The remittance slip

Yang Rui had come to pick up his takeout.

A meal of beef every day was perfectly ordinary for middle school students in later years, but in 1982, only small-town eateries like Shi Gui's could provide it. In a big city with strict rationing, Yang Rui could not even have afforded the meat coupons required.

Of course, without meat coupons, the price of beef made itself very clearly felt. In a little over a week, Yang Rui had spent two manuscript payments, eating his way through the equivalent of an adult's wages.

Even so, Yang Rui was perfectly happy with it. Consuming large amounts of protein had worked very well. He could already distinctly feel his muscles filling out, and in another two months, he might even grow a little taller.

As for the published manuscripts, they had taken only a few minutes to select and a few minutes to copy out and adapt. How could they compare in importance to his body?

Seeing Hu Yanshan and his group, Yang Rui was puzzled for only a moment before walking over without breaking stride.

Hu Yanshan suddenly had no idea what to say. Should he ask how Yang Rui made his money? Check whether he really had received manuscript payments?

If Yang Rui refused to tell him, what could he do? With the old Yang Rui, Hu Yanshan would not even have bothered asking. He would simply have snatched the letters and looked.

But the current Yang Rui... For no apparent reason, Hu Yanshan thought of the group gathered around the bench press rack at the western end of the sports field. After this period of training, quite apart from how much sturdier those fellows had become, they had grown much closer to Yang Rui. Boys raised in small towns were never afraid of a fight. If he tried throwing his weight around, given Yang Rui's current temper, the outcome would be hard to predict.

"Sir, is there any mail for me?" While Hu Yanshan's thoughts were running wild, Yang Rui had already reached the gatehouse, collected his takeout, and handed the elderly gatekeeper a cigarette. Then he began looking for his remittance slips.

The self-styled strategist had none of Hu Yanshan's reservations. He hurried over, taking the steps two at a time, and said with an awkward grin, "Yang Rui, got yourself a pen pal?"

As he spoke, his eyes darted about.

For people in the eighties, making pen pals was like finding strangers to chat with on QQ. Some kept up their correspondence for years, while others wrote more than ten pages at a time, exchanging letters four or five times a month.

Likewise, just as students chatting on QQ would claim they were practicing typing, students with pen pals would use writing practice as their cover. Letters from all over the country arrived at the school gatehouse almost every day.

Yang Rui turned to look at him. "You're that Dong something, right?"

"The boys all call me Dong Junshi." The self-styled strategist cupped his hands in greeting, imitating a man of the world.

"Oh," Yang Rui said, pulling several letters addressed to him from the pile at the window.

For his first round of submissions, he had worried that his work would not pass review, so he had sent different articles to several magazines, planning to send any rejected manuscripts around to the others later.

But the sheer number of magazines in the early eighties, and the scarcity of high-quality manuscripts, had exceeded his expectations. Most of the magazines had published his articles one after another. Now that half a month had passed, the payments were starting to arrive.

The sharp-eyed strategist immediately spotted the large words "Middle School Chemistry."

"So there really are manuscript payments..." he muttered aloud.

Yang Rui chuckled, tapped the envelopes in his hand into a neat stack, and turned to leave.

"Hey, Yang Rui, Yang Rui, let us have a look." The self-styled strategist stopped him.

Students in this era all had literary aspirations. The self-styled strategist had submitted poetry and fiction himself and knew a little about manuscript payments.

He had worked it out clearly: payment for an article was normally a few dozen yuan. Only leading magazines like People's Literature offered a maximum rate of 100 yuan per thousand characters. But however he calculated it, one or two payments would not let Yang Rui eat beef to his heart's content.

Yang Rui definitely had another way of making money.

That was what the self-styled strategist wanted to prove.

None too pleased, Yang Rui asked, "You want to read my letters?"

Private letters were naturally not for others to read.

"That's not what I meant." The self-styled strategist sold Shi Gui out in an instant, pointing at him. "This fellow said you'd received loads of manuscript payments. I was just curious."

Looking at manuscript payments was an entirely different matter from reading letters.

Shi Gui grew anxious. "What do you mean, I said it? You were the one who asked..."

"I asked, and then you told me." Dong Junshi was quick with his tongue. Turning back with a smile, he said, "Yang Rui, all the boys have heard. Who would have thought our school had a great writer? Come on, show us your manuscript payments. Broaden our horizons."

