

The boy bit his lips.

“My office,” Amby announced briskly. “About noon to-morrow.”

Riding home on a Northend bus, Joe stared out at passing corners and saw none of them. Amby was right. It got into you. You took a beating and came back for more.

“Joe,” his mother drawled, “let me see what real radio money looks like.”

The truth had to be told. “We get paid only if a show has a sponsor.”

Tom Carlin laid down his newspaper. “What’s that? Didn’t you say there was a scale of twenty-one dollars...?”

“My mistake,” said Joe, expressionless. “The scale is only for big-time stations. We take our pay in experience.”

“Humph! I pay my clerks every Saturday.”

“This is radio,” said Joe, and went upstairs to wash.

Anger grew in the man. “Kate, I don’t like this. Apparently the station gets a lot of entertainment for nothing. I don’t like to see Joe exploited....”

“Is it exploitation,” Kate Carlin asked quietly, “or a condition radio hasn’t yet solved? It must have been a shock to him. He’s taking it well.”

“Sometimes,” Tom Carlin said at last, “I wonder if you’re very wise or whether you’re spoiling him.” He found Joe in the bathroom. “You may need a little money,” he said, and handed his son five dollars.

Emotion made Joe’s voice gruff. “Dad, you’re—you’re tops.”

Next morning some cash in his pocket raised his spirits and youth’s eternal hope flowed in him again. At noon he was on the sixth floor of the McCoy Building. Amby’s office door was locked. To-day, instead of waiting, he went back to the elevators.

“Seen Carver?” he asked.

“Carver’s been in and gone out,” the operator told him.

Joe went out, too. He had no heart to wait for hours in the dusty hall—not so soon after yesterday. July heat made the narrow streets sultry. He didn’t want to go home, and neither did he want to make a round of the studios. Not to-day. He thought of Vic Wylie. Presently he was walking toward Royal Street.

Amby had once pointed out the building in which Wylie had offices. Joe found a line on the directory board. VIC WYLIE PRODUCTIONS, 921. In the outer office of 921 a young, rosy-cheeked stenographer talked into a telephone.

“He didn’t say, Mr. Lake. I know he’s read the script.” She looked at Joe. “Have you an appointment?” Before Joe could speak the telephone rang again. “Mr. Munn? Mr. Wylie would like you to be here about four. Yes, to read a part.”

Joe said: “Mr. Wylie asked me to come in.”

“He won’t be here until about two,” the stenographer told him.

The telephone rang once more. The telephone kept ringing. A young man came in and talked to the stenographer about a script. He was, Joe thought, the Mr. Lake who had telephoned earlier.

And then the door of 921 flew open and Vic Wylie arrived. “Did Munn call, Miss Robb?” He charged for the inner office, swinging the inevitable brief-case, and saw Joe. “With you in a minute.” He saw the other man. “A good script, Curt, but I can’t find a spot for it. Take it to New York and show it to Kate Smith’s agency. Now and then her show emotes.”

“What would it pay?” Curt Lake asked.

“Fifteen minutes on a Kate Smith? About two hundred and fifty dollars.” The door of the inner office closed upon Wylie and the script writer.

An intangible flavor of show business lingered in the outer office, and words echoed in Joe’s mind. Script—two hundred and fifty dollars—Kate Smith—emote. Emote meant, of course, that the Kate Smith show occasionally used a highly emotional sketch. There had never been talk like this in Amby’s office. Joe thought with a thrill: “This is radio.” What did Wylie want with him? The inner door opened, and his heart began to throb.

“No more scripts,” Wylie told Curt Lake with decision. “If Munson can’t make up his mind about the show after reading ten, he’ll still be yes and no if he reads fifty. If he yells for more, we’ll shoot him a synopsis.”

Lake was gone, and Wylie was at the desk of Miss Robb. His finger snapped.

“Telegram. Thompson, Chicago. The Wings in the Sky platter goes air-mail. See that it makes the three o’clock plane.”

“The three o’clock plane,” the stenographer repeated.

Wylie stood lost in frowning thought. Abruptly he motioned to Joe and was on his way back to the inner office.

