BookUnit10.ppt

Aunt Carrie was my favorite relative, as well as my favorite authority figure. She was always free with smiles, words of praise, and excuses for misdoings. For me she had but one drawback: She was also aunt to John Bullyer, the son of her sister who lived in Gloucester-shire. She invariably referred to him as “Little-John-my-other-nephew” all in one word, and she referred to him far too often. Time went on; so did the comparisons. By word of mouth during the holidays, by phrases that leaped out of letters during term time, I was kept up to date with John’s progress. Thus challenged, I began at last to look round for something that I could do well. When I discovered that I could write well, I worked with intensity at my craft, minding nothing else. Let this be mine, John Bullyer could have all the rest. The stories that I invented were mostly technological and science fiction in nature. They told of rockets and spacecraft, things that would take men high up into the sky. After some analysis of my personality, I realized that my stories were an extension of my own desires to rise to higher and higher altitudes, until I was above John Bullyer. Three or four times during the next forty years I saw mention of John Bullyer in the press. He was doing mathematical work that supported big, scientific projects. It was not the kind of career to attract much publicity, but occasional paragraphs in newspapers charted a steady success until he retired. On that occasion there was a half column about him; it said that his last job was the harnessing of solar power for a satellite put into orbit. He was working for a government bureau in a country in the Persian Gulf. I was, by that time, successful in my own line, having written a streak of 30 best-sellers without a single failure. Late that year, in November, I was in a club, sipping a glass of wine before dinner. A cough made me look round. I saw a short, fat man w