Summary:
An outstanding issue of Astounding that not only has Theodore Sturgeon’s Killdozer and Clifford Simak’s Desertion but also has good stories from Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore (When the Bough Breaks), and Malcolm Jameson (Alien Envoy). Unusually, the only non-fiction in this issue is the editorial and a science essay.
[ISFDB page] [Archive.org copy]

Other reviews:¹
Alva Rogers, A Requiem for Astounding  p. 129-134

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Catherine Tarrant

Fiction:
Killdozer! • novella by Theodore Sturgeon ∗∗∗∗
Desertion • short story by Clifford D. Simak ∗∗∗∗
When the Bough Breaks • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett] ∗∗∗+
Alien Envoy • novelette by Malcolm Jameson ∗∗∗
Redevelopment • novelette by George O. Smith [as by Wesley Long] ∗
The Harmonizer • short story by A. E. van Vogt ∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by Paul Orban (x3), A. Williams (x23), Frank Kramer (x2)
CRT • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Time for a Universe • essay by R. S. Richardson

_____________________

The next issue of Astounding I intended to review was the July 1944 one but, seeing as it has been a while since the last one and, as that issue has the start of a 100,000 word 4-part serial by Raymond F. Jones (sigh), I thought I’d ease myself back into the swing of things with this. As it happens I’ve already reviewed three of the stories (the Sturgeon, Simak, and Kuttner/Moore), so it also made for a quick read.
Normally I’d put the stories I’ve already discussed at the end of this review but, for various reasons, I’ve decided not to do that this time (one is that the first 100 or so pages of this issue must be the most sustained level of quality seen in any magazine in any decade, and I want that to be obvious here).

The fiction leads off with Killdozer! by Theodore Sturgeon,² which gets off to a (surprisingly, considering its ‘classic’ status) clunky, data-dump start which tells of an ancient war involving an alien lifeform of “tangible electrons” which ends up trapped on Earth. It would have been better if this had been chopped up into smaller sections and inserted into the narrative. That said, when the story gets going, it has an immersive opening section which portrays a small group of civilian contractors on a Pacific island during WWII, who are there to build a runway for the military. Tom Jaeger is the boss, and one of several clearly drawn individuals in a tale that is much better characterised than any other contemporaneous SF work I can think of. One of the men, Dennis, is the obvious troublemaker of the bunch, and a racist to boot. This latter characteristic comes to the fore in several passages which make the story one of the few of the time which has an obvious, if occasional, anti-racist slant. In the following extract Dennis comments about another man, Rivera, a Puerto Rican mechanic’s assistant:

“Why doesn’t that monkey stick to his grease guns?”
Tom turned and took the chewed end of a match stick out of his mouth. He said nothing, because he had for some time been trying to make a habit of saying nothing to Joe Dennis.
Dennis was an ex-accountant, drafted out of an office at the last gasp of a defunct project in the West Indies. He had become an operator because they needed operators badly. He had been released with alacrity from the office because of his propensity for small office politics. It was a game he still played, and completely aside from his boiled-looking red face and his slightly womanish walk, he was out of place in the field; for boot-licking and back-stabbing accomplish even less out on the field than they do in an office. Tom, trying so hard to keep his mind on his work, had to admit to himself that of all Dennis’ annoying traits the worst was that he was good a pan operator as could be found anywhere, and no one could deny it.
Dennis certainly didn’t.
“I’ve seen the day when anyone catching one of those goonies so much as sitting on a machine during lunch, would kick his fanny,” Dennis groused. “Now they give ’em a man’s work and a man’s pay.”
“Doin’ a man’s work, ain’t he?” Tom said.
“He’s a Puerto Rican!”
Tom turned and looked at him levelly. “Where was it you said you come from,” he mused. “Oh yeah. Georgia.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Tom was already striding away. “Tell you as soon as I have to,” he flung back over his shoulder.  p. 253-254

The action starts when Tom and Rivera go on a recce and come upon a mound where there is an odd looking stone. They move it and find what looks like a wall underneath. Tom guides Riviera in with the bulldozer and, when the wall gives way, the alien energy-being from the prologue escapes from the enclosure and possesses the machine. The bulldozer goes wild, and Riviera is thrown from it, his back broken. After Tom manages to fight the bulldozer to a stop with another machine he disables it by emptying the fuel tank. He then goes for help.
When Rivera is finally brought back to base the rescue party give Tom the shocking news that the bulldozer used the petrol starter motor (not its main engine) to move itself from its previous position to within twenty feet of Rivera before the former burnt out.

The next part of the story chronicles the mistrust that arises between the men, some of whom think that Tom attacked Rivera (who subsequently dies). Looming in the background is the bulldozer, which Chub the mechanic has started repairing. Even though Tom orders that no-one is to start the machine apart from him, Dennis does so once it is fixed. The final third of the story then tells of the alien-possessed machine’s killing spree, and the men’s attempt to destroy it.
This is a pretty good adventure story, but my four star rating is more for the character driven first two-thirds than the more straightforward (and perhaps overlong) action of the finale.

 

The fourth in the ‘City’ stories is Desertion, and it is set in a station on Jupiter, where they are transforming men into the native “loper” life form and sending them out onto the surface. The story opens with the chief of the station, Fowler, briefing Allen—the fifth candidate for conversion. Fowler does this against the backdrop of the converter operator’s, Miss Stanley, obvious disapproval (two earlier two-man teams have not returned).
The second half of the story sees Allen also fail to return, at which point Fowler decides to transform and go outside himself, along with his dog Towser. When this happens they find themselves in a wonderland where they can both talk to each other telepathically and, as they stand by an ammonia waterfall, they realise that they can both do much more:

“The music,” said Towser.
“Yes, what about it?”
“The music,” said Towser, “is vibrations. Vibrations of water falling.”
“But, Towser, you don’t know about vibrations.”
“Yes, I do,” contended Towser. “It just popped into my head.”
Fowler gulped mentally. “Just popped!”
And suddenly, within his own head, he held a formula—the formula for a process that would make metal to withstand the pressure of Jupiter.
He stared, astounded, at the waterfall and swiftly his mind took the many colors and placed them in their exact sequence in the spectrum. Just like that. Just out of blue sky. Out of nothing, for he knew nothing either of metals or of colors.
“Towser,” he cried. ‘Towser, something’s happening to us!”
“Yeah, I know,” said Towser.
“It’s our brains,” said Fowler. “We’re using them, all of them, down to the last hidden corner. Using them to figure out things we should have known all the time. Maybe the brains of Earth things naturally are slow and foggy. Maybe we are the morons of the universe. Maybe we are fixed so we have to do things the hard way.”
And, in the new sharp clarity of thought that seemed to grip him, he knew that it would not only be the matter of colors in a waterfall or metals that would resist the pressure of Jupiter, he sensed other things, things not yet quite clear.
A vague whispering that hinted of greater things, of mysteries beyond the pale of human thought, beyond even the pale of human imagination. Mysteries, fact, logic built on reasoning. Things that any brain should know if it used all its reasoning power.
“We’re still mostly Earth,” he said. “We’re just beginning to learn a few of the things we are to know—a few of the things that were kept from us as human beings, perhaps because we were human beings. Because our human bodies were poor bodies. Poorly equipped for thinking, poorly equipped in certain senses that one has to have to know. Perhaps even lacking in certain senses that are necessary to true knowledge.”
He stared back at the dome, a tiny black thing dwarfed by the distance.
Back there were men who couldn’t see the beauty that was Jupiter. Men who thought that swirling clouds and lashing rain obscured the face of the planet. Unseeing human eyes. Poor eyes. Eyes that could not see the beauty in the clouds, that could not see through the storms. Bodies that could not feel the thrill of trilling music stemming from the rush of broken water.
Men who walked alone, in terrible loneliness, talking with their tongue like Boy Scouts wigwagging out their messages, unable to reach out and touch one another’s mind as he could reach out and touch Towser’s mind. Shut off forever from that personal, intimate contact with other living things.

After these epiphanies, both Fowler and Towser are reluctant to return to the dome and devolve back to man and dog. This sets up the memorable closing lines of the story:

“I can’t go back,” said Towser.
“Nor I,” said Fowler.
“They would turn me back into a dog,” said Towser.
“And me,” said Fowler, “back into a man.”  p. 220

This truly classic story provided me with a massive sense-of-wonder hit when I was twelve or so, and it still holds up pretty well today (although the idea of a dog with fleas on a planetary station probably needs updating).
I note that this story, and the previous tale Census, both have an elegiac feel—at this stage in the series we are at a point where humanity and its civilization is dying. They are also, I would suggest, anti-Galactic Empire stories: rather than mankind spreading out through the universe and subjugating it to its will, it is quietly fading away.³

The magazine’s trifecta is completed with a story that isn’t quite as good as the first two, but which isn’t far behind. When the Bough Breaks by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore is one of the three stories that Kuttner and/or Moore published in Astounding in 1944, and it’s saying something that this good to very good piece is the weakest of the three, but only just.
The story opens with a young couple and their young child receiving a visit by four small men with big heads. They say they are from the future and have arrived to educate Alexander, who will grow up to become an immortal superman and leader in their time. After this explanation they paralyze the parents and start the process:

Dobish came over, clambered up, and pried Alexander out of his mother’s grip. Horror moved in her eyes.
“We won’t hurt him,” Dobish said. “We just want to give him his first lesson. Have you got the basics, Finn?”
“In the bag.” Finn extracted a foot-long bag from his garments. Things came out of that bag. They came out incredibly. Soon the carpet was littered with stuff—problematical in design, nature, and use. Calderon recognized a tesseract.
The fourth dwarf, whose name, it turned out, was Quat, smiled consolingly at the distressed parents. “You watch. You can’t learn; you’ve not got the potential. You’re homo saps. But Alexander, now—”
Alexander was in one of his moods. He was diabolically gay. With the devil-possession of all babies, he refused to collaborate. He crept rapidly backwards. He burst into loud, squalling sobs. He regarded his feet with amazed joy. He stuffed his fist into his mouth and cried bitterly at the result. He talked about invisible things in a soft, cryptic monotone. He punched Dobish in the eye.
The little men had inexhaustible patience. Two hours later they were through. Calderon couldn’t see that Alexander had learned much.
Bordent twirled the object again. He nodded affably, and led the retreat. The four little men went out of the apartment, and a moment later Calderon and Myra could move.  p. 225

The rest of the story charts Alexander’s development under the tutelage of the four men. He learns to talk, develops telepathic powers, and learns to teleport. He also learns how to teleport others and, at one point, sends his mother to the store for candy. Then he starts giving his parents electric shocks, and starts behaving more malevolently. At this point, Alexander’s father, Calderon, discusses disciplining Alexander with Bordent, the leader of the four, but the latter refuses.

The final section of the story (spoiler) has Alexander playing with a forbidden blue egg. At this point the traumatised and frightened parents vacillate about intervening, even though they fear that this may prove lethal for him. Alexander finally completes the egg, and vanishes in a flash of white light.
This latter part is well executed. Not only is the parents’ fear and ambivalent attitude to their son convincingly developed (one wonders to what extent this taps into all parents’ potential or sometime ambivalence about their spawn) but the manner of Alexander’s demise has a subtlety that would be missing in a more explicit attempt on his life by the parents (which is what I expected).

The story has an early 1940’s, Twonky-ish, execution for the most part (e.g. the inclusion of strange little men with big heads) although the subject matter is more Mimsy Were the Borogoves (educational devices transform children into super-beings). However, the ending is darker and more emotionally complicated than in that latter piece, and it has a satisfying, albeit troubling, ending. I almost gave it four stars.

There are three other stories in this issue, and the first of these, Alien Envoy by Malcolm Jameson, would have been one of the stronger pieces in a normal edition of the magazine. It opens with Ellwood, chief of the Bureau of Interplanetary Military Intelligence, receiving a call saying that the military has disabled and captured one of the hitherto impenetrable alien cruisers that have been landing on Jupiter and the outer planets for many years.
After some back story about the military’s lack of success in interdicting the Ursans, Elwood arrives in orbit to examine the ship and finds a surviving alien on board. He decides to suit up and go inside the chamber himself (the temperature and pressure are similar to Jupiter).
Later, he begins to teach this odd looking octopus-like creature English, a process that takes a number of weeks as he has to use audio, video, and Morse code (the aliens may communicate with radio waves). Eventually, the alien learns enough of the language to communicate with Elwood and, at this point, suggests that its way will be less painful, and quicker:

Ellwood turned off his set meekly.
It had not occurred to him before that mechanically generated radiation might have subtle differences in characteristics from the organically generated variety. He found himself praying that now that it was his turn and he was on the receiving end the converse effect would not be equally painful.
It proved not to be, though there were times when Ellwood felt he would go mad from the exquisite ecstasies that sometimes rose to intensities amounting almost to agony. For the Ursan discarded all dots and dashes and went straight to the source of thought. By means of its own uncanny mechanism it managed to tune in on the neural currents of the brain itself.
It was a dreamlike experience, verging occasionally on the nightmarish. Ellwood had a hard time later conveying some stretches of it to the Grand Council. Indeed, he had a hard time even remembering part of what he experienced, so utterly alien to human conception were many of the bizarre scenes he saw and activities witnessed.
First he had the giddy feeling one has when succumbing to a general anesthetic. It was as if his soul was being torn from his body and forced to float in space. There was never a time when he could be sure that he saw what he saw, or heard what he heard, or felt what he felt. Sensed? Divined? Perceived intuitively? Some such verb seemed more appropriate. But shortly Ellwood quit caring. He was in another world, a world so weird, so fantastic, so amazing in its extremes and distortions of ordinarily accepted laws of nature that he knew that up to then human science had no more than scratched the surface of general knowledge.

Throughout the education process we learn more about the human race’s lack of military success against the Ursans, and that the latter have only ever fired on the humans when they were fired upon themselves. Moreover, the aliens have shown no interest in the inner planets of the solar system, only the gas giants.
The Ursan offers Ellwood a peace deal: in exchange for access to the outer planets of the solar system the aliens will do the same for humans on suitable planets in other parts of the galaxy. The Ursan adds that, if the humans do not accept the offer, they will continue with their operations, and will ignore them unless attacked.

The story itself is fairly straightforward but there are a number of ideas that make it quite an original piece: first, there is the idea of a war starting between humans and aliens due to an inability to communicate; secondly, the Ursans are technologically superior to humans to the extent that they don’t really care about us; finally, and despite the latter, the aliens are capable of being altruistic and/or pragmatic, and even friendly—in the last scene the Ursan uses its pseudopod to shake hands with Ellwood. All of this makes it an atypical story for Astounding. Yes, another one.

Redevelopment by George O. Smith is the third of his ‘Plutonian Lens’ stories, and this one starts off with the “headstrong” Sandra Drake arriving at the Lens in a more collegiate mood, and looking for help from John McBride, the station director. Steve has gone missing in the Haywire Queen and she wants her drive modified to an FTL one so she can look for him. Cue this kind of thing:

McBride wasted no time. “Al,” he said, “you fit the mag-G for vertical bi-lobar field to cover the nose of the crate with the top lobe, and Westy, you see that the mech-G generator in the nose induces the proper vectors in the cupralum bar. I’ll get Hank and Jim to touch up the wiring and safety devices. We’ll have this crate back in space within the hour!”
“Working a little fast, aren’t you?” asked Sandra.
“No. I don’t think so. You’ve got most of the main stuff in place. It’s merely a matter of running the alphatron lines correctly—remember, Sandra, alphons are not electrons and even low-alphon lines require smooth, round bends, otherwise they squirt off in a crackling alphonic discharge that will eat the side out of a steel tank. You’ve done most of the heavy work. It just requires touching up here and there; getting the proper field-intensity out of the gravitic generators and adjusting the output of the alphatrons. Then there is some tricky relay work with the safety circuits; it wouldn’t improve your beauty to suddenly find yourself sitting in the pilot’s chair at seven thousand gravities.  pp. 138-139

Once her ship is modified Drake sets off for Sirius, supposedly look for Steve. Of course he later turns up on the station, and it becomes obvious that Drake has pulled a fast one, wanting her ship modified so she can be the first person to discover an extra-solarian planet.
McBride and Steve follow Drake to Sirius in the Haywire Queen, and eventually find her stranded on a planet inhabited by feathered humanoids. After some back and forth over the radio about her situation they approach the planet to land but find that the ship’s drive stops working. The rest of the story has them work through the problem with a lot of makey-up science involving a nearby moon:

Larry Timkins looked up from a page of scrawled equations. “A slab of cupralum a hundred miles in diameter, rotating in the mechanogravitic field thrown out by Sirius would certainly soak up every bit of power. Must be a slick tie-in. The gravitron puts our O.K. on a resistive load. Hooked to the drive, everything goes phhht.”
“Sure. That’s part of the trouble. It’s the drive, coupled with the general gravitic interference cut up by Soaky.”
“Soaky?”
“I have hung a name on the satellite. Heretofore it has been nameless. We have named it Soaky.”  p. 158

Meanwhile we see Drake behaving like a brat with the alien Telfuians, but she gets her comeuppance when they go to meet the landing Haywire Queen without her (they understand the science behind the drive even though they haven’t been able to get off the planet). The ship takes the two ambassadors on board but they have to leave Drake on the planet for six months because of more dodgy science, giving her a chance to cool her high heels.
This story has all the faults of the first two in the series and is even more padded (there is endless chit chat: “science” problems, domestic arrangements, banter, and patronising conversations with and about Drake).
There is another of this series due in an upcoming issue, sigh.

The last story in the issue is a fairly short piece by A. E. van Vogt, The Harmonizer, which starts off with a soldier noticing an unusual plant in his garden before he returns to the front. The story then flashes back to prehistoric times when an alien spaceship crashes on Earth—but not before spilling its cargo of ibis trees. One later reproduces, and we see the pacification effect that the seeds have on carnivorous dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex, which later become extinct.
This is moderately interesting but the twist ending, which (spoiler) involves the soldier (now revealed as a German) coming home to his house to fall under the plant’s thrall, is just a war-time gimmick. I’m also not sure it makes any sense unless the soldier (and the rest of the Reich) eat the seeds.

The Cover by William Timmins is a rather dark and uninspiring affair, and not one of his best. The bulldozer, however, with the impression of a mouth in its underside, looks suitably monsterish.
The Interior artwork comes mostly from A. Williams, who has a staggering twenty three illustrations in the issue. Most of these are spot illustrations, and fairly average stuff. That said, the last one for the Kuttner/Moore story, the empty booties, is quite good. Or at least suggestive.
Paul Orban and Frank Kramer provide the rest of the internal artwork (and given the length of Killdozer I would have expected more than three illustrations).
There is a very limited amount of non-fiction in this issue. CRT by John W. Campbell, Jr. is another of his dull editorials where he drones on about bits of radios or electronics. In this case he discusses the larger cathode ray screens that are becoming available, and how radio-hams can use them.

Time for a Universe by R. S. Richardson looks at how the age of the universe has been calculated by various means (expansion of the universe, uranium clock, dynamics of clusters, and statistics of binaries) and the differences in the results.
There is also a good anecdote about the necessity of being cautious about data:

There is a story told about Robert lvirchoff, the physicist, and Wilhelm von Bunsen, inventor of the Bunsen burner, that is worth repeating. The two were strolling across the campus of the University of Heidelberg one sunny afternoon deep in conversation upon some abstruse subject. As they passed a silver-coated globe set on the lawn as an ornament Bunsen absent-mindedly ran his fingers over the reflecting surface. To his amazement the side exposed directly to the sun was cooler than the side in shadow.
Immediately the two stopped and began excitedly to investigate this anomalous heating effect. Here perhaps was a new phenomenon in heat conduction involving some mysterious interaction between solar radiation and the reflecting properties of silver. While they were busy devising a theory to account for it the school janitor came by and reversed the position of the globe.
“I have to keep turning it around every once in a while on these hot days,” he remarked.
The story is pretty good except that it seems doubtful whether a reflecting surface as good as silver would heat up so seriously.  p. 107

There is no Analytical Laboratory this time around.⁴

A very good issue, maybe even one of the best ever.  ●

_____________________

1. Alva Rogers had this to say about this issue (A Requiem For Astounding, 1964):

November was distinguished by two outstanding novelettes. The first of these, “When the Bough Breaks,” by Lewis Padgett, could be considered a companion piece to the same author’s earlier “Mimsy Were the Borogoves.” Alexander is a normal eighteen-month-old son of a normal couple until four gnome-like characters present themselves and announce that they are from five hundred years in the future where it seems this same Alexander is still alive, the first of a new race of homo superior. The gnome-like characters are here at the future Alexander’s instructions to give the infant Alexander advanced training so he can get a head start on the future, and the results of this training are tragic and catastrophic.
The second novelette was the classic “Killdozer!” by Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon’s last story in Astounding had been “Medusa,” a less than memorable short in the February, 1942 issue. “Killdozer!” was up to the par of his classic 1941 novelette, “Microcosmic God,” and is, perhaps, his greatest story of his early period of science fiction writing. (“It,” from Unknown, was the greatest thing he ever wrote, including More Than Human, Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953, but this little gem was an out-and-out horror story and it isn’t fair to compare his science fiction writings with it.)
In its own way, “Killdozer! , the story of a giant bulldozer on a Pacific atoll during World War II that is brought to terrifying life by a malevolent alien intelligence—raising merry hell in the process—is as much a horror story as “It.” The picture of an utilitarian piece of machinery such as a bulldozer, without human guidance operating with deadly purpose, was very unsettling, to say the least.

Although Rogers mentions the ‘City’ series, he does not mention Desertion—even though he refers to the other three stories.

2. Paul Williams provides extensive story notes for Killdozer! at the back of Killdozer!, Volume III: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon (North Atlantic Books, 1996). Here are some brief extracts:

In terms of money and acclaim, it was arguably the most successful story of the first decade of his career. And in Sturgeon’s own telling of his life story, it punctuates his longest bout of “writer’s block,” usually described by him (in interviews, and in the foreword to his 1971 collection Sturgeon Is Alive and Well . . .) as lasting for six years, 1940 to 1946, with “Killdozer!” a solitary interruption in the middle, 1943.
Close examination of documentary evidence, primarily copies of letters to and from Sturgeon during and after this period, allows a more accurate dating. He did continue to write as long as he was still in New York, which he left (in order to manage his uncle’s hotel at Treasure Beach on the island of Jamaica) on June 28, 1941. Although he and his wife expected that the hotel job and change of scene would make it easier for him to go on writing fiction, he did not do any writing until April of 1944, on St. Croix in the Virgin Islands, when he wrote a (probably mainstream, i.e. not aimed at the science fiction or fantasy market) short story propagandizing in favor of the much misunderstood Nisei, or American-born Japs. (Italicized phrases are quotes from Sturgeon, in this case from a letter writen to his mother on May 8, 1944.) This story immediately went to a new agent, Nannine Joseph, who was unable to sell it; the manuscript does not survive among Sturgeon’s papers.
The first week of May, 1944, while still completing “the Nisei story,” [a mainstream story written in St. Croix in the Virgin Islands] TS began “Killdozer!”, which he wrote in nine days and immediately sent to [John Campbell]. From a letter to his mother, Christine Hamilton Sturgeon, July 8, 1944: “When we were right at the end of the rope, in comes a check and a letter from Jack Campbell. The check was a godsend, but the letter is something that I’ll treasure for the rest of my life. I must have sold him thirty-five or forty stories and never have I had such a missive from him. ‘I don’t know how I can place it or when I’ll be able to use it, but there, my friend, you have a hunk of story. I’m giving you our highest rate, which brings the check to $542.50. I’m glad you’re back in the field, and if you have any more with anything like this level of tenseness, send ’em along. I want ’em.’ ”
[ . . . ]
How Ted became a ’dozer driver (abbreviated from a conversation between TS and Paul Williams, December 6, 1975): “So while we were in Jamaica, along came December the 7th, and Pearl Harbor, and here we were at the hotel, ninety miles away from Kingston, with gasoline supplies cut off and no chance of getting any guests out there at all. The Americans started building a very large base at Fort Simonds, and we went down there and applied for jobs. I ended up on the Jamaican payroll, handling mess halls and barracks, and a food warehouse. And finally a man came along, clearing up ground around the housing area, and driving a bulldozer. And I fell in love with that machine. So he let me get up on it, and I learned an awful lot. Then I was transferred from quarters and barracks to a gasoline station. We serviced all kinds of equipment, and I got to know some of the American operators, and finally I got hired as a bulldozer operator. I was making more money than I’d ever seen in my life. Then when the base began to fold up, a guy came around recruiting for another job, in Puerto Rico at a place called Ensenada Honda, where they were building an enormous shipfitting plant, and a dry dock, and a landing field. And ultimately we moved over to St. Croix and I settled down to write.” Sturgeon worked in Puerto Rico as a bulldozer operator from August ’42 to December ’43, after which he worked for the Navy for a few months as a supply clerk and cost analyst. In April he and Dorothe and their two daughters moved to St. Croix.
[. . .]
In a letter to his father, Edward Waldo, Feb. 27, 1946, he further reported: “[. . .]the editor thought so well of it that he cancelled his production schedule and had it in print within weeks, as the lead novel in his magazine, with a cover illustration. (The original oil painting for that cover now hangs in my living room.) The magazine hit the stands just as I arrived back in the States, and apparently caused quite a stir in the science-fiction crowd.
[. . .]
Crown Publishing Co. released a new anthology of science-fiction last week. [The Best of Science Fiction.] A month ago, an advance copy was read by a science editor out in California who, on seeing KILLDOZER leading its section in the book, wrote me and asked me if I would take on this series of juveniles.” [. . .] And Crown has just sent me a check for $155 for the reprint rights! In other words, what seemed like a mere temporary alleviation of my circumstances down in St. Croix and nothing more, has proved to be the focal point of a whole series of fine breaks.”

The notes also include information about the 1974 TV movie made from the story, and details about a revised version of the story* used in a later Sturgeon collection Aliens 4:

Sept. 23, 1958, Sturgeon wrote his agent: I would like to correct galleys on the collection called KILLDOZER. One reason . . . has to do with the title story, which has been talked about for films ever since it was written. It is a World War II story and needn’t be; a very little invisible mending will take care of that. It also needs a touch here and there in characterization and dialogue—for example, Street & Smith’s editing “damn” into “care” every time they saw it, so that your bulldozer operators keep saying “I don’t give a care . . .” and one or two other small repairs.
So Sturgeon did rewrite the last eight paragraphs.

* The updated version of Killdozer! is unhelpfully listed as a separate story by ISFDB: Killdozer! (revised).

3. As well as Desertion being an anti-Galactic Empire story, it is another which does not fit into the supposed human primacy/exceptionalism rule said to exist in Campbell’s Astounding.

4. The Analytical Laboratory results for this issue appeared in the February 1945 issue:

I get the impression Campbell wrote this one before lunch.  ●

Summary:
The highlight of this issue is “Lawrence O’Donnell’s” (C. L. Moore & Henry Kuttner’s) The Children’s Hour, an excellent piece about a soldier’s relationship with a woman called Clarissa, and why his memories of her are hidden behind a hypnotic lock. This is one of the best stories of theirs I’ve read.
The other contributions are a much weaker bunch, and include Deadline by Cleve Cartmill, a poor piece but one which famously precipitated a counter-intelligence agent’s visit to Street & Smith’s offices due to the story’s discussion of atomic bomb technology. There is also an ‘Artur Blord’ story from E. Mayne Hull, and work from A. E. van Vogt, Eric Frank Russell, and a pseudonymous George O. Smith.
The interior abstract artwork by A. Williams for the O’Donnell story is noteworthy.
[ISFDB] [Archive.org]

Other reviews:¹
Alva Rogers, A Requiem for Astounding  p. 129-134

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Catherine Tarrant

Fiction:
The Contract • novelette by E. Mayne Hull ∗∗
The Rulers • short story by A. E. van Vogt ∗
Circle of Confusion • novelette by George O. Smith [as by Wesley Long] ∗
Controller • novelette by Eric Frank Russell ∗
The Children’s Hour • novelette by C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner [as by Lawrence O’Donnell] ∗∗∗∗+
Deadline • novelette by Cleve Cartmill ∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by Paul Orban (x8), A. Williams (x11)
Meters • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
In Times to Come
Counting Five Million a Second • science essay
The Vanishing Yankee • science essay by George O. Smith
The Analytical Laboratory: January 1944
“C” Frozen at 186272 • science essay by R. S. Richardson
Stellar Echo Ranging • science essay by Fred Nash
Brass Tacks • letters

_____________________

When I review an issue I usually report on the stories in the page order listed above, but this time around I’m going to lead off with a particularly notable story: no, I’m not describing the obvious choice, Cleve Cartmill’s Deadline (a story commissioned by editor John Campbell so he could grandstand to the Manhattan Project scientists—more on this below) but The Children’s Hour by “Lawrence O’Donnell”. This is one of the pseudonyms used by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, and usually indicates that the story was predominantly written by Moore. As we shall see, that is certainly the case here.

The story begins with Lessing, a soldier, midway through a series of hypnosis sessions conducted by a Lieutenant Dyke (these encounters are used as the framing device throughout the story). During previous sessions, Dyke has discovered a three month period of Lessing’s memories that have been hidden behind a hypnotic block:

Tonight might be the night that would end it. Lessing thought perhaps it would be. Something was stirring behind the intangible locks of his mind, and tonight that door might open which had resisted the skilled manipulations of hypnosis for so long. The door might swing wide tonight at last, and let the secret out which not even Lessing knew.  pp. 86-87

Dyke subsequently establishes that there is a woman involved:

“Tell me,” said Lieutenant Dyke.
“There was a girl,” Lessing began futilely. “I met her in a park—”
Clarissa on a glittering June morning, tall and dark and slim, with the waters of the Hudson pouring past beyond her in a smooth, blue, glassy current.
Stabbed by a white wench’s black eyes. Yes, very black eyes, bright and starry with blackness, and set wide apart in a grave face that had the remoteness and thoughtfulness of a child’s. And from the moment he met that grave, bright glance they knew one another. He had been stabbed indeed—stabbed awake after a lifetime of drowsiness. (Stabbed—like Romeo, who lost both his loves. . . .)
“Hello,” said Clarissa.  p. 100

They had met, Clarissa and he, in so many places in New York, and each place acquired a brilliance of its own once her presence made it clarissima for him. There was no sensible explanation for that glory about her, so that street noises clarified to music and dust turned golden while they were together. It was as if he saw the world through her eyes when they were together, and as if she saw it with vision clearer—or perhaps less clear—than human.  p. 100

Lessing is also led to recall an aunt, a shadowy figure who he cannot visualise, although he remembers a presence in an apartment full of mirrors. He also recalls a car accident which is averted when Clarissa vanishes into a tunnel of shining rings; on another occasion the couple run towards a summerhouse to shelter from the rain, but it disappears (Lessing senses this happens because Clarissa was meant to catch a fever). When Lessing decides to go to Clarissa’s apartment and confront the aunt, he finds himself in another world in front of a tall woman and an armoured man; he later wakes outside the front door of the apartment.

What is surprising about this story is how long it continues in this elusive, enigmatic, and, at times, slightly baffling manner (and is further complicated by literary allusions that contemporary readers of the time would not be able to easily look up on the internet):

The shadow grew, looming, leaning over him. A tinkling rhythm beat out. Words fitted themselves to it.
.
Between the dark and the daylight
When the night is beginning to lower
Comes a pause in the day’s occupation
That is known as the children’s hour—
.
It meant nothing. He groped through blindness, searching for reason.²  p. 86

About her the air shimmered. Lessing blinked. The air turned golden and began to shower down around her in sparkling rain. This was the dream, then, he thought wildly. He had seen it all before. Clarissa standing quietly beneath the golden shower, her face lifted, letting that shining waterfall pour over her slowly. But if it were the dream again, nothing further was to happen. He waited for the floor to spin underfoot—
No, it was real. He was watching another miracle take place, silently and gloriously, in the quiet apartment.
He had seen it in a dream; now it happened before his eyes. Clarissa in a shower of . . . of stars?
Standing like Danae in a shower of gold—
Like Danae in her brazen tower, shut away from the world. Her likeness to Danae struck him with sudden violence. And that impossible rain of gold, and her look of rapt delight. What was it that poured down the shining torrent upon her? What was responsible for setting Clarissa so definitely apart from the rest of humanity, sheltering her at the cost of outraging natural laws, keeping the smooth machinery that protected her humming along its inaudible, omnipotent course? Omnipotent—yes, omnipotent as Zeus once was, who descended upon his chosen in that fabulous rain of gold.³  p. 121

There are references throughout the story to other literary works, e.g., The Country of the Blind, Wordsworth, Cabell, etc.

Later in the story Lessing concludes that someone—or something—is grooming Clarissa for a purpose he can’t fathom (in one of his visions, he sees a figure in a crimson cloak hold Clarissa, and a golden light fall from its hood onto her face)—so he takes Clarissa dancing and drinking, planning afterwards to drive her far away in an effort to break the pattern:

Lessing was tinkling the ice in his third collins and enjoying the pleasant haze that just enough alcohol lent to the particular, shining haze that always surrounded Clarissa. He would not, he told himself, have any more. He was far from drunk, certainly, but there was intoxication in the air tonight, even in this little, noisy, secondrate nightclub. The soaring music had a hint of marijuana delirium in it; the dancers on the hot, crowded floor exhaled excitement.
And Clarissa was responding. Her great black eyes shone with unbearable brightness, and her laughter was bright and spontaneous too. They danced in the jostling mob, not feeling jostled at all because of the way the music caught them up on its rhythms. Clarissa was talking much more than usual this evening, very gayly, her body resilient in his arms.
As for himself—yes, he was drunk after all, whether on the three drinks or on some subtler, more powerful intoxication he did not know. But all his values were shifting deliciously toward the irresponsible, and his ears rang with inaudible music. Now nothing could overpower him. He was not afraid of anything or anyone at all. He would take Clarissa away—clear away from New York and her jailor aunt, and that shining Someone who drew nearer with every breath.  p. 125

This passage is notable not only for the unexpected mention of “marijuana delirium” in the pages of a straight-laced Astounding, but because it hints at what reading the story is like—although I imagine “opium dream” may be a better description. It’s certainly beyond my ability to give an adequate account of the piece, regardless of how many plot points or quotations I scribble onto the page: what I can say is that it feels about twenty years ahead of its time and, for much of its length, I wondered what it was doing in an early-1940’s issue of Astounding.

Notwithstanding these previous comments, the story is finally rationalised into a standard SF tale (or more of one, at least) at the end (I suspect Kuttner took over the writing duties in this section). Here we find that (spoiler) Clarissa is a super human/super being placed among humanity to mature. There is a drift to a Mimsy Were the Borogroves-like transcendence,⁴ but one that is complicated by the revelation that Clarissa is only one facet of an infinity of Clarissas throughout the Universe—and all that is mixed in with discussion of Lessing’s ability to perceive realities that are beyond his comprehension.

This is a very ambitious and complex work if, perhaps, a not entirely successful one: a couple of things aren’t clear, and the story is perhaps over-rationalised at the end. But it’s certainly near-excellent, and it is my favourite Kuttner and Moore story so far bar Private Eye (and I wouldn’t be surprised if that assessment changed on rereading this). As of now this is my choice for 1944 Retro Hugo Best Novelette (or possibly Novella: I have two different OCR word counts at the moment, one above 17,500 words, one below).

The Contract by E. Mayne Hull is the fourth of the six ‘Artur Blord’ stories, and is pretty much the same as the others, i.e., Blord, the interplanetary business man, is so competent and well-informed that he is always half-a-dozen steps ahead of everyone else.
The plot of this one has a policeman called Nadlin dispatched to offer Blord a contract for a thousand space drives so the police force can repay a debt that they want to discharge. Blord takes Nadlin onto his spacecraft as he goes to visit one of his businesses on another planet and, during the trip, accepts the contract. Just before he signs, Blord finds that the friendly boss of the subcontractor that will build the ships is missing, and that the deputy is refusing the order. Blord signs the contract anyway, to the policeman’s surprise.

The rest of the story plays out on the planet where Blord is mining ore to supply the spaceship contractor—this involves a group of strange looking humans who live there, and who are led by a woman called Evee Calder:

Her eyes were black, sunken pools of agony. Her face was the color of snow, drawn and somehow horrible. Her mouth was a thin, twisted, colorless line. Yet she did not look old. There were few lines even in her forehead, and, when she spoke, her voice though weak and a little harsh was that of a young woman. Here was that tragedy of tragedies: a pretty woman in the final stages of a virulent wasting disease.  p. 14

Calder and her group turn out to be escaped ‘zilth’, humans under strict quarantine on another planet because of a disease they have. They fled to this planet, and are building ships to spread out through the galaxy. You can probably guess how the story ends given Blord’s near-omnipotence.
The plot is quite contrived, but it’s a pleasant enough read nevertheless.

The Rulers by A. E. van Vogt starts with a doctor at a party telling a story about how he accidentally stumbled on a meeting of the thirteen men who rule the world (the doctor is a psycho-medician who can “read” people, so it was immediately obvious to him upon seeing them). He then flees and there is an extended chase (part of which is an aerobatic aircar). The thirteen eventually catch up with him by using his “h” drug controlled wife. The story ends when (spoiler) the doctor manages to get control of the thirteen’s “third personalities” (there’s a short bit of psychobabble which sets this up).
Van Vogt’s combination of dream narrative and super-science sometimes pays off spectacularly well; other times it falls flat. This is one of the latter.

Circle of Confusion by George O. Smith gets off to an engaging and picturesque start with a description of a terraformed Pluto which is warmed by an electromagnetic lens in orbit:

So uranium was mined near the region known on the Plutonian maps as The Styx Valley, but which, with characteristic lack of foresight, was across the Devil’s Mountains from the River Styx. Across the Devil’s Range went the uranium to Mephisto, where it was smelted down into pigs. It was then put on barges and floated down the River Styx to Hell, which lies across the River Styx from Sharon; both cities quartering on the Sulphur Sea.
It was loaded onto the ships of space at Hell, and then raced across the void, sunward to the Inner System where it was used.
[. . .]
The sun should have been a piddling little disk of ineffective yellow. Its warmth should have been negligible, just as it had been for a million years before the coming of man. Pluto had been ordained to be cold and forbidding, but it was not.
The sun was a huge, irregular disk of flaming yellow that had peculiar, symmetrical streamers flowing off; twelve of the main ones and a constantly opening and closing twenty-four minor streamers that flowed outward from the duodecagonal pattern of Sol. These streamers rotated, and looked for all the world like the pattern made by rotating two gratings above one another.  pp. 45-46

The story then switches to John McBride, the controller of the lens stations, who learns of a headstrong young woman intent on flying a spaceship through the centre of the lens: she thinks this will be safe (she has had expert advice), but McBride knows that the type of ship she is using will disrupt the lens. The rest of the story details what happens—major damage to the station’s electrical systems and crew, not to mention Pluto losing its central heating—and the engineering effort made to restore the lens’ operation.

Initially this maintains the high quality of the start (the disruption of the lens and initial effects are well described), but unfortunately it bogs down into pages and pages of McBride asking the other nine stations who and what is broken:

McBride called Station 9 again. “Fuller? Look, Bob, how’s 9?”
“Not good,” said Fuller glumly.
“Only one thing outbalances the rest. The alphatron went up with the rest of the stuff or Carlson would have been burned to a crisp by now. That means we’ll have to run over to 1 and get a new alphatron.”
“Can you repair it?”
“Nope. The field coils are melted right down into a copper ring and the insulation, which was vaporized, is now deposited all over the walls of the station in about two hundred atomic thicknesses. The latter is the worst, I think. That means that every single relay contact in the place has got to be gone over with trichlorethylene and a five-hundred-point file.”
“O.K., Bob. Send Tiny Hanson over with Carlson and we’ll send him back with the alphatron. Need anything else?”
‘‘Might send something that’ll either precipitate or absorb the smell of insulation. The whole joint stinks.”
“Cheer up,” said McBride. “Think of how it would stink if we were using rubber like the old boys did. That, Bob, would really make your eyes water! No, I haven’t anything here that you haven’t there. It’ll go away as the atmosphere clarifier takes up the impurities. Better keep a close watch on the filter screens, though, or you’ll get the system fouled and the atmosphere will not be cleared.”

