You gonna buy that?”

Laurence glanced at the shriveled little man. “Maybe. You have anymore of them?”
The bookseller tilted his head like a bird and looked at him. “I might. Depends on how many creds you got.”
Laurence stared at the faded American Medical Journal in his hands. “You know, these are still pretty common. I can go elsewhere.”
“Not in this town, you can’t,” The man snorted with laughter, a wheezy little bray that made the doctor in Laurence sigh and step back a pace. “There ain’t no other market got books like mine.”
Laurence had looked through his cred disk before coming in, searching in vain through all the little sub-folders on the chance that he might have hidden something away and forgot about it. But there had only been forty-eight. Forty-eight New U.S. creds, shown in little pips on the splay.

When the single digit pips were showing, it was time to be frugal.

I like the cred disk, but wondered why there were subfolders. Different currency? Different budgets?

I love the last line; it tells a lot with a little.

Some nit-picks. "The bookseller tilted his head to the side like a bird and looked at him." You could tighten it by losing "to the side" since "like a bird" tells us the same thing.

I agree with the bird comment.
As for the folders, different currencies, but also other stuff.

I didn't understand the last line you wrote though.

Oh, as for National Geographics, they're not being made anymore, so they're something of an item for Laurence.
And there's more of them to be had if he has the creds.

Laurence is basically a image doctor. He makes people look different. Kinda plastic surgeon, but more.
But he's down on his luck. He got caught doing illegal jobs in the New U.S, the consolidated states, and he was exiled to Texas, which is owned by Mexico again.
It's a dark world.

quote:

---

The man snorted with laughter, a wheezy little bray that made Laurence sigh. "Not in this town, you can’t."

---

“Not in this town, you can’t.” The man snorted with laughter, a wheezy little bray that made Laurence sigh and step back a bit. “There ain’t no other market got books like mine.”

(The man's wheezing because he has a virulent disease that closes up the alveoli in the lungs. It's eventually fatal.)

But not the whole thing.

Unless it's a final pre-submission critique, I VERY RARELY take more than about 3000-ish words. Generally that's enough to give you some ideas of where you're going right and wrong in your writing as a whole. Editors rarely go even that far before deciding it's going in the round file--unless of course they like that first couple of thousand words enough to keep reading. (Check out SFFW's January Newsletter--a great interview, done by one of our own [Hildy], of a working editor).