Six words went around and around in Joe’s head: “The best producer in the city.” His heart was a hammer. Following Wylie, he found himself in the strangest room he had ever seen, a room that spoke of a preoccupation which brushed aside as trivial matters that would have been important to other men. A wide flat desk, that must at one time have been beautiful, was charred with hundreds of black scars as though an absorbed man had carelessly laid down lighted cigarettes and then forgotten them. There was a disordered stack of papers, probably scripts. There was a lustrous radio as badly cigarette-burned as the desk. There were dozens of photographs on the walls—autographed photographs of men and women who were important in radio, in Hollywood, and on the stage. The cushions of chairs and of a settee, badly scuffed and lumped out of shape, suggested long hours of feverish argument when comfort was ignored. But strangest of all was the absence of what had been the highlight of Amby’s office, a dead, unwired, rehearsal microphone.

Or was it, Joe wondered, so very strange?

Wylie, from a swivel chair behind the desk, shot out a command. “Give me your background.”

“Eighteen,” said Joe. “High-school graduate. Four years in high-school plays. Made the cast my first year.”

“So you’ve decided you’re an actor?”

“I don’t know. I hope I am.”

“Anybody in show business give you any encouragement?”

“Ambrose Carver. He’d heard about me and came to Northend High for the June play. He told FKIP to call me in for an immediate audition.”

“Who gave you that story? Carver? Is he your agent?”

“Yes.”

“Written contract or verbal agreement?”

“My father signed a contract.”

“All nicely poisoned with legality.” Wylie’s voice was acid. He swung around in the chair and sat with his back to the room, nervously tense. Abruptly he swung back as though jerked by invisible wires. “I’m giving you a chance at something that may never happen. Munson’s store wants a serial. That’s no secret; everybody in radio knows it.”

Wonder was sharp in Joe. Was that why Amby had known, because everybody else had known?

The producer went on in a nervous rush of words. “The Everts-Hall Agency has the Munson account. They haven’t been able to come up with a show Munson’ll O.K. We’re giving it a whirl. We have our own ideas about the kind of show Munson should have. A heroine for the lead because a department store sells mostly to women. A widow fighting to give her son a chance in life. Sue Davis Against the World. You’re Dick Davis, the son. You’re fifteen. You want to get out of school and help.” Wylie tossed a script across the desk. “Page four. Read me the speech beginning ‘Mother, don’t shake your head....’” The chair swung again and the man’s back was to the room.

Joe Carlin found the place. Joe Carlin, who was becoming a veteran, who had had three station auditions, who had rehearsed a show and cut a platter for FKIP began to read:

Dick: Mother, don’t shake—

The chair spun around. “Mo—ther!” The voice that came out of the chair had a mocking, infantile bleat. Startled, Joe stopped.

“Mo—ther!” Vic Wylie’s frantic hands were in his reddish hair. “You’re not a five-year-old brat whining for a lollypop. You’re fifteen. You feel you’re a man. You’re suddenly aware that the most wonderful woman in the world is fighting a hard battle. You want to help. Put that into your voice.”

Joe tried again.

“No, no. Not ‘Mo—ther’ with a valley between the two syllables. That’s the way a young child pules. You’re fifteen. You feel that you ought to be the man of the family. You’re long past the ‘Mo—ther’ stage.”

Joe put snap into it. “Mother.”

Wylie groaned. “Too abrupt; too cold. You’ve got to get that ‘Mother’ with a depth, a feeling.... Try it again.”

Joe drew a breath. “Mother.”

“Now you’re swinging back to the cute stage. Something in between the two. Get it.”

A shaken Joe Carlin obeyed the will of an inexorable taskmaster. Sweat beaded his upper lip; sweat ran down his cheeks. For fifteen minutes he struggled to put into one word what a slave-driver wanted put into that one word. Then Wylie snapped his fingers.

“Carry that last ‘Mother’ in your ear. That’s the inflection I want. Give me the rest of it.”

Sweat dropped on page four of the script. Joe read:

Dick: Mother, don’t shake your head at me like that. You must listen to me. I’m not trying to duck out of high school. I can get through at night. I can get college at night. Oh, I know fellows talk about night study and never get to it. But I know what you’re trying to do for me. Mother, I won’t let you down. But I can’t get it your way. How long would it take me to become a doctor? Ten years? What would I be doing for those ten years, living off you? Letting you hustle off every morning to a job? A man can’t let a woman support him like this if he’s strong enough to handle a job. Don’t you see, Mother?

