“Basic Agreement,”  by Avis Pabel appeared in the September 1958 issue of Astounding and was reprinted in the December UK issue of  the magazine. It is the only story by Pabel that appears in the Internet Science Fiction Database, although she wrote articles under the name Avis Brick that appeared in the magazine Persuasion, which was published by the Nathaniel Branden Institute, part of the Objectivist movement championing Ayn Rand.

“Basic Agreement” is an odd little story of Marjorie, who insists she sees something out of the  corner of her eye in her bedroom each night after her parents put her to bed. Her father has little patience with her shenanigans. The fact that Marjorie is unable to describe what she saws just serves to make him less willing to offer her sympathy. Instead, he compares Marjorie to her older sister Jill, who has apparently died and was either a perfect child or whose death has sanctified her in her parents’ memories.

Marjorie clearly suffers from the isolation her parents are forcing upon her and she has either created an imaginary friend to help get her through life or there is actually some sort of alien that only Marjorie can see standing in the corner of her room, never threatening her, but being there in case Marjorie needs a friend.

The story is nothing out of the ordinary, although it did lead me to the author’s own story. Aside from what I’ve described about Pabel above, her story is interesting and unique. Avis Melander was born in Chicago Heights on March 9, 1932.  She married Phillip Brick, the owner of the Chicago Book Mart, and they had three children. In 1953, Federal agents walked into the bookstore and arrested Brick.

It turns out that Brick had been born in Hamburg, Germany as Reinhold Pabel in 1915, and was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1940. In 1943, he was wounded and found himself at an American aid station before being sent to the American Midwest as a POW. He escaped from the camp, took the name  Phillip Brick, and made his way to Chicago, where he bought a used bookstore and married Melander.

Although the US Government wanted to deport Brick/Pabel as having entered the U.S. illegally, the fact that he was brought to the U.S. as a POW meant he had entered the country legally and could only be charged with escaping. He was sent back to Germany for six months before being allowed to return.

Avis Brick stuck by her husband until 1960 when she deserted them to join up with the Randian organization, her husband divorcing her the following year. She wrote several articles under the Brick name and her only science fiction story as Avis Pabel. In 1968, around the time the NBI disbanded following Nathaniel Branden’s break with Ayn Rand, Pabel was reported missing.  In 1988, the authorities declared Avis dead, most likely murdered, although at least one source claims she died in Islip, New York on November 6, 1994.

Pabel/Brick died in Hamburg in 2008, having returned to Germany in 1966 with his three children.

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Steven H Silver is a twenty-time Hugo Award nominee and was the publisher of the Hugo-nominated fanzine Argentus as well as the editor and publisher of ISFiC Press for eight years. He has also edited books for DAW, NESFA Press, and ZNB. His most recent anthology is Alternate Peace and his novel After Hastings was published in 2020. Steven has chaired the first Midwest Construction, Windycon three times, and the SFWA Nebula Conference six times. He was programming chair for Chicon 2000 and Vice Chair of Chicon 7.