Yang Rui gave Shi Gui a long look, understanding perfectly well what was going on.

Shi Gui certainly had a big mouth, but the others' thoughts were not hard to guess either.

"All right. Have a look." Yang Rui quickly scanned the letters' senders, then confidently opened one, thinking, Feast your damned eyes on this.

The group at the school gate crowded around. None of those present had ever seen what a manuscript payment looked like.

Hu Yanshan shuffled his feet, then quietly took a place at the edge of the crowd. He was fairly tall; by rising slightly onto his toes, he could see what Yang Rui was doing inside the circle.

They watched as Yang Rui tore open the edge of an envelope bearing the name of Science Life magazine.

Inside was not a remittance slip but a folded sheet containing a short letter.

Yang Rui unfolded it unhurriedly. Sure enough, it was notification that his article "Biosphere" had been accepted for publication by the popular science magazine Science Pictorial.

Unlike those short science papers, "Biosphere" was a popular science article Yang Rui had written himself. It drew on the Biosphere 2 Experiment, which was soon to begin in America: a miniature, artificial, self-sustaining ecosystem intended to simulate Earth's environment.

The Biosphere 2 Experiment was very famous and very significant. Its purpose was to test whether humans could survive away from Earth.

If they could, then so-called lunar colonies and Martian colonies would have at least the most basic biological foundation.

If they could not, then no rocket or spacecraft, however advanced, could enable humans to colonize Mars.

In other words, the first prerequisite for colonizing outer space was a successful biosphere experiment. That held true in the eighties, in the nineties, and in the twenty-first century.

Without a successful biosphere experiment as a prerequisite, all reports of colonizing outer space were ignorant journalists peddling nonsense.

Unfortunately, the Biosphere 2 Experiment had failed.

In 1982, however, people were still full of hope for the Biosphere 2 Experiment, which had yet to begin. Wonderful visions of space abounded across the globe.

There could hardly have been a better subject for popular science.

Most importantly, this kind of popular science article could be very long and did not require particularly outstanding prose. Rigorous reasoning alone, demonstrating why Biosphere 2 was bound to fail, would already make a fine popular science article.

Thus, drawing on what he knew, some of the knowledge he had studied, and additional reference materials, Yang Rui had unhesitatingly written a thirty-thousand-character article, divided it into two parts, and sent it to Science Pictorial.

It was also the highest-paying popular science magazine Yang Rui knew of. At 65 yuan per thousand characters, the total payment for thirty-three thousand characters was 2,145 yuan, more than Secretary Yang's wages for two years and enough to buy a fourteen-inch black-and-white television. The figure was almost too staggering to look at.

Now that the acceptance notice had arrived, Yang Rui would not need to waste time copying other people's work for a good long while.

Using his own article to put an end to his plagiarism was rather amusing, too.

Dong Junshi and the others, meanwhile, were profoundly stunned.

This was Science Pictorial.

The students of Xibao Middle School might not have known that Science Pictorial's circulation at the time exceeded a million copies per issue. They might not have understood just how staggering a circulation of one million was, or guessed that this was a record-breaking magazine in a record-breaking era.

But who had not read Science Pictorial?

"Yang Rui, your article's going to appear in Science Pictorial?" Shi Gui spoke before the others. Though he was nearly thirty and busy running his eatery, in this age when everyone fancied themselves literary, even Shi Gui occasionally read Science Pictorial.

How could anyone living in town not read Science Pictorial?

Yang Rui nodded slightly. "It should be in the next issue. Looks like it jumped the queue."

"Hey!" Dong Junshi suddenly cried. "Never mind which magazine it's appearing in. Where's the payment? How much?"

He desperately wanted to prove that Yang Rui had another source of money.

"It should be in another letter." Yang Rui calmly picked out another envelope bearing the name Science Pictorial. He had no intention of hiding his income. At least, his present income did not need hiding. Otherwise, his substantial spending, both now and in the days ahead, would be even harder to explain.

Besides, with the beginning of reform and opening up, manuscript payments were gradually becoming one of the cleanest sources of income imaginable. Making them public offered more advantages than disadvantages.

The thin envelope was gently slit open.

Yang Rui pulled out the remittance slip and openly displayed it to everyone.

2,037.40 yuan.

Those few simple Arabic numerals seemed to absorb sound, leaving the surroundings utterly silent.

The difficult formal numerals spelling out the amount made Dong Junshi's head swim even more.