Wylie leaped from his chair. “I’m your audience this minute and I see nothing. No picture, no emotion. You give me nothing. Nothing but words. You don’t act. You read. Anybody can read.”

Joe Carlin sighed.

“Can’t you feel the scene? Can’t you see it? Are you a stick?” The producer appeared to be on the verge of horrified tears. “Take eight words: ‘A man can’t let a woman support him—’ Delicious. Remember, this is from a fifteen-year-old boy. Delicious comedy. But it’s comedy touched with pathos, and the high courage of youth, and the glorious dreams of the young. This boy must speak as a man. Doesn’t he call himself a man? A man’s speech with the boy showing through. Act it. Live it. The man with the boy showing through. Sir Galahad in knickers.”

Joe was desperate. “If you’ll give me time, Mr. Wylie—”

“Time,” the producer groaned. “There’s never enough time in radio.” He went back to his chair.

Joe was picked apart. Sometimes it was a word, sometimes a phrase, sometimes a complete sentence. Wylie became a wild-eyed, goading fiend.

Miss Robb knocked on the door. “Mr. Munn, Mr. Wylie.”

Vic Wylie looked at Joe broodingly. “You’re only a kid. I must forget that. I must sweat you until you give me what I want. If you can’t stand the sweating, don’t come back.”

“I’ll be back,” said Joe.

“Make it the early afternoon. I may be able to give you a half-hour; I may not be able to give you a minute.”

“I’ll be back,” said Joe a second time. In the outer office Archie Munn, tall and thin, chatted with the stenographer.

“Hello, Joe. Reading a part for Vic?” The actor studied the boy’s face. “When he gets through with you, you’ll have something.”

Joe thought wearily: “I’ll have nervous prostration.” A cup of coffee at Munson’s began to revive him. Excitement stirred. At least, when you rehearsed with Wylie, you rehearsed. There was no hocus-pocus in a deserted office with a dead microphone. You sweated and you panted, and there were moments when you hated Wylie. But you were learning every minute. And, strangely, you looked forward with a kind of eager hunger to what would happen next.

With Amby, nothing ever happened. Joe thought: “I’ll have to tell him.” He walked to the public telephone booth in the rear of Munson’s.

“Why didn’t you wait?” Amby chided him briskly. “I came in only a minute or two after you left. Where’d you go?”

Joe was still learning. When you kept an appointment at Wylie’s office, Wylie would be there. He might not be able to see you, but you knew that in advance. You wouldn’t wait and wait in a dusty hall. He said coldly: “I went to see Wylie.”

“That’s exactly where I was going to send you. What did he want?”

“I’m reading a part.”

“Vic didn’t tell me that. One of my best friends; I guess he wanted to surprise me. A great pal. What show?”

“Munson’s.”

Amby became excited. “Didn’t I call the turn on that? Look, Joe, that’s big. Munson’s tops. He buys plenty of radio time; he spends plenty of money. You didn’t go begging Wylie for a job; he came looking for you. He wants you on that show. That puts you in the driver’s seat. Tell him you want ten dollars a show.”

Joe had few illusions left concerning Ambrose Carver. “Are you still my agent? I thought agents handled salary demands.”

Amby coughed. “I’m pretty busy, Joe. As soon as I get around to it—”

“Sure,” said Joe, “you’ll tell Wylie.” He hung up.

A new day colored yesterday and softened it and made yesterday’s sweating agony yesterday’s romance. Joe counted impatient hours until it was time to walk into Vic Wylie’s office. Miss Robb, the stenographer, greeted him as one had been admitted to an inner circle. Tall, thin Archie Munn cast aside a copy of Variety.

“What’s Vic got you reading, Joe, the Munson show? Dick Davis? A fat part. Lucille Borden auditioned for Sue Davis. No dice. Vic’s giving the part to Stella Joyce. You remember her. She worked the I Want Work platter.”

Joe remembered the small, bird-like woman with the fluttering, bird-like voice. “What was the matter with Lucille?”

