"The Defenestration of Prague"

Part 1

This story is one of my favorites, but on its original publication there was unfortunately a major typographical error at the beginning. Not just a misspelled word — I'm talking major, here: 17 lines which belong on the second page were inexplicably printed in the wrong place, and the result was that the first two pages of the story became hopelessly confusing. Damn! If you ever stumble across this magazine, you can straighten things out by skipping from page 136, right column, line 23, to page 137, left column, line 3. Read on through page 137, right column, line 8, then go back to those misplaced 17 lines before continuing. Sheesh!

Meanwhile, I like Bruce Baker's sketch of the dead Stebbins in the bathtub, and there's a letter to the editor from me on page 20 and praise for my previous two-parter, "Assignment: Vienna" ("the best of the two-part tales yet") from regular letter-to-the-editor writer David Miller on page 21. Part 2 of the story appeared in the August 1986 issue.

Happily, Part 1 was reprinted thirty-two years later in a hard-covered British anthology, Agents & Spies (Flame Tree Publishing, 2018), with the original layout error corrected, and then it was correctly reprinted again, later the same year, in Issue #8 of The Digest Enthusiast. Then, at the beginning of 2019, Part 2 was included in DE #9.

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