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years of his life, David Murphy remained a devoted reader of Analog , seldom missing an issue, never disposing of any after he read them. On occasion he picked up some of the other science fiction magazines— Galaxy, If, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Vertex —but it was only in Analog , in some indescribable way, that he found the sort of thing he liked to read. He went through high school with a copy tucked in among his textbooks—no small matter, for during the seventies it was far more socially acceptable to smoke pot than to be caught reading science fiction—and when he was in college and faced a choice between a meal or the latest issue, he would sooner go hungry before passing up on what he called “his Analog fix.” After he met Donna during his third semester of his postgrad tenure at Cornell, on the first night she spent with him she was astonished to find a dozen issues of Analog beneath the bed of his small apartment. She was even more amused the first time he took her home to visit his mother for Christmas, and she found boxes upon boxes of science fiction magazines stacked in the attic.
    It was during this time, while he was working on his Ph.D. in astrophysics, that David attempted to write science fiction. It didn’t take very long—only a couple of dozen reject slips, garnered not only from Analog but also Asimov’s, Omni , and F&SF —for him to realize that, no matter how much he enjoyed reading SF, he had absolutely no talent for creating it. Not that he couldn’t write at all—in fact, one of his dissertation advisors, no less than the estimable Carl Sagan, often remarked on his innate writing skills—yet the art of fiction was beyond him; his dialogue was tone-deaf, his characters wooden, his plots contrived and reliant upon unlikely coincidences. This wasn’t very heartbreaking; writing was little more than a hobby, and certainly not a passion. Nonetheless, his secret ambition was to have his name appear in the same magazine he had followed since he was a kid. Even after he received his doctorate and was happily married to Donna, with a ten-month-old baby in his arms and a new job at NASA waiting for him, he considered his life to be incomplete until he was published in Analog .
    Then, late one afternoon while sitting out a Beltway traffic jam with nothing but All Things Considered on the radio to keep him company, Murphy had a brainstorm. He may not have much talent as a fiction writer, but he wasn’t half-bad at nonfiction. After all, he had already published three articles in major astrophysics journals; it might be possible for him to turn those same skills to writing pop-science articles. Indeed, he knew several working scientists who moonlighted as regular contributors to Astronomy and Discover . Why couldn’t he do the same with Analog?
    After dinner that evening, Murphy sat down in his study and, very methodically, made a list of ideas for articles he could see himself writing for Analog . It was remarkably easy; as a lifelong reader, he had a good grasp of what the magazine published, and as a NASA researcher he was able to keep up with the latest developments in the space science community.
    At the top of the list was “Spacewarp Drives—Are They Possible?” This was followed by “Three Ways to Terraform Mars,” “Biostasis for Interstellar Travel,” “New Space Suit Designs,” “How to Grow Tomatoes on the Moon,” so forth and so on … and at the bottom of the list, added almost as an afterthought, was: “UFOs—A Different Explanation (Time Travel).”
    Much to his surprise, Analog bought his article about spacewarp drives. The check he received for six weeks of part-time work amounted to a little less than half of his weekly take-home pay from NASA, but that wasn’t the point. Nine months later, when the article finally saw print, Murphy blew away the