“Too much on the Tug-Boat Annie side. The script makes Sue Davis the self-sacrificing mother type. The part wants sweetness and light. Stella fits. That’s the curse of show business, Joe; you get typed, and that’s the only way they want you.”

Joe thought: “What’s the difference so long as they want you?” The telephone was never still for long. He tried to concentrate on yesterday’s rehearsal, to run lines through his mind, but the closed inner door proved a disturbing fascination. Every time that door opened, Wylie’s quick, nervous voice reached the outer office with some talk of radio.

“Another year of sitting hour after hour in producers’ offices,” Archie Munn’s deep voice rumbled, “and they’ll stick pins in me to see if I’m alive.”

Show business throbbed through the rooms like a living pulse. Somebody came in from FKIP and passed inside. Somebody else arrived whom Joe remembered having seen at FFOM. Two girls walked in and talked to Miss Robb. They were singers, Joe gathered; a sister act; part of a road company that had disbanded. Miss Robb explained that Wylie produced only radio dramatic sketches and eased them out. Then a beefy, red-faced man was with them. “Howdy, folks, howdy,” he called and joined Wylie in the inner room.

Archie Munn, sitting on his spine in a chair tilted against the wall, pulled in his long legs. “Tony Vaux, Joe. If we’re lucky, we’ll see a lot of that boy. Head of Everts-Hall’s radio department. Munson’s agency. If Sue Davis Against the World goes on the air he’ll be handing us our checks every week.” The actor glanced at his watch. “Four-thirty. Three and a half hours is long enough to sit in any producer’s chair. Be seeing you.”

Joe continued to wait. At five o’clock Miss Robb put on her hat and opened the inner door.

“Good night, Mr. Wylie. Mr. Carlin’s still waiting.”

Wylie, disheveled and harassed, popped through the door. “Couldn’t get to you; tied up. Eating downtown?”

Joe nodded. “I could.”

Wylie popped back and closed the door.

“That’s his way of telling you to wait,” Miss Robb smiled.

It was seven o’clock before the door opened again to let genial Tony Vaux out. Vic Wylie cried in a temper: “When it comes to radio, I’m boss. Tell that to Munson. I don’t handle plopperoos.” A motion of the brief-case swept Joe toward the hall and the elevators. The two soon found themselves at the farthest table of a restaurant off Royal Street.

Wylie’s elbows were on the table; his hands ravaged his hair. “Love,” he groaned. “A two o’clock love serial. The air lousy with love shows in the afternoon and Munson wants to toss in another one. A sure plopperoo.” A waitress set down rolls and butter, and the producer looked up. His eyes cleared. “You’ll get used to me talking to myself,” he said to Joe and broke a roll.

Joe burned with curiosity. “Why does Munson want another show? He’s got Miss America and What She’ll Wear....”

Wylie jabbed a wad of roll into his mouth. “That’s going off.”

“But all the women in our end of town—”

“We know the ratings, kid; we can tell you just how many listeners the show grabs. But it isn’t bringing Munson business. A sponsored show is advertising. It must produce. Not only listeners—business. If it doesn’t bring in the boxtops, it lays an egg. That’s radio.”

Learning, Joe thought; learning every day. And then his thoughts were back in the book department of his father’s store. Thomas Carlin Presents.... He had based so much on the Munson show! Something in him crystallized to conviction. Clothing was only clothing, but books were romance and adventure. You could always sell romance and adventure. There was only one question—how?

“Mr. Wylie, why does one show bring in the boxtops while another show fails?”

“Kid, National or Columbia will pay a fortune to the man who can answer that.” Wylie opened the brief-case and laid a script on the table. It was the Sue Davis Against the World script.

“You want me to read?” Joe asked, incredulous. His glance swept the restaurant; tables, diners, waitresses. “Here?”

Wylie’s hands were brusque, impatient. “I’ve heard a trouper speak his lines from a hospital bed. If you live that scene you won’t be Joe Carlin reading to Vic Wylie in a restaurant. You’ll be Dick Davis talking to his mother.”