There are pages of this, and it is only leavened with cringe-inducing scenes where McBride meets the headstrong female pilot:

McBride gritted his teeth. “Look, beautiful and senseless. This is Station 10. It is electronegative. One is electropositive. You haven’t got a charge-reversal generator in that crate of yours, because I know darned well that the only place where they have ’em is right here in the lens itself. It’s the only place they’re needed. Now, Miss Drake, the lens is twenty-two million miles in diameter. It is that size because a disk of that diameter subtends the same arc as the sun does when viewed from Terra. Since the lens is situated halfway between Sol and Pluto, the magnification amounts to the projection of the sun on Pluto equal to the sun on Terra. Or don’t you understand the simpler mathematics of optical systems?
“Now, out across six and a half million miles of space, from here, are Stations 9 and 1, both electropositive. It so happens, Miss Sandra Drake, that if the density of matter in space were as high as the atmosphere of Terra at twenty thousand feet, the difference in charge between Station 9 and this one, 10, would be high enough to cause an ionisation discharge! Now put that in that jade cigarette holder and choke on it! Can you possibly—is that microscopic mind of yours large enough—conceive of the effect upon contact? Sister, you’d not only be electrocuted, but you’d light up the sky with the electronic explosion to a degree that would make some Sirian astronomer think that there was a supernova right in his back yard. Now quit acting like the spoiled brat you are, and come along.”  p. 58

When the pair get back to Station 1, McBride hands Drake over to his wife Enid, who puts another flea in her ear (this time about gender roles and relations).
This is so bad it is almost worth reading. The one star is for the good beginning.

Controller by Eric Frank Russell starts with a Japanese army unit landing on a Pacific island that is home to an American inventor. The Japanese are (spoiler) subsequently defeated by the latter, who uses a secret invention which produces “mirror-men”, duplicates of the invaders. These have no ego or soul, and are somehow entirely loyal to him.
It is a formulaic anti-Japanese war story.

Last, and most decidedly least, is Deadline by Cleve Cartmill, which has a Seilla (Allies) spy called Ybor Sebrof (Roby Forbes) dropped into Sixa (Axis)⁵ territory:

All he had to do was to penetrate into the stronghold of the enemy, find Dr. Sitruc, kill him, and destroy the most devastating weapon of history.  p. 155

After landing Roby kills some enemy soldiers, and then encounters a young woman who has been following him. She turns out to be the director of the underground (what are the chances?), and pulls a gun on him as she thinks he is a Sixa agent.
Up to this point the story, a fast moving pulp, isn’t that bad, but it is shamefully padded from then on (Roby’s imprisoned; the woman and her henchman threaten to torture him when he won’t reveal his mission; they send for someone to identify him; an enemy patrol comes to the house; the messenger returns with news that the person that could identify him is dead, yada, yada, yada).
Eventually, Roby escapes and manages to get a patrol of enemy soldiers to take him to see Dr Sitruc, the inventor of the super-weapon. Cartmill finally gets to the point of the story, which is pasting in the atomic technology description he had received from John Campbell:

Now U-235 can raise the temperature of local matter to where it will, uh, ‘burn’, and give off energy. So let’s say we set off a little pinch of U-235. Surrounding matter also explodes, as it is raised to an almost inconceivable temperature. It cools rapidly; within perhaps one-hundred-millionth of a second, it is down below the point of ignition. Then maybe before it’s down to one million degrees hot, and a minute or so may elapse before it is visible in the normal sense. Now that visible radiation will represent no more than one-hundred-thousandth of the total radiation at one million degrees—but even so, it would be several hundred times more brilliant than the sun. Right?”
Dr. Sitruc nodded. [Roby] thought there was a touch of deference in his nod.
“That’s pretty much the temperature cycle of a U-235 plus surrounding matter explosion, Dr. Sitruc. I’m oversimplifying, I guess, but we don’t need to go into detail. Now that radiation pressure is the stuff that’s potent. The sheer momentum, physical pressure of light from the stuff at one million degrees, would amount to tons and tons and tons of pressure. It would blow down buildings like a titanic wind if it weren’t for the fact that absorption of such appalling energy would volatilize the buildings before they could move out of the way. Right?” Dr. Sitruc nodded again. He almost smiled.
“All right,” [Roby] went on. He now entered the phase of this contest where he was guessing, and he’d get no second guess. “What we need is a damper, something to hold the temperature of surrounding matter down. In that way, we can limit the effect of the explosion to desired areas, and prevent it from destroying cities on the opposite side of Cathor. The method of applying the damper depends on the exact mechanical structure of the bomb itself.  pp. 173-174

He stopped before the bomb, looked down at it. He nodded, ponderously. “I see,” he said, remembering Sworb’s drawings and the careful explanations he had received. “Two cast-iron hemispheres, clamped over the orange segments of cadmium alloy. And the fuse—I see it is in—a tiny can of cadmium alloy containing a speck of radium in a beryllium holder and a small explosive powerful enough to shatter the cadmium walls. Then—correct me if I’m wrong, will you?—the powdered uranium oxide runs together in the central cavity. The radium shoots neutrons into this mass—and the U-235 takes over from there. Right?  p. 174

—That’s not Roby talking to Sitruc there, that’s Campbell pitching to the Los Alamos/Manhattan Project scientists.
Roby eventually manages to overcome Dr Sitruc and kill him (he grabs Sitruc’s gun with his tail—the story is supposedly set on an alien planet, although there is very little detail) and then walks out with the bomb (because, of course, the chief enemy scientist would interrogate an agent in the room that houses the weapon, wouldn’t he?) Roby gets picked up by an allied plane, and during the flight back they dismantle and scatter the bomb.

This is a pretty awful story but, when it was published, the detailed discussion of atomic bomb technology came to the attention of the authorities (security officers at Los Alamos overheard a group of scientists discussing the story in a copy of Astounding), and an agent visited both Campbell and Cartmill. There has been a lot of commentary about this incident over the years, mostly celebratory⁶ (SF fans of the time craved serious attention—something that is still true today), but the episode seems attention-seeking and irresponsible to me, and could have had serious repercussions.
If it wasn’t for the interest of the authorities, the story, and Cartmill, would be long forgotten.

The Cover this issue is by William Timmins, another dark affair which shows an oddly shaped man—a “zilth”—from the Hull story.
Paul Orban and A. Williams share the credits for the Interior artwork this issue, although most of it is by the latter. William’s work includes abstract illustrations which complement the Moore & Kuttner story.
Meters by John W. Campbell, Jr. is more electronics essay than editorial. It begins by discussing radios and “metering” and it’s only later in the article, when Campbell starts talking about central heating systems, that it becomes apparent he is talking about control systems and/or primitive robotics. I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that Campbell is a dreadful science writer.
In Times to Come trails two series stories in next month’s issue: the first is van Vogt’s The Changeling, the third and last of the ‘Pendrake’ stories (although it doesn’t mention this); the second is The Bureaucrat, a ‘Bullard’ story (a space navy series) by Malcolm Jameson.

Counting Five Million a Second is a short science/photo essay about a Bureau of Standards radio station which produces a highly calibrated signal. Although the writer goes into great detail about the workings of the transmitter, it’s not entirely clear what the purpose of the signal is—I think it’s for radio manufacturers to calibrate their equipment, but I’m not entirely sure.⁷

The Vanishing Yankee by George O. Smith is (a) partly a near-incomprehensible account about basement or garret inventors and the problems of building a radio that is as good as a commercially available one, and (b) partly an examination of how science has moved on from sole inventors and hobbyists:

Perhaps, some day, some tinkerer will uncover some phenomena that lacks explanation, and studying it, he will lay the basis for personal-phone. He will bring forth the Garret Geniuses again; calling them from their gadgeteering to discover the many unknown, simple factors of the unknown science.
Then for a few years, Garret Genius and his brother will leave their minor discoveries of how to put a kink in a hairpin, and why it is better to put the scratchem on the back of a pack of matches. He is a survivor type, this Garret Genius, and never will become completely extinct. But right now, Garret and his brothers are all working for laboratories, and making their strides in seven league boots since they have the right equipment to work with.
He went into partial oblivion because he was too good. Big Business said: “If Garret Genius can discover and invent in his own attic with junk and haywire, what more could he do for me in a well-equipped laboratory, with a steady income, and with plenty of tools and supplies?’’
The answer is easy. And so I predict that when mankind is ready for the next Great Art, it will emerge from the laboratory and not from the garret. p. 116

Some of Smith’s observations about lone scientists echo those made by Alec Nevala-Lee & Edward M. Wysocki, Jr. in a recent (January-February 2020) Analog essay, Making Waves: The Inventions of John W. Campbell (which, in part, looks at the sole scientist trope in Astounding—see the Cartmill story above—versus the reality of teamwork).⁸
Smith’s article is hard going in places—it reads like it is written for ham enthusiasts—but it is worth persevering with.

 

The Analytical Laboratory: January 1944 was discussed in that issue.⁹
“C” Frozen at 186272 is a short science essay by R. S. Richardson that compares the different values of ‘c’, the speed of light, measured over the years. The value given, 186,282 mph, is 10 mph slower than modern values.
Stellar Echo Ranging is a half-page science squib by Fred Nash about measurements taken of Nova Persei. I have no idea what point he was trying to make.

Brass Tacks leads off with a long letter by John L. Gergen, of Mineapolis, Minnesota which contains a review of 1943 and a good general critique of the magazine (the faulty glue used for a previous issue, the smaller size, the contents page illustration, etc.). It is worth a read (click on the image above for a higher resolution version).
R. E. Bowman of Blacksburg, Virginia, contributes another long letter about the poor state of science teaching in schools:

Four years ago the English science teachers published the Spens Report, giving their ideas [about technical schools], and is summarized in Vol. 143 of Nature. There has been a conspiracy of silence concerning this report in the United States. But get it out and read it. How many schools in this country will measure up to the ideas set forth there? Unfortunately, Britain may be too poor after the war to build many such. Read the article and write the Editor. I only wish I could have attended such a school when I was eleven plus.  p. 150

This is followed by a couple of more eccentric letters from E. L. Cameron of Front Royal, Virginia, and Frederick G. Hehr of Los Angeles, California. The first discusses Galactic Government, and how it will need to get rid of those pesky democratic systems and institute an oligarchy, and the second is about “high mutants” hiding in society. (I probably exaggerate a little.)

This is generally a poor issue, but is worth obtaining for The Children’s Hour.  ●

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1. Alva Rogers mentions only the Cartmill story in A Requiem for Astounding (see footnote 6 below), but not the O’Donnell one. Given this omission, and the lack of comment about  Jameson’s The Anarch in the last issue, I’m beginning to wonder to what extent the book is a useful guide.

2. The title of Moore & Kuttner’s story (and the quote therein) comes from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Children’s Hour:

Between the dark and the daylight,
When the night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day’s occupations,
That is known as the Children’s Hour.
.
I hear in the chamber above me
The patter of little feet,
The sound of a door that is opened,
And voices soft and sweet.
.
From my study I see in the lamplight,
Descending the broad hall stair,
Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,
And Edith with golden hair.
.
A whisper, and then a silence:
Yet I know by their merry eyes
They are plotting and planning together
To take me by surprise.
.
A sudden rush from the stairway,
A sudden raid from the hall!
By three doors left unguarded
They enter my castle wall!
.
They climb up into my turret
O’er the arms and back of my chair;
If I try to escape, they surround me;
They seem to be everywhere.
.
They almost devour me with kisses,
Their arms about me entwine,
Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen
In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!
.
Do you think, O blue-eyed banditti,
Because you have scaled the wall,
Such an old mustache as I am
Is not a match for you all!
.
I have you fast in my fortress,
And will not let you depart,
But put you down into the dungeon
In the round-tower of my heart.
.
And there will I keep you forever,
Yes, forever and a day,
Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,
And moulder in dust away!

3. Danae is a figure from Greek mythology. (There is a Wikipedia page here: I’m not sure how this fits in with the story, other than the image of golden rain.)

4. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to view Mimsy Were the Borogroves as a warm-up act for The Children’s Hour, although the latter has been comparatively overlooked by anthologists. It has seldom been reprinted (its ISFDB page is here) and, in particular, was not included in The Great Science Fiction Stories Volume 6, 1944 by Isaac Asimov & Martin H. Greenberg (ISFDB page here).
It’s been suggested to me that the story was overshadowed by Moore’s story from later that year, No Woman Born.

5. If I hadn’t seen mention of the reverse anagrams in Cartmill’s story elsewhere, I don’t think I’d have noticed.

6. A typical example of positive coverage of Cartmill’s story is Alva Rogers’ account in A Requiem for Astounding:

Perhaps the most sensational story of the year was “Deadline,” a novelette in the March issue by Cleve Cartmill. This story was not sensational literarily, but literally.
[. . .]
[It excited] certain persons in government circles into action with ludicrous results. Campbell has published his version of the affaire Deadline, and I think it might be interesting to hear Cartmill’s. In a personal latter, he had this to say:
.
“Deadline,” that stinker, came about when John Campbell or I suggested to one or the other that I do a yarn about an atomic bomb. I’m not sure we called it that in our correspondence—we were thinking in terms of U-235 and critical mass. Our correspondence took place in early August, 1943. My file shows that I mailed it to Astounding Sept. 8, received the check Sept. 20. John wasn’t too happy with the story, but he knew I was hungry.
He published it early in March, 1944 and a week or two later a Brooks-Brothered young man from Military Intelligence came to see me at my home in Manhattan Beach. We spent about five or six hours together, mostly in my answering questions. I had the file of Cartmill-Campbell correspondence about the story, and he borrowed this for copying. Upshot: I was in the clear, but violated personal security which every American should etc., etc., etc. Just how I violated any kind of security wasn’t clear then; all the facts contained in the story were matters of public record.
What they were afraid of was that I—or John—had had access one way or another to information supposedly confined to the Manhattan Project: The similarity of names: Manhattan—Manhattan Beach were purely coincidental and half a continent apart.
They also put John through the question mill. He told me at our first meeting—Westercon, LA—some fifteen years after that they had tried to extract a promise that he would publish nothing more concerning nuclear fission and he told them to go fly their atoms.
Well, the various stories released in later years had everything from the FBI to foreign spies in the act. But I saw of Mata Hari(s) neither hide nor hari, damnit. (November 19, 1961)
.
Campbell was immensely pleased by the furor the story created in Washington. It was proof positive that science fiction, particularly the Astounding brand, was important enough to warrant serious scrutiny by learned heads in the government, and by inference from this fact, by others in the scientific community. No longer did science fiction deal with childish and improbable Buck Rogers adventures, but dealt instead, in many instances, with serious scientific problems. And most fans felt pretty much the same pride in their favorite form of literature when the facts concerning “Deadline” and Astounding’s involvement with atomic bomb security became known. For a while it was a devastating weapon used in refuting any sneering aspersions cast at science fiction by its critics.  p. 132-133

There is an extensive (and much less flattering) account of the incident in Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding (Harper-Collins, 2018). Here are a couple of extracts to give you an idea:

[Campbell] had long suspected that the government was working on an atomic bomb. His earliest stories in college had revolved around the discovery of nuclear power, but when the moment finally came, it found him on the outside looking in. If he had graduated from MIT a few years later, he might conceivably have been part of the effort, but instead, he was just an “organized fan.”
It led him to break his one rule. He had said that Astounding would refrain from publishing anything that might reveal secrets of national defense, and now he was deliberately printing a story with blatant parallels to the most important military project of all time. Campbell made no effort to clear it with the censors, as he had for similar works. It was an act of recklessness that exceeded anything that Hubbard ever did—but it was also the only bomb that he could detonate.
And its impact was felt at once. The Manhattan Project counted many science fiction fans among its workers, and word of the story rapidly spread, until employees were talking about it openly in the cafeteria of the atomic weapons lab in New Mexico. Cartmill’s device bore minimal resemblance to the designs under development, but it didn’t matter. Edward Teller, who would later be known as the father of the hydrogen bomb, recalled that the reaction at Los Alamos was “astonishment.”
But it made its most significant impression on a man who wasn’t a scientist at all. He was a security officer. As the others discussed the story over lunch, he listened quietly—and he took notes. If Campbell had wanted attention, he was about to succeed beyond his wildest expectations.

On March 8, 1944, a month after “Deadline” appeared, Agent Arthur E. Riley went to interview Campbell at the Chanin Building at 122 East Forty-Second Street, where the magazine had recently relocated. It was exactly the sort of reaction that the editor had hoped to provoke. The story wouldn’t have received nearly the same degree of interest if he had simply submitted it to the censorship office, and he seemed flattered by the inquiry, answering the agent’s questions as cheerfully as if he were auditioning for a role on the Manhattan Project itself.
Campbell took full responsibility, saying that he had written to Cartmill—who had “no technical knowledge whatever”—with the idea. Riley wrote in his report, “The subject of atomic disintegration was not novel to [Campbell], since he had pursued a course in atomic physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1933.” As an editor with a scientifically literate audience, Campbell added, he often drew on published sources and the work of his “technically minded intimates and associates.” He showed Riley a copy of a journal that talked about nuclear fission, and he even described the story line of “Solution Unsatisfactory.”
If he was hoping to make a favorable impression, he wasn’t entirely successful. Riley reported that Campbell was “somewhat of an egotist,” a judgment confirmed when the editor stated grandly, but not inaccurately, “I am Astounding Science Fiction.” Campbell also provided Cartmill’s address and offered to suppress the magazine’s Swedish edition, which seemed the one most likely to fall into German hands—and in fact, Wernher von Braun, the head of the Nazi rocket program, was allegedly obtaining it using a false name and a mail drop in Sweden, although there was no way that either man could have known this at the time.

These extracts come from the last part of Chapter Eight and the beginning of Chapter Nine

7. There is more information about the WWV reference signal on Wikipedia.

8. My review of Alec Nevala-Lee & Edward M. Wysocki, Jr’s Analog article is here.

9. The Analytical Laboratory results for this issue appeared in the June issue:

I’m pleasantly surprised that not only did the Moore & Kuttner story end up in first place (although it did have the benefit of being the longest story), but that the voters realised that the Smith, Russell, and Cartmill stories were turkeys (presumably the latter was in sixth place—or was it redacted?)  ●

Reposted 20^th March 2020 as the original blog post had vanished. (Memo to self: do more backups).

Summary:
A lacklustre issue whose only story of note is Frederic Brown’s Arena. E. Mayne Hull and A. E. van Vogt’s The Winged Man concludes (it isn’t as good as the first half), and there are stories by Hal Clement, Murray Leinster, and Randall Garrett (the latter is a pseudonymous entry in the unfortunately returned Probability Zero department).
William Timmins contributes another good cover.
[ISFDB page] [Archive.org copy]

Other reviews:¹
Alva Rogers, A Requiem for Astounding  p. 129-134

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Catherine Tarrant

Fiction:
Trog • novella by Murray Leinster –
Trojan Fall • short story by Hal Clement ∗
Arena • novelette by Fredric Brown ∗∗∗+
Boomerang • short story by Harry Walton ∗∗+
The Winged Man (Part 2 of 2) • serial by E. Mayne Hull and A. E. van Vogt [as by E. Mayne Hull] ∗∗
Probability Zero:
Contagion • short story by George Holman ∗
The Absence of Heat • short story by Randall Garrett [as by Gordon Garrett] –
Secret Weapon • short story by Robert Browning (II) ∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by Paul Orban (x16), A. Williams (x8)
The Difference • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
The Analytical Laboratory: February & March 1944
Brass Tacks • letters
Mathematician • science essay
“They Were Dead—” • science essay by Willy Ley

_____________________

This issue’s fiction opens with a novella by Murray Leinster called Trog which, like the handful of other stories I’ve read by this writer, only reinforces my low opinion of his work. That said, the first couple of pages, where Dick Drummond and Sally cross the river to a post-apocalyptic New York, aren’t too bad:

At only one place along the whole Hudson shore was there a tiny plume of steam. That was where a barge lay alongside a ship sunk at its dock, salvaging cargo from the swamped vessel. The other docks were lifeless.
But not empty. One stretch three city blocks long, to be sure, was a scorched mass of ruin, with the masts of three steamers standing up above the wreckage. But the rest of the water front seemed intact as far as the docks were concerned. Yet there was no sign of life. The monster liner Queen Caroline lay careened, her deckhouses crushing in the roof of the wharf beside her.
The rest of the wharves had sunken ships beside them. Some few had settled upright. More leaned one way or another, and several lay on their sides with no human beings anywhere about. The rest of the city was as strangely quiet. A horse and wagon crawled along the Hudson Drive. There was smoke from the chimney of a brown-brick building at Thirtieth Street. Somewhere up where Riverside Drive began there were a few bright spots which might have been children. But the city seemed to be dead. There were three steamers—one listing badly—at anchor down in the lower harbor, and a sailing schooner came down under the George Washington Bridge. That was all the water traffic. Absolutely all.  p. 6

As they are taken across the river in a rowboat, Sally indicates to Dick that their oarsman is a looter and a “trog”. When they arrive at the far shore Dick mentions this to the soldiers there to meet them, and the man dives into the water to escape, only to be shot.

In the next few pages we learn more about this collapsed society, and what a “trog” is, starting with comments from Hamilton, who is also there to meet Dick:

[Hamilton said bitterly:] “Man, the Master of the Universe! Getting to the point where he was almost his own master—where he’d cease to be an animal responding to his environment and become someone who would change his environment to suit himself! We were almost at that point. But the troglodyte in us—our mass consciousness, they say—couldn’t stand it. So it took charge and pulled everything down.”
[. . .]
[Dick said:] “There is a mass consciousness with which each brain has a more or less tenuous contact. It accounts for telepathy and a few other things we haven’t been able to explain with our brand of screwdriver research. But I haven’t quite accepted the theory that people are sick of civilization, and every so often one of them will draw from that mass consciousness the impulse and the information he needs to smash up a power plant by reversing the polarity of a key relay—much less that there’s a mass consciousness for the whole human race which can’t stand civilization and has cracked up and set out to destroy it.”  p. 10

Dick is right to be sceptical of this idea as—after more padding about the world situation, and a plane crash involving Sally’s father, a scientist, returning from a European conference to discuss the crisis—he manages (spoiler) to lure a trog into his lab and empty a tommy-gun magazine into him.  When Dick subsequently examines the trog’s body he finds an electronic box, and later determines that it induced the catatonic brain patterns he and Sally and Blaisdell recorded when the trog arrived at the lab. (This ambush takes a lot of organisation as Dick has to set up ECG monitors, cameras, and alarms, etc.).
Dick then goes to town with written accounts of how the trogs operate, and tells the leaders there to send messengers to the rest of the country.
Later on in the story, after the authorities capture more trogs, they realise that they are German agents involved in a plot to take over the world (third time lucky). The American military then spots an enemy armada sailing towards the USA, and Dick and his associate Blaisdell manage to modify the trog device so that it can be used to incapacitate the would-be invaders.
This is a fairly dreadful story: apart from the fact that the mind-control plot just doesn’t convince, the piece is heavily padded (this includes a lot of the dialogue with inserted ellipsis that don’t seem . . . to have any purpose . . . but to increase the page count . . . and presumably pay rate).
There are also parts of the story which look like Leinster pitched the story to Campbell and that the latter contributed his ideas: the “mass consciousness” sections (the idea that a large groups of people can be manipulated like a herd); the radio ham babble used in the description of the counter device; a speech which asserts that German ideology will never triumph over American industry and technology, etc., etc.

Trojan Fall by Hal Clement is ostensibly about a thief going on the run in a spaceship but is, for the most part, a barely disguised (and dull) lecture about celestial navigation:

From where he was, the runaway could not lay a direct course for his chosen hideout. His knowledge of solid geometry and trigonometry was so small that all he could do was to continue on his present course until the proper heliocentric distance was attained, then stop, put Sol exactly on his beam, hold it there while he turned in the proper direction, and again run in second-order flight for a certain length of time—dead reckoning pure and very simple. By thus reducing his goal position to a known plane—or near plane; actually the surface of a sphere centered on Sol—he could get the course of his second leg by simply measuring, on a plane chart, the angle whose vertex was the point in the sky toward which he had been driving, and whose sides were determined, respectively, by some beacon star such as Rigel or Deneb, and the star of his destination. He dragged out a heliocentric chart and protractor, and set to work.  p. 61

The thief eventually arrives at a pair of dwarf red suns and parks himself at what he thinks will be a stable Trojan point (where he will theoretically remain in position and not drift). Then he shuts down his ship and waits for the Feds to turn up, hoping they will search the area, fail to find him, and move on. When they arrive he holds on as long as he can before (spoiler) the temperature inside the ship becomes too hot to be bearable. When he turns his systems back on he realises he has drifted towards the sun and is doomed.

In the final scene there is a point of view change to the pursuers, who explain his mistake: this involves a geeky mini-lecture about Trojan points only working when one of the two planets/suns has a mass at least twenty-five times greater than the other (such as our sun and Jupiter).

Arena by Fredric Brown opens with Carson, a scout ship pilot, engaging an alien Outsider warship beyond the orbit of Pluto—he then wakes up naked, lying on blue sand under a blue dome, and notices a red spherical object in the distance.
Carson hears a disembodied voice which says that the speaker, an alien super-being, chanced upon the human and the Outsider fleets about to destroy each other. Rather than allowing this mutual destruction to occur (neither the human race or Outsiders would win outright, and both races would be left crippled), the super-being decrees that Carson and an Outsider (the red sphere) will engage in single combat: the loser’s race will be annihilated, leaving the victor unscathed.
The rest of the story tells of the fight between the Carson and the Outsider, which starts when the “Roller” moves towards him but is stopped by a force field. The pair throw rocks at each other for a while, and then the Outsider lobs a decapitated blue lizard which it caught and killed.

The events of the rest of the story unfold against Carson’s increasing thirst and weakness, and involve his unsuccessful attempt at negotiating peace (Carson can sense the Outsider’s malevolent emotions in response), and experiments to see what will pass through the force field. Eventually, Carson passes out, but comes round when one of the lizards in the dome approaches him:

“Hello,” said the voice.
It was a small, thin voice. It sounded like—
He opened his eyes and turned his head. It was a lizard.
“Go away,” Carson wanted to say. “Go away; you’re not really there, or you’re there but not really talking. I’m imagining things again.”
But he couldn’t talk; his throat and tongue were past all speech with the dryness. He closed his eyes again.
“Hurt,” said the voice. “Kill. Hurt—kill. Come.”
He opened his eyes again. The blue ten-legged lizard was still there.
It ran a little way along the barrier, came back, started off again, and came back.
“Hurt,” it said. “Kill. Come.”
Again it started off, and came back. Obviously it wanted Carson to follow it along the barrier.
He closed his eyes again. The voice kept on. The same three meaningless words. Each time he opened his eyes, it ran off and came back.
“Hurt. Kill. Come.”
Carson groaned. There would be no peace unless he followed the blasted thing. Like it wanted him to.
He followed it, crawling. Another sound, a high-pitched squealing, came to his ears and grew louder.
There was something lying in the sand, writhing, squealing. Something small, blue, that looked like a lizard and yet didn’t—
Then he saw what it was—the lizard whose legs the Roller had pulled off, so long ago. But it wasn’t dead; it had come back to life and was wriggling and screaming in agony.
“Hurt,” said the other lizard. “Hurt. Kill. Kill.”
Carson understood. He took the flint knife from his belt and killed the tortured creature. The live lizard scurried off quickly.  p. 89-90

Carson (spoiler) then has an epiphany about the nature of the force-field, which leads directly to the climactic events of the story where he renders himself temporarily unconscious to get through the force field.

This is an inventive and entertaining story, and is much better than the later Star Trek episode (which made Brown’s story more famous today than it might otherwise have been).²

Boomerang by Harry Walton has a narrator called Ed who lost his financial interest in a substance called Sodorite to a man called Carner who, in turn, lost a controlling 51% interest to a third man called Sporn. The story opens with all three meeting in a speakeasy with its own teleport booth. There, Carner makes a proposition to Sporn: if Carner can manage to kill Sporn in the next five days he gets all the shares in the company; if he doesn’t manage to kill him, Sporn gets them (there is a duelling code in this world, so this would all be legal). Carner suggests that Ed holds all the shares until the end of the five day period, at which point they pass to the winner.
This doesn’t really convince, nor does (spoiler) the teleportation gimmick that lets Carner win. That said, the story’s world-building is intriguing and noir-ish, with its duelling and psychodynamic conditioning giving it a similar feel to Kuttner’s Private Eye, or Alfred Bester’s later 1950’s novels. It’s worth a look.

The second part of The Winged Man by E. Mayne Hull and A. E. van Vogt picks up after the fishmen’s kidnap of Jones-Gordon, the submarine’s commander. Kenlon, the first officer, tries to get the location of the fishmen’s city from Nemmo so he can pursue the kidnappers, but has no success.
When Kenlon later goes above to check the other ships in the area he notices that an air boat is approaching. As the craft gets nearer Kenlon sees it is full of Amazonian women and, when it arrives, their six foot tall leader talks to him in a strange form of English.

He learns that the woman is Dorilee, “the Tenant of Joannas guarding the Sessa Clen on her way to her marriage bed”. Kenlon learns that the women—the “joannas”—are from 10,000 AD.
When Dorilee asks to see around the submarine Kenlon takes her below. There, after more conversation, Dorilee sprinkles white crystals on the floor which immobilise the crew but leave her unaffected:

She was speaking again: “Ordinarily, we would never have taken such action as this. But the Sessa Clen must be prepared to occupy the marriage bed within two weeks. Or else her place will be taken by her sister.
“You may say, why not, when the winged men finally return us to our time, ask them to see that we re-emerge within seconds of where we entered. They have told me that the mechanical laws of time-travel make it necessary to allow for all the time that passes here.”
She went on: “What was finally decisive was the statement of the winged men that they would permit no one to return to their particular age until the city of the fishmen was destroyed. So you see”—she shrugged—“we have no alternative. We must use your ship to carry out their purpose.”  p. 147

Two of the four men on the coning tower come down and are overcome by the crystals, which alerts the others: there is a standoff between Dorilee and the men left above. Kenlon is then released from the neural effect so he can order them to surrender. The other joannas come aboard, as well as a birdman who was circling above the boat. As the latter, Laren, talks to Dorilee, Kenlon realises that there are tensions between them. Laren then tells Kenlon that the council wants to talk to him, and they leave together, with Laren carrying Kenlon to the eyrie.
The rest of the story is typically van Vogtian: Kenlon arrives at the eyrie, where he is fascinated by its construction and its angel-like occupants—but then suddenly finds himself in the mind of a bird man far above the eyrie:

He was flying. There was no mistaking the movement, the free, the strong, the immensely strong movement. Flying through a thick mist of cloud that hid even the tips of his wings.
His vision included eye awareness of his legs drawn up against his body; and it included blurred visualization of his wings—blurred because the two great pinions were hammering away at the air like the pistons of a swiftly running engine. His body glowed with power; his whole being exulted with the glory of winged flight. The exhilaration was a tingling joy inside him.
For a long minute that was all there was. Then slowly his brain began to emerge from the state of rigidity into which it seemed to have frozen. The era of pure impression ended. And a personal thought was born, the first of many.
A thought so powerful, so devastating, that his wings ceased their pumping, his body twisted with amazement; he felt bewildered, stunned. And still that thought would not be eased, but rather grew like a storm, becoming more violent with each passing moment: What—what—WHAT had happened?  p. 157

Kenlon sees (through the eyes of the birdman whose mind he is in) a group of two hundred have gathered above the clouds in the sun, and he watches as they sing about their history and a hoped-for return of land.
Then—just as suddenly—Kenlon finds himself inside the mind of a fishman who is part of a group hunting a shark. After they kill it, the fishman takes the body down into the undersea city. When he arrives, Kenlon sees around the undersea city and learns more about that society as the fishman goes about his business. When the fishman eventually reaches one of the far airlocks, Kenlon sees Jones-Gordon (the submarine’s kidnapped commander) arrive, and realises he is going to be revived and taken to the fishmen’s council.

Kenlon then departs this host and finds himself in mental communication with the Council. They discuss the war with him, and ask him to choose whether the birdmen or fishmen will survive. They say that, while he deliberates, he should regain control of his boat. Kenlon notes that, even though the fishmen are the aggressors, he admires their primitive energy.
The rest of the story (spoiler) details how Kenlon regains control of the submarine; his mutiny against Jones-Gordon (who returns from the fishmen’s city wanting to destroy the birdmen); and Kenlon’s destruction of the fishmen’s intelligence centre (which gave them the technology to wage their war). Kenlon leaves the rest of their underwater city intact as he knows that, without the intelligence centre, they are no longer a threat to the birdmen.
The story closes with Jones-Gordon forgiving the mutiny, and the submarine going home.
This part of this novella isn’t nearly as good as last month’s, and there are a number of reasons for this: first, the climax is incredibly rushed, to the story’s detriment; second, the interesting interplay between Kenlon and Jones-Gordon is absent in this half due to the latter’s kidnap; third, as the situation in the future is described and explained, the less convincing the story becomes; fourth, this part just isn’t as smoothly written, and it feels like the work of an entirely different writer.³
A game of two halves, but I might pick up the book-length version to see if it is any better.⁴
This issue unfortunately heralds the return of Probability Zero (I don’t think I’ve read one I like). There are three entries, led off by Contagion by George Holman, which is a briskly told piece about a man arriving on Venus, and undergoing a medical and inoculation process:

I felt the prick of the needle and the swelling of a vein as the serum entered. “Twenty years ago [kleptomania] was regarded as mental unbalance,” the doctor said, as he laid the needle aside and opened my mouth. “Today this peculiar human activity is known to be caused by the germ kleptococcus pilferatorius. It is invariably accompanied by the germ prevaricatus falsificatum, without which it cannot survive. Before being exposed to these germs by contact with human immigrants, these native Venusians would not lie or steal. After they became infected, they began to lie like Trojans and to steal everything they could get their hands on. But after Hansel isolated kleptococcus pilferatorius an antitoxin was developed, and the Venusians were cured of stealing.”  p. 130

The ending (spoiler), where a hunger epidemic and an outbreak of lying coincide at an alien village, didn’t make any sense to me, but it sets up a punchline.
The Absence of Heat by Randall Garrett is about the threat of crystalline aliens spreading throughout the universe. The daft ending depends on the idea that (spoiler) matter ceases to exist at absolute zero (it doesn’t).
Secret Weapon by Robert Browning II is about (spoiler) sinking German U-boats by electroplating them (they become so heavy they sink).

The Cover by William Timmins is another good effort and, like his last, shows only part of a larger vessel. In this case it is the stern of one of the scuttled boats that feature in the opening to Trog. The ruins in the background are New York.
Two thirds of this issue’s Interior artwork is by Paul Orban, who work ranges from the forgettable spot illustrations of Leinster’s Trog, to some not bad work for Hull & van Vogt’s The Winged Man.
A. Williams provides good, action-packed illustrations for Fredric Brown’s Arena, but dull productions for Walton’s Boomerang (although that is a tough one to illustrate).
The Difference by John W. Campbell, Jr. is another short, turgid science essay masquerading as an editorial. It starts by talking about steam turbines and heat engines, then discusses their inefficiencies, and finally ends up with a discussion of the gas turbine. If you aren’t familiar with the mechanical operation of these devices (compressors, etc.), then I’m not sure this will make much sense.
I wish Campbell would use this editorial space to talk about matters that affect the magazine or the field.
The Analytical Laboratory: February & March 1944 were discussed in those issues.⁵
Brass Tacks opens with “Caleb Northrup” (Campbell) supposedly replying to Murray Leinster’s “one-man war against ‘brass hats’, ‘bureaucrats’, and ‘politicians’”, but it’s just an opportunity for him to hold forth on one of his pet subjects: the habits of politicians and officers.
The second letter is from the soon-to-be editor of New Worlds magazine⁶ (launched in 1946), John “Ted” Carnell, who writes that he is back from “world-cruising” (military service in WWII), and has found a pile of Astoundings waiting to be read. He recounts his previous situation:

You might be interested in knowing that I’ve found copies of your magazines in the most unexpected places—there were numerous back issues available in Cape Town and Cairo—at fancy prices, too—and for a short spell I was in Damascus, Syria, and was stopped on the main street by a dirty old Arab who was selling clean American magazines, amongst which were two copies of 1942 ASF’s. Again, during a storm in the Mediterranean we came across a derelict hulk, and upon boarding her I found two copies of this year’s issues.  p. 97-98

The last letter from R. Silbiger (no address) is a complaint about the shrinkage of Astounding and the cessation of Unknown, while paper continues to go to less worthy magazines.

Mathematician looks like it’s a short photo essay about a wall-sized early computer, but is actually about a supply-and-demand simulator for a regional electricity company.

I was dreading the prospect of reading “They Were Dead—” by Willy Ley as it has some ghastly photographs of dogs that were killed and brought back to life (there is one particularly unpleasant photograph of a dog’s severed head exhibiting basic sensory and motor response—needless to say this was not a dog that was brought back to life).
That said, it covers these experiments fairly quickly before moving on to describe cell death and the different periods that the body and brain remain viable, and in what conditions (temperature, etc.). Ley concludes with a discussion on the revivification of humans, and the ethical problems this poses—do you revive people who will be brain-damaged?:

It would need a new set of rules of professional ethics.
And it might require a law—but the legislators will have a hard nut to crack when confronted with the question whether a person’s intellect is, on principle, to be valued higher than his body. It is possible, in legal practice, to restrict a person because of insanity. But I don’t think that any country has a law which provides that a hopelessly insane person can or must be killed. (The German SS does it, but the practices of the German SS are far outside of recognized ethics, legal or otherwise.)  p. 118

A lacklustre issue apart from Frederic Brown’s Arena, and some of the artwork.  ●

_____________________

1. Alva Rogers says of Fredric Brown’s Arena:

The idea of an inter-galactic war being settled by single combat in the old chivalric tradition is an interesting one and Brown handled it quite well, notably in the combat scenes, and his handling of the alien champion was exceptionally well done.  p. 131

2. The Arena episode of Star Trek was written before the discovery of Brown’s story—probably why it is so naff. The Wikipedia page for that episode is here.

3. I note that the Sevagram link I provided in last month’s review (about the idea that “E. Mayne Hull” was a pseudonym for A. E. van Vogt) isn’t as categorical as I thought. There is another link at the top of the article which provides a counter argument that suggests Hull was the author or partial author of these works.

4. The Winged Man grew from a 32,000 word novella to a 46,000 word novel which was published in 1966. I can’t remember the Sphere SF paperback from 1977 (most of the van Vogt I bought was published by Panther), but it’s got a pretty good cover:

5. The Analytical Laboratory results for this issue appeared in September:

Trog a joint winner? Words fail me. I will never understand the Astounding voters.

