Introduction to
THE HAPPY BREED:

This is the second of two stories I bought from writers whose work I did not know. It came in, one of a pair, from Robert Mills, my own agent. The note accompanying it said simply, "You'll like the way he thinks." That, in the trade, is called the undersell. When I was younger, when I worked in a bookstore on Times Square, an area where the hard sell was invented (or at least perfected), I used the undersell—or "mush" as it is called—with only two items. The first was with a book called The Alcoholic Woman. It was ostensibly a volume of case histories intended for medical students, dealing with psychiatric aberrations attendant on female alcoholism. But there was one passage, on page 73, if I recall properly, that was extremely steamy. Something about lesbianism, rather graphically reported by the lushed female herself. When we would get in one of the moist-palmed salesmen from Mashed Potato Falls, Wyoming, in search of "lively reading" (because he couldn't pick up some bimbo in a bar for the evening's release), we would conduct him to the rear of the shop and hold up the book. It invariably fell open to page 73. "Here, read anywhere," we would say, jamming his nose, like a lump of silly putty, right onto that paragraph. His eyes would water. A pair of poached eggs. He would always buy the book. We stiffed them fourteen bucks for the thing. (I think it's in paperback now, for about half a buck, but them was in the days before Fanny Hill.) Page 73 held the only really "lively" action in the book. The rest was a jungle of electroshock therapy and stomach pumping. But the mush worked marvelously.

The other item was a twelve-inch Italian stiletto in the knife case. When a customer asked for a blade, I would unlock the case and pull out all that steel. I would hold it up, closed, to show it had no switch button on it. Then I would carelessly flip my wrist in a hard, downward movement, and the blade would snap open, quivering. It would usually be about two inches under the customer's tie knot. Eyes bulge. Poached eggs. Et cetera. Seven-buck sale. Every time.

The only times you can use the mush with any degree of assurance are the times you know for damn dead certain you've got a winning item, something that won't let go of them. Bob Mills was smart to use the mush on me. He knew he had a winner. John T. Sladek's "The Happy Breed" is a helluva story.

Sladek was born in Iowa on 12/15/37, and attended the University of Minnesota 19 years later as student #449731. He studied mechanical engineering, then English literature. He left school to work (Social Security #475—38—5320) as a technical writer, bar waiter and for the Great Northern Railway as switchman #17728. He thumbed through Europe with passport #D776097 until he found himself standing in a soup line at Saint-Severin in Paris. He worked as a draftsman in New York, then returned to Europe. He is now living in England, registered as Alien #E538368. He has been published in New Worlds, Escapade, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and elsewhere. He has just finished his first novel of speculative fiction, The Reproductive System.

The only mushy thing about Sladek or his story is his lousy head for figures. Carry on.