Joe read. Wylie picked him up on the first sentence; the sweating agony started. The supper hour passed and restaurant tables emptied, but at the last table a man whose hair had become wild goaded and harried a boy who tried to do miracles with his voice. The sugar bowl was upset and blocks of sugar, unnoticed, lay strewn across the cloth. Joe, draining a water-glass in a momentary respite, thought of something he had read in high school: “Genius is the infinite capacity for taking pains.” Sometimes the producer, frenzied, swooped on the accent of a word, sometimes the cadence of a phrase. A shade of difference, a mere shade. Often that was all Vic Wylie asked.

A porter came to the back of the restaurant with mops and pails. The producer, hearing the clatter of chairs being lifted from the floor and stacked on tables, shook his head as though to clear it of a mist, stared at the spilled sugar, and was all at once quiet, inert.

“What time is it, kid?”

“Eleven-thirty.”

“A long day.” Vic Wylie put the script back in the leather case.

Royal Street had the exhausted midnight desertion of an avenue given over during the day to brisk business and the shuffle of crowds. A parked taxi waited hopefully at a corner. Fog was coming in on a damp east wind.

“You’re a worker, kid,” Wylie said. “You’ve got to work in this game. When you put on a show, the listeners hear it only once; it’s got to be good that one time. I don’t spare myself; I don’t spare my casts. I like an actor who’ll go along with me and take it.” He stood on Royal Street and rubbed his chin. “What’s Carver doing for you?”

“He got me station auditions,” Joe said. It came to him with a shock of surprise that he hadn’t thought of Amby all day. Or of the McCoy Building.

“Nobody has to get anybody station auditions. Anything else?”

“He got me a bit part in I Want Work.”

“Funny! I always thought FKIP picked its own casts. What’s he getting?”

“Fifty per cent until I’m twenty-one.”

Wylie made a sound with his lips. “Think you could leave word some place that Carver’d pick up?”

Joe nodded. “I think so.”

“When I use an actor who has an agent, I like to talk to that agent. Tell Carver I’ll be looking for him to-morrow.”

There was an oasis of light and life outside the FKIP Building where a loudspeaker from the hall brought the blare of a late program to the street. The Northend bus carried a handful of sleepy passengers. Joe thought with surprise: “I’m not tired to-night.” Radio dealt you a life that was so full, so packed with surprise, so different. Amby Carver, for instance. He had ideas about Amby, but he wasn’t quite sure. Archie Munn in a tilted chair, philosophic, resigned. Did all radio performers haunt producers’ offices and spend anxious hours in anterooms? Lucille Borden, too hard, too tough for the lead in the Munson show. Two young singers “at liberty,” probably almost broke in a strange city, looking for an engagement and trying to hide their worry behind a mask of sparkling animation. Show business! Vic Wylie going into wild, creative trances. Vic Wylie pleading, Vic Wylie storming, Vic Wylie cutting you into inch pieces, Vic Wylie insulting you with maddening sarcasm. You hated him. You loathed him. You—you’d do anything for him any day in the week, every week.

A light burned upstairs in the Carlin home. “That you, Joe?” his mother called.

“A late rehearsal,” said Joe. “You’d never guess where. In a restaurant.” All at once he began to laugh.

And yet, as he dropped off to sleep, his thoughts were not with a strange rehearsal in a restaurant, but with books. Romance and adventure! How could his father sell romance and adventure on the air?

A nervous Ambrose Carver telephoned him in the morning. “What does Vic want, Joe?”

“He says he likes to talk to an actor’s agent.”

“Well—Did he say what time? How about three? You can go in with me and sort of break the ice.”

“What ice? Isn’t he a great friend of yours?”

“A pal, Joe, a pal. I haven’t been seeing much of Vic lately....” There was a moment of silence. “Make it three o’clock sharp.”

Joe Carlin walked into the office of Vic Wylie Productions at half-past two. The door to the inner office was closed. Behind that door a voice was lifted momentarily in audible protest. Joe swung around to Miss Robb.

“Carver?” he demanded.

The stenographer said: “Ambrose Carver. Know him?”

“He’s my agent.”

“I can tell him you’re here.”

“I’ll wait,” said Joe.

He took the chair that had been warmed for hours yesterday by Archie Munn. Amby had distinctly said three o’clock. Not once, twice. Why had three o’clock been so strongly stressed the second time? To make sure that he did not come in until three? But Amby’s original thought had been for them to go to Wylie together. Word by word, the telephone conversation came back to Joe. He had reminded Amby of a claimed friendship. That, he decided, was when Amby must have shifted his plans.