6. I’ve reviewed the first issue of New Worlds magazine here.  ●

Summary:
This is a lacklustre issue whose only highlight is the first part of E. Mayne Hull & A. E. van Vogt’s serial, The Winged Man, an entertaining adventure that features a US military submarine and crew transported one million years into the future!
Noteworthy is the first of Clifford Simak’s ‘City’ series, City and the debut of A. Bertram Chandler. There is also a second ‘Plutonian Ring’ story by George O. Smith, Latent Image, and stories by Frederic Brown and P. Schuyler Miller among others.
The science article by Campbell is about a discovery that wasn’t: Ehrenhaft’s magnetic monopoles. There is no Analytical Laboratory in this issue due to lack of room and of letters (Campbell states he will change the publication schedule of this department to allow time for more letters to arrive).
[ISFDB page] [Archive.org copy]

Other reviews:¹
Alva Rogers, A Requiem for Astounding  p. 129-134

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Catherine Tarrant

Fiction:
“Latent Image” • novelette by George O. Smith [as by Wesley Long] ∗
“This Means War!” • short story by A. Bertram Chandler ∗∗
The Winged Man (Part 1 of 2) • novella serial by E. Mayne Hull and A. E. van Vogt [as by E. Mayne Hull] ∗∗∗+
The Yehudi Principle • short story by Fredric Brown ∗∗
Cuckoo • novelette by P. Schuyler Miller ∗
House of Tomorrow • short story by Roby Wentz ∗∗+
City • novelette by Clifford D. Simak ∗∗
Environment • short story by Chester S. Geier ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by Paul Orban (x12), A. Williams (x13), Alfred (x2)
Sandwich for Nazis • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
In Times to Come
Power • science essay
Beachhead for Science • essay by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Brass Tacks • letters

_____________________

“Latent Image” by George O. Smith is a sequel to March’s Circle of Confusion, and starts with McBride on Mars getting the news that his pregnant wife Enid (who is back home on the Plutonian Lens) has had a fall. Unfortunately for McBride the regular ship has just left and the next one isn’t due in for five days. After making enquiries he finds there is an experimental ship, Haywire Queen, that will take him to the Lens if he helps them finish their repairs. This leads to vast quantities of explainium:

But look, Hammond, have you tried the magnetogravitic spectrum yet?”
“No. That was our next program.”
“I’d have tried that first,” mused McBride. “Knowing that the drive depends upon the action of a cupraluin bar under high magnetic density plus an electrogravitic warp, I should think that the close relationship between the magnetic and electronic phenomena would lead you to try the mag-grav first.”
“I didn’t want to start at the top,” said Hammond dryly. “In spite of the fact that Dr. Ellson claimed to have discovered a region in the mag-grav spectrum that produced a faint success.”
“Well, what I’m thinking is that we can rip up the E-grav generator and use the field coil for the alphatron. It’ll carry electrons as well as it carries alphons, you know.”
“Better,” said Hammond. “But what do we use for an E-grav?”
“First we’ll hunt up through the spectrum of the magnetogravitic spectrum. If that doesn’t work, we can add the warp produced by your mech-grav, run from the lifeship’s little alphatron. Right?”
“It’s an idea. Seems to me that I’ve heard somewhere that the combined warps of magneto- and mechanogravitic produces some vectors in the electrogravitic spectrum.”  p. 11

It never fails to amaze me how Campbell lets Smith gets away with pages and pages of this unreadable drivel in his stories.
Anyway, the rest of the tale sees McBride meet the crew, and they figure out a plan to repair the ship. Then McBride learns that Hammond, the captain, has hired a pilot called Sandra Drake—the reckless, headstrong, and gobby young woman who crashed through the lens in the first story. When she arrives there is much shouty arguing with the equally gobby McBride before she eventually agrees to fly the ship to get her licence back.

The trip itself is beset with unexplained acceleration changes caused by the repaired drive—this increases up to seven gee before returning to normal and repeating the cycle again. After more explanium they fix the problem and, after a modification suggested by Drake, find themselves travelling at trans-light speeds.
Drake arrives at the Lens station to save the day (the mere sight of him is enough to pull his wife through her pregnancy crisis), and the story ends with him arguing with Drake about who should pilot the ship to Earth (“I’m not going to let any idiot male handle the Haywire Queen, and don’t you forget it!”)
Not so much a story as a collection of bad habits.

“This Means War!” by A. Bertram Chandler is the debut of a long term contributor to the SF magazines, and tells of an amphibious alien submariner’s visit to the oceans of Earth with his fleet. This largely consists of his account of the hostilities unleashed on them by WWII surface fleets, submarines, and aircraft. The story ends with the alien council which is receiving his report (spoiler) declaring war on Earth.
This is a readable enough, if rather too straightforward story, and shows some promise for the future.

The best thing in this decidedly middling issue is the first part of The Winged Man by E. Mayne Hull and A. E. van Vogt. This opens on the a US submarine on its way to the battle with Japan, with the first officer, Kenlon, on duty in the coning tower. He sees a large bird in the night sky, and phones the third officer, Tedder, to quiz him about it. After the call Kenlon sees this:

A shadow darkened the face of the moon. Kenlon, on the verge of turning away, glanced up again. Then he gasped. And caught the railing and glared like a madman.
Plainly silhouetted against the moon was the figure of a tall man with wings. The wings were only partly spread; and they were not moving. He seemed to be poised there like a creature out of a nightmare, black as only a shadowed outline could be. Intently he stared down towards Kenlon.
For a long instant, that was the picture, like a “still” taken at night. And then, the legs drew up, the body lost its manlike resemblance. A great bird swooped out of the path of the moon into the covering darkness.  p. 39

Events develop quickly in the next part of the story: Tedder comes up to see Kenlon and, as they are speaking, the Quartermaster arrives and points to a winged man on the deck. The creature attaches what looks like a metal plate to the hull, and the men rush down in an effort to capture him but, after a brief struggle, he escapes into the sky.
At this point the sub’s commander, Jones-Gordon, gets involved, and he and Kenlon discuss the “bomb” attached to the deck and how to get rid of it. On closer examination the metal disc appears to be an electronic device but, no matter what the crew try, it remains attached to the boat. Then the winged man lands again, and attaches a device at the opposite end; this time they capture him (or, as we later find out, he allows himself to be captured).
During the interrogation of the winged man Kenlon discovers that he speaks no known language, but draws a picture of the submarine with its hatches battened down. After some more back and forth Kenlon realises that the sub may be in danger, and rushes up to the deck crew, ordering the hatches shut behind him. There is a bright light, and he finds himself underwater for a time, before surfacing in a roiling sea alongside three of the four other men. The submarine appears shortly afterwards and takes them on board.

The second part of this instalment involves further interrogation of the prisoner, who communicates to them that the submarine is now a million years in the future. There are also drawings of a city floating in the air above the sea, whose winged occupants are fighting something underneath. At this point the lookout sights land, and a boat is sent to investigate. This reveals, when the team lose a man, that the mud near the shore is like quicksand, and that the ground is the same.
A month later, by which time they have taught the birdman—who is called Nemmo—to speak English, they learn this quicksand effect is due to a strange rain that came from space. This robbed solid material of its ability to stick together (and also raised the sea-level, which is why the submarine and deck crew arrived here underwater).
The rest of the Q&A session has Nemmo explain that the groundmen (who are now dead) made the birdmen and the fishmen to ensure the survival of humanity, but that these two races are now at war. Nemmo states that if the submarine destroys the fishmen’s metal underwater city for the birdmen, they can return to their own time.

The installment finishes with the submarine arriving at the birdmen’s eyrie. As they arrive the fishmen come out of the sea and take Jones-Gordon overboard.
If this all seems like a typical fast-paced van Vogtian adventure, it is, but it is much more than that too. For one thing the plotting is more considered and less wild than in some of van Vogt’s stories, and it is also more smoothly written (van Vogt’s prose is sometimes notably crude and ungainly). There is also an atypical amount of character observation: throughout the piece Kenlon frequently assesses his commander Jones-Gordon to see how he is coping with the strange events they are experiencing and, in the early part of the story, worries that he does not appreciate the implications of the winged man’s existence. However, Jones-Gordon frequently transcends Kenlon’s expectations, perhaps most notably in this later passage:

Jones-Gordon stood staring out to sea, his heavy face almost expressionless. Kenlon recognized the fatalistic look that finally came into the lieutenant commander’s eyes. The officer said in a curiously quiet voice:
“If our situation is as this creature described, then we are, so far as the United States Navy is concerned, an expended unit. By that statement you will see that I take no stock in their promise to return us to 1944 when we have accomplished this ridiculous purpose of theirs. I think we are justified in assuming that we are lost men, and are, therefore, free of all constraint and all the petty alarms of men who still retain hope.”
He stopped; and Kenlon sighed inwardly. Like all human beings, Jones-Gordon could not be docketted into one pigeonhole. Practical he might be, but in this mood his character changed almost literally. Somehow, long ago, the lieutenant commander had resigned himself to death. It had made him utterly fearless, cool and unexcitable in battle, the perfect commander. It was theoretically possible that all the men who went down to the sea in submarines should similarly surrender themselves to a destiny with death. But they hadn’t. Kenlon hadn’t. In battle, his nerves tensed to violin-string tautness; his mind was as cold as the metal plates of the sub in which he served; his calmness the artificial calm of the trained man who has a job to do, and does it.
But he feared death. Sometimes at night he would wake up sweating from a dream in which they had been sunk, and the water was pouring in with a hellishly final violence.  p. 65

There is convincing evidence to suggest that “E. Mayne Hull” was little more than a pseudonym for A. E. van Vogt² but, reading the passage above, I wonder. The far-future plot and elements certainly seem to be typical of van Vogt, but the writing above? Did E. Mayne Hull (van Vogt’s wife) perhaps write the story based on her husband’s outline?

The Yehudi Principle by Fredric Brown starts with Charlie Swann demonstrating a newly invented device to the narrator:

“Does what?” I wanted to know.
The dingbat, I might interrupt myself to explain, was a headband.
It fitted neatly around Charlie’s noggin and there was a round black box not much bigger than a pillbox over his forehead. Also there was a round flat copper disk on each side of the band that fitted over each of Charlie’s temples, and a strand of wire that ran down behind his ear into the breast pocket of his coat, where there was a little drycell battery.
It didn’t look like it would do anything, except maybe either cure a headache or make it worse. But from the excited look on Charlie’s face, I didn’t think it was anything so commonplace as that.
“Does what?” I wanted to know.
“Whatever you want,” said Charlie. “Within reason, of course. Not like moving a building or bringing you a locomotive. But any little thing you want done, he does it.”
“Who does?”
“Yehudi.”  p. 69

After “Yehudi” does various simple tasks for the pair—drinks arrive, and are mixed—Charlie explains that there really isn’t a Yehudi completing these tasks but that the device is an “automatonic autosuggestive sub-vibratory superaccelerator”, a device which allows the wearer to do the task incredibly quickly but not remember doing it (and this is why the wearer “blurs” for a second or too when using the device).
The narrator then uses the device write a story in less than a second.
This goes on for a while until a final scene where (spoiler) one of the two says “shoot yourself”. This is followed by a bang, and the device ceasing to function. There is then the realisation that Yehudi may have been doing the tasks, and that they have just killed him. The pair then notice the recently written story describes all these events, including the ones that happened after it was created . . . .
This is metaphysically entertaining stuff, but you cannot escape the fact that the author continually moves the goalposts (Yehudi to “accelerator” to Yehudi), and then tacks an ending that has little to do with the rest of the piece.³

Cuckoo by P. Schuyler Miller is initially told from the viewpoint of Commander Jeff Norcross of the Triplanetary Space Patrol, the unwilling officer in charge of the Morgan Wildlife Preserve on Venus. The story gets going (as much as it ever does) when he and his assistant Hall host two professors at a dinner party:

Professor W. Ouderkirk Simms led the procession. He would have come to Hall’s shoulder if he had cared to stand on tiptoe to try it.
The top of his head had been planted with a stiff white herbage of about the length and distribution of the green variety which one occasionally saw growing from the skulls of plaster Hibernians in florists’ windows back on Earth. His face was pink, pear-shaped, and full of little wrinkles, and his eyes were bright and beady. He had a nose as long and as sharp as Norcross’ own hawkish beak, and a series of punctured chins draped one behind the other in descending sequence above a neat bow tie. He was wearing the formal professorial garb of the previous century—stiff shirt front, high collar, and flapping tails. He had a row of medals pinned unevenly over the breast pocket of his rather rusty coat.
Behind the little professor loomed a female whom Norcross took to be C. Virginia Banning—and his eyes glittered with wicked satisfaction as he sized her up. She had long red hair, cut raggedly to shoulder length, apparently with a kitchen knife on a bread board. It streamed out in all directions as though each separate filament were highly charged and repelling every other one. Her face was her own, and she was balancing pince-nez precariously on a nose which did nothing whatever to supply them with an adequate foundation. She was broad of shoulder, long of leg, and massive of contour, and she had dressed to display her squareness and massiveness to the greatest if not the best advantage.  p. 81

This passage illustrates the story’s semi-farcical tone and general bagginess. The rest of the story, largely told from second-in-command Hall’s point of view, involves: a “whippersnapper” nest with a “cuckoo’s” egg in it; Hall shooting down a drone above the reservation and discovering an embedded Geiger counter; the cuckoo hatching from its shell, and the latter found to be made of pure U235; and (spoiler) both professors’ involvement in the discovery of a uranium lode in a new part of the reserve.
Or something like that—I rather lost interest in this unlikely and padded tale half-way through. It is hard to believe that this one came from the author of the fast-paced and lean The Cave (Astounding, January 1943).

House of Tomorrow by Roby Wentz is set in WWII Munich, where a schoolboy tells his master of the strange device that he has found in the vaults below. Eventually, the schoolmaster narrator goes down to see it:

At first I saw nothing where he pointed in the gloom. Then, moving in the direction, I caught my first sight of it. I made out the lines of the hull first, then forgot them for the moment as the candlegleams touched the surfaces and flamed back in mirrored beauty from the brilliant surfaces of the most exquisitely fashioned sculpture or artifact of an inanimate object I have ever seen.
It was a ship, or rather boat, yet modeled with the antique lines of an ancient galley, about the length and size of a modern canoe. What it was made from, I cannot tell: a lifetime as a teacher of physical science gives me no clue to the metal—if it was metal—of the object, it was silvery-smooth, more polished than the aluminum of an airplane wing, yet with an indescribable quality of depth—as though one were gazing into water of incredible clarity.  p. 121

There are more visits. During one of these the boy climbs in, grabs the controls, and promptly vanishes. Later, as the master searches for him, the ship reappears, piloted by a man who turns out to be a time-traveller from centuries earlier. He reveals himself as a member of a strange guild (the forerunners of Bacon and Galileo) that invented the time boat and other advanced devices. The man later says he is searching for three men from his guild who stole the boat to get to this time period: their descriptions match those of Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels. The narrator then agrees to lure them to the vault (by sending a letter with details of the machine, etc., to Berlin) in exchange for the safe return of the child.

The first part of this is a well written and atmospheric piece (I suspected a mainstream writer slumming⁴) but the second half is a more routine and melodramatic potboiler. Entertaining piece, though, although it would be better without the framing device of a future archaeologist finding and reading the narrator’s account.

One of the highlights of Astounding in 1944 and 1945 was Clifford Simak’s ‘City’ series, which begins with the novelette City in this issue. The beginning of this story will, to those of us who have robot vacuum cleaners and the like, feel very contemporary:

Gramp Stevens sat in a lawn chair, watching the mower at work, feeling the warm, soft sunshine seep into his bones. The mower reached the edge of the lawn, clucked to itself like a contented hen, made a neat turn and trundled down another swath. The bag holding the clippings bulged.
Suddenly the mower stopped and clicked excitedly. A panel in its side snapped open and a cranelike arm reached out. Grasping steel fingers fished around in the grass, came up triumphantly with a stone clutched tightly, dropped the stone into a small container, disappeared back into the panel again. The lawn mower gurgled, purred on again, following its swath.
Gramp grumbled at it with suspicion.  p. 117

When Gramp’s friend Ole drives by in his car, he stops to talk. During this conversation we find that internal combustion cars are obsolescent, the roads unused, and towns and cities are largely abandoned. Gramps reflects further on these subjects when he later goes for a walk around the deserted neighbourhood:

The years had moved too fast. Years that had brought the family plane and helicopter, leaving the auto to rust in some forgotten place, the unused roads to fall into disrepair. Years that had virtually wiped out the tilling of the soil with the rise of hydroponics. Years that had brought cheap land with the disappearance of the farm as an economic unit, had sent city people scurrying out into the country where each man, for less than the price of a city lot, might own broad acres.
Years that had revolutionized the construction of homes to a point where families simply walked away from their old homes to the new ones that could be bought, custom-made, for less than half the price of a prewar structure and could be changed at small cost, to accommodate need of additional space or just a passing whim.
Gramp sniffed. Houses that could be changed each year, just like one would shift around the furniture. What kind of living was that?
He plodded slowly down the dusty path that was all that remained of what a few years before had been a busy residential street. A street of ghosts, Gramp told himself—of furtive, little ghosts that whispered in the night. Ghosts of playing children, ghosts of upset tricycles and canted coaster wagons. Ghosts of gossiping housewives. Ghosts of shouted greetings. Ghosts of flaming fireplaces and chimneys smoking of a winter night.
Little puffs of dust rose around his feet and whitened the cuffs of his trousers.
There was the old Adams place across the way. Adams had been mighty proud of it, he remembered. Gray field stone front and picture windows. Now the stone was green with creeping moss and the broken windows gaped with ghastly leer. Weeds choked the lawn and blotted out the stoop. An elm tree was pushing its branches against the gable.
Gramp could remember the day Adams had planted that elm tree.
For a moment he stood there in the grass-grown street, feet in the dust, both hands clutching the curve of his cane, eyes closed.
Through the fog of years he heard the cry of playing children, the barking of Conrad’s yapping pooch from down the street. And there was Adams, stripped to the waist, plying the shovel, scooping out the hole, with the elm tree, roots wrapped in burlap, lying on the lawn.
May, 1946. Forty-four years ago. Just after he and Adams had come home from the war together.  p. 141

At that point a young man arrives and starts talking to Gramps. He eventually identifies himself as Adam’s grandson, and he is there to visit the old house.

The next part of the story introduces Webster, who arrives at a city council meeting where there is an argument about burning empty houses to move squatters on and prevent crime. Webster quarrels with the other men, and loses his job, but he ends by giving a speech which says they should be glad the cities are dead, and people and industries dispersed, otherwise humanity would have perished in an atomic war.
After this long (largely talking heads) section, Webster goes to the Bureau for Human Adjustment, where Taylor, the man who interviews him, does more talking about recent changes, and finishes by offering Webster a job.
The rest of the tale (spoiler) concerns a stand-off between the police and Gramps and the squatters. This is resolved when Gramps and the grandson turn up at city hall to reveal that the grandson has bought all the houses that have unpaid taxes. He wants the city charter dissolved, and plans to turn the city into a museum to show people how their ancestors lived.
There are some good parts in this story, such as the material about a transition to a post-capitalist society, but there’s also a lot of speechifying and data-dumping, and the standoff at the end feels rather contrived. A middling start to a major series.

Environment by Chester S. Geier⁵ has a spaceship arrive at a deserted alien city looking for previous settlers who have subsequently gone missing. As the two crew, Gaynor and Harlan, fly around in their anti-grav packs, they see what look like crystalline birds:

As they flew, a small cloud of the aerial creatures flashed past. The things seemed to be intelligent, for, as though catching sight of the two men, they suddenly changed course, circling with a clearly evident display of excited curiosity. The crystalline chimings and tinklings which they emitted held an elfin note of astonishment.
If astonishment it actually was, Gaynor and Harlan were equally amazed at close view of the creatures. For they were great, faceted crystals whose interiors flamed with glorious color—exquisite rainbow shades that pulsed and changed with the throb of life. Like a carillon of crystal bells, their chimings and tinklings rang out—so infinitely sweet and clear and plaintive that it was both a pain and a pleasure to hear.  p. 164

The pair land, and see a fountain decorated with a bas-relief showing humanoid creatures. They later find crystals inside the city’s many apartments and, when they hold these, they have visions of ghostly furniture and machines, and get an inkling of something they can sense but cannot understand.

The rest of the story (spoiler) has them go through all the apartments in the city. During this process they turn into the aerial creatures they saw after landing:

“The Third Stage. The tasks will be very difficult, Wade—but interesting. We’ll be putting our knowledge into practice—actually creating. This means we’ll have to deal directly with the powers of the various soldani and varoo. As these are extradimensional, control will be solely by cholthening at the sixth level, through means of the taadron. We’ll have to be careful, though—any slightest relaxation of the sorran will have a garreling effect—”  p. 176

This piece is essentially a Mimsy Were The Borogoves redux, with an added last line that suggests the city is some sort of trap:

A perfect environment, the city. Ideal for the inquisitive humanoid.  p. 178

Well-enough, if predictably, done.

The Cover by William Timmins is a good effort I think—the bulbous red spaceship, the abstract sun image, and the Van Gogh swirl in the background work for me.
The Interior artwork is the usual mixed bag, but I liked the Paul Orban illustrations for the Hull (although the second one has what looks like a normal bloke with wings drawn on⁶) and the Wentz, and A. Williams quirky spot drawings for the Miller,⁷ as well as his work for the Simak. Alfred’s two contributions are uninspired and boring (but it’s a hard story to illustrate).
Sandwich for Nazis by John W. Campbell, Jr. is short essay about compound materials which ends by describing those used in the RAF’s “Nazi-killing Mosquito”:

In essence, the sandwich materials represent the compound material reduced to its simplest elements.
A layer of material A, a layer of B and a layer of A—or C. Common plywood is the # 1 representative of the class. The next most familiar example is shatterproof glass. In plywood, the “layer of A” is wood, and B becomes the binding adhesive. In shatterproof glass, it’s glass and a synthetic resin. But the sandwich really begins to come into its own with the type of sandwich represented in the famous Mosquito fighter-bomber. The sandwich is wood, with a glue binding the layers together; the trick is that the wooden sandwich is made up of a layer of very thin, fragile hardwood veneer, a comparatively thick slab of balsa—on the order of a quarter of an inch in thickness—and another thin, fragile peeling of hardwood veneer.
[. . .]
The sandwich is tough, strong, rigid, and extremely light—as perfect for the job as the Nazi-killing Mosquito is in its job.  p. 6

In Times to Come starts off bemoaning the lack of space and of letters for the Analytical Laboratory.⁸ It seems that Campbell has finally realised that he should allow a longer period between the publication of an issue and the published results. The rest of the column is a warmongery plug for Murray Leinster’s Trog:

Some while back I remarked editorially that attacking the United States with mechanised war was inherently an unhealthy idea. Like a man attacking a lion on a tooth-and-nail basis—the lion’s got more teeth and lots more nail. The mechanized weight of American power is really beginning to swing into action now, proving the argument. But—how could you attack America? Past experience indicates that the Nazis’ successors in control of Germany will probably try. German citizens seem to like monomaniac rulers—with a mania for world conquest.
Murray Leinster has a long novelette next month—“Trog”—that has an astute suggestion on that problem. He’s right, too—it’s one form of attack we might fall for—and before!  p. 28

Power is a short photo article about various kinds of motors and gearing.

Beachhead for Science by John W. Campbell, Jr. fleshes out last month’s editorial announcement about the purported discovery of magnetic monopoles by Dr Ehrenhaft. Campbell is an awful science writer and his explanations are as clear as mud:

Curiously, electrical engineers and physicists have, for years, calculated the properties of free magnetic poles—north pole charges, without south pole accompaniment—and of magnetic currents, flowing magnetism, as well as the properties of magnetic fields. It was long recognized as a mathematicophysical simplification to consider that free north poles did exist, and calculate the behavior of such poles under the conditions laid down in the problem. Electrical engineering data were so calculated—always with the accompanying denial of the reality of the free north pole.
Other engineering and physical problems were solved—meaning, naturally, that they got the answers that agreed with the facts!—by assuming the existence of a magnetic current, purely as a means of simplifying the mathematical processes of attacking the problem. And, of course, denying the reality of that current.  p. 104

Why give a clear example when you can waffle? Although I skimmed most of the rest of this, I got the impression that Campbell also has other bad habits for someone who wants to be a science writer: one is odd analogies (there is one about aliens trying to measure the heating effects of electrical current in remote vacuum, where most metallic materials are superconductors), and another is a tendency to leap into blue-sky speculation about what we may not know and what might be possible.

Perhaps another part of the article gives a clue as why (other than temperament) Campbell had this latter habit:

Resurveyal of atomic theory is nothing new; it has been done with great regularity about once every five years since 1890. Recently, they’ve discovered neutrons and positrons in the atom. Because their figures would not balance properly, they have been forced to postulate a neutrino, a changeless particle of electron mass.  p. 117

With basic science changing at such a rapid rate perhaps this kind of over-excited piece is inevitable. I’ll be interested to see to what extent this tendency is exacerbated by the events of August 1945.

Brass Tacks has a couple of letters about technical matters (space travel, and the machining processes in one of George O. Smith’s stories) and a long, interesting one from John Gergen of Minneapolis, Minnesota, that discusses Simak’s writing and the magazine’s artwork among other matters. It’s worth reading in its entirety (click on the image above).

The serial is the only highlight of what is a lacklustre issue.  ●

_____________________

1. Alva Rogers says that The Winged Man was “a moderately interesting story” but later adds:

Miss Hull always gave the impression of being a second-rate writer, and this short novel didn’t materially change that impression.  p. 130

Pah.
He has this to say of Simak’s ‘City’ series:

Clifford D. Simak, one of the best craftsmen in the science fiction field and one of the handful of old pros who had smoothly managed the transition from the thud and blunder of the thirties to Campbellian science fiction of the middle forties, began in May a series that would eventually bring him “The International Fantasy Award” when all the stories in the series were combined into a book. The story, of course, was “City,” which told, from the viewpoint of the Webster family, of the breakup of the urban complex and the return to a more pastoral existence brought about by automation, inexpensive and fast transportation, etc. This novelette was quickly followed by “Huddling Place,” a short in the July issue and “Census,” the cover story for September. “Huddling Place” examined the phenomenon of man, served by robots, surrounded by labor-saving devices and in instant face-to-face communication with any point in the world, being psychologically unable to face the prospect of leaving his home. “Census” was concerned with the need to determine the probable number of non-human mutants who could take over and keep the dreams of man alive when man eventually vanished from the Earth. The dogs, of course, were the ones who would fill the bill. A fine series that deserved every bit of acclaim it received.  p. 132

2. There is a post on the subject of “E. Mayne Hull” at Sevagram.

3. I would have put serious money on this story of Brown’s turning out to be a refugee from Unknown Worlds (Astounding’s companion magazine folded in late 1943, and several stories were transferred from its left-over inventory). However, it isn’t listed in Stefan Dziemianowicz’s The Annotated Guide to Unknown & Unknown Worlds (1991).

4. This was actually the fourth of four stories that Roby Wentz contributed to Astounding and Unknown. His ISFDB page.

5. Geier’s story is a potential addition to the list of stories in Astounding where the aliens win (the big myth is that Campbell always insisted on human supremacy). See the comments section in this Classics of Science Fiction blog post for a longer list of stories where this did not apply.
I note that this is the only story Geier sold to Campbell for Astounding, although he did sell him a couple for Unknown. Geier sold many other stories to his main markets, Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures: his page at ISFDB.

6. Orban’s “normal bloke with wings drawn on”:

 

7. Some of Williams’ other illustrations for Miller’s story:

8. The Analytical Laboratory results for this issue appeared in September:

I’m surprised that (a) the Hull/van Vogt serial didn’t come top, and (b) the Smith did as well as it did.  ●

Summary:
This is, at best, an average issue with only two good but minor stories (Malcolm Jameson contributes a ‘Bullard’ piece called The Bureaucrat, and Fritz Leiber provides the short, paranoid, Sanity). There is also a ‘Venus Equilateral’ story from George O. Smith, and work from Clifford D. Simak, among others.
[ISFDB link] [Archive.org copy]

Other reviews:¹
Alva Rogers, A Requiem for Astounding  p. 129-134

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Catherine Tarrant

Fiction:
The Changeling • novella by A. E. van Vogt ∗
The Long Way • novelette by George O. Smith ∗
Invariant • short story by John R. Pierce ∗∗
The Bureaucrat • novelette by Malcolm Jameson ∗∗∗
Lobby • short story by Clifford D. Simak ∗
Sanity • short story by Fritz Leiber ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by Paul Orban (x10), Frank Kramer (x6), A. Williams
Super-Conservative • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Not Quite Rockets • science essay
Rocket Artillery • science essay by Willy Ley
In Times to Come
The Analytical Laboratory: April 1944
Brass Tacks • letters

_____________________

The Changeling, A. E. van Vogt’s novella in this issue, is supposedly a ‘Pendrake’ story, although I fail to see the connection between this one and the others I’ve read.²
The story opens with the narrator, Lesley Craig, being told by an assistant that he has been with their company for four years. Craig knows this is incorrect and, when he looks in the mirror later on, he sees a face that is thirty-four rather than fifty years old. When Craig subsequently speaks to his wife he gets the impression that she knows what is happening to him.

Craig is later kidnapped by a group of young women who have taken the “Equalizer” drug (the story atypically has a war-of-the-sexes sub-theme that runs throughout the story), and they bring him to President Dayles. The President talks about the technological stagnation of society, a radio signal from Mars, experts that are unable to collaborate, and his “Amazons”:

“A very curious manifestation, these women. And, I think, a typically American manifestation at that. Once taken, the drug cannot be counteracted; and I regard it as an evidence of the basic will-to-adventure of American girls that some thousands took the treatment.
“Unfortunately, it brought them to a dead end, left them futureless. Unequalized women dislike them, and men think they’re ‘funny’ to use a colloquialism. Their existence did serve the purpose of galvanizing the women’s clubs into undertaking a presidential campaign. But as individuals the amazons discovered that no employer would hire them, and no man would marry them.
“In desperation, their leaders approached me; and just before the situation reached the tragic stage, I arranged a skillful preliminary publicity, and hired them en masse for what is generally believed to be perfectly legitimate purposes.
“Actually, these women know their benefactor, and regard themselves as peculiarly my personal agents.”
Jefferson Dayles paused blandly. “I hope, Mr. Craig, that this will explain to some extent the odd method by which you were brought before me. Miss Kay Whitewood”—he motioned to the young woman at the desk—“is their intellectual leader.”
Craig did not let his gaze follow the gesturing hand. He stood like a stone, and was almost as blank mentally. He had listened to the brief history of the group of amazons with a fascinated sense of unreality.
For the story explained nothing. Literally nothing. p. 13

I had that feeling most of the way through this piece, but the story eventually reveals itself as a one about a latent superman (he is in a “toti-potent” state) and the two sides trying to force him to his final evolution. During this process Craig unearths information about himself (his birth and military service certificates); he (spoiler) tries to escape from his home but injures himself and loses an arm (this later regrows); and he organises an attack on a Women’s march, and is subsequently imprisoned but escapes. Later, an organised group of toti-potents are revealed; super weapons are developed; and, finally, Craig’s mind control powers become apparent.

For most of its length this story is fast-paced and reasonably entertaining nonsense, but it goes on far too long, and makes increasingly less sense as it does so—I suspect what we have here is an unsuccessful product of van Vogt’s dream-plotting technique.³

The Long Way by George O. Smith is another of his ‘Venus Equilateral’ stories, and has more of the flaws and less of the strengths of that series. It opens with this:

Don Channing stood back and admired his latest acquisition with all of the fervency of a high school girl inspecting her first party dress. It was so apparent, this affection between man and gadget, that the workmen who were now carrying off the remnants of the packing case did so front the far side of the bench so that they would not come between the director of communications and the object of his affection. So intent was Channing in his adoration of the object that he did not hear the door open, nor the click of high heels against the plastic flooring. He was completely unaware of his surroundings until Arden said:
“Don, what off earth is that?”
“Ain’t she a beaut?” breathed Channing.
“Jilted for a jimcrank,” groaned Arden. “Tell me, my quondam husband, what is it?”  pp. 67-68

The device turns out to be a transmission tube built by Terran Electric that Channing wants to modify to enable two-way communications between Venus Equilateral and in-flight spaceships. The problem is that the device comes with an engineer and a lawyer: the former is affable enough, but the lawyer insists on such restrictive conditions that Channing and crew eventually resort to building a solar power generation array to give them leverage over Terran Electric. Channing figures that if he threatens to put them out of business he’ll gain unfettered access to the transmission tube.

The explanations of how the the transmission tube and the solar generator work are unintelligible, and I wonder how many Astounding readers understood them:

“I know that, but the driver cathode disintegrates at a rate of loss that is terrific compared to the loss of emitting surface in the transmission tube.”
“The driver cathode is worth about two hundred G-hours. But remember, there is no input to the driver such as you have in the transmission tube. The power from the driver comes from the disintegration of the cathode surface—there isn’t a ten thousandth of an inch of plating on the inside of the tube to show where it went. But the transmission tube has an input and the tube itself merely transduces this power to some level of radiation for transmission. It is re-transduced again for use. But the thing is this: Your tube is the only thing we know of that will accept subelectronic energy and use it. If the driver and the transmission tubes are similar in operational spectrum, we may be able to detect driver radiation by some modification.”  p. 73

The story is a typical engineers-outsmart-the-others piece (the “others” are usually politicians, lawyers or bureaucrats).

Invariant by John R. Pierce is an okay piece about Homer Green, whose experimental immortality treatment has (spoiler) left him with memories that are as “invariant” as the other cells in his body. This becomes apparent during an interview conducted by a man from 2170, who tells Green (spoiler) that it isn’t 1943 anymore—even though he will shortly forget that information.

The Bureaucrat by Malcolm Jameson is one of his ‘Bullard’ series (the eighth of nine) and, by this point in his career, he is the Admiral in charge of the Bureau of Spatial Strategy (essentially the C-in-C of Space Command). Bullard only appears at the beginning and end of this story, however, and the protagonist is a young lieutenant called Benton, who manages to get an appointment with him (Benton’s father served with Bullard):

But as the machine slid swiftly along gleaming passages, Benton saw that the private suite of the grand admiral was no small place. Through door after door he glimpsed tremendous activities. Occasionally they whizzed through open bays of desks where scraps of conversation could be overheard, while all about were annunciators flashing weird symbols incessantly.
“Sector 4,” droned a voice, “Pegasus and Altair joining action. . . . Pegasus hit. . . . Pegasus blows up. . . . Cruiser Flotilla 36 moving in from lower port quarter. . . . Altair hit—”
As that faded, the orderly cut across the back of a balcony overlooking a great hall. Far down in the pit Benton could see a huge swirling ball of vapor, glittering with pin points of varicolored lights cast upon it by unseen projectors. That would be the ultra-secret Battle Integrator—the marvelous moving solidograph that resolved six dimensions into four. Stern-faced officers watched it intently, snapping orders into phones, and uniformed girl messengers dashed everywhere. Then Benton was out of that place and passing other wonders.  pp. 119-120

When he finally meets Bullard, Benton tells him that his mother’s wealth has bought him a sinecure on the Vindictive, a ship which is stationed over the Manhattan financial district, far from the war, and which has no guns or rocket engines. Bullard displays his files on the screen behind Benton and sees that the ship is full of the influential, the malingering, and the cowardly—and all of whom have the protection of the Secretary of Defence.
Bullard then tells Benton he is a bureaucrat, and can do nothing. After the young man leaves, however, Bullard summons his aide and issues a general order. . . .
Matters proceed pretty much as you would expect (spoiler): all spaceships of Vindictive’s specification (although it is the only one still on active service) get orders to go on gunnery exercises. Although the captain and his executive officer, a legal type, try to get an exemption, they fail (there is some back and forth as various agencies get involved, but matters develop an inertia of their own). Benton tours the ship, and starts to get it ready.

When the Vindictive finally goes on a firing exercise (after they have re-engined the ship and repaired the guns) they manage to hit the target. However, when they fire their guns something strange happens which causes the ship considerable interior damage, and leaves them far away from their initial position. For some unexplained reason the drives have given them a terrific burst of acceleration. Meanwhile, the captain and a number of the officers have abandoned ship, leaving Benton in charge.
The story ends with the Vindictive receiving orders from SPAST (Spatial Strategy) to intercept two raiders who have sneaked past Earth’s defences and are headed for Bullard’s headquarters on the Moon—Benton engages the enemy and uses the acceleration effect in the battle.
Bullard appears again at the end of the story to reiterate to Benton how inappropriate it would be for him to intervene in personnel matters and take Benton off Vindictive—before telling him he will have command of the refitted ship.
This is formulaic Space Navy material, but fairly good for all that.

Lobby by Clifford D. Simak is a story about opposition to atomic power:

“For years they’ve dreamed about atomic power. Reams of speculation have been written about it. Men have planned for it and banked on it, built future worlds on it. And now that it’s within their grasp, what do people do? Now that they can practically reach out and touch power so ridiculously cheap it would be almost free, what do they say and think? They allow a power lobby and a bunch of crooked politicians to scare them silly with bogey stories about the terrible menace of atomics. They listen to yelping preachers on the street corner who tell them it’s sacrilege to destroy God-created matter, that it’s tempting Providence, asking the lightning to strike.”  p. 145

Cobb, who runs the nuclear company, gets a visit from a journalist (which does not go well) and then another from a more shadowy character called Adams. The rest of the story has Cobb take a helicopter to the nuclear plant in Montana to check on its progress but, en route, he sees a blue flash. On arrival he sees the plant has been destroyed (due to sabotage) but that Butler the chief scientist has, with all the research paperwork, survived in a nearby tunnel.
Adams joins the two men at Cobb’s house later on, and (spoiler) reveals he is a member of the World Committee. He has evidence of a corrupt senator, and the power company’s involvement in the explosion at the plant.
This is a mediocre story, and the free nuclear power/world committee worldview is outdated and politically unrealistic.

Sanity by Fritz Leiber is a talking-heads story which opens with World Manager Carrsbury speaking to General Secretary Phy in his office. He explains that he has come to a realisation:

Whether my case was due chiefly to heredity, or to certain unusual accidents of environment, or to both, is unimportant. The point is that a person had been born who was in a position to criticize the present state of mankind in the light of the past, to diagnose its condition, and to begin its cure.
For a long time I refused to face the facts, but finally my researches—especially those in the literature of the twentieth century—left me no alternative. The mentality of mankind had become—aberrant.  p. 163

He goes on to explain to Phy that his analysis led him to train a cadre of political leaders “free of neurotic tendencies”, and that he set up a secret police force to protect himself. Phy counters with a vacuous grin, and the statement that the semi-solid material he has been kneading while listening to Carrsbury came from a hole he cut in his sofa.
Phy, though, isn’t as mad as he sounds: he goes on to tell Carrsbury that (spoiler) his attempts to reduce the amount of insanity in the world have been subverted. Phy becomes demonstrative, and one of Carrsbury’s security guards appears. As Carrsbury leaves for an appointment, Phy asks to accompany him, and the three of them end up in an elevator. There, the tables are further turned:

“Do you know how many floors there are in this building?”
Carrsbury was not immediately conscious of the new note in Phy’s voice, but he reacted to it.
“One hundred,” he replied promptly.
“Then,” asked Phy, “just where are we?”
Carr opened his eyes to the darkness. One hundred twenty-seven, blinked the floor numeral. One hundred twenty-eight. One hundred twenty-nine. Something cold dragged at Carrsbury’s stomach, pulled at his brain. He felt as if his mind were being slowly and irresistibly twisted. He thought of hidden dimensions, of unsuspected holes in space. Something remembered from elementary physics danced through his thoughts: If it were possible for an elevator to keep moving upward with uniform acceleration, no one inside an elevator could determine whether the effects they were experiencing were due to acceleration or to gravity—whether the elevator were standing motionless on some planet or shooting up at ever-increasing velocity through free space.
One hundred forty-one. One hundred forty-two.
“Or as if you were rising through consciousness into an unsuspected realm of mentality lying above,” suggested Phy in his new voice, with its hint of gentle laughter.  p. 170

They eventually arrive at a transparent section of the building that Carrsbury did not know existed. They wait for an aircraft to come and pick Carrsbury up. Phy explains that the only reason that Carrsbury was allowed to do what he wanted was so he could express himself, like everyone in the world, but that now that must stop.
After Carrsbury leaves, Phy turns to the guard and delivers the story’s neat closing line:

“I’m glad to see the last of that fellow,” [Phy] muttered, more to himself than to [the guard], as they plummeted toward the roof, “He was beginning to have a very disturbing influence on me. In fact, I was beginning to fear for my”—his expression became suddenly vacuous—“sanity.”  p. 173

I’m not sure this makes much sense as a story to be honest, but its paranoid feel, the switch-around, and the biter-bit ending work well enough.

