Thank you, Roger . . . . Written immediately after EBL, but published a year sooner, owing to the vagaries of the publishing business. At this point I decided I would definitely have to do this sort of thing more often. I didn't sell another God-damned story for almost two years. This one collected quite a stack of bounces before Ajay Budrys finally bought it for the old and much-missed print version of Tomorrow.
Nobody seems to have read it, even then.
I still think it was a good story. This is the one everybody made such a fuss about. It made the short list for the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and Sidewise awards, the last of which it actually won. WAM got badly overshadowed by TU, perhaps because they came out so close together. Mike Resnick argues that WAM is the better story, and I think I agree.