Why? Joe got up from the chair and walked to a window near Miss Robb’s desk. What was Amby anxious to hide? As he debated this question, one fact became clear. To-day his suspicions concerning the agent would be verified or dissipated. For, when the brisk man with the trick mustache came out of Wylie’s office, what had been between an agent and an actor would be cemented with a stronger bond or else it would be destroyed. He didn’t know how or why. All he knew was that this was so.

Behind that closed door Vic Wylie was speaking words of scorn.

“Carver, you’re a chiseling crook. You never went out to Northend High to hear Carlin in a school play. You had nothing to do with FKIP calling him in for an audition. You’ve made a few friends around the stations; you’ve oiled yourself in on auditions. When you find them putting some kid down as a possibility, you get to that kid quickly. The kid’s green, awed, gullible. You sell him a bill of goods.

“You’re a phony. You’ve hung around studios, you’ve watched producers at work, you’ve picked up a smattering of technic. You don’t know radio and you never will. But if you can gather in twenty credulous kids, that will set you up, won’t it? Fifty per cent from twenty kids. They have some talent or a station wouldn’t have listed them. In time they’ll get a little work. Perhaps they’ll earn ten or twelve dollars a week. Half to you. That leaves them six dollars a week. They’ll manage to live, God knows how. But Mr. Carver, the agent, collects at least one hundred dollars a week. Mr. Carver gets himself a nice racket; Mr. Carver lives soft.”

Amby’s lips were dry. “You’ve got me wrong, Mr. Wylie. I’ve been working for Joe....”

“You’ve been working for nobody but Carver. I could expose you to the kid, but I’ll let him find you out gradually. He’s young. He’ll learn about the rat-holes of show business soon enough. You’re taking an agent’s ten per cent and no more. You’re not entitled to that, but the easy way is best. I don’t want you trying to make trouble on the contract.”

The word “contract” gave Amby a sudden boldness. “A legal contract,” he blustered. “Nobody can get around that. Joe’s father signed.”

Wylie leaned across the desk. “You’re mailing Joe’s father a new contract. A ten per-cent contract. You can give him any reason you like.”

Amby sprang to his feet. “That contract’s iron-clad. Why should I take ten? Do I look dumb?”

“I’ll let you write the answer,” Wylie said. “Radio wants the good will of the public; it can’t let itself get hurt. I’ll go to every station in the city and show them how they’ve opened their doors to somebody who’ll hurt them in the end. How long do you think it will be before they bar you? Who do you think they’ll listen to, a gyp agent or Vic Wylie?”

It didn’t take Amby long to write the answer. If the stations tossed him out.... He had come to this meeting wearing spats and a panama and sporting a jaunty cane. He ran the cane thoughtfully through one hand.

Wylie glowered. “Speak fast.”

“To-morrow,” Amby said reluctantly. He could find no “out”; he had to take it. He smoothed his hair and straightened his tie. Wylie opened the door.

Joe swung around from the window.

Amby’s cane made a flourish. “Joe, Vic and I have had a long talk about you. No time to give it all to you now.... An agent isn’t all pocket-book, Joe. Sometimes he sees big things shaping up and he plays ball. He voluntarily shortens his end. This gives an actor more incentive. You see, Joe?”

Joe was expressionless.

“I mean I’m clipping myself. I’m cutting my end from fifty to ten.”

Joe stared, steady, unblinking.

“You won’t need Joe to-day, Vic?” Amby asked, ill-at-ease.

Wylie said: “Not to-day.”

Amby’s cane made another flourish. “All right, Joe; we’ll be getting along.”

Joe Carlin did not move from the window.

The agent went alone to the door. The situation was becoming awkward. “Hot, isn’t it?” he asked in the lame way a flustered man speaks who feels he has to say something.

Nobody answered.

Amby cleared his throat. “I’ll take care of that, Vic.” He was making conversation. “First thing in the morning. Nice lay-out you have here. I may move into this building when my lease runs out....” He gave it up. “Coming, Joe?”

“Not now,” said Joe.

The jaunty cane faltered on a flourish. Ambrose Carver opened the door and stepped out into the hall.