The Cover, once again, is by William Timmins. Paul Orban does a lot of this issue’s Interior artwork (about two-thirds), and the rest is from Frank Kramer and A. Williams. I am bored with Kramer’s repeated drawings of what looks like a 1940’s Hank Kuttner in a hat—if I’ve seen this illustration once, I’ve seen it a dozen times:

Super-Conservative, John W. Campbell, Jr.’s editorial, starts with this:

It has long been maintained that science-fiction is written by, edited by, and read by wild-eyed dreamers, with a raving imagination, and that it consists solely of impossible fantasies. Ask any nonreader. Or—maybe you’d better not, just now. The non-readers have been somewhat shocked very recently, and might possibly be a little less certain of the one hundred percent standing of science-fiction as pure fantasy. The jet-propelled plane comes dangerously close to making a rocket-propelled ship sound almost as though it might, a thousand years hence, be remotely possible—
Personally, I’ve long maintained that science-fiction is conservative.  p. 5

There is more of this before Campbell tells us that the rotogravure section of the magazine is made up first, which meant that he couldn’t include a breaking-news article about Dr Felix Ehrenhaft’s supposed discovery of magnetic monopoles and magnetic current. Campbell goes into full messiah mode about this subject, eventually concluding with:

Lack of space now prevents an adequate discussion of this discovery. Next month’s issue will contain photographs, and more detailed reports. For the moment: Dr. Ehrenhaft, having made the most important discovery of this century—I do not except the uranium fission—will most certainly receive that final honorary degree, the degree no college confers, but which is conferred only by the people who find his name forever in their conversation. He will be not Dr. Ehrenhaft to the future, but Ehrenhaft. Probably, as a matter of fact, he will be perpetuated as an ehrenhaft.  p. 6

He wasn’t, but more on this next issue.

Not Quite Rockets is a short article about early jet aeroplanes (principally the Italian Caproni-Campini and the German Blohm & Voss models):

The article also explains how a jet engine works.

Rocket Artillery by Willy Ley compares the ranges, payloads, and convenience of artillery shells versus rockets. The article also goes into the maths of the latter in some detail, but he primarily talks about powder rockets (the first liquid-fuelled German V2 rockets were fired at England six months later in September 1944).

In Times to Come plugs a sequel to last issue’s Circle of Confusion by “Wes Long” (George O. Smith): Latent Image. The other story mentioned is E. Mayne Hull’s The Winged Men, which sounds like a far-future pulp adventure (an American submarine ends up in 1,000,000 A. D., and has to pick sides in a war).
The Analytical Laboratory: April 1944 was discussed in the review of that issue.⁴

Brass Tacks includes a long letter of comment from Chan Davis, a short one from L. Sprague de Camp, and a request for pocketbook reprints from Henry G. Higgins (no address, oddly)—to which Campbell replies that they feel lucky to get the paper they need for the magazine.
There is also a ringing endorsement of fantasy fiction in Astounding from Walt Liebscher, of the Battle Creek “Slan Shack” in Michigan:

By all means, let’s have fantasy in Astounding. I haven’t the slightest doubt that “We Print the Truth” was destined to be the lead novel in an issue of Unknown. So, when Unknown was obliterated by the paper shortage, you published it in Astounding, which resulted in its being voted the second best yarn in the issue.
Unknown was undoubtedly the greatest fantasy magazine of the last decade. I’ve had my issues professionally bound, for I’m positive that, included between the covers of the thirty-nine issues of Unknown, are some of the greatest fantasy stories of our age.
Some of your “regulars” write finer fantasy than science-fiction, and it would be a crying shame to hold them down to a type of story not strictly their forte. Surely the most inveterate science-fiction addicts will not begrudge we, who lean towards the fantasy side of imaginative fiction, at least one story per issue.  p. 178

Campbell’s comment, “Fantasy—but not the werewolf—vampire type, perhaps?” indicates he is still sounding out the readership.
Given the quality of some of the fiction in recent issues of Astounding, I think Campbell made a big mistake in cancelling Unknown and not continuing both magazines on a bimonthly schedule—he would have had a much wider pool of writers to choose from, and could have produced two better quality magazines.
The last letter, from George A. Foster of Stoughton, Massachusetts, is an amusing account of a visiting aunt, who, having read a couple of stories in Astounding, wonders why her nephew hasn’t built a betatron from the twenty pounds of spare wire in the cellar to zap the mice!
I note in passing the teaser advert inadvertently added to this issue (it plugs the van Vogt story):

In conclusion, a poor issue with only two good, if minor, stories.  ●

_____________________

1. Alva Rogers has this to say about van Vogt’s story:

There was A. E. van Vogt’s “The Changeling” which appeared in April and which was probably one of his first important stories revolving around a character with remarkable, unexplained powers gradually realized, who is impelled into action for unknown reasons and by forces of which he has no knowledge. It was a taut story told with van Vogt’s blend of action and bewildering complexity, but certainly not one of his classics.  p. 130

2. The Changeling underwent “substantial revision” for van Vogt’s fix-up novel The Beast (UK: Moonbeast). The ISFDB page for the series is here.

3. Van Vogt would apparently set his alarm to wake himself up every 45 minutes (or whatever) throughout the night so he could jot down the contents of his dreams on a notepad.

4. The Analytical Laboratory results for this issue appeared in the July 1944 edition:

All these results show is, again, that the longest story usually places first, and that Astounding readers have an extraordinary tolerance for nonsense plots (the van Vogt) and bad writing (the Smith).  ●

ISFDB
Archive.org

Other reviews:¹
Alva Rogers, A Requiem for Astounding  p. 129-134

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Catherine Tarrant

Fiction:
Off the Beam • novelette by George O. Smith ∗∗
Though Dreamers Die • novelette by Lester del Rey ∗∗∗
Plague • novelette by Murray Leinster –
Taboo • short story by Fritz Leiber ∗
The Anarch • novelette by Malcolm Jameson ∗∗∗
Catch That Rabbit • short story by Isaac Asimov –

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by Paul Orban (x5), Smith (x2), A. Williams (x8)
Practically Nothing • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
In Times to Come
Sensory Range • science essay
Brass Tacks • letters
“Eyes to See” • science essay
Universes to Order • science essay by John R. Pierce [as by J. J. Coupling]
The Plurality of Worlds • science essay by Willy Ley
The Analytical Laboratory: December 1943

_____________________

Off the Beam by George O. Smith is another of his ‘Venus Equilateral’ series, and it opens with Don Channing (the relay station’s Director of Communications) on a spaceship trip to Earth. When he receives a telegram from Venus Equilateral he has a short conversation with the steward, speculating that one day they’ll be able to reply to the station: this exchange telegraphs the story’s arc (one of the previous stories dealt with the reverse problem, of Venus Equilateral’s inability to urgently contact a ship in flight).
Shortly after their exchange the ship is hit by a meteor which damages the engine controls. The ship undergoes a 10g acceleration for ten hours and they fly past Earth.
When Channing recovers consciousness he explores the ship and finds many casualties and  fatalities floating around in the now zero gee spaceship. He goes to the surgery and finds the ship’s doctor patching up some injured nurses, before going down to the engineering section. Channing finds the repair crews trying to get the normal lighting back on, as well as restoring artificial gravity by decelerating the ship.
The rest of the story (spoiler) is a nuts and bolts (or anode and cathode) account of how Channing and crew turn the ship into a massive electron gun which will fire a crude communication beam at Venus Equilateral. Some of the scientific detail I understood, some of it I didn’t (the explanation about the ship’s speed and where they think they are heading made no sense). The story does, however, give you an idea of the vast distances covered a high gee acceleration.
This story is no worse and no better than the others in the series.

Though Dreamers Die by Lester del Rey has a dull ‘man waking up’ beginning which eventually reveals that Jorgen the narrator is on a spaceship, and is being revived by five robots. We learn he is the only human left alive on the ship as the other passengers have succumbed to a plague that killed all human life in the solar system. Later on in the story we find that Jorgen has early signs of the disease too, so the ship’s flight has been in vain.
When the robots discover a habitable planet the decision is made to land:

It was in many ways a world superior to that his race had always known, remarkably familiar, with even a rough resemblance between plant forms here and those he had known. They had come past five suns and through ninety years of travel at nearly the speed of light to a haven beyond their wildest imaginings, where all seemed to be waiting them, untenanted but prepared.
Outside, the new world waited expectantly. And inside, to meet that invitation, there were only ghosts and emptied dreams, with one slowly dying man to see and to appreciate. The gods had prepared their grim jest with painful attention to every detail needed to make it complete.  p. 46-47

They land near a perfect natural harbour, and (robot) Five describes a vision of the city that could have been built there. Jorgen then realises that man’s dream will only live on through the robots, so he orders them to forget humankind and build their own civilization. He later leaves on the ship but, just before that, there is a moving scene where he notices that Five has kept a picture of the planets of the solar system. Quite a good mood piece.
I’ve mentioned before that del Rey seems to be two writers in one: the first does more sober and (comparatively) literary pieces like this story, The Faithful (Astounding, April 1938), and Whom the Gods Love (Astounding, June 1943); the second does stories like Nerves (Astounding, September 1942).

Plague by Murray Leinster begins with a reserve officer called Ben Sholto—dishonourably transferred for using his common sense rather than blindly following orders—contacted by the space service, his previous employers, and put back on active duty. He is told to report any ship trying to leave a quarantined planet called Pharona. When he sees one he contacts HQ, who dispatch a destroyer as Sholto’s ship is unarmed. Meanwhile, Sholto establishes contact with the fugitive ship, and finds that his ex-girlfriend is on it.
This is a slick start to the story but thereafter it goes downhill, partly due to the long digressions at the start of each chapter that show how stupidly bureaucratic the administration has become. All of this is done in a smart-alecky style reserved for paper-pushers by SF writers:

A space cruiser resignedly took up post in an orbit about the dark star Lambda Bootes. It would circle that star for six months and be relieved. Forty years before, a subcommissioner had intended to change cruisers at that place, and commanded that one be there to meet him. He had later changed his plan of travel, but there was no order to withdraw the cruiser posted at the rendezvous. The first cruiser asked for relief after six months of utterly useless waiting.
It was relieved by a cruiser under orders to take its place. Seventy-eight cruisers, in turn, had uselessly swung about the dark star for six months each because of an order given forty years before and never rescinded.  p. 71

The other major drawback is the story’s ridiculous plot, which involves Sholto’s ex-girlfriend, Sally, having the plague (which causes her to glow due to some radioactive or energy effect). Eventually, Sholto realises that the plague isn’t a disease but that an alien has taken up residence in her. As he tries to exorcise the alien, there is much pseudoscientific gibberish involving positrons, electrons, and insulated chairs.
The story comes to a head when the Navy catch up with Sholto (now under a sentence of death for some earlier misdemeanour) just as he is away to transmit the cure to the rest of the Galaxy.
An awful story.

Taboo by Fritz Leiber begins with a bit of a Gather, Darkness! vibe, when an outlaw called Arnine seeks sanctuary at the Outsiders, a pseudo-religious order that has renounced the benefits of atomic power and the universal transmutators. Although these latter should have made Earth a paradise, it is in an almost post-holocaust state.
Seafor, the chief of the Outsiders, then finds a young boy of noble birth outside. Although the boy had previously been kidnapped by Arnine, he also demands refuge. Then the boy’s father turns up, demanding his release . . . .
This has an interesting background but the story isn’t developed, and it comes to a juddering halt. Disappointing.

Last year I was particularly impressed by Malcolm Jameson’s story Blind Alley (Unknown Worlds, June 1943) and, for the majority of its length, I thought that The Anarch was going to be its equal.

The story starts with Medical Inspector Garrison, who is struggling to issue a death certificate for a patient who has died from a condition that is supposed to be treatable:

He was in no ordinary dilemma, and was beginning to know it. It was more a being caught between two opposing sets of antlers bristling with scores of prickly points. The death, as far as that went, of the obscure Leona McWhisney meant nothing to a seasoned doctor. People were dying at Sanitar all the time. But they were dying in approved ways that could be reported on approved forms. Her departure from the normal played hob with the whole Autarchian set-up. Garrison groaned aloud, for he was, until that moment, a thoroughly indoctrinated, obedient, unthinking cog in the vast bureaucracy that was Autarchia. Not once in the thirty years of his life until then had the Code failed him. He had never doubted for an instant that that wonderful document was the omniscient, infallible, unquestionable guide to human behavior. It was unthinkable that he could doubt it now. And yet—
Yet Leona McWhisney was dead.  p. 124

But there were only three forms [. . .], for there were only three possible ways for an Autarchian to die. The most common—reportable on the gray form—was by euthanasia after recommendation of a board of gerocomists, and approved by the Bureau of Population Control. Elderly citizens beyond further salvage, or those in excess of the Master Plan were disposed of in this fashion. Then there was the yellow form that was employed when violent accidents occurred. Even the all-wise framers of the Code had not known how to recapitate or re-embowel a citizen thus torn apart. Last of all there was provided the scarlet form for the use of the executioner at Penal House after the monitors had finished dealing with dissenters. That one was on the road to obsolescence, for in recent generations there had been few who refused to abide by the Code, or scoffed at it. The trait of rebelliousness had been pretty well bred out of the race.  p. 125

Garrison then goes to the diagnostat department to get the dead patient’s diagnosis confirmed; while he is there, the technician tells him of a number of similar fatalities from supposedly non-fatal illnesses.
When Garrison goes to the mess hall for food that evening, there is an announcement that puts this story solidly into proto-1984 territory:

A fanfare of trumpets warned that something big and unusual was about to come through. He got to his feet and stood at attention. A uniformed figure appeared on the screen.
“By order of his supremacy, the Autarch,” he proclaimed in a deep, sonorous voice. “Effective immediately, those provisions of the Social and Penal Code requiring attendance during Renovation Hour at Social Halls is suspended for officials of C.I. one-thirty or better. Such officers may attend or not, as they choose—”
Garrison blinked. He had never heard the word “choose” before and had but the faintest idea of what it might mean. More obscure ones were to follow.
“If they so elect, they may stay within their own quarters or visit other officers of similar rank in theirs. Restrictions as to topics of conversation are lifted during this period. Officers will not be required to discuss assigned cultural subjects, but may talk freely on any topic they prefer. Monitors will make note of this alteration in the Codes.
“The order has been published. Carry on.”
The light failed, and with it the figure on the screen. Garrison continued to stand for about a minute, entirely at sea as to what the communication he had just heard meant. Such words as “elect,” “choose,” and “prefer” had long since become obsolete if not actually forbidden. The concept of choice was wholly absent under the autocracy. It never occurred to one that there could be such a thing—it was inconsistent with orderly life. One simply obeyed the Code, which always said “you shall.” To think of anything different was rank heresy and treason, and subject to the severest penalties. Garrison puzzled over the order a moment and gave it up. No doubt there would be further clarification later. Perhaps the Propag lecturer of the evening would have a word to say about it. The order would be carried out of course, but to Garrison’s well-disciplined mind it had the bad fault of ambiguity.  pp. 129-130

Later in the story, Garrison takes an elevated monorail home to his dorm. As he travels over the fields below he sees they are blighted. When Garrison notices an unusually healthy section, a senior medic sitting behind him starts a conversation about the similarities between the problems in the fields below and the growing number of medical problems in the larger population. Garrison is scared by the treasonous nature of these comments, but his bluster is met by the senior medic’s revelation that his heart is failing and he likely faces euthanasia at an imminent board hearing. Before they part, he tells Garrison that a man called Clevering is the agronomist in charge of the healthy section of field.

That evening at the social hour, no-one is brave enough to talk freely about the problems that their society faces.
The next day Garrison goes to work and finds a surge in admissions—and notices Clevering’s name among them. Garrison finds the agronimist close to death but, before he dies, Garrision finds out that he has conducted illegal agricultural research, and that he also has a small library of forbidden books. After Clevering dies, Garrison goes to recover them:

The book he came to love most of all was a very slim one—a little volume on “Liberty” by a John Stuart Mill. His limited vocabulary troubled him much at first, but he shrewdly arrived at the meanings of such words as “choice” and “freedom” by considering the context. He discovered to his delight that there were shades between good and bad. There were the words “better” and “best” as well as the bare, unqualified “good.”  p. 141

Garrison starts making experimental drugs and treats his patients with them. Eventually, he begins to cure them. Then the Monitors come for him.
The next part of the story involves his torture and maltreatment by the Monitors, which, initially, ties in with the previous arc of the story. The rest of it though, where Garrison is taken to see the Autarch,² is where everything falls flat.
Garrison is questioned by the supreme leader, and does not mince his words when asked about what is wrong with the system. However, after a few pages of mildly adversarial talking heads material about democracy, etc., they end up working together. The story ends with them issuing conflicting codes, to force people to learn to think for themselves, and to compromise.
This ending is unconvincingly consensual (as well as being far too talky) but, for most of its length, this story is a very good piece about totalitarian society, and covers much of the same subject matter as George Orwell’s later 1984 (life in a regimented society, methods of control, what happens to language, etc.) The Autarch is worth reading, if only to gain an appreciation of what this writer might have produced had he not died of cancer in his early fifties.³

I didn’t much like the last ‘Donovan & Powell’ story from Isaac Asimov that I read, and thought even less of Catch That Rabbit. In this one the pair are on a mining asteroid where Dave the robot (who is running six subsidiary units) periodically goes into a fugue state which causes him to march the robots up and down the tunnels. Eventually, and after a lot of theorising, and a contrived situation which puts the two men in peril, we find the problem is that (spoiler) Dave giving orders to six other robots causes a malfunction, but giving orders to five doesn’t. The reader has no chance of working this out before the solution is presented on a plate.
The story is also hugely padded, and has completely unconvincing dialogue and interaction (you sometimes wonder if Asimov had ever listened to anyone other than obnoxious teenagers):

Michael Donovan’s face went beety, “For the love of Pete, Greg, get realistic. What’s the use of adhering to the letter of the specifications and watching the test go to pot? It’s about time you got the red tape out of your pants and went to work.”  p. 159

Powell groaned heavily behind a noticeably insincere smile. The unwritten motto of United States Robot and Mechanical Men Corp. was well-known: “No employee makes the same mistake twice. He is fired the first time.”
Aloud he said, “You’re as lucid as Euclid with everything except facts. You’ve watched that robot group for three shifts, you redhead, and they did their work perfectly. You said so yourself. What else can we do?”  p. 160

Powell scowled at the ceiling and pulled at his brown mustache. “I’ll tell you what, Mike. We’ve been stuck with pretty lousy jobs in our time, but this takes the iridium asteroid.”  p. 160

Clunk, clunk, clunk. This one is just awful, even worse than the Leinster.

This issue’s Cover by William Timmins (for Smith’s story) is of interest for the combination of realistic and abstract elements (the diagrams and the tear at the bottom of the page). Timmins had flirted with this kind of thing on the June 1943 cover, and would use the technique again. It’s a bit of a muddy affair nonetheless.
The Interior artwork is again hobbled by the fact that it is mostly spot work. Out of the three artists that contribute to this issue—Paul Orban, Smith, and A. Williams, the latter provides the best work (although even some of his is so-so; but the one on p. 132 is pretty good, as is the one on p. 99, which looks like a black and white Timmins).
Smith’s and Orban’s robots look very primitive and old-fashioned, and come from a future where they still use large rivets.
Practically Nothing by John W. Campbell, Jr. is in the editorial slot but is really a science essay that discusses the difficulty of testing equipment which requires a hard vacuum. It goes on to state that this would be easier on the Moon or in space.
In Times to Come talks about the improbability of mankind falling victim to alien microorganisms before ceding that it may happen on rare occasions and cause mutations. This preamble introduces one of next month’s stories, The Contract by E. Mayne Hull (who Campbell refers to as “he” funnily enough—a slip of the tongue I presume, as I think he knew that the writer was A. E. van Vogt’s wife).
Sensory Range is a half-page filler about the human auditory range, and suggests that, “The inhabitants of alien planets may not be able to speak our language, but they’ll hear it, and we’ll hear theirs.”
The Brass Tacks column contains four letters this month, including two from future SF writers Chan Davis and Frank Robinson.
Davis, of Sandwich, Mass., opens the column with his likes and dislikes (currently, his ratings are letters, he hasn’t yet graduated to the later 1 to 10 scale with decimals): he gives the August instalment of Moore’s Judgement Night an A+, and Leiber’s The Mutant’s Brother an A.
Virgil Utter,⁴ of Modesto, CA, also liked Moore’s piece best, and had this to say:

For her first stf epic Miss Moore has outdone herself. By far the most beautiful piece of writing this year has produced; better even than the marvelous “There Shall Be Darkness.” My favorite science-fiction stories embody certain little fantasy suggestions as are in this story. Little things like the ilar and its behavior, the visit to Cyrille—that was a real thrill!—and all the tiny fantasies that transpired there, and I especially enjoy going down into some deep underground passage that simultaneously holds so much of death and an equal amount of life. These are perfect touches, but they alone could not sell me on a story so completely. Moore has dug up a rather ancient plot, smoothed it into a new setting, and shined it up like new. The wonderful description is, to be VERY trite, out of this world.  p. 96

Frank M. Robinson, of Sacremento, IL, also thought highly of Moore’s novel (“outstanding”) and liked the other stories too. However, he criticises the artwork:

With Rogers gone, your covers have slipped tremendously. With Schneeman gone, so have your interior drawings. Williams—or Kolliker—is simply ng. Ditto for Orban and Fax. Kramer is so-so. One could hope for eventual inclusion of Virgil Finlay, Leydenfrost, Charles Chickering, or practically anybody else besides the Fax-Kolliker-Kramer-Orban-and-Williams quintuplets.  p. 98

He then asks about the future publishing plans of Street & Smith:

As a humble request: May we expect Astounding—and likewise Unknown—to return to the large-size magazine after the war is over and the paper shortage remedied? At least, here’s hoping.  p. 98

Campbell replies:

Ye Ed is doing no more prophesying for the duration; Astounding and Unknown may reappear in large size A. T. W., but don’t quote me! At present, paper is so tight, and gets tighter so suddenly, that the October Unknown carries an editorial about the new, small-size Unknown—but, after that issue was printed, our paper was cut again. Sorry—there won’t be any new Unknown for the duration! So I quit prophecy.  p. 97

The last letter is from John Samuel, from Evanston, IL, and comments further on the early meat replacement research I mentioned in an earlier review:

About that yeast—it has been my good (?) fortune to taste some of it. The biochemistry department of the University of Illinois tried out some of the Anheuser-Busch product on its students this summer. It tastes quite well undiluted—much like sodium glutamate, which is like a poor imitation of chicken soup. But it is dry and salty, and when diluted it is rather nauseating. However, it can undoubtedly be improved. As to its effects—none in particular except it increases purine metabolism—i.e., uric acid output.
I think readers of Astounding might like to know about this first nonagricultural food.  p. 98

“Eyes to See” is a short photo essay about x-ray and electron microscopes, which is followed by Universes to Order by John R. Pierce, an eye-glazingly dull piece about electron multipliers and amplifiers.

The Plurality of Worlds by Willy Ley is about the development of various cosmological theories, most of which are concerned with the construction of the solar system and the relative positions of Earth, Sun, planets and stars.
At the end of the article there is a mention of the discovery of a third extra solar planet and that, at the time of writing, there is no theory if planetary formation.

The Analytical Laboratory: December 1943 was discussed in the review of that issue, although I’m happy to moan once more about Anthony Boucher’s We Print the Truth coming in second (and not winning last year’s Retro Hugo for novella).⁵

A very mixed issue with some poor work from name writers. Worth digging out for the Jameson, though.  ●

_____________________

1. Alva Rogers hasn’t got anything to say about this issue in A Requiem for Astounding, but he does have something to say about the year:

Of all the years commonly considered Golden, 1944 was the least memorable; the outstanding stories that were published only pointed up the disappointing quality of the bulk of what was left. In some respects, 1944 can be regarded as a bridge between two peaks; the peak 1940 to 1943, and the peak 1945 to 1950. At any rate, the slump was short lived and things began to pick up considerably from 1945 on.  p. 134

2. I’m not sure why Jameson’s story is called The Anarch when the references in the story are to “The Autarch”.

3. Malcolm Jameson’s Wikipedia page. If I’m ever in New York, I’ll lay some flowers at his grave.

4. Virgil Utter later wrote various non-fiction pieces, as well as compiling a few bibliographies (including Moore and Kuttner among others). His ISFDB page is here.

5. The Analytical Laboratory results for this issue appeared in the June 1944 edition (late, according to Campbell, due to publication schedule changes):

At least the readers got the first and last places right, even if the Leinster snuck by them.  ●

ISFDB
Archive.org

Other reviews:¹
Alva Rogers, A Requiem for Astounding  p. 52-56

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.

Fiction:
Hell Ship • novelette by Arthur J. Burks ∗
Jason Comes Home • short story by A. Macfadyen, Jr. ∗
Resilient Planet • short story by Nelson Tremaine [as by Warner Van Lorne] ∗
“Who Goes There?” • novella by John W. Campbell, Jr. [as by Don A. Stuart] ∗∗∗+
The Terrible Sense • short story by Thomas Calvert McClary [as by Calvin Peregoy] ∗∗
Asteroid Pirates • short story by Royal W. Heckman ∗∗
Eviction by Isotherm • short story by Malcolm Jameson ∗∗
The Disinherited • short story by Henry Kuttner ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by H. W. Wesso
Interior artwork • by H. W. Wesso (x7), C. R. Thomson, Jack Binder, uncredited (Coughlin, Flatos, and Orban) (x5)
Food for the First Planet • essay by Thomas Calvert McClary
“Power” • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
The Analytical Laboratory: June 1938
In Times to Come
Orbits, Take-Offs and Landings • essay by Willy Ley
Science Discussions and Brass Tacks • letters

_____________________

This issue is best known for John W. Campbell’s novella Who Goes Here?, later seen as a pretty good SF movie in the early 1980s, The Thing.² The fiction leads off, however, with a bigger name—Arthur J. Burks, and his Hell Ship. This is the first of his ‘Josh McNab’ series (and my heart later sank when I discovered this is the first of four stories that appeared in Astounding).

McNab is the chief engineer of a tramp steamer—sorry, spaceship—called the Arachne. In among the thrust bearings, girders and scent of oil, we learn that McNab is a fifty year old widower (his wife Mary died in childbirth) and, in case you didn’t guess it from his name, he is Scottish:

“Ye’re the purrtiest thing,” said Josh, looking the Arachne over from the rim of the slip, his gray eyes glistening with pride. “Purtier than the bonniest lassie that ever coom oot o’ Scutland, save one! If only I had the money to own ye!”  p. 8

We also find out that the Arachne is going to Mars with a cracked rotor shaft (the parsimonious ship owner Caperton wants to delay the repair):

“An’ there be scuts that say the Scotch are teet!” [McNab] muttered. His Scotch dialect was broad enough to cut with a knife when he was aroused, or talking to himself.
If repairs were to be made in the slip, Caperton had to pay union wages plus time and a half for overtime. If they were made enroute—sailors had to do it, and they received no extra pay. Then, it was “for the safety of the ship”, and plain duty. Moreover they had to do it [to get] home again. “An’ weel yon Caperton kens it!” muttered Josh McNab.  p. 7

This sets up (spoiler) the obvious arc of the story, which is the deterioration of the rotor shaft to the point that McNab disobeys the Captain’s orders and stops the ship en route to effect a repair. This causes a period of zero gee, much to the consternation of the passengers.

Padding all this out is a lot of malarkey about McNab’s neice Mary (the same name as his dead wife) who is travelling with the ship to Mars, and who flirts shamelessly with McNab (much to his embarrassment). Mary, however, is involved in a love triangle with one of the young sailor-spacemen on board, which later leads to McNab consoling her about her romantic misfortunes (one of the many unintentionally hilarious scenes in the story):

Then, when things were pretty bad for Mary, by the looks of her, and she stood on a landing with McNab, in the Tunnel abeam of the belt promenade: “Murrry,” he said softly, dropping his calloused hand over hers—which took a lot of courage for Josh McNab, “is yon laddie worth it?”
“To me, Josh, yes.”
She swayed, and would have fallen, and Josh had an inspiration.
“Tell me, Murrry, the noo, aboot the ship. Answers micht help a wee bit ye ken—”
She understood instantly, and turned her head toward him for a moment, without relaxing her grip on the rail.
She did, however, lean her body a bit away from the cylindrical pit of the rotor. “Top and main thrust bearings, Josh,” she said, “are oil pad flotation surfaces, with 22 square feet area, operating with an oil pressure of 350 pounds per square inch. The metal of the bearing-plates is cadmium bronze. The main rotor ball-caps are chome-moly-vanadium steel; the shaft itself a 30” chrome-moly heat-treated alloy—”
The Arachne, after all, was one of her passions, and her own words did a lot to help her back to herself.
“The hull plates are of magnesiumberyl— Thanks, Josh. I needed that, I guess. I’ll try my best to stop being silly. If he doesn’t care, I’m foolish to bother, even though it hurts inside. But you wouldn’t know, Josh—”
“Her name was Murrry, too, lang an’ lang ago,” said McNab slowly.
“Oh, Josh, I didn’t think—”
“So mony folk, Murrry, dinna think at all! But dinna ye fret—”  p. 14

After all the excitement is over, Mary eventually gets her man.
As I’ve mentioned in a previous review,³ Burks and L. Ron Hubbard were foisted on Campbell by the Street & Smith management to introduce “people” into the stories. What a pity that what he got were these ludicrous stereotypes and their mundane concerns.

Jason Comes Home by A. Macfadyen, Jr. begins with Jason paddling a canoe in the wilds when he comes upon an area covered in slime. In the midst of this are alien skeletons and a spacecraft. He goes inside the vessel, and after flicking a couple of switches is soon accelerating through space.
The rest of the first part of the story tells of how Jason manages to decipher the alien crew’s books, and manages to get control of the craft. He then goes to the aliens’ home planet and finds out that the slime has destroyed them. During this visit his craft becomes infected too (his pet squirrel’s bones liquefy) and he retreats to a safe area to develop an ionising weapon to kill the slime.
Afterwards Jason returns to Earth to find that it has destroyed civilisation there too, and he once more uses his weapon. A few human survivors appear at the very end.
This has better prose than most stories from this period but it’s a creaky, old-style tale with numerous mini-science dumps, and not very good.

Resilient Planet by Nelson Tremaine starts with a spaceman with a drive malfunction⁴ heading out of the solar system. When he stumbles upon a world he lands there and meets a rubbery looking man:

He stayed on the road as the car came to a halt. The creepy sensation returned. When the door opened a resilient man jumped out! He actually bounced when he landed! His legs shortened, then gradually extended to raise his body back to normal position. A simple robe was his only clothing.
Bob could hardly believe the creature was alive. He appeared more like the image of a man that a child would mold in putty. But he seemed intelligent, and certainly the machine represented the work of a well-developed brain.  p. 50

The rest of it is mostly description of this rubbery man’s world and travelling society (they move from city to city to avoid full sunlight). Later, the spaceman sees another human who is, when he finally tracks her down, a young woman (for some unexplained plot reason the aliens have kept them apart). As the man has previously discovered that shouting causes the aliens to fall  unconscious, he makes a lot of noise and they escape. The aliens eventually repent and help the couple leave the planet.
This reads like an amateur writer’s story, and I wonder if it was accepted because Nelson Tremaine was F. Orlin Tremaine’s (Campbell’s boss’s) brother. (Conversely, it isn’t much worse than some of the other stuff here.)

“Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell, Jr.⁵ opens at an Antarctic research station with the crew standing around the tarpaulined body of a frozen alien. One of the main characters, McReady, tells the men that they discovered it at a crashed spaceship near a magnetic anomaly they were investigating. During the process of digging the alien out of the ice they accidentally destroyed the ship.

After this atmospheric but data-dump start the men then discuss whether it is safe to defrost the creature and examine it. The camp physicist, Norris, is vehemently opposed, and his warning telegraphs the arc of the story:

“How the hell can these birds tell what they are voting on? They haven’t seen those three red eyes, and that blue hair like crawling worms. Crawling— damn, it’s crawling there in the ice right now!
“Nothing Earth ever spawned had the unutterable sublimation of devastating wrath that thing let loose in its face when it looked around his frozen desolation twenty million years ago. Mad? It was mad clear through—searing, blistering mad!
“Hell, I’ve had bad dreams ever since I looked at those three red eyes. Nightmares. Dreaming the thing thawed out and came to life—that it wasn’t dead, or even wholly unconscious all those twenty million years, but just slowed, waiting—waiting. You’ll dream, too, while that damned thing that Earth wouldn’t own is dripping, dripping in the Cosmos House tonight.
“And, Connant,” Norris whipped toward the cosmic ray specialist, “won’t you have fun sitting up all night in the quiet. Wind whining above—and that thing dripping—” He stopped for a moment, and looked round.
“I know. That’s not science. But this is, it’s psychology. You’ll have nightmares for a year to come. Every night since I looked at that thing I’ve had ’em. That’s why I hate it—sure I do—and don’t want it around. Put it back where it came from and let it freeze for another twenty million years. I had some swell nightmares—that it wasn’t made like we are—which is obvious—but of a different kind of flesh that it can really control. That it can change its shape, and look like a man— and wait to kill and eat—
“That’s not a logical argument. I know it isn’t. The thing isn’t Earthlogic anyway.”  p. 66-67

After some more discussion the men agree to have Connant babysit the alien’s body overnight, but it isn’t long before he falls asleep and the body goes missing. Then everything kicks off when the Thing is found in the huskies’ enclosure, and the men head there with ice-axes, .45s, and flamethrowers:

Connant stopped at the bend in the corridor. His breath hissed suddenly through his throat. “Great God—”
The revolver exploded thunderously; three numbing, palpable waves of sound crashed through the confined corridors. Two more. The revolver dropped to the hard-packed snow of the trail, and Barclay saw the ice-ax shift into defensive position. Connant’s powerful body blocked his vision, but beyond he heard something mewing, and, insanely, chuckling. The dogs were quieter; there was a deadly seriousness in their low snarls. Taloned feet scratched at hard-packed snow, broken chains were clinking and tangling.
Connant shifted abruptly, and Barclay could see what lay beyond. For a second he stood frozen, then his breath went out in a gusty curse. The Thing launched itself at Connant, the powerful arms of the man swung the ice-ax flatside first at what might have been a head. It scrunched horribly, and the tattered flesh, ripped by a half-dozen savage huskies, leapt to its feet again. The red eyes blazed with an unearthly hatred, an unearthly, unkillable vitality.  p. 73

I love that “mewing and insanely chucking” description.
Even though they finally manage to kill the Thing they note that it has changed shape during the fight to become part-dog. This ability of the alien to change itself down to the cellular level drives the rest of the narrative, as the men no longer know who is human and who is a Thing . . . .
There are a couple of later scenes that rise above the well done paranoia and claustrophobia: one of these is (spoiler) when the men have their blood tested (the theory is that a Thing’s blood will want to “live”); and the other is when McReady and Barclay go to see Blair, who has been isolated in another part of the camp. This last part provides an SFnal finish to the story (in contrast to the movie) when they discover the Thing has built a blue-light emitting atomic reactor to power an anti-gravity device it intends to use to escape.
The best parts of this story are very good but the story as a whole is rather uneven, with some parts that don’t really work (e.g., I didn’t understand the explanation for the failure of the serum samples before they attempted the blood test). A greater problem (and one that I wouldn’t have been able to articulate until I saw it discussed elsewhere) is that the characterisation and point of view is all over the place. If the men were more clearly drawn, and the story told from McReady’s point of view (rather than the semi-omniscient one used), it would be a much smoother and more effective piece. Overall you get the feeling of a story that needs another draft—but, for all that, it is well worth reading.

The Terrible Sense by Thomas Calvert McClary starts with a deaf man getting a hearing transplant from a bat (the biological details are not explained). Once you get past this daft premise (just as with McClary’s recent serial Three Thousand Years) the first part is a pretty good account of his developing bat-abilities as he carries out his day to day job as a bookkeeper:

He did not notice it, but he no longer turned to see who was approaching. He knew long before he was fully conscious of their footsteps or voices. He was sitting on one side of a partition with Will Flanagan at noon one day when Will said idly, “I wonder exactly what Marie Stevens is doing at one minute to twelve?”
“Combing her hair,” Theodore said. He was not guessing. She might just as well have been powdering or rouging. But he knew she was combing her hair.
Will looked around the partition and said, “Jeepers!” He gave Clews a peculiar look.
The other bookkeepers began making a lot of remarks like that to Clews. As long as they asked about somebody in the room, or standing in a draft blowing into the room, Clews usually knew the answer. A week later they framed him. They had Marie Stevens sit absolutely quiet behind a filing case. They led up to the idea and asked Clews.
Clews’ mind went blank with concentration. He had not discovered how he knew things yet. He had not even discovered he was being kidded. After a second he said seriously, “She’s trying to be quiet. But she’s chewing gum.”
The committee ran to investigate. She was. They did not notice that the effort of absolute control made her breathe a little harder.  p. 102

This story rather loses its engrossing Weird Tales vibe when he changes career to become a successful blindfolded boxer! Worth reading for the middle section perhaps.

Asteroid Pirates by Royal W. Heckman starts intriguingly with a reporter who lands outside a restaurant and then turns his anti-gravity suit off:

Few people were about. All Earthlings, Fennel noted. He was a little surprised at not seeing any balloon-headed, skeleton men from Mars. Or those infernal Venusians! This part of New York was extremely popular with the inhabitants of Earth’s neighboring planets. Especially after midnight.
Greg was hungry. The new Interplanetary Restaurant was just around the corner. It was a dandy place to pick up news items for his ten-minute column in the New York Radio Star. He made the turn.
A rotund Venusian rolled swiftly toward him. Fennel jumped aside. The Venusian rolled to the outer edge of the walk and went swiftly on his way. The small, round head stuck out from the center of one side like a black hub cap. Greg cursed.
They ought to put a speed limit on those living pinwheels! Of course, with their stubby legs and spherical bodies, the Venusians found it difficult to waddle along a crowded street. But when they lay down and rolled, twenty miles an hour was low gear to them!  p. 113

Fennel then goes into the restaurant and meets an acquaintance who, after some chit-chat, tells him about a nefarious Venusian plot to turn the asteroid belt into a planet. This leads to Fennel’s kidnap (he now knows too much), along with three Saturnian apes, and their trip out to the Belt. There (spoiler) the action kicks off, and the apes prove more than a match for their captors.
This is the usual pulp nonsense, but it is reasonably entertaining, and I suspect it would be enjoyed by Doc Smith fans among others.

Eviction by Isotherm by Malcolm Jameson is an early geoengineering/weather war story set during a future ten year armistice between warring American and Eurasian superpowers. The Americans prime two volcanoes in the Panama Canal area as a defensive measure.
When the Eurasians eventually break the armistice and attack, America explodes the volcanoes and supercharge the eruptions by pumping seawater through underground tunnels. The airborne ash and the diverted Gulf Stream plunge Europe into an Ice Age.
This is dull and characterless for the most part, and I’m not convinced that America would escape so lightly—but this has a spectacular and interesting ending. Awful title.

The Disinherited marks Henry Kuttner ’s first appearance in the magazine—but he wouldn’t return  under his own name until 1943.⁶
The story starts with the protagonist, Carver, finishing his shift in an underground radium mine; he is a Helot, and they are ruled over by the Lords in this future Earth. Carver returns home to Morna, his mate, who tells him that a spaceship going to Mars has turned back for some reason. After discussing their reproductive status (she is determined not to have a child who will be a slave), Carver takes food to his blind father. The latter is hiding in the country to avoid a euthanasia order.
When Carver returns to see his father the next day, he arrives as soldiers discover and kill him. Carver launches a suicidal attack on them, but is saved when a Martian superman arrives and puts a force field around them both. We then get a lecture about the Cosmic Watcher who has sent the Martian to take electrical power away from humanity so that they can get back on the “right path”.
The story is a jumble of almost completely random elements, but it’s more smoothly written than some work I’ve seen from Kuttner and, despite the massive deus ex machina, an okay read I guess.

The Cover for this issue is an average looking piece by H. W. Wesso, but he produces better Interior artwork, especially for the Campbell story. There is also identifiable work inside by Thomson and Binder, but the remainder (for the Tremaine, McClary, Jameson, and Kuttner stories) are uncredited (although Coughlin, Flatos, and Orban are also listed on the contents page).

Food for the First Planet by Thomas Calvert McClary is a short article (although it seems longer) about growing food on other planets. Not only is the discussion of growing crops on Mars based on completely out of date science, some other details sound incorrect or speculative:

We have such a laboratory to study the little matter of the human lung’s reaction to carbon-monoxide gas at altitudes above 14,000 feet.  p. 45

I assume this is meant to be “carbon dioxide”—carbon monoxide will kill you, regardless of altitude.

After the scientist comes the miner, the soldier of fortune. But soldiers of fortune are notoriously moody and strictly speaking, highly unbalanced.  p. 47

Based on a survey of how many mercenaries?
That said, I did find this interesting snippet (I couldn’t corroborate it, but I did find an interesting book by Hubbard⁷):

Efforts to combat the tsetse problem were made by Wynant Davis Hubbard. While the fly slaughtered domestic animals after each rain, and there appeared no way to control or exterminate the fly, the wild life of the area lived immune. Hubbard started crossing wild animals with domestic stock. He crossed Herefords with the savage Rhodesian wild buffalo, and Polands with the bush pig.
He tamed elephant, lions, the forty-pound Rhodesian cat. Only the local cat could defend itself against the wild animals of the district. Rhodesian mice and rats destroy more crops than all the locusts put together.
Bit by bit, he was successful. His cattle herds were tractable and began to produce high quality beef and milk. Cross-bred pigs began to show signs of heavy pork. Pet lions and tamed wild dogs acted as watch dogs—and learned to leave domestic stock alone. The tsetse came and as usual killed off the innoculated domestic cattle—but the cross-bred cattle maintained the immunity of their wild forebears.  p. 43

“Power” by John W. Campbell, Jr. starts with a discussion of what the word power means before segueing to what a “better” story is. This is a particularly inelegant, possibly confusing, and certainly unnecessary way of introducing an extended Analytical Laboratory and Reader Survey (just get to the point!)

In Times to Come states that the next issue will mark five years of Street & Smith management⁸ before introducing a mixture of forthcoming stories by writers old and new. Campbell ends by talking about a new serial from L. Ron Hubbard, The Tramp (not what you would describe as a typical SF title).
The Analytical Laboratory: June 1938 was discussed in the review of that issue.⁹ See the image above for the extra information that Campbell seeks from his readers this time around.

Orbits, Take-Offs and Landings by Willy Ley is mostly about Hohmann orbits (the curved paths that spacecraft take to get from one planet to another).
At the end of the essay Ley identifies the best place for a spaceport (a place that combines the best rotational speed of the Earth, the highest elevation, etc.):

Strangely enough, there is actually a mountain in existence that fulfils most of the conditions for an ideal spaceport. It is Mt. Kenya in Central Africa, situated directly at the equator, more than three miles high, and surrounded by territory that would present no unsurmountable difficulties for the construction of several large airports. Since Mt. Kenya has generally gentle slopes, it would not even be difficult to build railways all the way from the airports near its foot to a possible spaceport on its top.
It would be strange if the first spaceships would take advantage of these opportunities and ascend from Mt. Kenya—the most modern product of civilization being launched from the very heart of the least civilized continent!  p. 133

Science Discussions and Brass Tacks has a couple of Science Discussions letters before the Brass Tacks section. The first of the former is a puff piece from Arthur J. Burks for his story in this issue, part of which is a description of the magnetic force drive that powers the Arachne.

The Brass Tacks letters are mostly lists of likes and dislikes with comments that are, in places, delightfully unrestrained—such as this from Bob (Wilson) Tucker of Bloomington, Illinois:

May I politely suggest that James Avery of Skowhegan, Maine, commence walking east and not hesitate when he reaches the shore?  p. 155

(Avery was complaining about other letter writers, apparently.)
Or this from John Chapman of Minneapolis, who thought the June issue was otherwise splendid:

The new serial [Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Time] is nothing but tripe. He must have written it while striking a match.  p. 157

Other correspondents praise the story, as well as Gallun’s The Seeds of Dusk, Norman L. Knight’s Isle of the Golden Swarm, and Manly Wade Wellman’s Men Against the Stars. McClary’s Three Thousand Years receives mixed notices (some complain it is too similar to a previous work, Rebirth).
The last letter comes from Isaac Asimov of Brooklyn. He suggests a “mutant” cover showing the rings of Saturn from that planet’s surface, and then makes a plea for longer stories:

Your “novelettes” are often only a page or two longer than the short stories. This is unfortunate as the long complete story fills an indispensable cavity in the scheme of things. Its length permits the development in more complete detail of the plot and it has none of the elements of discontinuity which mark the serial.
I think it would be quite easy for you to give us two thirty-page novelettes each month if you would give us only one serial at a time.
Furthermore, one science article is quite enough, and the ten pages thus saved could quite profitably be turned to fictional uses.  p. 161

Presumably he will be pleased by the inclusion of Campbell’s long story (around 22,000 words) in this issue.
In conclusion, this is an issue which improves after a lacklustre start (either that or I just adjusted to the awfulness), and it is worth reading for the Campbell story.  ●

_____________________

1. Alva Rogers says, in A Requiem for Astounding, that the cover “is possibly one of Wesso’s finest”, and that Who Goes There? was “without question, the outstanding story of the year”. He adds, “This brilliantly conceived and written tale of Antarctic horror is probably the greatest thing Campbell ever wrote.”
Rogers also notes that Malcolm Jameson’s contribution is his first SF story.

2. I note from Wikipedia that The Thing was initially badly received—I saw when it was first released and thought it was great; glad everyone else caught up. There appears to be a 2011 prequel of the same name, and I’d wager it’s awful (I have a sixth sense for these things).

3. For more about the arrival of Burks and Hubbard at Astounding, read footnote four in the July review.

4. Tremaine’s story is the third in a row that features a drive malfunction—they must all have been built by British Leyland. (Topical Election joke about nationalised industries; I’ll explain it over a stale British Rail sandwich and cup of tepid tea.)

5. There is a lot of history behind Campbell’s story, but I’ll deal with that in an upcoming review of Frozen Hell, the expanded version of Who Goes There?

6. I count seven stories in Unknown under Kuttner’s own name (and dozens elsewhere) before he reappeared with Nothing but Gingerbread Left in the January 1943 Astounding. There were three “Lewis Padgett” stories in Astounding that appeared in late 1942.

7. The book by Wynant Davis Hubbard is called Ibana (New York Graphic Society Publishers, Ltd., 1962): “. . . 13 square miles of glorious lion country in Northern Rhodesia, is also the African adventure of a young American couple who lived there four exciting years taming the land and its wild inhabitants as ranchers and zoologists.”
It appears to be based on four previously published articles, the first of which appeared in the 14^th April 1934 Saturday Evening Post.

Subscribe to the The Saturday Evening Post archive here.

8. Street and Smith took over Astounding Stories in September 1933 after Clayton Magazines went bust in March of that year.

9. The Analytical Laboratory results for this issue were published in the October edition:

Campbell uses a different scoring system here from the one he would eventually settle on, but Who Goes There? is the obvious winner.  ●

ISFDB
Archive.org

Other reviews:¹
Alva Rogers, A Requiem for Astounding  p. 129-134

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Catherine Tarrant

Fiction:
Technical Error • novelette by Hal Clement ∗
As Never Was • short story by P. Schuyler Miller ∗∗
The Leech • novelette by Malcolm Jameson ∗
Far Centaurus • short story by A. E. van Vogt ∗∗
Alias the Living • short story by Frank Belknap Long –
Ogre • novelette by Clifford D. Simak ∗∗∗+
Probability Zero:
Sourdough • short story by George Holman ∗
Light Trap • short story by Jerry Shelton –
Picture from Tokyo • short story by H. O. Hoadley –
The Vacuumulator • short story by Malcolm Jameson –
Cash on the Dimension • short story by Ray Karden –

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by Paul Orban (x9), A. Williams (x3), Olga Ley (x6), Frank Kramer (x4)
Soft-Boiled • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
A Matter of Taste • essay by Willy Ley
In Times to Come
The Analytical Laboratory: November 1943
“Quartz …” • essay by uncredited
Postwar Plan For Mars • essay by R. S. Richardson

_____________________

This issue is one of the weakest issues of Astounding I have read, so I’ll try to keep this short.

Technical Error by Hal Clement, initially gets off to an intriguing start:

Seven spacesuited human beings stood motionless, at the edge of the little valley. Around them was a bare, jagged plain of basalt, lit sharply by the distant sun and unwavering stars; a dozen miles behind, hidden by the abrupt curvature of the asteroid’s surface, was a half-fused heap of metal that had brought them here; and in front of them, almost at their feet, in the shallow groove scraped by a meteor ages before, was an object which caused more than one of those men to doubt his sanity.
Before them lay the ship whose heat-ruined wreckage had been left behind them only minutes ago—perfectly whole in every part. Seven pairs of eyes swept it from end to end, picking out and recognizing each line. Driving and steering jet pits at each end; six bulging observations ports around its middle; rows of smaller ports, their transparent panes gleaming, obviously intact, in the sunlight; the silvery, prolate hull itself—all forced themselves on the minds that sought desperately to reject them as impossibilities. The Giansar was gone—they had fled from the threat of its disordered atomic engines, watched it glow and melt and finally cool again, a nearly formless heap of slag. So what was this?  p. 7-8

After they get inside the ship they discover that it is different internally—and obviously the product of an alien civilization. Prospects of a wild Van Vogtian adventure quickly disappear though, and it soon becomes a story of scientist-types trying to figure out how this strange ship operates. Eventually (after a lot of trailing around) they find a partially repaired engine and manage to get it going (after the obligatory molecular binding/separation tech lectures).

This drive (spoiler) malfunctions too, and they melt down yet another spaceship (I hate to think what this will do to their insurance premiums). But at least the rescue ship sees the drive running and comes to pick them up.
The external similarity of the ship is never explained, and there are other unlikely occurrences (e. g. stumbling upon the vessel in the middle of nowhere) which make the story difficult to believe. It is boring in places as well.

As Never Was by P. Schuyler Miller begins with a passage where the narrator fantasises about killing his grandfather with a knife. It then pivots to become a piece about time travel, and archaeologists going into the future rather than the past (this latter is pointless as travellers end up creating another time line and can’t get back to their own).
Eventually the story focuses on the narrator’s grandfather, and his travels into the future. On his one and only trip he returned with an unusual knife:

He hadn’t washed it. There was dirt on the fine engraving of the dull-black hilt, and caked in the delicate filigree of the silver guard. But the blade was clean, and it was as you have seen it—cold, gleaming, metallic blue—razor-edged—and translucent.
Maybe you’ve had a chance to handle it, here in the museum. Where the blade thins down to that feather-edge you can read small print through it. Where it’s thicker, along the rib that reinforces the back of the blade, it’s cloudy—milky looking. There has been engraving on the blade, too, but it has been ground or worn down until it is illegible. That is odd, because the blade is harder than anything we know except diamond. There is no such metal in the System or the Galaxy, so far as we know, except in this one well-worn and apparently very ancient knife blade.  p. 35

The grandfather dies soon afterwards and many attempts are made over the years to find the period that the knife came from. The narrator eventually rebuilds his grandfather’s machine and travels as far forward in time as he can. He finds his grandfather’s dig site and (spoiler) discovers the knife was found in the ruins of the museum that was built for it in the narrator’s time—the knife only exists in an enclosed time loop.
The ending is pretty good, but the story has a clunky setup and takes some time to get going.

The Leech by Malcolm Jameson opens with a guard trying to shoot Cranborne (the narrator and the owner of a technology company) when he arrives for work one morning. After he disarms the guard, the latter says that something took control of him, a phenomenon reported elsewhere. Cranborne’s reaction to this is, essentially, “Forget it, there’s a lot of it going about”—confirmed when he goes to his office and finds his secretary burning papers in his office. Later, he sees a co-worker copying secret plans. Both were suffering from the same temporary possession.
Cranborne then discovers that many of the inventions in the company’s pipeline have been preemptively patented by someone else, and suspicion falls on a former disgruntled employee, Joaquin Jones. Jones has become, inexplicably, a big shot in town, and is President of the bank which later forecloses on Cranborne’s company.
Cranborne and his colleagues find out that Jones is also being controlled, just like the guard and secretary. The person behind this turns out to be Neville Bronsan, another previous employee, and an ‘ugly on the outside, ugly on the inside,’ megalomaniac:

The first impulse was to think of him as a madman, but he was not mad. Neurotic, yes, but not insane. His trouble was that he was undersized, ugly and deformed. One leg was shrunken and there was the hint of a back hump, and his long pendulous nose gave him a gnomish appearance that drew giggles or aversion from women. To offset this—or perhaps to heighten the effect of it—was a keen mind that leaped all technical obstacles at a rush. The resultant was a bitter psychic conflict, the sense of intellectual superiority on the one band and physical inadequacy on the other. It manifested itself in a quarrelsome and arrogant disposition that immediately estranged any rash enough to try and work alongside him. It was his obnoxious personality that was the real reason for his leaving the Labs. The other associates had voted him out.  p. 58

Cranborne and his team (spoiler) then build their own mind reading and controlling device after finding some old workbooks of Bronsan’s, a development that involves much pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo. A few plot twists later, Bronsan gets his just deserts when they mentally connect him to a prisoner about to be executed by electric chair.
This is pretty poor, formulaic stuff, and it’s hard to believe it comes from the writer of Blind Alley (Unknown Worlds, June 1943).

Far Centaurus by A. E. van Vogt gets off to a rather good start (even if it does lash about like a broken-backed snake later on) with Bill waking up from deep sleep on a starship. After an extended period of rehabilitation (the automated massage lasts for almost an hour), he notes the time:

I leaned over the control chair, and glanced at the chronometer.
It said: 53 years, 7 months, 2 weeks, 0 days, 0 hours and 27 minutes.
Fifty-three years! A little blindly, almost blankly: Back on Earth, the people we had known, the young men we’d gone to college with, that girl who had kissed me at the party given us the night we left—they were all dead. Or dying of old age.
I remembered the girl very vividly. She was pretty, vivacious, a complete stranger. She had laughed as she offered her red lips, and she had said “A kiss for the ugly one, too.” She’d be a grandmother now, or in her grave.
Tears came to my eyes. I brushed them away, and began to heat the can of concentrated liquid that was to be my first food. Slowly, my mind calmed.  p. 69

Bill then gets up and performs some routine tasks, during which he finds Pelham, one of the other three crewmembers, dead (the drug they take has a death rate of ten per cent). He checks on the other men, then suits up and disposes of Pelham’s body. Bill notes these events in the log, and then goes back to sleep.
The rest of the first third of so of the story details Bill’s waking periods on the long journey to Alpha Centauri: during one such episode he sees a spaceship on fire behind them; in another he reads a written note from Blake—the men take turns waking— about the third man’s, Renfrew’s, mental stability.

Eventually they arrive at Alpha Centauri, and (spoiler) the story becomes something else entirely when they are greeted by a future human civilization. It turns out that, after the four men left, humanity designed faster ships which arrived long before they did and colonised the system. The ambassador responsible for dealing with the men welcomes them, and tells them they have been financially provided for (there is money in the bank). He also notes that, as they smell particularly unpleasant to current day humans, his people would appreciate it if they could keep to themselves.
We later get a science lecture about star travel before Renfrew (now cured of his madness) buys a spaceship, whereupon they all leave. Renfrew later flies them into a star which, because of the future science gimmick, sends them back in time to just after they departed from Earth.
The first part of this is a good account of life on a suspended animation starship, but the rest does not convince or gel.

Alias the Living by Frank Belknap Long is the obligatory war story for the issue, and is about the use of image projectors by US Marines (which beam the soldiers’ likeness ahead of them as they patrol through the jungle). When one of the soldiers called Jimmy is later caught in an ambush, he rushes a Japanese machine gunner and bayonets him—but the man is unaffected, gets up, and runs away.
The denouement of the story reveals that (spoiler) early in the engagement Jimmy was injured and incapacitated, and what we saw was the actions of his image, which carried on without him . . . .
The story ends with unlikely—and unconvincing—talk of ghosts and “wild talents”.

Clifford D. Simak hit an early high spot in 1944, during which he published the first four of his ‘City’ stories (City, Huddle, Census, and Desertion in the May, July, September, and November issues of Astounding). Of almost equivalent quality (and the best of his early stories I’ve read so far) is Ogre, which gets off to an intriguing start:

The moss brought the news. Hundreds of miles the word had gossiped its way along, through many devious ways. For the moss did not grow everywhere. It grew only where the soil was sparse and niggardly, where the larger, lustier, more vicious plant things could not grow to rob it of light, or uproot it, or crowd it out, or do other harm.
The moss told the story to Nicodemus, life blanket of Don Mackenzie, and it all came about because Mackenzie took a bath.
Mackenzie took his time in the bathroom, wallowing around in the tub and braying out a song, while Nicodemus, feeling only half a thing, moped outside the door. Without Mackenzie, Nicodemus was, in fact, even less than half a thing. Accepted as intelligent life, Nicodemus and others of his tribe were intelligent only when they were wrapped about their humans. Their intelligence and emotions were borrowed from the things that wore them.  p. 123-124

Apart from Nicodemus there is more local colour: outside Mackenzie’s house is a rifle-tree that takes occasional—but luckily inaccurate—shots at Mac and Nicodemus. There is also Nellie, a book-keeping robot and nag who is the current companion of Encyclopaedia, a fully sentient plant. Encylopedia is also, unlike Nicodmeus, independently mobile.
The story gets going when Mackenzie goes to see Harper, the planetary factor, about the news the moss has brought: Alder, one of the planet’s insectoid aliens, has composed a new symphony at the musical tree grove. It turns out that a recording of this would be very profitable for the Earthmen—the music produced by the aliens is very addictive—so Harper tells Mackenzie to go to the grove with Nellie and Encyclopaedia to cut a deal.
Also mentioned in this conversation are a couple of other items: first, a man called Alexander, who previously became so addicted to the music that he was returned to Earth for treatment, is back on the planet and involved with another visiting alien race called the Groombridgians; secondly, Encyclopedia wants to go to Earth, so it can continue its obsession of accumulating ever more knowledge—at one point in their discussion the men wonder if Encyclopedia is acting for itself or for the planet, and what its real reasons for the trip are.

These latter two threads provide the minor and major plot arcs for the story. The first plays out when Mackenzie and his party arrive at the tree-grove to find that Taylor and the Groombridgians have dug up two of the trees (with plans to ship them off-planet), but are pinned down by a human composer called Wade who has been camping nearby and is now shooting at them:

The man who back on Earth had been known as J. Edgerton Wade, crouched on the low cliff that dropped away into Melody Bowl. The dull red sun was slipping toward the purple horizon and soon, Wade knew, the trees would play their regular evening concert. He hoped that once again it would be the wondrous new symphony Alder had composed. Thinking about it, he shuddered in ecstasy—shuddered again when he thought about the setting sun. The evening chill would be coming soon.
Wade had no life blanket. His food, cached back in the tiny cave in the cliff, was nearly gone. His ship, smashed in his inexpert landing on the planet almost a year before, was a rusty hulk. J. Edgerton Wade was near the end of his rope—and knew it. Strangely, he didn’t care. In that year since he’d come here to the cliffs, he’d lived in a world of beauty. Evening after evening he had listened to the concerts. That was enough, he told himself. After a year of music such as that any man could afford to die.  p. 130

Taylor and the Groombridgians are soon dealt with by Wade, Mackenzie and the others, and the rest of the story deals with Encyclopedia’s maneuvering. Before this plays out Alder, the insectoid composer, says the grove doesn’t want the two trees back as they are troublemakers. So Mackenzie and company arrange a deal where they will take them to Earth.
The last part of the story overcomplicates matters. It turns out (spoiler) that the idea to take the trees back to Earth was Encyclopedia’s, part of a plot to use the trees’ music to modify the way humans think, to change them into something better and less threatening. Nellie discovers this however (she managed to reverse the telepathic process that Encylopedia was using on her to extract her knowledge), and tells Mackenzie. He then plans to burn all the trees to save humankind, but then Wade intervenes to save them and nearly succeeds, only to have Nellie eventually overpower him. The story ends with the trees quarantined, and with Encylopedia getting a suspiciously Campbellian-sounding (it’s pretty jingoistic) lecture about human supremacy.

This is both an interesting and entertaining piece with lots of original or seemingly original ideas. That said, it is also uneven, and has far too much going on (the description above—believe it or not—leaves out several sub-plots and scenes). Well worth your time, though, and head and shoulders above anything else in the issue.

This issue’s fiction finishes with (alas) five Probability Zero pieces: Sourdough by George Holman has a down-on-his-luck Venusian prospector telling of various strikes that didn’t work out (artificial replacements were found for the gold, diamonds and oil he found)—until he finally bores down and finds black coffee, but even that doesn’t work out; Light Trap by Jerry Shelton is about a perpetual energy device that stops working when it is found to be theoretically impossible; Picture from Tokyo by H. O. Hoadley is one I didn’t understand about the enhancement of a pre-war photograph of part of Japan; The Vacuumulator by Malcolm Jameson is a piece of nonsense about light displacing air in a vacuum chamber; and Cash on the Dimension by Ray Karden has a writer use a dimensional machine to enable him to sell his novel in five hundred worlds similar to this one—there is no mention of the other five hundred versions of him who have written the same novel.
These five squibs are a complete waste of trees (and now pixels).

To accompany the indifferent fiction we have a dark and muddy Cover by William Timmins. The cover type—”Astounding” in dark grey and “Science Fiction” in bright yellow—is possibly early evidence of Campbell’s desire to change the name of the magazine.
The quality of the Interior artwork isn’t much better, and reproducing it as small spot illustrations doesn’t help (Orban’s illustration on p. 25, or Kramer’s on p. 132, would have been much better spread across the entire page). This meanness is a consequence of wartime paper shortages and the resultant space restrictions, and I don’t understand why Campbell didn’t lose half a dozen pages of text (preferably the Probability Zero pieces) and increased the size of the illustrations—the magazine would have looked a lot better for it.
Campbell’s editorial, Soft-Boiled, is a short science piece which compares cooking a soft-boiled egg with tempering steel.

The food theme continues in A Matter of Taste by Willy Ley, which is an article about all the strange things humans eat (various animals, insects, mushrooms, clay, etc.) What this is doing in Astounding I have no idea.

In Times to Come and The Analytical Laboratory: November 1943 both share the same page. The first part plugs a new ‘Venus Equilateral’ story (unnamed, but it is Off the Beam), and makes it sound as dull as ditch water (see above). The Anlab for this issue was discussed in the November review.²

“Quartz …” is a two page photo essay about the mineral’s uses.

Postwar Plan For Mars by R. S. Richardson is a long but quite interesting article about Mars (and, to a lesser extent, its “canals”). Richardson starts by saying that observing planets is an unfashionable occupation for astronomers (it is less productive in terms of new knowledge than star or nebula observations) before going on to expand on how the profession works, and the solar geometry of Earth and Mars (last in opposition—closest to each other—in 1941).
Throughout the essay he discusses various images of the planet (there are numerous interior illustrations), before recounting a night’s viewing of his own when he had the good fortune to start on the observatory’s six inch telescope before fortuitously progressing through a number of others to the one hundred inch one:

I left the sixty-inch thoroughly dejected. I was picking my way through the dark with some vague notion of trying another drawing, when a flashlight came bobbing down the path toward the one-hundred-inch. Coming closer it proved to be the observer himself. He had wandered out to smoke a pipe and relax a bit until his next object had risen high enough to start an exposure.
We strolled along, chatting of many things. I called his attention to the fine appearance of Mars, now rising to meet the meridian. He acknowledged its pleasing aspect and expressed pleasure at the remarkable seeing that night.
Other more mundane affairs seemed to weigh heavily on his mind, however. He was worried about the Russians who seemed unable to stem the Nazi tide. The income tax. His car was wearing out, too. Maybe he should get a new one. Yes, he admitted, knocking the ashes from his pipe, things were getting pretty tough. Then suddenly he made a proposal. There was still an hour yet before N. G. C. 1285 would be in position. Suppose we took a look at Mars in the meantime.
He gave me an eyepiece that magnified one thousand and brought Mars within an optical distance of thirty-eight thousand miles. Yet even under this power the image was painfully bright, so bright that all sensation of color was washed away. The pink deserts were turned into a yellowish white like the moon at full; the olive-green areas were dirty brown patches. The whole appearance was so contrary to that at the six-inch it was hard to believe the two were one and the same object. I recognized part of the outline of the Sabaeus Sinus but the other markings were like a strange map. Of course, Mars had rotated a few degrees since my original look but not enough to alter it that much.
And if detection of the canals before had been difficult, now it seemed absolutely hopeless. I could not discern so much as the shadow of the ghost of a canal. You got the impression very strongly that there never could be such a thing as a canal on that flat expanse of moonlike yellow disk.
It would have made a fitting climax to have told how each step upward in power had brought the canals closer and closer, until in the world’s largest telescope they burst into view, covering the planet with a mesh of great circle lines.
But like the old lady who searched in vain for the ice cubes, truth compels me to confess that after studying Mars under the most favourable seeing conditions through four instruments of widely different power, the detail grew progressively less linelike if anything with each increase in aperture. I do not attempt to account for this circumstance. I merely report what happened to me.  p. 169-170

Richardson suggests reasons why the Martian canals are only intermittently visible, and mentions an experiment that sheds light on how the human eye works:

The usual explanation is that the canals are merely subjective, an optical illusion arising from our process of visual perception. The eye is a marvelous natural integrating machine. It gathers everything together that it sees. We glance at the stars and immediately start grouping them into lines and clusters. We look at a tree and instead of analyzing it into leaves and branches, integrate the whole mass into clumps of foliage. Many experiments have been performed based upon this integrating power of the eye.
The most famous of these is the one by Evans and Maunder on some English schoolboys back in 1902. I confess that I once dallied with the idea of repeating their experiment, even going so far as to look up the original paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
It seemed they had used classes of twenty boys ranging in age from twelve to fourteen selected from the Royal Hospital School at Greenwich. The boys were seated at different distances from a circular disk upon which were drawn markings on a certain hemisphere of Mars, except the canals were omitted.
Each boy was told to draw as accurately as possible exactly what he saw upon the disk. All were supposedly ignorant of the appearance of Mars through a telescope. They were simply shown an odd looking figure and told to reproduce it as best they could.
It must be conceded that boys just on the limit of distinct visibility drew lines bearing a startling resemblance to the canals. Not only did they insert lines where none existed on the disk, but they drew lines where canals appear on the recognized maps of Mars. In all they drew twelve lines that could be attributed to well-known canals. Also, it was evident that on the average the boys who were the best draftsmen were the best at putting in canals. One lad named Allen was a whiz at inserting canals. (I wonder what he is doing now?) From which Evans and Maunder concluded that the numerous observers who had so painstakingly been charting canals for the last twenty-five years had indeed been drawing precisely what they saw, except that what they saw had no existence in reality.  p. 171

He finishes up by mentioning photos that supposedly show canals (although they had not got from France to the USA at the time of writing).³
The article finishes with a proposition for a multidisciplinary task force to constantly observe Mars in 1956, the next opposition.
An interesting article for its content and historical perspective.

Apart from the Simak story and the Richardson article, this is a very poor issue.  ●

_____________________

1. Alva Rogers doesn’t say anything about this issue in A Requiem for Astounding, but he says this about 1944:

Of all the years commonly considered Golden, 1944 was the least memorable; the outstanding stories that were published only pointed up the disappointing quality of the bulk of what was left. In some respects, 1944 can be regarded as a bridge between two peaks; the peak 1940 to 1943, and the peak 1945 to 1950. At any rate, the slump was short lived and things began to pick up considerably from 1945 on.  p. 134

2. The Analytical Laboratory results for this issue appeared in the March 1944 issue:

I have no idea why the Simak story didn’t top the poll: too much biological life and not enough rivets, I suspect.

3. According to Wikipedia, the Martian Canals were discounted much earlier than 1944:

The influential observer Eugène Antoniadi used the 83-cm (32.6 inch) aperture telescope at Meudon Observatory at the 1909 opposition of Mars and saw no canals, the outstanding photos of Mars taken at the new Baillaud dome at the Pic du Midi observatory also brought formal discredit to the Martian canals theory in 1909, and the notion of canals began to fall out of favor. Around this time spectroscopic analysis also began to show that no water was present in the Martian atmosphere. However, as of 1916 Waldemar Kaempffert (editor of Scientific American and later Popular Science Monthly) was still vigorously defending the Martian canals theory against skeptics.  ●

ISFDB link
Archive.org link

Other reviews:¹
Alva Rogers, A Requiem for Astounding  p. 172

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Catherine Tarrant

Fiction:
Private Eye • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett] ∗∗∗∗∗
Expedition Polychrome • novelette by Joseph A. Winter, M.D. ∗
How Can You Lose? • short story by W. Macfarlane ∗
Death Is the Penalty • short story by Judith Merril ∗
The Red Queen’s Race • novelette by Isaac Asimov ∗∗∗+
The Players of Ā (Part 4 of 4) • serial by A. E. van Vogt (unread)

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Hubert Rogers
Interior artwork • by Hubert Rogers (x10), Edd Cartier (x5), Paul Orban (x3)
Gleep and Bepo • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
The Analytical Laboratory: September & October 1948
Modern Calculators • science essay by E. L. Locke
Brass Tacks • letters

_____________________

I ended up reading this issue as I have been working my way through The Great SF Stories 11: 1949 (edited by Marty Greenberg & Isaac Asimov, 1984), and realised that I’d read two of the stories here (the Kuttner/ Moore and the Asimov)—so I thought I may as well finish it off. Apart from that I wanted to talk at greater length about Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore’s story Private Eye, which is probably the best thing I’ve read in Astounding so far.

In their anthology Asimov and Greenberg both describe Kuttner and Moore’s piece as a murder mystery, but this rather misdescribes the story as it is much a psychological portrait of the main character as anything else. However, that said, it begins with a forensic sociologist and a “tracer” engineer watching Sam Clay kill, perhaps murder, a man called Vanderman:

The tracer engineer twirled a dial and watched the figures on the screen repeat their actions. One—Sam Clay—snatched the letter cutter from a desk and plunged it into the other man’s heart. The victim fell down dead. Clay started back in apparent horror. Then he dropped to his knees beside the twitching body and said wildly that he didn’t mean it. The body drummed its heels upon the rug and was still.
“That last touch was nice,” the engineer said.  p. 8

The pair watch via a device that can see into the past by using the “fingerprints” of light and sound waves imprinted on matter (although the machine can only go back fifty years), and their job is to investigate Clay’s timeline to find out if the killing was premeditated. In this future world only intent enables a charge of murder to be brought, otherwise killers usually go free, or receive some lesser punishment.
One of the first things the pair discover is that Clay was dumped by Bea, his dominating girlfriend, for Vanderman eighteen months earlier. What isn’t apparent from their observations is that Clay has decided to murder Vanderman because of this, and plots how to kill him without leaving any evidence for the all-seeing temporal eye that will examine his historical actions afterwards.
Clay decides to pick a fight with Vanderman:

Anywhere you sat in the Paradise Bar, a competent robot analyzer instantly studied your complexion and facial angles, and switched on lights, in varying tints and intensities, that showed you off to best advantage. The joint was popular for business deals. A swindler could look like an honest man there. It was also popular with women and slightly passé teleo talent. Sam Clay looked rather like an ascetic young saint. Andrew Vanderman looked noble, in a grim way, like Richard Coeur-de-Lion offering Saladin his freedom, though he knew it wasn’t really a bright thing to do. Noblesse oblige, his firm jaw seemed to say, as he picked up the silver decanter and poured. In ordinary light, Vanderman looked slightly more like a handsome bulldog. Also, away from the Paradise Bar, he was redder around the chops, a choleric man.
“As to that deal we were discussing,” Clay said, “you can go to—”
The censoring juke box blared out a covering bar or two.
Vanderman’s reply was unheard as the music got briefly, louder, and the lights shifted rapidly to keep pace with his sudden flush.
“It’s perfectly easy to outwit these censors,” Clay said. “They’re keyed to familiar terms of profane abuse, not to circumlocutions. If I said that the arrangement of your chromosomes would have surprised your father . . . you see?” He was right. The music stayed soft.
Vanderman swallowed nothing. “Take it easy,” he said. “I can see why you’re upset. Let me say first of all—”
“Hijo—”
But the censor was proficient in Spanish dialects. Vanderman was spared hearing another insult.
“—that I offered you a job because I think you’re a very capable man. You have potentialities. It’s not a bribe. Our personal affairs should be kept out of this.”
All the same, Bea was engaged to me.”
“Clay, are you drunk?”
“Yes,” Clay said, and threw his drink into Vanderman’s face. The music began to play Wagner very, very loudly. A few minutes later, when the waiters interfered, Clay was supine and bloody, with a mashed nose and a bruised cheek. Vanderman had skinned his knuckles.  p. 11-12

After this Clay buys a gun and threatens Vanderman, but does not follow through. Later he feigns remorse, but is secretly pleased that he has established an alibi against premeditation by giving the impression that his anger has dissipated.
The next section details an elaborate plot that Clay sets in motion, wherein he befriends Vanderman’s personal secretary, Josephine, and later guilts Vanderman into giving him a job. Over the next year and a half he slowly insinuates himself into Vanderman’s good graces, a process helped by the announcement that he intends to marry Josephine. Vanderman and Bea’s relationship eventually hits a rocky patch, and it is then Clay chooses to act: he goes to her and Vanderman’s apartment when the latter isn’t there and breaks the spy camera in the wall so Vanderman will not know what transpires between them.

The murder occurs when Clay next sees Vanderman in his office: the latter toys with the “stingaree” whip that Clay has previously planted (Vanderman habitually fingers objects while at his desk). When Vanderman finally snaps, he lashes out with it, causing Clay immense pain. In a supposedly reflexive retaliation, Clay picks up the scalpel that Vanderman uses as a letter opener and stabs him.
In the subsequent trial the forensic sociologist offers no evidence of premeditation, so the court acquits Clay and he walks free.
I’ll admit that this plot synopsis does not sound convincing, but what it doesn’t fully convey is the length of time that elapses (eighteen months), or the gradualist development of these interlocking plot pieces, or that this is only the first three quarters or so of the story. Moreover, what I’ve described so far is only a skeleton over which much, much more is laid, in particular the evolving psychological portrait of Clay, the submissive role he played in his relationship with Bea and, more pivotally, what happened to him as a child:

The engineer had a free period. He was finally able to investigate Sam Clay’s early childhood. It was purely academic now, but he liked to indulge his curiosity. He traced Clay back to the dark closet, when the boy was four, and used ultraviolet. Sam was huddled in a comer, crying silently, staring up with frightened eyes at a top shelf.
What was on that shelf the engineer could not see.
He kept the beam focused on the closet and cast back rapidly through time. The closet often opened and closed, and sometimes Sam Clay was locked in it as punishment, but the upper shelf held its mystery until—
It was in reverse. A woman reached to that shelf, took down an object, walked backward out of the closet to Sam Clay’s bedroom, and went to the wall by the door. This was unusual, for generally it was Sam’s father who was warden of the closet.
She hung up a framed picture of a single huge staring eye floating in space. There was a legend under it. The letters spelled out: THOU GOD SEEST ME.
The engineer kept on tracing. After a while it was night. The child was in bed, sitting up wide-eyed, afraid. A man’s footsteps sounded on the stair. The scanner told all secrets but those of the inner mind. The man was Sam’s father, coming up to punish him for some childish crime committed earlier. Moonlight fell upon the wall beyond which the footsteps approached showing how the wall quivered a little to the vibrations of the feet, and the Eye in its frame quivered, too. The boy seemed to brace himself. A defiant half-smile showed on his mouth, crooked, unsteady.
This time he’d keep that smile, no matter what happened. When it was over he’d still have it, so his father could see it, and the Eye could see it and they’d know he hadn’t given in. He hadn’t . . . he—
The door opened.
He couldn’t help it. The smile faded and was gone.  p. 27-28

There is much more psychological observation and comment in the story, albeit most of it from the viewpoint of the forensic sociologist and, to a lesser extent, the engineer.
As well as all this there is also some world building going on in the background—we’ve seen the futuristic bar in the passage above, but there are also quirky details like this:

It appeared as though Andrew Vanderman had, during a quarrel, struck Clay across the face with a stingaree whip. Anyone who has been stung by a Portuguese man-of-war can understand that, at this point, Clay could plead temporary insanity and self-defense, as well as undue provocation and possible justification.
Only the curious cult of the Alaskan Flagellantes, who make the stingaree whips for their ceremonials, know how to endure the pain. The Flagellantes even like it, the pre-ritual drug they swallow transmutes pain into pleasure.  p. 9

And the curious upshot of this imbalance came when the act of homicide was declared nonpunishable, unless intent and forethought could be proved. Of course, it was considered at least naughty to fly in a rage and murder someone on impulse, and there was a nominal punishment—imprisonment, for example—but in practice this never worked, because so many defences were possible. Temporary insanity. Undue provocation. Self defense. Manslaughter, second-degree homicide, third degree, fourth degree—it went on like that. It was up to the State to prove that the killer had planned his killing in advance; only then would a jury convict. And the jury, of course, had to waive immunity and take a scop test, to prove the box hadn’t been packed. But no defendant ever waived immunity.  p. 8-9

These glimpses of this dark future, combined with a psychologically driven and flawed character, recall Alfred Bester’s novels The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination, and more than once it felt like I was reading one of that writer’s better mid-50’s short stories.
All of the plot elements and psychological observations are drawn together in the final section, when Bea and Clay meet after the trial. She wants him back, but he tells her he plans to marry Josephine. She laughs and mocks him, and they argue, and then Clay blurts out that he planned Vanderman’s murder. Almost immediately he realises that this puts him at risk of a retrial and conviction.

Clay reflects on the peril he has put himself in, and also what he was hoping to achieve by murdering Vanderman. From his inner turmoil comes to a pivotal moment of self-realisation: he wasn’t defying the eye after he murdered Vanderman, but has been hiding from it. The last few lines provide (spoiler) a shockingly violent end where Clay transcends the psychological trauma of his childhood (although not in a good way), and the Eye appears as a final image.
It’s hard to overstate how powerful an ending this is—for the most part I thought the story oscillated in quality between good and very good, but those last few sentences pull all the elements into alignment. I can’t remember the last time I finished a story and was left staring at the page open-jawed, and thinking, “Wow.”
An excellent piece, and the best thing of theirs I’ve read.²

Expedition Polychrome by Joseph A. Winter, M.D. is the sequel to an earlier ‘Expedition’ story (Expedition Mercy) which appeared in the November issue. Both stories take place on an alien planet called Minotaur.
The story is breezily told but feels amateurish and clunky, and it is full of talking heads:

No doubt about it—Edwards was feeling quite pleased with himself.
And it was well-deserved. The medical expedition under his direction to the planet Minotaur had just solved a most unusual problem involving the death of all members of Expedition I.
He tilted back in his chair in the control room and continued.
[. . .]
“To give you another example: the body is capable of only certain color changes. The skin might turn brown, due to the presence of melanin, one of the normally found pigments. Or it might turn any one of the colors seen in the degradation of hemoglobin. You know, those fascinating hues which change from dark blue to green to yellow, which we all saw adorning your left eye last year.
“No,” he continued, without giving Tom a chance to explain how he got that shiner, “we could never expect to see a man turn, say, an aquamarine blue. There just isn’t a precursor for that color in the body. So we’ll never see an exotic disease where the skin is aquamarine or we’ll never see a disease where a man reacts outside of the normal limitations of response.”
“So that’s it,” mused Tom. “Yes, what is it ?” He turned around as a knock came at the door.
It was one of the crew members. “Sorry to interrupt, sir, but I’d like to have Dr. Edwards take a look at me. My skin is kind of a funny color.”
Edwards turned around. Like the Bay of Naples on a sunny day, or Lake Superior in July, the man’s skin was a beautiful vivid aquamarine blue.
Bob’s jaw dropped. He had just said that such a color couldn’t possibly occur, yet here it was!  p. 34

After much medical discussion, the patient’s problem (spoiler) is traced to a plant he sniffed while wandering around on the planet’s surface (yes, yet another Darwin Award candidate). When another crew member goes to get a sample of the plants he observes a new alien life form:

Picture a four-legged animal with a body the same size as a St. Bernard dog, with disproportionately short, bowed legs like a dachshund. Give him a hairless, wrinkled graygreen skin, and a long, graceful neck dike a camel, emerging from powerful shoulders. Put a head with long jaws on that neck; large yellow eyes, no external ears and a placid expression, for features. And finally, on the anterior surface of the long neck, imagine a rugose, lobulated mass of flesh reminiscent of the wattles of a turkey. There you will have, at first glance, the dominant inhabitant of the planet Minotaur.
[. . .]
“Look at the color changes in that gadget on his neck! What do you suppose that’s for?” asked Schultz.
And the colors were changing; various shades of red were playing over the surface. A broad, horizontal band of scarlet, followed by a light pink, would travel down the length of the colored area. This would be replaced by a vermilion, which would seem to pulsate, gently, alternately deepening and lightening in shade.  p. 42

The crew attempt to communicate with the aliens and then, just as Slawson, the sick man, looks like he is going to expire from some haemoglobin-bonding syndrome (a bit like carbon monoxide poisoning), the aliens come aboard the ship. They take a particular interest in Slawson; one them then leaves (spoiler), returning with flowers which cure the sick man.
This is pleasant enough but, added to its other shortcomings, the idea that the aliens would have diseases analogous to ours is just not believable.

How Can You Lose? by W. Macfarlane is an epistolary story (a letter this time, not a diary) where the writer discusses fixing a college football team to win bets. The SF gimmick, dropped in towards the end of the story, involves (spoiler) a serum from an unknown dinosaur that makes the players strong and heavy.
A weak squib.

Death Is the Penalty by Judith Merril is about a future couple who meet at a stream when they both go there to swim at the same time. Over the course of the story they fall in love, and the story has a number of mawkish passages such as this:

And then how impossibly perfect it was when he did begin to talk. He listened gravely. He didn’t say anything; he nodded, but in the nod she saw he knew about all the years and all about the men who were just a little silly, a little juvenile, who came running when she smiled, but backed off in fright when she talked.  p. 59

She knew he had understood, from the beginning, so she poured out to him now all the lonely years. She told him how the exams in Secondary had just barely passed her by for Restricted work, how she was left among men who were pleasant, friendly, good at their work. But always, when she met someone, he stayed a little while, then went away.
She was too good—too smart, too quick. A man doesn’t want a woman who is greater than he is.
Janice had subjected them, one by one, to the hot inquiring searchlight of her intellect, probed at their minds, and, when she was not herself discarded, she had discarded them, each in turn. Because a woman doesn’t want a man who is less than she is.  p. 61

Throughout this (and from an initial bookend section) we find out that they work in different areas and are not supposed to meet. At the end of the story (spoiler) security turns up and, while they embrace, they are turned into “dark shapes”:

By the side of the stream, the two black figures have made an island of quiet for themselves. The area inside the unrepaired old fence is filled with the calm inwardness of their tender cold embrace.
The guide will stop here and wait, until everyone is in the clearing, until each face has turned questingly toward the dark mystery. And when he speaks, the guide’s voice will be quiet. Under the great trees he shouts, but in the presence of the black lovers, a man does not speak too loudly.  p. 56

The SF part of the story is never explained, i.e., what ultimately happens to the pair, or what their work is about, and I wasn’t interested in the emotional yearning in the rest of it. I’m somewhat surprised that Campbell bought this, and suspect he only did so as a future investment in the writer who had previously sold him That Only a Mother (Astounding, June 1948).³

The Red Queen’s Race by Isaac Asimov starts with an incident at a nuclear power plant, where all of the fuel has been converted to energy by means of an abnormal process that caused no explosion or released any gamma rays—although the temperature of the immediate surroundings was slightly raised. A Professor called Tywood is found in the reactor, dead from apoplexy, and the strange equipment beside him is a fused mass.
The story continues from the point of view of an agent who is at the university questioning the other staff and students. Initially the agent talks to the other professors but gets nowhere, so he decides to interview the dead man’s research assistants. One of them reveals that Tywood was researching “micro-temporal translation”—sending material back in time.
When the agent then researches the magazine articles that Tywood wrote he discovers something that he takes to his boss:

“The article,” I went on, “is entitled: ‘Man’s First Great Failure!’”
Remember, this was just before the war, when the bitter disappointment at the final failure of the United Nations was at its height. What I will read are some excerpts from the first part of the article. It goes like this:
“ ‘Then Rome came, adopting the culture, but bestowing, and enforcing, peace. To be sure, the Pax Romana lasted only two hundred years, but no like period has existed since . . .
“ ‘War was abolished. Nationalism did not exist. The Roman citizen was Empire-wide. Saul of Tarsus and Flavius Josephus were Roman citizens. Spaniards, North Africans, Illyrians assumed the purple. Slavery existed, but it was an indiscriminate slavery, imposed as a punishment, incurred as the price of economic failure, brought on by the fortunes of war. No man was a natural slave, because of the color of his skin, or the place of his birth.
“ ‘Religious toleration was complete. If an exception was made early in the case of the Christians, it was because they refused to accept the principle of toleration; because they insisted that only they themselves knew truth—a principle abhorrent to the civilized Roman . . .
“ ‘With all of Western culture under a single polis, with the cancer of religious and national particularism and exclusivism absent; with a high civilization in existence—why could not Man hold his gains?
“ ‘It was because technologically, ancient Hellenism remained backward. It was because without a machine civilization, the price of leisure—and hence civilization and culture—for the few, was slavery for the many. Because the civilization could not find the means to bring comfort and ease to all the population.
“ ‘Therefore, the depressed classes turned to the other world, and to religions which spumed the material benefits of this world—so that science was made impossible in any true sense for over a millennium. And further, as the initial impetus of Hellenism waned, the Empire lacked the technological powers to beat back the barbarians. In fact, it was not till after 1500 A.D. that war became sufficiently a function of the industrial resources of a nation to enable the settled people to defeat invading tribesmen and nomads with ease . . .
“ ‘Imagine then, if somehow the ancient Greeks had learned just a hint of modem chemistry and physics. Imagine if the growth of the Empire had been accompanied by the growth of science, technology and industry. Imagine an Empire, in which machinery replaced slaves; in which all men had a decent share of the world’s goods; in which the legion became the armored column, against which no barbarians could stand. Imagine an Empire which would therefore spread all over the world, without religious or national prejudices.
“ ‘An Empire of all men—all brothers—eventually all free . . .
“ ‘If history could be changed. If that first great failure could have been prevented— ’ ”
And I stopped at that point.

The agent says that he suspects that Tywood has sent a translated science book back in time to change the past and improve the present. The pair calculate that, if this is the case, they have two and a half weeks until any change “ripples” forward through time. In the meantime they decide to track down the Ancient Greek translator, Professor Boulder, only to find that he has already come to them, and is outside in the anteroom.

The final interrogation reveals that Professor Boulder was aware of Tywood’s plan to change the present but was scathing about the possibility of success. There is then an extended conversation/lecture about a variety of subjects—the history of scientific progress, how man progresses, etc.—until Boulder (spoiler) reveals a critical piece of information:

“In other words, gentlemen, while you are right that any change in the course of past events, however trifling, would have incalculable consequences, and while I also believe that you are right in supposing that any random change is much more likely to be for the worst than for the better, I must point out that you are nevertheless wrong in your final conclusions.
“Because THIS is the world in which the Greek chemistry text was sent back.
“This has been a Red Queen’s race, if you remember your Through the Looking Glass. In the Red Queen’s country, one had to run as fast as one could merely to stay in the same place. And so it was in this case! Tywood may have thought he was creating a new world, but it was I who prepared the translations, and I took care that only such passages as would account for the queer scraps of knowledge the ancients  apparently got from nowhere would be included.
“And my only intention, for all my racing, was to stay in the same place.”

Despite the fact that the story contains virtually no action or characterisation, and the narrative almost entirely involves talking heads (it reads like a fictionalised version of one of the writer’s later science columns) Asimov nevertheless manages to make an engrossing story out of all this. If you don’t mind lecture-type stories, and are interested in the history of scientific progression (with a nod towards atomic state security and the guilt of A-bomb scientists), you should find this of interest.
I note in passing that the general quality of this story is markedly better than some of Asimov’s early-1940’s work.

Normally I wouldn’t leave a magazine unfinished but, at the moment, I didn’t want to read the previous three parts of A. E. van Vogt’s The Players of Ā, or reread the prequel, The World of Null A (Astounding, August-October 1945). I’ll revise this when I’ve eventually done so. Meanwhile, here is some of Rogers’ artwork:

(I hope this idea of posting pictures without any text doesn’t catch on or I’ll be out of a job.)

The Cover by Hubert Rogers is a striking effort for the Kuttner & Moore story, but I don’t know what the skull is doing there. If you ask me, he missed a trick by not replacing the latter with an image of a boy in a cupboard .
Rogers also contributes most (and the best) of the Interior artwork, although I also liked Edd Cartier’s ‘two dinosaurs’ drawing. I don’t think the latter’s light style was a good match for the Merril story. Paul Orban draws some people from the 1940s.
Gleep and Bepo by John W. Campbell, Jr. is an editorial that discusses early atomic piles (these were used for making radioisotopes rather than producing power it seems, primarily plutonium for bombs). He focuses on two British reactors, Gleep and Bepo,⁴ and ends with this:

In the field of peacetime atomic energy, therefore, the British are doing a first-rate job, and have every reason to do so. They are, in fact, quite apt to establish commercial atomic power plants before we do.
Be it remembered that the United States has unlimited coal reserves, and completely adequate coal production; we don’t need atomic fuel. Britain, on the other hand, is severely pinched by lack of fuel power; they want and need a new source of energy for energy’s sake. The United States wants and needs atomic energy for special purposes, special situations, but not for the sake of simple bulk energy.  p. 6

The Analytical Laboratory: September & October 1948 will be discussed in those issues if and when I read them. Campbell gives explanation of how the AnLab scores are calculated “for those who wonder”.⁵

Modern Calculators by E. L. Locke is a very dry article about computers (binary and analog) that I struggled to get through. I did learn where “bits” came from though:

Thus, if we wish to express a 12 decimal digit number in the binary notation, we will need forty binary digits. Incidentally, some wag proposed to refer to these as bigits. Happily, this term has been contracted to “bits.”  p. 98

Brass Tacks is rather dull this month, leading off with a letter about the dynamics of the Weissacker Theory (I hadn’t read the original R. S. Richardson article, it was late, and I started skimming). In among the letters there are two half-page adverts for books. I can’t recall seeing these in Astounding before—they are no doubt a result of the burgeoning book market of the late 1940’s.

A must get issue for the Kuttner & Moore story, with the bonus of the Asimov.  ●

_____________________

1. Alva Rogers, in A Requiem for Astounding, concentrates (like Greenberg and Asimov) on the murder mystery aspects of Private Eye but adds that Kuttner and Moore tell their story in “their usual masterful manner and [throw] in a lovely twist at the end.”

2. A straw poll of less than a handful of people on the Great SF Stories group (groups.io) suggests that Kuttner & Moore’s three best stories are: Mimsy Were the Borogoves, Vintage Season, and Private Eye. The general feeling is that Vintage is mostly Moore, and Private Eye is mostly Kuttner, but see the quote below from C. L. Moore’s introduction to Fury (1947):

We collaborated on almost everything we wrote, but in varying degrees. It worked like this. After we’d established through long discussion the basic ideas, the background and the characters, whichever of us felt like it sat down and started. When that one ran down, the other, being fresh to the story, could usually see what ought to come next, and took over. The action developed as we went along. We kept changing off like this until we finished. A story goes very fast that way.
Each of us edited the other’s copy a little when we took over, often going back a line or two and rephrasing to make the styles blend. We never disagreed seriously over the work. The worst clashes of opinion I can remember ended with one of us saying, “Well, I don’t agree, but since you feel more strongly than I do about it, go ahead.” (When the rent is due tomorrow, one tends toward quick, peaceful settlements.)

James Blish adds this in his introduction to the story in The Mirror of Infinity, ed. by Robert Silverberg (Harper & Row, 1970):

Some of the strengths you will find in this story, however, are not actually his. Almost all of his mature work was written in collaboration with his wife, Catherine L. Moore. There seldom seemed to be much foreplanning in this collaboration, especially in its last years; one of them would simply leave a story in the typewriter, so to speak, and return to find that it had been advanced several thousand words by the other. Viewing stories written individually by each of them, one can see what each of them gave the other: Henry by himself had no particular eye for sensory detail, while Catherine had a relatively weak plot sense and could not write clean, pointed dialogue.
The combination was ideal, and resulted in some of the best science fiction ever written by anybody (as well as an excellent suspense novel, Man Drowning). Their productivity was enormous, too; at one time the Kuttners operated so many pen names that almost any new writer was automatically suspected of being another of their masks. I myself in 1948 received a letter which, once out of the envelope, turned out to begin, “Dear Mr. Kuttner.” I forwarded it to him, thus beginning a ten-year correspondence from which I learned more about writing than I have ever learned from any other person.  p. 97-98

The bulk of Blish’s piece focuses on Kuttner’s plotting skills, and has several quote-worthy passages:

The old pulp magazines cared very little for style or characterization, but they absolutely required that their authors know how to plot. This is a craft that is viewed with indifference, if not with outright scorn, by most publishers of the art story, though there is no objection to it in the slick magazines. Even in science fiction, we have today a whole generation of writers which has grown up unexposed to the rigorous plotting demands of the (now extinct) pulps, considerably to their loss, and the readers’.  p. 95

These days it is considered equally unsatisfactory for the omniscient author to lay out the precedent material, a la Trollope. Kuttner, however, never took any of the technicalities of writing for granted, and after close examination of the machinery, he worked out a way of rehabilitating the omniscient author. His method was to start the story not with the usual narrative hook (“Autumn was descending on U.S. Highway 66 when John met the naked princess’’) but with a genuine sub-crisis, and within the space of about a thousand words develop it into a resounding paradox. While the reader is wondering what the answer to the paradox could possibly be, Kuttner drops the story for about a thousand words of straight lecture on the background of the situation, confident that the reader, captured by the paradox, will sit still for it.  p. 96

If you can find a copy this essay it is worth a read (there is currently one at archive.org that you can borrow for 14 days, but you’ll have to join the queue).

3. It appears that Merril never sold to Campbell again, and most of her subsequent two dozen or so stories sold to secondary markets (bar half a dozen, mostly to F&SF). My tentative deduction is that her reputation is mostly based on her editorial and critical work, and not her fiction.

4. There is information about the Bepo (British Experimental Pile) here.

5. The Analytical Laboratory results for this issue appeared in the April 1949 one. It seems that Campbell only took a decade to work out that longer stories get higher marks:

I suspect that Private Eye did not top this poll as it was too complex, too dark. A pity.  ●

ISFDB link
Archive.org link

Other reviews:¹
Alva Rogers, A Requiem for Astounding  p. 126-127

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Catherine Tarrant

Fiction:
The Debt • novelette by E. Mayne Hull ∗
Lost Art • novelette by George O. Smith ∗∗
Fricassee in Four Dimensions • novelette by P. Schuyler Miller ∗
The Iron Standard • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett] ∗∗∗
We Print the Truth • novella by Anthony Boucher ∗∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by Paul Orban (x12), Frank Kramer (x3)
Insects Now • by John W. Campbell, Jr.
The Analytical Laboratory: October 1943
In Times to Come
Elementary, of Course— • science essay
Master Chemist • science essay by John W. Campbell, Jr. [as by Arthur McCann]
Extraterrestrial Bacteria • science essay by Willy Ley
Brass Tacks • letters

_____________________

The Debt by E. Mayne Hull is the third of her ‘Artur Blord’ series, and sees the return of the alien Skal from the previous story. This one starts with Blord coming upon a ravaged spaceship, where all the men are dead and there is only one hidden survivor, Ellen Reith. All the other women have been taken by the Skal’s henchmen to the Castle of Pleasure. Blord realises that they will soon deduce from the manifest that Reith is missing, and that they will return for her. He calls his office to organise a cover up.
Blord and Reith then travel to a night club on Fassor III, one of the Skal’s business fronts, to track down the missing women. During the journey Blord learns about previous unsuccessful attacks on the Castle of Pleasure by the authorities, and the green ray used to defend it. He is then told by his office that the wreck has been found along with the decoy body put on board by his men.

When Blord and Reith arrive at the nightclub they identify one of the attackers, and Blord kidnaps him in an invisible spaceship. Shortly after this the Skal contacts Blord—he has penetrated Blord’s deceptions—and negotiates for the release of his man.
The rest of the story continues this—rather unlikely—game of move and countermove, climaxing with (spoiler) Blord arranging for a corrupt employee to pass information to the Skal which will enable it to target Blord’s ship. The Skal mindspeaks to Blord shortly before attacking with the green ray—which Blord reflects back to the Castle of Pleasure with a mirror. The story finishes with a raid on the Skal’s underlings where, to avoid a battle, Blord negotiates a financial deal with them. The story then cuts to Blord and Reith having breakfast (!) where he cheerfully tells her that he has had them executed!
This is a readable enough piece but it has a rather ramshackle plot and weak ending. I suspect that Hull is emulating her husband A. E. van Vogt’s work in these ‘Blord’ stories, but the problem is that, while they feel like his work on the surface, they don’t have the underlying wild and complex plot structure which makes some of van Vogt’s word so good. The best story I’ve read by Hull so far is one written in her ‘own’ voice, The Ultimate Wish (Unknown Worlds, February 1943).

Lost Art² by George O. Smith gets off to a confusing start, lashing about between Sargon of Akkad on Earth six thousand years ago, to near future mankind (who know about a dead Martian civilization from Sargon’s era), to a Martian contemporary of the latter called Atlas. As you can see, it is a struggle to coherently synopsise it—the story doesn’t do much better.
Anyway, after an unnecessary page of this, the story gets going with Atlas the Martian and his son setting up a machine. Although the son has read the manual, Atlas suggests that there is more to it than that . . . .
The story then cuts to present day Mars, where Barney Carroll and James Baler are flying across Mars when they see a glint below: they land, and uncover an ancient Martian tower. After salvaging the device they take it back to base with them, where they start repairing and experimenting with it. As well as the device they also find an instruction manual, which they translate. This doesn’t turn out to be as much help as they hoped, and during testing they find the device exhibits several anomalous properties, which include setting a wall on fire, and later fracturing it with a transmitted hammer blow.

The men’s experimentation alternates with short excerpts where Atlas and his son set up the device and, for the most part, this is moderately entertaining—Smith balances the tech talk with banter like this:

“Yeah, and it’s about as lethal as a sun lamp. D’ye suppose the Martians used to artificially assist their crops by synthetic sunshine?”
[. . .]
“I’d believe anything if this darned gadget were found in a populated district,” said Jim. “But we know that the desert was here when the Martians were here, and that it was just as arid as it is now. They wouldn’t try farming in a place where iron oxide abounds.”
“Spinach?”
“You don’t know a lot about farming, do you?” asked Jim.
“I saw a cow once.”
“That does not qualify you as an expert on farming.”
“I know one about the farmer’s daughter, and—”
“Not even an expert on dirt farming,” continued Jim. “Nope, Barney, we aren’t even close.”  p. 41

Eventually, they learn their experiments have caused electrical grid disruption all over Mars and, at the end of the story, find that the tower (spoiler) is a broadcast power station which served the whole planet. The final joke is that a later human instruction manual for the device wouldn’t be any clearer to the Martians then theirs is to humans.
The story is okay overall but it drags on too long, and it is not entirely lucid (Smith, as in his last story, overdoes the technical detail).

Fricassee in Four Dimensions by P. Schuyler Miller³ has the narrator fishing near a “hobo jungle” when he comes across a tramp. After he gives the tramp one of the fish he has caught, he is amazed by the man’s culinary skills:

I handed him the fish. What he did I still don’t know. There was a sort of twist of his wrist, and the trout was inside out. He flicked here and there with a shining little knife and deposited its plumbing in a hole he had dug beside the fire, with a neat stopper of turf beside it. Then twist—zip—and the trout was inside out again. He hung it on a bush, saw that I was watching him bug-eyed, and turned bright red.
“Sorry,” he mumbled. “Little trick I picked up from a feller in Yuma. Indian. It—bothers people.”  p. 56

The narrator then hires the man—Smitty—and he takes him home. When the narrator’s son and daughter—Mike and Pat—arrive, Smitty magics up some cookies straight away, even though the oven is off. This won’t be the first occasion where Smitty appears to conjure meals out of thin air, and the children later tell their father that he can empty eggs and cans without opening them.
The next phase of the story has Smitty phoning the narrator to tell him that his daughter Pat has gone missing, but that he knows where she has gone. Mike greets his father when the latter quickly returns to the house, and he also seems to know where she has gone:

“She’s all right,” he insisted. “Smitty knows. He’ll get her.” He tried to squirm out of my grip.
“Look here, pal,” I told him. “This is no game. Pat’s only three, and a lot can happen to her before anyone catches up with her, I want to know where she is.”
He could tell I meant it, but it came hard for him. He wouldn’t lie and he didn’t want to tell me. “Well.” he finally admitted, “I guess she went over there.”
“Over where?” It meant nothing to me. “Over to the woods?” We’d been on a picnic the Sunday before, across the river in a grove of pines.
Now the ice was broken, Mike was willing enough to talk. “Gee, no,” he scoffed. “Over there—where Smitty goes.” He waved his arm vaguely. “Like this—”
He hitched up his pants and began to count. Then, in time to the count, he began to sway back and forth from one foot to the other. Back and forth, back, and forth—then suddenly he twisted queerly on his heel—and vanished.  p. 62

So far, so Mimsy Were the Borogoves. However, in this story Mike returns from “over there” to teach his father how to do the trick. When they both arrive in the other world they see two tracks going through the grass, and they follow them to find Pat and Smitty. When they all try to go back home the narrator can’t manage the trick (conveniently), so they camp out over the weekend and explore this unusual world.

On one of these nights away the narrator finds his daughter Pat cuddled up with a “wabbit”, which turns out to be part of a 4-dimensional animal. Smitty subsequently provides a related explanation about his own dimensional/time-travelling abilities, with the obligatory tesseract analogy thrown in.
Once they arrive home (Smitty picks up the narrator and carries him back) they find that Pat has a wabbit with her. Her mother Eleanor takes it away and tells Smitty to get rid of it.
At this point the story becomes a different piece altogether: Eleanor gets involved in catering for visiting dignitaries, but the four chickens they plan to have for dinner are killed and spoiled by the dog. Smitty manages to save the day by cooking a splendid meal using part of the wabbit but, after they have eaten, digestive problems ensue as other-dimensional parts of the wabbit are still alive.
The time-travel/4D gimmick isn’t convincing, and the two different parts do not splice together well.

The Iron Standard by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore is another of their stories that gets off to a rather confused start (you get the impression the writer started this before the morning coffee had kicked in). This time we have a spaceship crew (which includes, among others, a Native American called Mike Soaring Eagle⁴) on an inaugural trip to Venus, where they are short of food due to difficulties with the natives. If they had money (the planet is on the “iron standard”) they could buy what they require—but they don’t, so cannot. Moreover, they cannot get jobs as the tarkomars (the native guilds/unions) require a joining fee.
The story tells of the various schemes the Earthmen try to make some money, and the numerous setbacks they experience because of the natives’ ultra-conservative attitude towards change:

Bronson described how watersheds worked. “Suppose you imported Earth plants and trees and forested the mountains. And built dams to retain your water. You’d have power all the time, and you’d need only a few big stations. And they’d be permanent”
Skottery thought that over. “We have all the power we need.”
“But look at the expense!”
“Our rates cover that.”
“You could make more money—difals and sofals—”
“We have made exactly the same profits for three hundred years,” Skottery explained. “Our net remains constant. It works perfectly. You fail to understand our economic system, I see. Since we have everything we need, there’s no use making more money—not even a fal more.”
“Your competitors—”
“We have only three, and they are satisfied with their profits.”
“Suppose I interest them in my plan?”
“But you couldn’t,” Skottery said patiently. “They wouldn’t be interested any more than I am. I’m glad you dropped in. May you be worthy of your father’s name.”
“Ye soulless fish!” Bronson yelled, losing his temper. “Is there no red blood in your green-skinned carcass? Does no one on this world know what fight means?” He hammered a fist into his palm. “I wouldn’t be worthy of the old Seumas Bronson’s name unless I took a poke at that ugly phiz of yours right now—”
Skottery had pressed a button. Two large Venusians appeared. The head of Water Power pointed to Bronson.
“Remove it,” he said.  p. 85-86

Eventually (spoiler) the Earthmen prevail by disrupting the Venusians’ monetary system by selling pep pills, and the takomars are forced to pay them to stop.

This is one of those stories that is probably more interesting for its economic ideas and social attitudes than it is for the story but, while reading it, I found it hard to ignore the implicit assumptions about human exceptionalism and the superiority of the capitalist system. Normally I don’t have much truck with political or social analysis of seventy-odd year old stories through a contemporary lens, but I suspect that current day readers are unlikely to have a sanguine attitude towards the Earthmen’s disruption of a successful non-capitalist system (it’s hard to see how the status quo would persist after the story’s end). How ironic that nowadays we would fall over ourselves to investigate how they make their balanced society work.
For those that don’t want to think about the politics of the story, it is an entertaining enough read.

Completing the issue’s fiction is We Print the Truth by Anthony Boucher, which has this blurb from Campbell:

WARNING—Pure Fantasy. This is a tale of pure fantasy, run as an experiment. If you don’t like an occasional fantasy, the experiment ends right here. But this is a story of a newspaper that always printed the truth—for anything it printed became truth!  p. 125

After Unknown (Astounding’s sister fantasy magazine) folded with the October 1943 issue, Campbell was left with a considerable inventory of unused stories. In an attempt to use this already paid-for work, and perhaps to keep the magazine’s spirit alive until it could be revived after the war, Campbell would slip suitable stories from its inventory into Astounding over the following months, and requested reader feedback. This practice eventually stopped, and I’ll discuss the whys and wherefores in the issues to come.
The story itself starts in newspaper editor John MacVeagh’s office, where he and the local undertaker, chief of police, priest, alcoholic, etc., are having their regular weekly bull session. Their conversations always end in a discussion about God (Jake the undertaker is an atheist), but tonight Phil Rogers bursts in to tell them that his aunt has been murdered. They all quickly disperse to do their jobs, and Molly, MacVeagh’s Girl Friday at the newspaper, manages to convince him to let her get the story as, we find out later, MacVeagh is romantically interested in the murdered woman’s niece, Laura.
After they leave, MacVeagh goes to see his printer to tell him that the weekly paper will produce an extra edition to cover the murder:

“I’m sorry, John,” Whalen said gravely. His voice was the deepest MacVeagh had ever heard in ordinary speech. “I’m leaving tonight.”
“Leaving—” MacVeagh was almost speechless. Granted that tramp printers were unpredictable, still after an announcement such as he’d just made—
“I must, John. No man is master of his own movements. I must go, and tonight. That is why I wished to see you. I want to know your wish.”
“My wish? But look, Whalen: We’ve got work to do. We’ve got to—”
[. . .]
“You never did get my name straight, John,” Whalen went on.
“It was understandable in all that confusion the day you hired me after Luke Sellers had retired. But Whalen is only my first name. I’m really Whalen Smith. And it isn’t quite Whalen—”
“What difference does that make?”
“You still don’t understand? You don’t see how some of us had to take up other trades with the times? When horses went and you still wanted to work with metal, as an individual worker and not an ant on an assembly line— So you don’t believe I can grant your wish, John?”
“Of course not. Wishes—”
“Look at the book, John.”
MacVeagh looked. He read:
.
At this point in the debate his majesty waxed exceeding wroth and smote the great oaken table with a mighty oath. “Nay,” he swore, “all of our powers they shall not take from us. We will sign the compact, but we will not relinquish all. For unto us and our loyal servitors must remain—’’
.
“So what?” he said. “Fairy tales?”
Whalen Smith smiled. “Exactly. The annals of the court of His Majesty King Oberon.”
“Which proves what?”
“You read it, didn’t you? I gave you the eyes to read—”
John MacVeagh looked back at the book. He had no great oaken table to smite, but he swore a mighty oath. For the characters were again strange and illegible.
“I can grant your wish, John,” said Whalen Smith with quiet assurance.  p. 130-131

After this strange encounter, MacVeagh goes back to the office, where Mr Hitchcock, an influential local businessman who is a relative of the murdered woman, confronts MacVeagh, and attempts to pressure mim into soft-peddling the story. MacVeagh is having none of it, and his attitude hardens when he finds out that Hitchcock, Phil Rogers and Laura (Hitchcock’s daughter) were alone in the house when, supposedly, a tramp broke in and killed the aunt. The pair depart on bad terms, and MacVeagh goes back to see Whalen. He know what he wants to wish for:

“Did you ever look at our masthead? Sometimes you can see things so often that you never really see them. But look at that masthead. It’s got a slogan on it, under where it says ‘Grover Sentinel.’ Old Jonathan Minter put that slogan there, and that slogan was the first words he ever spoke to me when he took me on here.
[. . .]
“The Sentinel’s battle cry: We print the truth. So this is my wish, and if anybody had a stack of Bibles handy I’d swear to it on them: May the Sentinel never depart from that slogan. May that slogan itself be true, in the fullest meaning of truth. May there never be lies or suppression or evasions in the Sentinel because always and forever we print the truth.”
It was impossible to see what Whalen Smith did with his hands. They moved too nimbly. For a moment it seemed as though their intricate pattern remained glowing in the air. Then it was gone, and Whalen said, “I have never granted a nobler wish. Nor,” he added, “a more dangerous one.”
He was gone before MacVeagh could ask what he meant.  p. 134

MacVeagh soon realizes the consequences of his wish when he has a testy encounter with Phil and Laura on the way to see the chief of police. Phil makes fun of a typo in the paper saying Old Man Herkimer, who has just died, was 17 (instead of 77). Soon after this Jake the undertaker arrives at the chief’s office raving about Old Man Herkimer’s body. MacVeagh goes with him to the funeral parlour, and sees that the old man looks like a 17-year-old.
MacVeagh tests his theory that this is because of the news story by rehiring Luke, his retired printer, and placing a piece in the next edition about a freak storm and damage to a local statue. When these events come to pass MacVeagh decides to use his power for good. Initially he makes the murderer confess (it was the butler who did it!), and then sorts out a simmering local conflict between Hitchcock and his workers at the local plant. Then there is “news” of a benefactor giving the paper a huge donation so it can go from weekly to daily publication . . . .

At this point the story accelerates through MacVeagh’s subsequent successes in improving the life of the town, before Molly (who is the only other one apart from Luke who knows what is happening at the paper) sounds a note of caution, referencing a E. Nesbit book, and pointing out that wishes always have a catch. This falls on deaf ears as MacVeagh has been seduced by the positive comments he has heard in town (“this burg is just about perfect”).
Things start falling apart when Hitchcock invites MacVeagh to dinner. He attends, hoping to see Laura, and he eventually manages to slip outside with her. They talk about his improved position in the town, and she mentions that he’ll need to think about settling down. Taking his cue from her, MacVeagh says that marriage is a wonderful thing but, before he can profess his love to her, she tells him that she is soon to be married. MacVeagh can’t control himself and blurts out how he feels, but she makes it clear she isn’t interested in him. MacVeagh goes to a local bar and gets drunk, and then goes to the office to set the type for the social notes column: he announces his and Laura’s engagement.
Later on MacVeagh learns that he has stolen Laura from Johannsen, the likeable plant manager, and he also finds out about another problem caused by a review of a local theatre play (the headline is “Rio Rhythm stinks”). Rather than learning the obvious lesson from these two events, MacVeagh doubles down, and decides to use his power to end the war.

The rest of the story develops in a way that is both expected and unexpected. Although the war stops in Grover, it doesn’t elsewhere, and the story later cuts to a distant FBI office where an agent is tasked to investigate the town and why it is not meeting its war commitments. This epistolary (diary) section has the FBI agent travelling to Grover and, on his way there, stopping at a garage where he meets a strange old man working as a blacksmith (although the man adds that he works at “all kind of metal trades, printing mostly”). At one point they talk about the power of the press:

He had a lot of strange ideas, that old boy. Mostly about truth. How truth was relative, which there’s nothing new in that idea, though he dressed it up fancy. And something about truth and spheres of influence—how a newspaper, for instance, aimed at printing The Truth, which there is no such thing as, but actually tried, if it was honest, to print the truth (lower case) for its own sphere of influence. Outside the radius of its circulation, truth might, for another editor, be something quite else again. And then he said, to himself like. “I’d like to hear sometime how that wish came out,” which didn’t mean anything but sort of ended that discussion.  p. 159

This is Whalen, of course, who appears in the story on three or four occasions. During one of these, he grants a wish to a man who wants a jar of beer that never empties. Later we find out that the man dies from this. By the time “Whaling” (as he is now called) makes his final appearance, we realise that he is at best an ambivalent actor, and possibly an evil one.
Meantime MacVeagh feels the strain of writing news that keeps the world at peace (at least inside Grover), and finds out that Johannsen and Laura are seeing each other behind his back. Phil Rogers then turns up at the office to kill him: he has learned what is happening from Luke the printer—who has relapsed into alcoholism—and MacVeagh is only saved when Johannsen arrives unexpectedly.
Things continue to deteriorate until Molly (who has just attempted suicide) convinces MacVeagh to take a break away from the town. When he leaves he finds out the rest of the world is still at war, and is picked up by an FBI man who wants to know what is happening in the town. MacVeagh only just escapes, and eventually arrives back at the office looking like a tramp, having been on the run for some time. He tells Molly he knows what he has to do . . . .
This is an impressive piece, and one that becomes more complex as it progresses: initially it appears to be a linearly told, single point-of-view wish-fulfillment story, but develops into a piece where portions of the story are omitted (“If it’s all right with you, we’ll skip pretty fast over the next part of the story. The days of triumph never make interesting reading”); different points of views emerge; and the story gets much darker. It also addresses a number of issues: the downside of magic wishes; how absolute power corrupts; the limits of free will; and the power of the press/fake news! Interweaved with the latter are numerous biblical quotations, and at least a couple of conversations with the local priest about the power of God.
The story is Boucher’s best since The Compleat Werewolf, and I hope that this time around he gets the Retro-Hugo. (I commend those who nominated this work—I hadn’t read it at the time.)

The Cover by William Timmins attempts to show the invisible spaceship from the Hull story (the black border makes this a very dark cover).
The Interior artwork in this issue is nearly all by Paul Orban (he contributes a dozen illustrations to Frank Kramer’s three) and they all look pretty mundane—there are too many drawings that could have come from any contemporary magazine (see the ones above for the Boucher story), and those that look interesting are squashed into quarter of a page to save space. Kramer’s are better.
Noted in passing: the title page illustration is reduced in size and positioned away from the page edge.⁵
Insects Now by John W. Campbell, Jr. is a weird editorial that starts with the description of an aircraft bombsight and then over-analogises both:

Save for [the bombardier’s eyes]—the whole system closely resembles a stupendous stinging insect, guiding itself, controlling, leveling, directing its own flight, sighting its prey, and accurately delivering the sting.
The nerves are copper wires, the ganglia electron tubes and the sense-organ gyroscopes, variable capacitors, sensitive metal membranes, the muscles—of two sorts—are motors. There are the great flying muscles, the four main engines, and the more delicate trimming muscles, the electric motors that control the tail surfaces, the wing tabs and ailerons—and release the deadly sting.  p. 6

Campbell goes on to say that systems like this may have their own eyes in the future—he seems to edge towards a description of robotic weapons—but then finishes with this, which telegraphs the appearance of Simak’s forthcoming ‘City’ stories:

Still they’ll be insects, unknowing, stupid things, for all their size. Bees to gather honey or hornets to sting.
But—how long till men make a dog-thing that knows of its own existence, and of its builder, and helps him consciously?  p. 6

The Analytical Laboratory: October 1943 was discussed in the review of that issue.⁶
In Times to Come trails a new story by Hal Clement called Technical Error, which, intriguingly, will feature elliptical bolts tightened in elliptical holes (well, intriguing if you are engineering/science inclined!) Maybe the magazine should now be described as “the one with elliptical bolts” rather than “the one with rivets”.

Elementary, of Course— is a single page filler that lists all the elements used in aircraft manufacture.

Master Chemist by John W. Campbell, Jr. is a science essay about microbiological production techniques including the use of yeast, which is discussed in some detail. I was surprised to read this:

Recently, a yeast strain has been developed which produces proteins—regular animal-food proteins. This strain has been subdivided, and sub-bred for further specializations, till strains producing a high concentration of protein—higher percentage, in fact, than animal tissues—have been produced which also produce flavor compounds very closely akin to those of beef. The resultant washed, dried yeast tastes like beef, and nourishes like beef! The texture is wrong, naturally—but a yeast-beef stew strongly resembles the true beef stew in flavor, texture and nourishment value. The great difference is that the yeast can be grown in vats in one-ton lots in twelve hours from molasses and ammonia, almost without human labor, while the cow takes months, acres, and much labor.
Since beef flavor has been produced, presumably there is no need of monotony. And, of course, no particular reason why the flavorstrains should be held down to imitations of known meat flavors!  p. 107

There is also discussion of penicillin, which was replacing inferior contemporary drugs like sulfa, but was problematical to produce:

At present, penicillin is produced by an extremely expensive, laborious and slow method, involving the culture of the penicillium mold in separate one-gallon culture bottles, followed by extraction of the active substance from the resultant culture liquor. The production per colony is small, and the mold is sensitive to temperature changes and variations of the culture medium.
The work is being pressed because of the very great value of the penicillin as a therapeutic agent.
There are two lines of attack on the problem of greater production, and both are being followed up vigorously. Efforts to analyze the structure of the penicillin are being made, so that synthesis can be attempted. There is always the possibility that it will turn out to be a substance which, like quinine, cannot be practically assembled chemically. (On the other hand, it may turn out to be actually identical with some, long-known substance, synthesized years ago, but never considered a drug. Nicotinic acid, described by chemists years ago, turned out to be one of the B-complex vitamins.)  p. 194-195

Extraterrestrial Bacteria by Willy Ley is an interesting but short account about (ultimately negative) attempts to find bacteria in meteorites.⁷

Brass Tacks leads off with a letter from Malcolm Jameson, the writer, about the inaccurate description of the Ainu people in Anthony Boucher’s story, One-Way Trip.
There are a couple of other letters in this short column—the most interesting is Robert Silburn’s (he writes from Aberystwyth in Wales, and we are probably lucky a U-boat didn’t get it). He comments on a number of matters, including the number of new names appearing in the magazine (unlike the bad old days), and that the interior artwork could be better:

Orban is the only artist I really like; Kramer’s originality seems to be running dry, while Fax doesn’t seem ever to have had any. Your new chap, Williams, is indistinguishable from Kolliker, but might come to something. I forgot to mention the Isips. Their slick, streamlined style is a joy to the eye.  p. 124

The beginning of his letter is about Leiber’s Gather, Darkness!:

I want to say it’s one of your best yet. It has the same theme of a scientific-religious feudalism that has cropped up in one or two recent stories, but the idea has never been as fully exploited before. And its a perfect example of the constant mutation that ASF has undergone continually under the “Campbell Regime.” Two years ago, “Gather Darkness” would have gone automatically into Unknown. Nowadays the tales in Astounding are almost all of the “wacky” variety, with a maximum of miracles and a minimum of explanation.  p. 123

An issue worth getting for Boucher’s novella, and to a lesser extent, the Kuttner/Moore.  ●

_____________________

1. Alva Rogers has this to say in A Requiem for Astounding:

December rounded out the tenth full year of Astounding under the Street & Smith label and also marked the end of the most notable years of the so-called Golden Age. The issue, as such, contained nothing outstanding with the possible exception of a long novelette by Anthony Boucher which had been originally intended for the recently deceased and universally mourned Unknown Worlds, “We Print the Truth.”  p. 127

He adds that Miller’s tale is “amusing”, before going on to discuss the “Golden Age” comment above:

Tradition and nostalgia have ineradicably fixed upon the years currently under discussion the designation of the Golden Age, but if we must chop the time-line of Astounding into eras, or ages, or whatever, for the sake of accuracy this period should rightfully be labeled the Second Golden Age. To mark the demarcation line between a Golden Age and the preceeding and following years is an extremely difficult task; actually, almost impossible. A magazine doesn’t change radically from one month to the next in the ordinary course of events. One exception to this is where one publisher or editor takes over from another.
When Street & Smith took over Astounding from the Clayton chain and installed F. Orlin Tremaine as editor, the policy and appearance of the magazine were completely changed from the Clayton Astounding, and the ensuing three or four years constitute what is essentially the first Golden Age of Astounding. Where it ended and the interregnum commenced is hard to say. The last couple of years of Tremaine’s tenure fell off somewhat from the high level at which he had held the magazine during the first two years of his editorship, and John W. Campbell, Jr. took roughly a year and a half to really get a solid grip on things when he became editor. When he finally did get things going the way he wanted them to, the second Golden Age came into being.
It is easy enough to ascribe the beginning of this second Golden Age to the July, 1939 issue; the hazard sets in when you attempt to pinpoint the ending. I’m going to meet this problem head on, and pinpoint it at December, 1943. This brought the richest years of the Golden Age to a close. But to satisfy those who are unwilling to restrict the Golden Age to these few short years, I will concede that the next two years could be considered a Final Phase of the Golden Age, with the magazine settled on a moderately high plateau of competence, from which the outstanding and classic stories reared like isolated mountain peaks.
The features that distinguished the years 1939-1943 were exciting new ideas, talented new authors, refurbished old authors, and a deluge of exceptional stories from their typewriters. This phenomenon was the unique property of these few short years, but the momentum begun then carried the main aspects of the Golden Age onward for a few more years.
There is another aspect of science fiction, particularly the science fiction found in Astounding from 1934 through the middle forties, that will be briefly discussed here; an aspect that materially contributed to both the Golden Ages and the years between. This is the much misunderstood Sense of Wonder. It is true that most of the stories of this period lack the literary polish and sophistication of the contemporary output, but, oh! the Sense of Wonder, the breathless adventure and the boundless imagination they had instead. This was what made so much of the older science fiction so intensely memorable and classic. Today it is virtually impossible to generate the same enthusiasm for a story that could be generated ten, fifteen, or twenty years ago.
In the final analysis a Sense of Wonder is the priceless possession of the youthful discoverer of science fiction; it may last but for a short fleeting instant, or it may stay with him for a number of years. At any rate, it is sooner or later lost, seldom to be recovered.  p. 128

2. This is listed by ISFDB as a ‘Venus Equilateral’ story but the only connection to the main series is a one-line reference to Don Channing, the station director. According to ISFDB it was not included in the original collection, Venus Equilateral, but was added into The Complete Venus Equilateral in the mid-70s, along with two other stories, The External Triangle and Identity.

3. Although Miller’s and “Padgett’s” pieces are listed as short stories, they are approximately 9500 and 9800 words long (by OCR), so we would now consider them novelettes (the Smith story is 9800 words long: I assume that Campbell listed fiction less than 10,000 words long as a short stories—and presume that the Smith rounded up above this by his counting methods).

4. Mike Soaring Eagle is called “Redskin” by the other crew members, but is one of the more prominent characters. It is interesting to note that, at one point in the story, he is the one who describes the Venusians’ ancestor worship and ultra-conservative resistance to change, and explains how minor alterations to a culture can have a major effect. He does this without any reference to what happened to his own people.

5. This issue’s contents page (top) compared with last issue’s (bottom):

6. The Analytical Laboratory results for this issue appeared in the February 1944 issue:

Campbell does not give a coherent account of what the readers have said: his initial comments indicate that the majority don’t want fantasy, but he finishes by saying they do if it is well written. He seems unable to disambiguate that the readers may like Boucher’s story but don’t want fantasy in the magazine.
In The Annotated Guide to Unknown & Unknown Worlds (Starmont House, 1991), p. 154, Stefan Dziemianowicz states that the Boucher story got the highest AnLab score of all the fantasies that were subsequently transferred from Unknown’s inventory to Astounding.

7. The Wikipedia article on Panspermia is here.  ●

ISFDB link
Archive.org link

Other reviews:¹
Alva Rogers, A Requiem for Astounding  p. 126-127

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Catherine Tarrant

Fiction:
Recoil • novelette by George O. Smith ∗∗
Death Sentence • short story by Isaac Asimov ∗
The Beast • novelette by A. E. van Vogt ∗∗∗
Gallegher Plus • novelette by Henry Kuttner [as by Lewis Padgett] ∗∗∗
“… If You Can Get It” • short story by Murray Leinster ∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by Paul Orban (x9), Elton Fax (x2), Alfred (x3)
Arithmetic and Empire • by John W. Campbell, Jr.
The Analytical Laboratory: September 1943
In Times to Come
“Those Giant Tubes …” • science photos
“Turn On the Moon—Make It Hotter!” • science essay by R. S. Richardson
Keep ’Em Under • science essay by Malcolm Jameson
Brass Tacks • letters

_____________________

In 1943 Astounding went through two format changes because of wartime restrictions, changing from a large bedsheet magazine to the smaller pulp size in May, and shrinking further to digest size now. The magazine also drops all advertising with this issue.

The fiction leads off with Recoil by George O. Smith, the third of his ‘Venus Equilateral’ series about a future space station cum communications hub. The opening establishes that Channing, the station director, is on honeymoon, and Walter Franks is in charge:

Walter Franks sat in the director’s office; his feet on the director’s desk. He was smoking one of the director’s cigarettes. He was drinking the director’s liquor, filched shamelessly from the director’s private filing cabinet where it reposed in the drawer marked “S.” Drawer “B” would have given beer, but Walt preferred Scotch.
He leaned forward and tossed the director’s cigarette into the director’s wastebasket and then he pressed the button on the desk and looked up.
But it was not the director’s secretary who entered. It was his own, but that did not disturb Franks. He knew that the director’s secretary was off on Mars enjoying a honeymoon with the director.
Jeanne entered and smiled. “Must you call me in here to witness you wasting the company’s time?” she asked in mock anger.
“Now look, Jeanne, this is what Channing does.”
“No dice. You can’t behave as Don Channing behaves. The reason is my husband.”
“I didn’t call to have you sit on my lap. I want to know if the mail is in.”
“I thought so,” she said. “And so I brought it in with me. Anything more?”
“Not until you get a divorce,” laughed Franks.
“You should live so long,” she said with a smile. She stuck her tongue out at him.
Walt thumbed his way through the mail, making notations on some, and setting others aside for closer reading. He came to one and tossed it across the desk at Jeanne.
She took the message and read:
.
Dear Acting Director:
Having a wonderful honeymoon; glad you aren’t here!
Don and Arden.
.
“Wonderful stuff, love,” smiled Franks.
“It is,” agreed Jeanne. A dreamy look came into her eyes.
“Scram, Jeanne. There are times when you can’t work worth a damn. Usually when you’re thinking of that  husband of yours. What’s he got that I haven’t?”
“Me,” said Jeanne slyly. She arose and started for the door.  p. 5-6

One would hope that she goes straight to HR to file a sexual harassment complaint, but what actually happens is that she stays to listen to a data dump lecture. Franks is developing an electron gun to be fitted to spaceships, to move obstructions out of their path (the station struggles to maintain contact with the ships when they manoeuvre rapidly to avoid meteorites, etc.).
A later first test is unsuccessful, even when they use the full power of the station on a passing meteor.

The story then cuts to Channing (the director) and Arden, who are on their honeymoon, and where a reporter interrupts them with a question about a missing spaceship. After some (unconvincing) hand-wavium from Channing, he tells the reporter that piracy is the most likely cause. Sure enough, as the couple go the spaceport to talk to its boss, a ransom demand arrives, and the couple leave immediately for Venus Equilateral. After a long flight they have to take evasive action to avoid pirates—who have recently surrounded the station—before making a rough landing.
The rest of the story is about how the Venus Equilateral team (spoiler) sort out the technical problems with the gun and defeat the space pirates.
If all this talk of interstellar swashbuckling sounds dead exciting, be warned that some of the story is aimed at an Astounding audience and not a Planet Stories one:

“But in the betatron, the thing is run differently. The magnet is built for A. C. and the electron gun runs off the same. As your current starts up from zero, the electron gun squirts a bouquet of electrons into a chamber built like a pair of pie plates set rim to rim. The magnet’s field begins to build up at the same time, and the resulting increase in field strength accelerates the electrons and at the same time, its increasing field keeps the little devils running in the same orbit. Shoot it with two-hundred cycle current, and in the half cycle your electrons are made to run around the center a few million times. That builds up a terrific velocity—measured in six figures, believe it or not. Then the current begins to level off at the top of the sine wave, and the magnet loses its increasing phase. The electrons, still in acceleration, begin to whirl outward. The current levels off for sure and begins to slide down—and the electrons roll off at a tangent to their course. This stream can be collected and used. In fact, we have a two-hundred-cycle beam of electrons at a couple of billion volts. That, brother, ain’t hay!”  p. 25

—little surprise that Astounding/Analog is sometimes described as “the science fiction magazine with rivets”.
There are about six pages of this—my eyes glazed over—which is a pity, as the story was fairly good up until this point. That said, this will appeal to some readers, and you can see why these stories of optimistic, flirty, can-do engineers were popular at the time, even if they are now rather dated (and I’m mostly referring to the science here).

Death Sentence by Issac Asimov is one of his robot stories but, even though it involves United Robots and positronics, it doesn’t seem, for reasons that will become apparent, to be a tale that fits into that universe.
The story begins with Theor Realo approaching Brand Gorla, an old college classmate, for help. Realo describes to Gorla the ancient science of psychological engineering, and tells him about a planet of positronic robots that was set up to conduct experiments in this subject. Realo then reveals that the experiment has been running on its own for tens of thousands of years, and that he has been there for the last five! Gorla agrees to present the information to the Federation’s Board Master, and an expedition is organised.

The rest of the story takes place on the planet, and details the accompanying Under Secretary’s increasing concern about the threat the robots pose to the stability and peace of the Federation. After they discuss the matter, the team agree to blockade the planet if the money can be found, and not to do anything further unless the robots develop interstellar travel.
What then happens is that (spoiler), during a conversation between the Board Master and Realo, the latter reveals hitherto unknown information about his arrival on the planet. The robots closely examined his ship, and Realo realised that they would eventually develop the technology themselves. When the Board Master states that this means a death sentence for the robots, Realo runs off to warn them. There is a lame twist ending where (spoiler) one of the robot cities is revealed as . . . New York! This ridiculous final twist drags down a okay-ish story to mediocre.
I note that, although there are some memorable Asimov stories from this period (the ‘Foundation’ stories, Nightfall, some of the ‘Robot’ tales), he was still capable of producing poor work at this stage of his career (I wasn’t that impressed with last year’s Runaround either, although it’s not as bad as this). And what is it with the weird names?
I guess this one got on to this year’s Retro Hugo final ballot because of name recognition.

The Beast by A. E. van Vogt is the second of the ‘Pendrake’ series, which opens with a mini-data dump about the previous story The Great Engine (Astounding, July 1943):

Slightly more than two years had passed since that day in August, when he had found an atomic engine in the hillside near Crescentville, slightly less than two years since he had traced the marvellous machine to these turreted towers and to a group of scientists who were secretly operating spaceships to Venus, carrying emigrants to that fantastically lovely and fertile planet under an idealistic plan of their own.  p. 48

For “idealistic plan” read “with press gangs”.
The story starts with Pendrake (a one-armed man of unusual strength) again visiting the Lambton Settlement Project building, which was the scientists’ front operation. Here he finds that Germans have taken over the building, and is held at gunpoint before being put on a spacecraft into orbit.
Before his story continues there are two other sub-plots set running. The first of these involves Pendrake’s Air Force buddy, Major Hoskins, who is questioned by his bosses about his friendship with the Pendrake, and the kidnapping, murders, and propeller-less plane he witnessed at his home (part of the previous story). The second sub-plot has a henchman called Birdman meet his boss, where they drink a toast to Hitler.

Pendrake meanwhile wakes up on the moon near a crashed spacecraft. He remembers a fight on board that led to the accident. He realizes, while examining the site, that he cannot keep warm in the shade, and cannot work out how to use the suit controls to turn the heater on. Night starts falling, and with it the possibility he may freeze to death, so he periodically buries himself in the dust to warm himself up as he treks across the Moon. He eventually descends deep into a cave, stumbles on a radiant ore, and then an artificial corridor. Eventually he finds a stream, where spacesuit-less men attack him.

Back on Earth the two sub-plots merge when Birdman is told the FBI are investigating, and that he is to kill Hoskins, who has been examining Pendrake’s home. The assassination attempt on Hoskins occurs at a public meeting, but his bullet proof vest saves him. As the Feds arrive, Birdman escapes in his car:

The gray car slowed, hesitated, and for the first time Hoskins grew aware that its engine was making no noise. With a hiss of indrawn breath he realized what was going to happen.
The gray sedan rose, like a thistledown it rose into the air and climbed straight up like a shooting star in reverse.
It became a dot in the sky and headed into the blue mists of immense heights. Just before it vanished, Hoskins had the curious impression that a long torpedo-shaped structure was waiting up there.
It was there; and then it wasn’t.
Gone, too, was the car. Hoskins shook his head, thinking hazily: It could have been a trick of his vision.
But he knew better. A torpedoshaped spaceship was not at all out of place in the tremendous game that was being played here.  p. 63

A short data dump then sets out the general situation, revealing that the government know about a number of missing scientists and the atomic engine. Meanwhile, Birdman’s boss tells him about Pendrake’s arrival on the Moon, and that they will need to deal with him and the cave-dwellers.
Up until this point the story is a rather uneven, kitchen-sink piece but it subsequently develops a propulsiveness that propels the reader through the remainder of the far-fetched plot: to wit, Pendrake awakes to find a man called Morrison tending him, and is told that he will be taken to see Big Oaf—a near-immortal Neanderthal. There is also mention of the “devil beast in the pit”.
When Pendrake finally gets to his feet in this lunar chamber he sees an almost impossible scene:

Below him was a town set in a garden of trees and flowers. There were broad streets, and he could see men and—queer!—uniformed women.
He forgot the people of the town.
His gaze soared from horizon, to horizon. There was a green meadow on the far side of the town where cattle grazed. Beyond, the ceiling of the cave swept down to a junction with the ground at some point below the cliff, a point invisible from where he sat.
It held him for a moment, that line where a radiant cave sky met a cave horizon.
Then his gaze came back to the town, to the gorgeous town. A hundred yards away it began. First there was a line of tall trees heavily laden with large, gray fruit. The trees sheltered the nearest of many buildings. The structure was small, delicate-looking. It seemed to have been built of some shell-like substance.
It glowed as if light was inside it, shining through its translucent walls. Its design was more that of a shapely bee’s nest than of a sea shell, but the resemblance to the shell was there, too.
The other buildings that glinted tantalizingly through the trees differed widely in details, but the central architectural motif, and the basic glow-material was ever present.  p. 68-69

Pendrake goes to see Big Oaf, and notices on the journey there that the people in the town are from various periods and locales: German Army women, Neanderthals, and a number of men from the Wild West, etc. Pendrake later finds out that this strange mix has been gathered either from raids on German bases on the Moon, or from a time portal that Big Oaf keeps guarded.
Most of the rest of the story concerns Pendrake’s attempts to undermine Big Oaf’s rule in the town, during which further (!) fantastic elements are introduced:

Pendrake approached the edge of the abyss cautiously, and peered over. He found himself staring down a wall of cliff that descended smooth and straight for a distance of about five hundred feet. There was brush at the bottom and a grassy plain and—
Pendrake gasped. Then he felt faint. He swayed dizzily— and then with a terrible effort caught his whirling mind. And looked again, trembling.
The yellow-green-blue-red beast in the pit was sitting on its haunches. It looked as big as a horse. Its head was tilted, its baleful eyes glaring up at the two men. And the hideously long teeth that protruded from its jowls confirmed Pendrake’s first mind-shaking comprehension:
The devil-beast was a sabretoothed tiger.  p. 76-77

Various things happen: Big Oaf tries to recruit Pendrake to shut down the portal (so that they cannot be invaded from other time periods), and also to go on a raid of a German lunar base. He also tells Pendrake that men with silver suits and laser guns appeared out of the portal hundreds of thousands of years ago, but he left them to die of hunger and thirst inside the stockade in case they proved a threat.
Back on Earth, meanwhile, Hoskins and Lipton go to occupied Germany to be briefed on two “murder centres”, which appear to be linked with spaceship activity. This section produces some predictive (although wrong) post-occupation comment:

As you know, Hitler’s method was to put a party man into every conceivable controlling position in every community.
“Naturally, we deposed all these petty fuehrers, replacing them with the stanchest pre-war democrats we could find. At this point we ran into a difficulty.
“The Nazis had anticipated us. In every district a secret Nazi cell had been built up with a secret leader under whose command were young, stone-hearted men specially trained to commit murder and to defeat all attempts to reconstitute democracy. The leaders we appointed hardly dare to make a move for fear of displeasing these hidden Nazi zone chiefs.
“It will straighten out in time, of course. As the Nazi youth go into their thirties, get married, their zest for danger will fade; and the new, younger generation is being trained our way.
“Nevertheless, political creeds like pretensions to thrones, die hard. And right now these people are  committing about a thousand murders a week in Germany itself; about eight hundred more in the rest of Europe.”  p. 86

The climax involves (spoiler) a fight between Pendrake and Big Oaf, which the former loses, but Big Oaf is the one who ends up in the pit with hungry sabre-tooth tiger. We learn that Birdman’s boss is Hitler, who shoots himself when the Americans arrive on the Moon. The sabre-tooth tiger (amusingly) ends up in a cage in an unsuspecting zoo (presumably the RSPCA/ASPCA et al ducked that call).
Van Vogt does a good job at melding these disparate and unlikely elements: show me another writer who could put together a one-armed superman, anti-gravity drives, caves on the Moon, time portals, immortal Neanderthals and sabre-toothed tigers, lunar Nazi holdouts, etc., and produce an entertaining potboiler.²

Gallegher Plus by Henry Kuttner is the fourth of the ‘Gallegher’ stories, and the last that would appear until a final story in 1948 (Ex Machina in the June Astounding). This one starts, as usual, with Gallegher waking up with a hangover to find he has built another machine:

Gallegher uncoiled his lanky body and wandered across to the machine, examining it curiously. It was not in operation. Through the open window extended some pale, limber cables as thick as his thumb; they dangled a foot or so over the edge of the pit where the back yard should have been. They ended in—
Hm-m-m! Gallegher pulled one up and peered at it. They ended in metal-rimmed holes, and were hollow. Odd.
The machine’s over-all length was approximately two yards, and it looked like an animated junk heap.
Gallegher had a habit of using makeshifts. If he couldn’t find the right sort of connection, he’d snatch the nearest suitable object—a buttonhook, perhaps, or a coat hanger—and use that. Which meant that a qualitative analysis of an already assembled machine was none too easy. What, for example, was that fibroid duck doing wrapped around with wires and nestling contentedly on an antique waffle iron?  p. 122

Joe (the “Proud Robot” from the last story) tells Gallegher a cop is waiting, and Gallegher gets served a summons. He also finds that he needs to deliver on three paid-for contracts, and that his recently bought shares in Devices Unlimited have tanked.
He contacts the man who served the summons after talking to his lawyer, and the former says he’ll come over. Gallegher meanwhile turns on the machine, which uses its tubes to hoover up material from the hole, plays the tune St James infirmary, and produces nothing.

The rest of the story (again, as usual) weaves together a number of strands until (spoiler) Gallegher finally discovers the purpose of the machine, which is (a) to get rid of the spoil from a building site excavation, (b) produce a wire for spaceship control runs and (c) stereoscopic screens. The fourth function is to sing a duet with Gallegher while he is drunk.
This is a pleasant enough story with some amusing elements: the exchanges with Joe the robot, for instance, or the drinking game that Gallegher undertakes:

Unfortunately an alphabetical pub-crawl, with its fantastic mixtures, proved none too easy. Gallegher already had a hangover. And Cuff’s thirst was insatiable.
“L? What’s L?”
“Lachrymae Christi. Or Liebfraumilch.”
“Oh, boy!”
It was a relief to get back to a Martini. After the Orange Blossom Gallegher began to feel dizzy. For R he suggested root beer, but Cuff would have none of that.
“Well, rice wine.”
“Yeah. Rice— hey! We missed N! We gotta start over now from A!”
Gallegher dissuaded the alderman with some trouble, and succeeded only after fascinating Cuff with the exotic name ng ga po. They worked on, through sazeracs, tailspins, undergrounds, and vodka. W meant whiskey.
“X?”
They looked at each other through alcoholic fogs. Gallegher shrugged and stared around. How had they got into this swanky, well-furnished private clubroom, he wondered. It wasn’t the Uplift, that was certain.
Oh, well—
“X?” Cuff insisted. “Don’t fail me now, pal.”
“Extra whiskey,” Gallegher said brilliantly.  p. 137

Nevertheless, the story feels too similar to the previous three, and has more of a deux ex machina ending. Although I enjoyed this one I’m glad he stopped the series here (until adding one final story in 1948).

“… If You Can Get It” by Murray Leinster has the narrator go to a show where he sees an old college acquaintance called “Stinky” doing sensational magic tricks. Afterwards he goes to see Stinky and discovers that he isn’t doing conventional tricks at all, but knows how to imagine things into reality.
As the story progresses we find out that there is one drawback, which is that if someone does not believe he is capable of doing something he can’t do it. The major downside of this is that he can’t get back to Llanvabon, a created world where they believe he can do anything (the narrator wants to go there because of the large number of pretty young women).
Ultimately (spoiler), the problem isn’t resolved, and the ending—an appeal to the readership for help—does not disguise that:

SOS! R.S.V.P.! Help! Aid! Assistance! Any bright mind in call, work out a solution for Stinky Selden and me, and write your own ticket! Anything you like, from a couple of hogsheads of jewelry to King Chosroe’s harem, is yours if you figure out a way to get back the knack that Stinky had a little while ago. It’s life and death! It’s patriotism! Write, wire, or telephone. Put your brains to work! I’m dizzy with trying to figure it out, but it’s bound to be simple!
SOS! R.S.V.P.! Help!  p. 165

The month’s Cover by William Timmins is a particularly dreary, almost monochromatic affair, and shows us the wrong end of the action (there is a tiny spaceship at the other end of the electron beam).
The Interior artwork is mostly by Paul Orban, who provides the best of it (his work for the van Vogt story). That said, some of his other illustrations are mediocre, as are the ones from Elton Fax (disappointingly, after his near-Schoenherr quality effort in a previous issue) and Alfred. There is also a new illustration on the redesigned contents page:

Arithmetic and Empire by John W. Campbell, Jr. follows on from his Galactic Empire editorial in the last issue with speculation about the huge number of government employees required to run it.
The Analytical Laboratory: September 1943 was discussed in the review of that issue.³
In Times to Come plugs a new E. Mayne Hull ‘Artur Blord’ story, and talks a little (see above) about the Timmins cover to go with it, and the problems in painting an invisible spaceship. Most of the rest of the space concerns George O. Smith’s new story (you can tell that Smith was one of the first to press Cambell’s buttons):

George O. Smith is a radio designing engineer; he’s got a yarn coming up next month that comes from the heart. Any technician who’s tried to work from a “complete” instruction manual knows with a bitter  certainty that such texts invariably leave out all the important data. In “Lost Art,” Smith discusses the ancient Martian technique of—something or other. Like most manuals, the “complete” manual found in the Martian ruin neglected to explain what the purpose of the technology was.
(Ever see a standard manual that explained what radio was intended for? RCA’s excellent and elaborate “Receiving Tube Manual.” for instance, doesn’t so much as hint that a transmitting station somewhere is a great help to proper operation of a radio!) The discoverers of the manual—and the necessary tube to go with it—know it’s a vastly important science. Only—what the heck is it?  p. 154

Pages 99 to 114 are the sixteen special pages (I presume) that Campbell mentioned last issue, the ones done in rotogravure printing, and which allow the reproduction of photographs. To squeeze in “Those Giant Tubes …” and the two science articles that carry photographs into that space, the first article by Richardson is truncated and completed at the end of the issue.

The first of those articles, “Turn On the Moon—Make It Hotter!”, tells of Richardson’s time as an astronomical adviser on a Hollywood film, The Heavenly Body.

There are some interesting sections in the article:

In addition to having an astronomer present to supervise the observatory scenes, the studio also employed an astrologer to handle the astrological sequences. The two of us never met, the studio evidently fearing that we would immediately start to tear each other apart upon sight. I always had the greatest curiosity to meet this individual, with the idea of asking some of the questions that people are continually asking me about astrology. Half of an astronomer’s social time is spent in explaining that he doesn’t know how to cast a horoscope.  p. 105

In addition to catching astronomical errors, the technical adviser is also called upon for lines that have an authentic ring to them. I was asked for a line in Bill’s speech to the effect that if he hadn’t made a mistake in his calculations, the comet was sure to hit the moon. One that sounded really powerful and dramatic.
After pondering the matter for several minutes, I finally came through with the following:
.
BILL (DICTATING TO HIS ASSISTANT):
“And should there be no error in my calculations, these two heavenly bodies are sure to intersect in their orbits.”
.
To my amazement, everyone in the room, from the director to the stenographer, burst into laughter. They assured me that under no circumstances would the Hays [censors] office allow a line like that one to get by. I never realized what the moving picture industry was up against before.  p. 106

The second article has little to do with SF—it would be a good fit for Reader’s Digest—but is one which, having just finished watching the WWII U-boat series Das Boat, I found fascinating. Keep ’Em Under by Malcolm Jameson is about submarine warfare, and it also has a number of interesting passages:

The submarine carries no armor beyond light splinter plating on the conning tower. Any hit on it may well prove fatal, however small the caliber of the shell, for the greatest of all the sub’s weaknesses is its lack of reserve buoyancy. Where even the rustiest of old cargo ships could receive hit after hit and ship tons of water and still stay afloat on a reasonably even keel, the submarine is mortally injured by the slightest puncture of its skin. The sub is always in a state of delicate trim, and the admission of unwanted salt water not only tends to destroy the small store of spare buoyancy, but may send the sub reeling at crazy angles and out of control.
Buoyancy and trim are the key words to submarine performance.  p. 108

Correcting trim is a tricky job.
There are two reasons for this. One is inherent in submersibles, the other is due to human frailty. A submarine has two conditions of stability—one when light and on the surface, the other when completely under. When the Main Ballasts are flooded there is a sickening moment of uncertainty as the boat tremblingly shifts from one condition to the other. It may have been in apparently perfect trim above, yet assume a disconcerting slant the moment it is under. This can be forestalled by thorough knowledge of the characteristics of the particular boat and painstaking care in compensation. Human frailty enters in that things are sometimes overlooked, or go unreported, or errors may be made in computation.
Even veteran submarine men undergo a moment of anxiety when diving after a long period on the surface, for they can never be sure until they get under and see how the boat behaves.  p. 112

Submarines usually will submerge at the first sight of hostile aircraft, and deeply, for subs can be seen from the air in certain lights even when at considerable depths.  p. 116

Altogether, the lot of the submariner is not a happy one, despite the scare he sometimes throws into us and the undeniable damage he does. Every man’s hand is against him, including those of his own people, for submarines are shot at first and challenged afterward. He works alone and every move he makes is attended by the threat of sudden death. When he dies in action—and he often does—the world does not know when or how. His death may be swift, or again by slow asphyxiation in the dark of the ocean bed. While he lives he is always in discomfort, cooped up under artificial light in cramped quarters and breathing smelly air. In the winter he is always cold, for he is immersed in icy brine and energy for heating is too precious to be expended. Yet there are plenty of men who like it.  p. 117-118

The first two letters in Brass Tacks are both from Paul Carter, but the first has a Idaho address, and the second a Massachusetts one. The first mentions the July issue and praises Leiber’s Gather Darkness; the second discusses C. L. Moore’s Judgement Night, Hal Clement’s Attitude, and van Vogt’s Concealment. Given the non-overlap I presume they are from the same person.
There follows a short letter from George O. Smith (in reply to Caleb Northrup’s comments in an earlier issue about, I think, the problems of scientific development), and then a very long letter from Walter A. Carrithers Jr. of Fresno, CA, who has gone through all the Brass Tacks letters to develop a reader score for all stories published to date:

This, unfortunately, is one of those garbage in, garbage out analyses—the author himself points to the varying numbers of letters in Brass Tacks over the years (the column didn’t appear for a while in 1938, so there are no letters from that period), as well as their varying content (some early 1930’s columns were mostly concerned with fan feuds, etc.). This perhaps explains the poor showing from Golden Age stories in the list—that, and the small sample size, which may not reflect the views of the wider readership.
The last letter is from a regular, Chad Oliver, who didn’t like Bradbury’s Doodad, “because he tried to suit his style to Astounding [. . .] I prefer the old style—the serious, even beautiful writing to the clever stuff in Doodad.”
Finally, the column has a new title design:

An okay issue.  ●

_____________________

1. Rogers says that “the magazine was 5½ x 7¾ inches in size, [and] had 176 pages” and that fan reaction to the new size was “in the main favourable”. He adds that “the best story in the issue was Padgett’s Gallegher Plus”. The Asimov and Leinster stories are not mentioned.

2. The Pendrake stories were fixed up into one of the earliest paperback novels I bought, Moonbeast (originally The Beast). I didn’t particularly like it as, if I recall correctly, it was too kitchen sink. Although van Vogt’s wild plots work over the course of a novelette or novella, they just seem a jumble when you strap three or four of them together and call the result a “novel”.

The ISFDB page for the ‘Pendrake’ series is here. The notes for The Beast/Moonbeast tell us that, according to Icshi,* chapters 1-5 are The Great Engine; chapters 5-11, are The Changeling (not a ‘Pendrake’ story according to Ischi); chapters 12-13 are linking material; and chapters 14-31 & Epilogue are The Beast.
*Ischi’s van Vogt site is here.

3. The Analytical Laboratory results for this issue appeared in the January 1944 issue:

I would have put the van Vogt and Kuttner together at the top, followed by the Smith, and then the Asimov and Leinster a long way behind . . . but as Campbell says, there was a small sample size.  ●

ISFDB link
Archive.org link

Other reviews:
Alva Rogers, A Requiem for Astounding p. 125-126

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Catherine Tarrant

Fiction:
The Storm • novelette by A. E. van Vogt ∗∗∗+
Fifty Million Monkeys • novella by Raymond F. Jones ∗∗
Paradox Lost • short story by Fredric Brown ∗
The Proud Robot • novelette by Henry Kuttner [as by Lewis Padgett] ∗∗∗+
Willie • short story by Frank Belknap Long ∗
Symbiotica • novelette by Eric Frank Russell ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by Paul Orban (x10), Hall (x2), Frank Kramer (x5), Alfred (x1),
Concentration • by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Tidal Waves • essay by Malcolm Jameson
The Analytical Laboratory: August 1943
In Times to Come

_____________________

This issue has three stories (by van Vogt, Kuttner and Russell) that are not only 1944 Retro-Hugo nominees but also appear in Asimov and Greenberg’s Great Science Fiction Stories #5: 1943.¹ I imagine, therefore, that many would rate this the best issue of the year: let’s come back to that at the end of the review.
The fiction leads off with The Storm by A. E. van Vogt, the second of his ‘Mixed Men’ series. This follows on from last issue’s story, Concealment, where the human spaceship Discovery (commanded by the imperious Grand Captain Lady Laurr) discovers an outpost of Dellian civilization, android robots who fled humanity after a massacre thousands of years before.
After a short introduction that describes a ferocious galactic storm, the story opens on one of the robot planets, with Laurr’s ship about to go back to Earth with news of their discovery. The Dellians do not want Earth to learn of their existence, so they send Captain Maltby, one of their navigators, to the ship to supposedly guide the Earthmen through the nearby storm: their secret plan is to get Maltby to steer the ship into the storm’s fringes, so they can disable and capture it.

In light of the problematic history between the humans and robots, Laurr prepares her crew for Maltby’s arrival:

“There’s no doubt, Captain Turgess,” she commented once, savagely, “that we’re being lied to on a vast scale. But let it be so. We can use psychological tests to verify all the vital details.
“For the time being it is important that you relieve the fears of everyone you find it necessary to question. We must convince these people that Earth will accept them on an equal basis without bias or prejudice of any kind because of their robot orig—”
She bit her lip. “That’s an ugly word, the worst kind of propaganda. We must eliminate it from our thoughts.”
“I’m afraid,” the officer shrugged, “not from our thoughts.”
She stared at him, narrow-eyed, then cut him off angrily. A moment later she was talking into the general transmitter: “The word robot must not be used—by any of our personnel—under pain of fine—”
Switching off, she put a busy signal on her spare receiver, and called Psychology House. Lieutenant Neslor’s face appeared on the plate. “I heard your order just now, noble lady,” the woman psychologist said. “I’m afraid, however, that we’re dealing with the deepest instincts of the human animal—hatred or fear of the stranger, the alien.
“Excellency, we come from a long line of ancestors who, in their time, have felt superior to others because of some slight variation in the pigmentation of the skin. It is even recorded that the color of the eyes has influenced the egoistic in historical decisions. We have sailed into very deep waters, and it will be the crowning achievement of our life if we sail out in a satisfactory fashion.”  p. 11-12

The central section of the story takes place after Maltby joins the ship, and involves the probing of Maltby by Laurr and her crew. They learn, after psychologically surprising him on launch with a scene that makes it seem as if he is floating over the planet, that Maltby is a mixture of both Dellian and non-Dellian robot, a “Mixed Man”. Later, when Laurr suspects he may there for nefarious reasons, we see his ability to switch between his dual minds to evade human probing and interrogation:

These people might be more dangerous than she had thought. She said with unnatural sharpness for her: “As you know, we have to question you. We would prefer that you do not take offense. You have told us that Cassidor VII, the chief planet of the Fifty Suns, is twenty-five hundred lightyears from here. Normally, we would spend more than sixty years feeling our way across such an immense gap of uncharted, star-filled space. But you have given us a choice of orbits.
“We must make sure those orbits are honest, offered without guile or harmful purpose. To that end we have to ask you to open your mind and answer our questions under the strictest psychological surveillance.”
“I have orders,” said Maltby, “to cooperate with you in every way.”
He had wondered how he would feel, now that the hour of decision was upon him. But there was nothing abnormal. His body was a little stiffer, but his minds—
He withdrew his self into the background and left his Dellian mind to confront all the questions that came. His Dellian mind that he had deliberately kept apart from his thoughts.
That curious mind, which had no will of its own, but which, by remote control, reacted with the full power of an I. Q. of 191.
Sometimes, he marveled himself at that second mind of his. It had no creative ability, but its memory was machinelike, and its resistance to outside pressure was, as the woman psychologist had so swiftly analyzed, over nine hundred. To be exact, the equivalent of I. Q. 917.

Maltby answers all Laurr’s questions satisfactorily, and he has dinner with her later that evening—the same time that the course he has plotted will cause the ship will hit the storm’s edges! During the meal one of Laurr’s psychologists interrupts them: she has worked out that Maltby’s Mixed Man heritage means he has two brains, and that he may have used them to conceal his intentions. Laurr orders an emergency course change, and Maltby is taken away to be interrogated. This latter process involves breaking down his resistance by conditioning him to love Grand Captain Laurr.
Despite the course change, the ship hits the storm:

If she had had time to slow, the storm would have meant nothing.
Striking that mass of gas at half a light-year a minute was like running into an unending solid wall. The great ship shuddered in every plate as the deceleration tore at her gigantic strength.
In seconds she had run the gamut of all the recoil systems her designers had planned for her as a unit.
She began to break up.
And still everything was according to the original purpose of the superb engineering firm that had built her. The limit of unit strain reached, she dissolved into her nine thousand separate sections.
Streamlined needles of metal were those sections, four hundred feet long, forty feet wide; sliverlike shapes that sinuated cunningly through the gases, letting the pressure of them slide off their smooth hides.
But it wasn’t enough. Metal groaned from the torture of deceleration. In the deceleration chambers, men and women lay at the bare edge of consciousness, enduring agony that seemed on the verge of being beyond endurance.
Hundreds of the sections careened into each other in spite of automatic screens, and instantaneously fused into whitehot coffins.
And still, in spite of the hideously maintained velocity, that mass of gases was not bridged; light-years of thickness had still to be covered.
For those sections that remained, once more all the limits of human strength were reached. The final action was chemical, directly on the human bodies that remained of the original thirty thousand. Those bodies for whose sole benefit all the marvelous safety devices had been conceived and constructed, the poor, fragile, human beings who through all the ages had persisted in dying under normal conditions from a pressure of something less than fifteen gravities.
The prompt reaction of the automatics in rolling back every floor, and plunging every person into the deceleration chambers of each section—that saving reaction was abruptly augmented as the deceleration chamber was flooded by a special type of gas.
Wet was that gas, and clinging. It settled thickly on the clothes of the humans, soaked through to the skin and through the skin, into every part of the body.
Sleep came gently, and with it a wonderful relaxation. The blood grew immune to shock; muscles that, in a minute before, had been drawn with anguish—loosened; the brain impregnated with life-giving chemicals that relieved it of all shortages remained untroubled even by dreams.
Everybody grew enormously flexible to gravitation pressures—a hundred—a hundred and fifty gravities of deceleration; and still the life force clung. The great heart of the universe beat on. The storm roared along its inescapable artery, creating the radiance of life, purging the dark of its poisons—and at last the tiny ships in their separate courses burst its great bounds.
They began to come together, to seek each other, as if among them there was an irresistible passion that demanded intimacy of union.
Automatically, they slid into their old positions; the battleship Star Cluster began again to take form—but there were gaps. Segments destroyed, and segments lost.

Perhaps the story’s best passage, and the, “They began to come together, to seek each other, as if among them there was an irresistible passion that demanded intimacy of union” phrase telegraphs the final section of the story.

Maltby and Laurr end up shipwrecked together on a nearby planet, where they are out of touch with the partially reconstituted ship, and have to work together against a group of hostile aliens. During this Maltby’s love conditioning becomes apparent. We later find out that Laurr is, if they are not rescued, under a legal compulsion to reproduce with Maltby and populate the planet! This narrative arc means that the story changes from an excellent superscience space opera into more of a boy-gets-girl piece which, while not badly done, is not as good as what preceded it (some of the relationship material is a little dated and corny). The pair are (spoiler) eventually rescued by the ship, by which time Laurr is carrying Maltby’s child.
Notwithstanding the weaker last part, the story is still an impressive piece.²
Fifty Million Monkeys by Raymond F. Jones starts off on a future Earth, in the offices of Jamieson & Son, a firm of “Consulting Physicists” who apparently have a world-wide monopoly on “brain-teaming” (science has become too complicated for individual specialists and they now work together in psychologically matched teams). Craig, the son of the owner, is greeted one morning by Carlotta, the Director of Psychological Engineering, with the news that she has cancelled his appointments. She tells him that Team Thirty Four are cracking under the burden of “some knowledge which is causing them tremendous fear”. We learn the team were working on a problem involving Maitland Company spaceships and their navigational errors during long flights.

Craig orders the team’s psychological tapes and the pair put on their headsets:

The first wave of near-paralyzing fear threw a giddy, shimmering cloak about him. He groped blindly amid darkness for a chair. Carlotta helped him to one.
Surging, mounting—that fear filled the Universe and had nothing to do with personal security. It was fear that existence itself would cease to be existence and become a black and nameless nothingness.
He tore off the headset and sat in momentary trembling. Impassively, Carlotta stood beside him. Her eyes were closed but the cap was still on her head.
No expression showed on her face as she let that terrible sensation flow over her mind and rebuffed it calmly.
In wonderment, Craig watched her.
He knew that such ability was the result of her long years of training in peering into the dark, mysterious, amplified depths of men’s mind. Yet still he wondered how she could do it day after day and remain sane. He glanced down at the headset in his hands and let her go on.
After a moment, she opened her eyes. “Here’s the part you should know. I’ll turn it down a bit.”
He refitted the cap to his skull once more and the subdued impulses throbbed in his mind again. He sensed something more definite than the blinding fear. He sensed a conflict. And he sensed the cause of it. There was the impression of a vast, overwhelming curtain that hung threateningly over all creation, like a wrap of night about to fall forever.
Then it was over. The spools had run to the end.
He wiped his brow. “They must have sent up the wrong spools. That could only come out of a psychopathic ward.”  p. 41

After this they decide to give the “Maitland Problem” to Team Sixty Eight and monitor their progress while they investigate what has happened to Team Thirty Four.
We then get some backstory about the origin of these science teams before Team Thirty Four turn up in Craig’s office asking to be disbanded. During this conversation, Craig finds out what the problem is: the Stillson drives powering Maitland’s spaceships are creating regions of polarised space which, when it eventually meets its opposite, will cancel out and result in the immediate extinction of the universe. According to the team, who have already looked into the problem, there is no solution.
After Craig’s initial attempts to find a cure with another team fail, he becomes personally involved and forms a super-team. He also follows up a hunch that the problem is solvable by extracting the answer from “randomness”. This concept is initially not very convincing, or clear. Moreover, it results in an obsession with the idea of a group of monkeys randomly typing all the books in the British Museum, to the point that he actually orders a batch of monkeys and sets them to work in the basement.

This experiment is soon discontinued, and instead they set up several machines producing random English and maths, later adding a selector that prints only the coherent parts. Eventually one of the machines produces a math theorem that lets the teams manipulate time, which speeds up the process even further. Meanwhile, the English machine produces an alternate history of a human world, which they think may be in another existence:

One page near the middle told of the beginnings of the horrors.
“After the days of the hungry ones came the Paralytic Year. It was first observed in the Great City on the fourteen of four of thirty eleven. During the morning of that day several persons were found standing upon the streets, entirely unmoving and unable to move. They stared ahead with a look of despair upon their unchanging faces. They could not be persuaded to move or make any intelligent sign and when they were moved to hospitals they responded to no stimulus whatever.
“Through that night and during the next day the condition spread to other cities and by nightfall of the second day a million of the paralytics were stone rigid.
“It was, of course, impossible to locate all or even a small part of the unfortunates, especially in isolated districts. The majority of them remained where they were stricken, and as the days passed, they simply starved to death. They toppled where they stood, dying in an agony that could not express. Their corpses were everywhere. During that one terrible year over three hundred million died in that fashion.
“What it was or where it came from, no one ever knew. It was only another of the results of the Broken Law. Again the Light Master appeared in all the stricken cities throughout the world, and men hid their faces from the being. It touched the dead and stricken and a new plague of horrors swept over the world. Some were winged creatures that were seen to fly only against the Moon in the great cities. Others became crawling things that oozed into the sea and were drowned. Still others slunk about the street, mere rotting corpses that seemed possessed of some unknown, unholy mobility.”
When Craig finished the History, it was morning and the night was gone.  p. 68-69

As you would expect (spoiler) they finally discover a solution, but the minor plot complications aren’t over yet, and Craig has to sort out a personal dispute between his father and Maitland’s owner over a “chessmath” game before they can get access to the Stillson drives. This is a minor and unnecessary twist in the plot on the way to the big transcendent ending, which has the final random machine (amid warnings of its self-awareness from the team) giving birth to a “being of light”, who sorts out the problem and infuses Craig with god-like Powers. The being shows him another plane of existence and says he can go there and take Earth too—and that Craig can become the Light Master. When Craig hears this he heeds the warning in what he has previously read and goes back to Earth, putting his energy back into the machines and blowing the roof off the company building in the process.
Initially I wasn’t looking forward to reading this one—I haven’t been a big fan of Jones’ work so far—and it took me a long time to get through this as I could only read it in ten page chunks (it is a 26,000 word novella). The reason for my inability to read much more in a single sitting is that the story is generally clunky and expository, and uses several odd or unlikely concepts against the background of an unconvincing future world. However, around the halfway point it developed a momentum of its own and I warmed to it a little, although not to the point that I actually liked it particularly—but enough to concede that this ambitious piece is not entirely without interest.
If you are up for a story that involves pulp metaphysics (maybe if you are a fan of Barrington Bayley’s early work) you may find this worth a look.
Paradox Lost by Fredric Brown gets off to a lovely start:

A bluebottle fly had got in through the screen, somehow, and it droned in monotonous circles around the ceiling of the classroom. Even as Professor Dolohan droned in monotonous circles of logic up at the front of the class. Shorty McCabe, seated in the back row, glanced from one to another of them and finally settled on the bluebottle fly as the more interesting of the two.
“The negative absolute,” said the professor, “is, in a manner of speaking, not absolutely negative, this is only seemingly contradictory. Reversed in order, the two words acquire new connotations. Therefore—”
Shorty McCabe sighed inaudibly and watched the bluebottle fly, and wished that he could fly around in circles like that, and with such a soul-satisfying buzz. In comparative sizes and decibels, a fly made more noise than an airplane.
More noise, in comparison to size, than a buzz saw. Would a buzz saw saw metal? Say, a saw. Then one could say he saw a buzz saw saw a saw. Or leave out the buzz and that would be better : I saw a saw saw a saw. Or better yet; Sue saw a saw saw a saw.  p. 83

McCabe then sees the bluebottle disappear, apparently in mid-air, and when he explores the same space with his fingers they disappear too. He eventually finds himself in a dark void talking to another man who later takes him back in time (the hole in space is a time warp) to hunt dinosaurs.
After the captivating opening this eventually deteriorates into a talking heads story about how the dinosaurs died out. It is an unconvincing explanation.

The Proud Robot by Henry Kuttner is the third and best of the ‘Gallegher’ stories I’ve read so far. In this one the scientist, who can only invent things when drunk and invariably forgets what the inventions are for when he sobers up, has to contend with both a disobedient, narcissistic robot called Joe, and a disgruntled client called Brock, whose VoxView cinema business faces ruin because of pirated material. While Brock is berating Gallegher for not having completed the job he has been paid for (developing a content protection system for Brock’s tri-dimensional movies), Joe the robot introduces himself:

“No,” the robot said suddenly, “it’s no use. No use at all, Brock.”
“What the—”
Gallegher sighed wearily. “I forget the damned thing’s alive. Mr. Brock, meet Joe. Joe, meet Mr. Brock—of VoxView.”
Joe turned, gears meshing within his transparent skull. “I am glad to meet you, Mr. Brock. Allow me to congratulate you on your good fortune in hearing my lovely voice.”
“Ugh,” said the magnate inarticulately. “Hello.”
“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” Gallegher put in, sotto voce. “Joe’s like that. A peacock. No use arguing with him either.”
The robot ignored this aside. “But it’s no use, Mr. Brock,” he went on squeakily. “I’m not interested in money. I realize it would bring happiness to many if I consented to appear in your pictures, but fame means nothing to me. Nothing. Consciousness of beauty is enough.”
Brock began to chew his lips. “Look,” he said savagely, “I didn’t come here to offer you a picture job. See? Am I offering you a contract? Such colossal nerve— Pah! You’re crazy.”
“Your schemes are perfectly transparent,” the robot remarked coldly. “I can see that you’re overwhelmed by my beauty and the loveliness of my voice—its grand tonal qualities. You needn’t pretend you don’t want me, just so you can get me at a lower price. I said I wasn’t interested.”
“You’re cr-r-razy!” Brock howled, badgered beyond endurance, and Joe calmly turned back to his mirror.
“Don’t talk so loudly,” the robot warned. “The discordance is deafening. Besides you’re ugly and I don’t like to look at you.” Wheels and cogs buzzed inside the transplastic shell.
Joe extended his eyes on stalks and regarded himself with every appearance of appreciation.  p. 97

The story continues in the series’ usual rambling way (Gallegher goes to one of the pirate cinemas, and later meets some movie types before ending up in court) but it improves as it goes along, building to a reveal about the robot’s function that is a mini-tour de force. In this scene Gallegher simultaneously regains control of Joe, and (spoiler) finds out what the robot is for (it is a can-opener cum content protection device!) I know that this may not seem impressive in summary, but in the context of the story this is both amusing and ingenious.
Noted in passing is the story’s prescience about the idea of home TV putting cinemas out of business, and the latter’s later revival.
Willie by Frank Belknap starts with Monitor 236 looking at domed cities in a valley before realising he is wearing an animal skin around his loins. He doesn’t know why he is standing there but, before he can process the situation, he hears a noise behind him and sees a Prowler, which prompts him to throw his axe. After the Prowler dies, Monitor 236 cannot remember how he got into his current situation, so he decides to go to the city and find Willie, his robot.
As he approaches the city he gets on one of the moving sidewalks. When he gets there he finds it is deserted—apart from a young woman, who is also wearing animal skins. Together they go to meet the rest of her tribe and, when they arrive, they discuss the threat of the Prowlers. Throughout all this, Monitor 236 intermittently says things that don’t make any sense to the rest of them.

The story climaxes with a battle when the Prowlers attack. The city’s robots join in to vanquish the threat, and Monitor 236 is finally reunited with Willie the robot. We find that Monitor 236 has accidentally time-travelled a million years into the future, and that Willie has been dutifully waiting.
This story is little more than a series of random events and, as I mentioned last issue, I’m not a big fan of stories where men wake up in bodies/rooms/situations/etc. wondering how they got there.
Symbiotica by Eric Frank Russell is the third of the ‘Jay Score/Marathon’ stories about a robot that is part of a spaceship crew. Score plays a minor part in this one (I haven’t recently read the others so do not know how prominent he is in those), and the story mostly concerns itself with the kidnap of the crew by the natives of an alien planet. The crew’s subsequent problems with the native flora and fauna—which is all interdependent³— is initially a pretty good read (Russell writes crisp, fast-paced and absorbing prose):

Reaching the monstrous growth, we made a circle just beyond the sweep of its treacherous leaves, had a look to see where [our Martian crewmate] was wrapped in glue. He wasn’t wrapped in glue. We found him forty feet up the trunk, five of his powerful tentacles clamped around its girth, the other five embracing the green native we’d pursued. His captive was struggling wildly and futilely, all the time yelling a highpitched stream of gibberish.
Carefully, Kli Yang edged down the trunk. The way he looked and moved made him resemble an impossible cross between a college professor and an educated octopus. His eyes rolling with terror, the native battered at Kli’s glassite helmet. Kli blandly ignored the hostility, reached the branch that had caught Jepson, didn’t descend any farther. Still grasping the furiously objecting green one, he crept along the whipping limb until he reached its leafless end. At that point, he and the native were being waved up and down in twenty five-feet sweeps.
Timing himself, he cast off at the lowermost point of one beat, scuttled from reach before another eager branch could swat him.  p. 138

That said, you will need to ignore some idiotic behaviour on the part of the crew (who appear to be practising for the role of short-lived extras in the Alien movies), and the inordinate amount of back-biting that goes on between them. The story also goes on for too long (there is seemingly endless trailing about on the planet’s surface) and it ultimately descends into one of those ‘humans-slaughter-aliens’ tales, or more accurately, ‘dumb-humans-who-don’t-get-on-with-each-other-slaughtering-aliens’ tales. A more likely ending is that they would all have collected their Darwin Awards.
It is okay overall, I guess, but I’m a bit surprised that this made the Retro Hugo final ballot.

This issue’s Cover by William Timmins is a bit drab, and it isn’t helped by the text box used for the lead story title—a rather thoughtless piece of cover design
Around two-thirds of this issue’s Interior artwork comes from Paul Orban (ten illustrations), most of which seem competent if uninspired (although it’s hard to tell from the poor scan I was reading). My favourite of his is probably the drawing of the alien tree from Symbiotica. Hall’s two line drawings for the Jameson aren’t bad, as is Alfred’s single contribution. I liked Frank Kramer’s can opener/robot illustration best of all, I think.
In Concentration, Campbell uses his editorial to tell readers that, having just changed from bedsheet to the smaller pulp size format, they are changing again to a smaller digest size:

Beginning with the November issue next month, Astounding goes into a yet smaller size—the smallest it has ever attained. The reason should be obvious by now—paper shortage. There’s plenty of wood for wood pulp, plenty of machinery for production of the paper, and plenty of all the necessary chemicals—except chlorine, used for paper bleaching but needed more urgently for war-products processing; it’s an extremely useful general reagent—but there is a decided shortage of two sine qua non’s—manpower and transportation. So we use less paper.
But there will be surprisingly little reduction in content, because we will omit all advertising material; every page of the magazine will be a page of editorial material. The size will be somewhat larger than the “pocket” size books, but smaller than the present standard; there will be one hundred sixty pages of regular newsprint paper, plus sixteen pages of special material—a total of one hundred seventy-six pages. The sixteen special pages will be done in rotogravure, making it possible to print a number of articles which have absolutely required photographic articles and which, because of that, have been impossible heretofore.
The regular text will not be printed on the usual high-speed rotary press, either; we’ll be using a slower, older, but definitely cleaner letterpress-type press. The letterpress type has never attained the speed of production required for the enormous runs needed for a chain of magazines as voluminous as the Street & Smith Publications, or for a modern major newspaper. But the high-speed rotary press has never succeeded in producing the clean, sharp, and really black type impression the older, slower method did. Since only two of the Street & Smith magazines will be using the small size, it will be practicable to run them on the slower letterpress.  p. 6

Tidal Waves by Malcolm Jameson is a science article about tides that isn’t entirely clear in places—it could have done with some diagrams—but I learnt that the moon overtakes the tides it creates, and what with varying local geography, etc., it makes them quite complex events. I also learned fleetingly what “perigee”, “perihelion”, “meridian”, and “ephemerides” meant. Gone now.⁴

The Analytical Laboratory: August 1943 was commented on in that issue’s review.⁵
In Times to Come mostly plugs a new ‘Venus Equilateral’ story from George O. Smith:

The lead yarn is another of George O. Smith’s Venus Equilateral stories. George Smith is—as you might conceivably have guessed from the tone of familiarity with which his characters handle radio and electronic work—a radio engineer, research division in particular. Most of the gadgetry of Venus Equilateral exists as a fairly coherent reality in his mind. I imagine—the type of tubes, physical size of coils needed, etcetera. And some of the sour experiments he’s personally encountered, I suspect, led him to the basic idea of “Recoil.” the novelette coming up in November.  p. 162

There is no Brass Tacks in this issue.
Returning to my original comment at the start of this review, I’m not sure I’d say that this is the best issue of the year (that’s probably February) but it’s certainly worth getting for the van Vogt and the Kuttner.  ●

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1. My review of Great SF Stories #5, 1943 edited by Isaac Asimov & Martin H. Greenberg is here.

2. The Storm is one of the stories that Brian W. Aldiss talks about in detail in Trillion Year Spree (his history of science fiction which he expanded from his earlier Billion Year Spree in collaboration with David Wingrove):

A. E. van Vogt was talking confidently of interstellar winds back in 1943, and dropping in casual word of large dollops of space—as when a survey ship reports that a small system of stars “comprises two hundred sixty billion cubic light-years, and contains fifty million suns.” Van Vogt was the ideal practitioner of “Doc” Smiths billion year spree. He was not hard and cold and unemotional, in the manner of Clement, Asimov, and Heinlein. He could balance his cubic light-years and the paraphernalia of super-science with moments of tenderness and pure loony joy. Intimations of humanity surfaced now and again among all his frenetic mental powers and titanic alien effects.
Van Vogt is not seen at his best in longer work (he becomes as hopelessly snarled up as his readers in World of Null-A). Among his short stories, one of the best—because it exhibits all his talents in dynamic balance—is “The Storm” (1943), which contains some moments of love between Maltby and the Lady Laurr (Van Vogt was a sucker for a title). Indeed, there’s a hint that the story’s title is intended to refer also to an internal storm of emotion. Very sophisticated! But, of course, it was the intergalactic storm which interested readers, and that was what they got:
.
In those minutes before disaster struck, the battleship Star Cluster glowed like an immense and brilliant jewel. The warning glare from the Nova set off an incredible roar of emergency clamor through all of her hundred and twenty decks.
From end to end her lights flicked on. They burned row by row straight across her four thousand feet of length with the hard tinkle of cut gems. In the reflection of that light, the black mountain that was her hull looked like the fabulous planet of Cassidor, her destination, a sun at night from a far darkness, sown with diamond shining cities. Silent as a ghost, grand and wonderful beyond all imagination, glorious in her power, the great ship slid through the blackness along the special river of time and space which was her plotted course.
Even as she rode into the storm there was nothing visible. The space ahead looked as clear as any vacuum. So tenuous were the gases that made up the storm that the ship would not even have been aware of them if it had been travelling at atomic speeds.
Violent the disintegration of matter in that storm might be, and the sole source of cosmic rays, the hardest energy in the known universe. But the immense, the cataclysmic danger to the Star Cluster was a direct result of her own terrible velocity. If she had had time to slow, the storm would have meant nothing.
Striking that mass of gas at half a light year a minute was like running into an unending solid wall. The great ship shuddered in every plate as the deceleration tore at her gigantic strength.
In seconds she had run the gamut of all the recoil system her designers had planned for her as a unit.
She began to break up.
.
The writing has clarity and brevity, ably conveying Van Vogt’s excitement at his immense drama. Later, and beyond the pages of Campbell’s magazine, Van Vogt was never to recapture his first fine careless rapture. Nor that mixture of kookie science—half a light-year per minute, indeed!—with lyric excitement.  p. 236-237

3. Martin Greenberg says this about Symbiotica in the Great SF Stories #5: 1943:

Although the concept of symbiosis (the idea that species are linked together in mutually beneficial ways in nature) had long existed in biology, it did not receive widespread attention until the ecological concerns of the 1960s. “Symbiotica” beautifully illustrates the concept, and is a fine story besides.  p. 306

4. “Perigee” is the point in the orbit of a satellite, moon, planet, etc. at which it comes closest to the object it is orbiting; “perihelion” is the point in the orbit of a planet or other astronomical body at which it comes closest to the sun; “meridian” has various meanings, but here I think it was referring to a line of longitude (I should have known that one); “ephemerides” are tables listing the positions of the planets.

5. The Analytical Laboratory results for this issue appeared in December:

As usual the longest story tops the poll. I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way that you could get any sense out of these results is if you adjusted each set depending on its length (novella, novelette, etc.), how many stories are in the issue, etc. It would be a massive job, and I suspect it would still be garbage in, garbage out.
Campbell’s comments about Brass Tacks being taxed by the Post Office are interesting—why one Earth would they insist that reader’s letters are advertising matter? Bonkers.  ●

ISFDB link
Archive.org link

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Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Catherine Tarrant

Fiction:
Attitude • novella by Hal Clement ∗∗∗
Doodad • short story by Ray Bradbury ∗
Robinc • short story by Anthony Boucher [as by H. H. Holmes] ∗
Concealment • short story by A. E. van Vogt ∗∗
Judgment Night (Part 2 of 2) • serial by C. L. Moore ∗∗∗+
Probability Zero:
Der Fuehrer’s Base • short story by George O. Smith –
You Said It! • short story by Charles Ben Davis ∗
Finance • short story by David Charles –
Y = Sin X • short story by Harold Wooster –
Universal Solvent • short story by Clayton James MacBeth ∗
And Watch the Fountains • short story by Ray Bradbury ∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by William Kolliker (x4), Paul Orban (x2), Frank Kramer (x2), Elton Fax (x2), A. Williams (x5),
Minute and Mighty • by John W. Campbell, Jr.
In Times to Come
The Analytical Laboratory: June & July 1943
The End of the Rocket Society (Part 2 of 2) • essay by Willy Ley
Brass Tacks • letters

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I’m not a huge fan of what I would call “enigmatic awakening” beginnings in stories, those which involve a narrator who has no memory of who they are and/or what has happened to them and/or where they are. Why?—because this is usually followed by pages of tedious observation and deduction that eventually lead to a reveal which is, more often than not, something that involves aliens. That said, Attitude by Hal Clement is one of the better examples of the type, possibly because the story relatively quickly resolves the enigma and moves on to become a different type of story.
The protagonist in this one is a spaceship doctor called Little, who wakes up in free fall inside a strange hexagonal room with copper coloured walls. After examining his surroundings he deduces he is probably a prisoner on a spaceship. He confirms the latter is correct when he is later fed, or rather watered, by means of floating spheres of lime juice delivered regularly at four-hour intervals. This continues over several days, long enough for Little to start becoming sick of the lime juice, until there are gravity changes and manoeuvring which culminate in a landing.
Little then hears humans walking in the corridors, but his calls are ignored until a ladder drops into his cell. When he finally climbs out of his cell five silent starfish-like aliens (four in the illustration) take him to a chamber where he is reunited with the rest of his crew from his ship, the Gomeisa.

At this point the story switches to become essentially a prison break story, starting with the ship’s captain explaining to Little how they were boarded after stopping to survey a giant asteroid (a related explanation about Little’s survival in a space vacuum—which involves a gas used in suspended animation that turns up again later in the story—is not convincing). The situation is further developed when a Vegan translator from another captive ship appears and tells them that their attempts to build weapons have been pre-empted by their continually watchful captors.

The rest of the story involves: (a) a partially successful escape attempt by the human crew; (b) an attempt by the remaining human prisoners to fix their stellar position using a Heath Robinson contraption of various lenses and a diffraction grating; (c) the construction of a video transmitter; and (d) the human’s intentional loss of the transmitter to the aliens. This latter occurs after a realisation by Little about how the starfish-aliens communicate:

“They think and talk immeasurably faster than we do; and their thoughts are not in arbitrary word or picture symbols, but in attitudes. Watching them, I have come to the conclusion that they don’t have a language as we understand it at all; the motions and patterns of the spines, which convey thought from one to another, are as unconscious and natural as expressions on our faces. The difference being that their ‘faces’ cover most of their bodies, and have a far greater capacity for expression. The result is that they have as easy a time learning to interpret expressions and bodily attitudes of other creatures, as we would have learning a simple verbal tongue. What the psychologists call attitude—or expression, to us—is the key to their whole mental activity. Until we understood that, we had no chance of using their own methods to defeat them, or even of understanding the methods.”  p. 44

The story climaxes with (spoiler) the use of the suspended animation gas, which enables the humans to break into the aliens’ control room and use their confiscated transmitter (which the aliens have by now patched into their own more powerful systems). The explanation at the end of the story, after the aliens flee, reveals that the prisoners were allowed a considerable degree of freedom to do as they wished so the aliens could learn from them.

Although some of this isn’t entirely convincing (I’m not sure how a suspended animation gas would help you survive a space vacuum), the story gets off to a pretty good start, and Clement’s clear, readable style makes the story seem shorter than its 24,000 words (Campbell’s 30,000 word estimate in the last issue appears inaccurate). It shows some promise for what was only Clement’s third story.
Doodad by Ray Bradbury starts with a journalist pursued by gangsters taking refuge is a superscience version of a magic shop. After the proprietor shows him the various items he has for sale (“Thimgumabobs, Doodads, Watchamacallits, Hinkies”, etc.) Crowell leaves with a “doohingey”:

It may have been a crankshaft, and yet it resembled a kitchen shelf with several earrings dangling along a metal edge which supported three horn-shaped attachments and six mechanisms Crowell couldn’t recognize, and a thatch of tentacles resembling shoelaces poured out of the top.  p. 50

When Crowell gets back home the gangster boss turns up to kill him, but is (spoiler) killed by the doohingey, which also takes his body and puts it in the car. After Crowell disposes of the body, he gets a call from the shop owner to offer him a replacement model doohingey. When Crowell goes back to the shop he interviews the owner for the radio (“audio”) program he works for, and learns more about the shop’s items. The last scene has Crowell leaving with a box of various knickknacks which he then uses to stop two cars of gangsters that pursue him. There is a lame twist ending.

This is a beginning writer’s gimmick story, and not a particularly good one: it is rather dispiriting that this is one of the few pieces of Bradbury’s that Campbell accepted for Astounding (while presumably rejecting other contemporary stories such as the superior R for Rocket, which doesn’t seem any further from the magazine’s norms than, say, the Moore serial).¹
Robinc by Anthony Boucher is a sequel to March’s Q. U. R., and is the second of his ‘Usuform Robot’ stories. This one starts with a change in the law to allow usuform—single function—robot production (previously only multifunction robots that looked like humans, i.e. androids, were allowed).
Grew, the owner of Robinc, the monopoly android producer then begins a dirty tricks campaign against Quinby and his usuform robots to put him out of business. This starts with a usuform dowsing robot blowing up during a public demonstration, and progresses through the kidnap of Quinby and the narrator, to a resolution (spoiler) where they modify one of Robinc’s robots to become a “converter”—an android which will convert others of its kind to the efficiency of usuformity. When an ever-increasing number of Grew’s Robinc androids turn up at Quinby’s for modification, he concedes.

I didn’t much like the previous story, which was unlikely and contrived, and this is pretty much more of the same.
Concealment by A. E. van Vogt is the first of his ‘Mixed Men’ stories about a planet of robots who, thousands of years previously, fled human persecution to set up their own society. One day, a human ship finds one of their ouposts:

The Earth ship came so swiftly around the planetless Gisser sun that the alarm system in the meteorite weather station had no time to react. The great machine was already visible when Watcher grew aware of it.
Alarms must have blared in the ship, too, for it slowed noticeably and, still braking, disappeared. Now it was coming back, creeping along, obviously trying to locate the small object that had affected its energy screens.
It loomed vast in the glare of the distant yellow-white sun, bigger even at this distance than anything ever seen by the Fifty Suns, a very hell ship out of remote space, a monster from a semimythical world, instantly recognizable from the descriptions in the history books as a battleship of Imperial Earth.
Dire had been the warnings in the histories of what would happen someday—and here it was.
He knew his duty. There was a warning, the age-long dreaded warning, to send to the Fifty Suns by the nondirectional subspace radio; and he had to make sure nothing telltale remained of the station.
There was no fire. As the overloaded atomic engines dissolved, the massive building that had been a weather substation simply fell into its component elements.
Watcher made no attempt to escape.
His brain, with its knowledge, must not be tapped. He felt a brief, blinding spasm of pain as the energy tore him to atoms.  p. 88

The Watcher’s sacrifice proves to be in vain as the Earth ship’s female commander, Grand Captain, the Right Honorable Gloria Cecily, the Lady Laurr of Noble Laurr,² orders her scientists to reconstruct the station and the man. When this is completed Laurr introduces herself to the Watcher, and commands him to provide a course to his planet (she explains that Earth’s Empire allows no independent states). When he refuses he is forcibly interrogated by Laurr’s officers, at which point his IQ jumps to 800. Grand Captain Laurr then interrogates the Watcher herself, at which point (spoiler) he tries to attack her, and is cut down by energy beams. This reveals that he is a robot.
This starts well but has a rather inconclusive ending. I enjoyed it nonetheless as it provides background information to next month’s sequel The Storm, which I recently read in The Great SF Stories Volume 5, 1943.
Judgment Night by C. L. Moore continues in this second part with Juille, the daughter of the Emperor, being led down into the levels under the city by Egide, the leader of the insurgents, and Helia, her treacherous Andarean servant. The group eventually reaches a cavern where the ancient superweapons are kept, and Juille is left alone while they examine rest of the arsenal: this gives her a chance to hide one of the advanced guns in her clothing. When the others return, Juille hears a few of the weapons echo the sounds they make, at which point Egide plays his harp:

[His] calloused fingers swept the strings into a sudden, wild, wailing chord, and another, and then a third. The underground room rang with it, and on the wall a quiver of life leaped into shining motion as here and there a thin blade shrilled response. Egide laughed, a deep, full-throated sound, and shouted out what must have been a line or two of some old H’vani battle song.
His voice was startlingly sweet and strong and true.
The arsenal boomed with the deep, rolling echoes of it. Somewhere hidden under tons of dust, a forgotten drum boomed back, distant and softly muffled. Some metal cylinder of forgotten purpose took up the echo and replied with a clear, metallic reverberation, and down the hall an aeons-dead warrior’s helmet rang with its hollow mouth like a clapperless bell, and fell clanging to the floor and the silencing dust.
Egide laughed again, with a timbre of sudden intoxication, and smote his harp to a last wild, shrilling wail, sent one more phrase of the song booming down the room. And all the room replied. The muffled drum boomed back, and the clear ringing twang of the hidden cylinder, and the little blades shrilled like tongues upon the wall, shivering and twinkling with tiny motion.
Echoes rolled and rolled again. Egide’s voice sang on for a moment or two without him, diminishing against the walls. And this was no longer a thin, hopeless protest of the voiceless past against intrusion as the arsenal replied. Egide’s was a warrior’s voice, promising battle again, strong and savage with the savagery of a barbarous young race. These weapons had rung before, in the unfathomable past, to the voices of such men. Arsenal and weapons roared an answer to that promise of blood again, and the echoes died slowly among the blades and the drums and the hollow, hanging shields that might never echo any more to the sounds they were made to echo.
Juille, meeting the unashamed melodrama of his blue eyes and his laughter as he turned away, was appalled by a surge of genuine warmth and feeling. This was naked sentiment again, like the deliberate romance of Cyrille, but to her amazement, she found herself responding, and with an unexpected overwhelming response she did not understand.  p. 113-114

The next part of the plan is for Egide and his band to leave the planet with Juille as their hostage, but on the way back to the ship he goes to consult the enigmatic Ancients. While the rest of the group wait for him to return, Juille’s llar arrives and undoes her bonds. It slips a note and two items into her hand: the message is from Dunnar, and says that one of the items is the secret “photographic” weapon and gives instructions its use. The llar then leads her to the same place in the forest where Egide went to speak to the Ancients and, after some agonising, she follows him.

Juille penetrates deep into the forest, but the Ancient’s temple only slowly appears from the darkness of the trees. Inside the building there is a disorienting blackness:

Far, far away through the crystal on which she stood, a lazy motion stirred. Too far to make out clearly. It moved like smoke, but she did not think it was smoke. In a leisurely, expanding column it moved toward her, whether swiftly or slowly she did not even think, for awareness of time had ceased. And she could not tell if it were rising from fathoms underfoot or coiling down out of the sky toward her as she stood upside down on a crystal ceiling.
Nearer and nearer it came twisting, intangible as smoke and moving with the beautiful, lazy billowing of smoke—but it was not smoke at all.
When it had come almost to her feet it expanded into a great, slow ring and came drifting toward her and around her and up past her through the solid substance on which she stood. And as the ring like a wide, hazy, yawning mouth swept upward a voice that she thought she knew, said quietly in her ears:
“You may speak.”  p. 121

Juille asks how she can save her people from the H’vani, but the answer is enigmatic. She exits the temple with a vertiginous feeling, and then finds Egide telling her to open her eyes, whereupon she finds herself back in the forest, with the temple vanished. They struggle, but she cannot best him. When she stops struggling they discuss their experiences in the temple, and then talk about what happened on Cyrille and their feelings for each other. They kiss, but Juille is still very conflicted, and they end up fighting again until she is knocked unconscious.
Juille awakes later on Cyrille, imprisoned in one of its worlds. She eventually discovers by means of the communication screens that Egide and Jain have a huge laser beam pointed at the surface of Ericon, and they mean to burn the capital to the ground when they pass overhead. She uses her hidden weapon to blow a hole through the wall and escapes, later finding a palm gun. She then contacts the men, luring Jair away from the control room, which then leads to an extensive chase sequence that takes her and Jair through many of Cyrille’s virtual realities, including one particularly nightmarish one:

Below was a dim-green twilight forest of wavering weeds. Not too far below. Juille took a tight grip on both her guns and jumped. She was in midair before she saw the terrible pale face peering up at her through the reeds, its dark mouth squared in a perfectly silent scream.
It was a madman’s face.
Juille’s throat closed up and her heart contracted to a cold stop as she met that mindless glare. She was falling as if in a nightmare, with leisurely slowness, through air like green water that darkened as she sank. And the face swam upward toward her among the swaying weeds, its mouth opening and closing with voiceless cries.
The floor was much farther than it had seemed, but her slow fall discounted the height. And the creature came toward her as slowly, undulating with boneless ease among the weeds. Juille sank helpless through wavering green currents, struggling in vain to push against the empty air and lever herself away. The room was a submarine illusion of retarded motion and subdued gravity, and the dweller in it, swimming forward with practiced ease against the leverage of the tangled weeds, had a mad underwater face whose human attributes were curiously overlaid with the attributes of the reptile.
Juille’s reason told her that she had stumbled into one of the darker levels of Cyrille, where perversions as exotic as the mind can conceive are bought and practiced to the point of dementia and beyond. This undulating reptilian horror must be one of the hopeless addicts, wealthy enough to indulge his madness even when civilization was crumbling outside the walls of Cyrille.  p. 133-134

Juille and Jair fight their way through many more worlds until she manages, on her third or so attempt, to hit him with her palm gun. She seizes his weapon and starts trying to destroy her way towards the control room. Eventually, she causes so much damage (she blows lots of holes in things) Cyrille starts collapsing, and she is washed away in a huge wave of water, the mini-climax of a pretty impressive action/image sequence—which, perhaps, goes on for slightly too long. Eventually (spoiler) Juille finds Egide, and threatens to kill him with the secret weapon unless he stops the attack on the planet. They make their way back to the control room to find the capital is burning. Jair turns up, revealing himself as an android, before he leaves to meet the H’vani fleet to complete the conquest of Ericon. Juille takes Egide to the surface, and goes to see her father.

The H’vani space fleet attacks and lands its forces: the two sides clash and, during this, Juille recognises the envoy from Dunnar as one of the Ancients. He tells Juille and Egide that neither side will win, that humankind’s day is over, and that another race will surpass them. He and the llar ride off into the wood, while Juille and Egide go down to the battle.
The story closes with the llar reflecting on the communal nature of his own race, and that they should not trust the Ancients.
When I finished reading this novel I felt that, for all its many accomplishments, the various parts don’t entirely fit together. Perhaps this is because, ultimately, it isn’t really much more than a relationship novel mixed in with a fairly basic Empire vs, resistance plot. I also found that some of the motivation and plotting didn’t entirely make sense to me. That said, parts of it are particularly accomplished (the characterisation, the descriptive writing, the action sequences, the idea of virtual realties, etc.) and it is still a notable piece of work, even if it’s not of the same level as, say, Leiber’s Gather Darkness.
One final thing I found unusual about this work is its “doomed mankind” ending, which presents a strangely elegiac view of humanity that doesn’t entirely square with Campbell’s supposed human exceptionalism bias. Perhaps everyone was feeling pessimistic because of the ongoing World War.³

This issue also has, unfortunately, half a dozen Probability Zero items: Der Fuehrer’s Base by George O. Smith is some voodoo doll nonsense about Hitler with an ending I didn’t get/understand; You Said It! by Charles Ben Davis has a scientist develop a cliché actualiser; Finance by David Charles has a time-traveller play the stock market in 1929 and (spoiler) cause the Crash; Y = Sin X by Harold Wooster has radio sensitive pigeons and a dumb ending; Universal Solvent by Clayton James MacBeth is self-explanatory, and has a vaguely clever thiotimolineish-like ending; And Watch the Fountains by Ray Bradbury has two intensely competitive liars meet—one says he has a time machine and will use it to kill the other in the future—the other prepares: this has a nonsensical setup and a lame ending.
The Davis, MacBeth and Bradbury are mediocre; the others aren’t even that good.

The Cover is an average effort by William Timmins for Clement’s story. The Interior artwork in this issue is almost uniformly mediocre: the one saving grace is the illustration by A. Williams on p. 126, where Juille goes through the forest to speak with the Ancients: I’d have liked it even more if she wasn’t wandering about in what appears to be stockings and high heels. The magazine needs more striking full-page illustrations like this: the spot and half page illustrations provided by the other artists just seem half-baked by comparison.
Minute and Mighty by John W. Campbell, Jr. is a snippet about the amplification and stabilisation of radio signals that feels like it would be more at home in Radio Ham Monthly.
In Times to Come is part blurb for A. E. van Vogt’s The Storm, and part Campbell’s maunderings about stars and night bombers.
The scores for The Analytical Laboratory: June & July 1943 were commented on in the reviews of those issues.⁴ I note in passing Campbell’s observation about trying to compare the results for stories in different issues:

The June issue carried seven stories besides the article; this means that point-score votes ranged from one to seven—and made point scores tend to run high. That’s somewhat unfair, in a way—a third-place story or fourth-place story in such an issue has met and surpassed more competition, yet gets a tougher point score than the rear-guard item in a five-story issue. Some day all things will be perfect—and a completely fair system of reporting may be worked out.  p. 48

The End of the Rocket Society by Willy Ley continues this issue, and starts with a description of the boom times in German rocketry at the beginning of the 1930s:

To an outside observer during the years 1930 and 1931 it must have looked as if the “rocket people” were in all the rooms—at least in all the rooms in Berlin. For weeks we had an exhibit of the Oberth rocket, the Mirak and a lot of apparatus right in the middle of Potsdamer Platz. Then the exhibit was moved for two weeks to Wertheiin’s—Berlin’s equivalent of Macy’s—and could have been moved to the equivalent of Gimbel’s after that, if the equipment had not been needed. We got more newspaper space than ever before and every magazine in existence ran at least one article about our activities. I overheard fishermen mending their nets at the shores of the Baltic talk about the VfR; I had to explain the principles of rocket propulsion to innumerable street-car conductors, gasoline-station operators and bookkeepers, in addition to the normal complement of engineers and newspapermen. One morning I received a letter with government stamps on it—philatelists will know what I mean, the Dienstmarken that go on “official business”—asking me to come to the Reich Post Ministry to see Postal Counselor So-and-So. It turned out that the counselor was the editor in chief of a biweekly official magazine, “must” reading for all postal employees. He wanted me to write a comprehensive report about the VfR for immediate publication, to be followed up by supplementary articles once every second month. Thereafter all postal employees knew as much about rockets and the VfR as most of the members.
[. . .]
The intensity of the interest can be judged by the following: Around the middle of December, 1931, I knew that I would have about a week in January or February to visit my parents living in Konigsberg in East Prussia. I also informed one of our few Konigsberg members about it and he wrote back asking whether I would be willing to lecture.
My week then looked as follows: Sunday, radio; Monday, Engineering Society; Tuesday: free; Wednesday, University, Geographical Seminary; Thursday, Merchant’s League; Friday: University, Department of Physics; Saturday: free; Sunday: radio again. I did not speak a word without being paid for it, and the VfR got half of the gross proceeds. When I got back to Berlin I slept for a full day: six lectures in eight days, plus an eight-hundred-mile round trip, is work.  p. 58-59

The rest of the article describes further rocket tests against a deteriorating political background and the eventual involvement of the military. Ley concludes with this:

It is my estimate that a quick rehash of the work done and to forge on to the meteorological rocket from there would require some thirty thousand dollars per year for the first three years, more later.
At present the problem has to rest until Hitler is dead—after the war we’ll see. At any event I believe as firmly as ever in the feasibility of the first practical step, the instrument-carrying high altitude rocket. And I have never for a moment stopped believing in the ultimate goal: the spaceship.

Ley doesn’t seem have foreseen the first offensive use of the V2 rocket a year later.⁵
Brass Tacks has letters by two writers, the yet to debut A. Bertram Chandler, and Malcolm Jameson. It also has this from Karl K. Webber, from Flora, IL:

“Final Blackout”—Who cares whether it’s science fiction or history or what? Everyone who reads it is on the lieutenant’s side when the U. S. comes to call.
Hubbard is no small potatoes as a writer. Next (these aren’t in order of preference—they’re all equal) is: “The Weapon Makers,” a story which has as great a sweep as Smith’s series, but doesn’t get you bogged down by breathlessness caused from too much space—a form of spacesickness, I guess. Last is a short story and it needs no explanation—“Mimsy Were the Borogoves.” Padgett may be a pen name, but he reads Carroll and loves him—even as I (and maybe you). Every adult ought to read Lewis Carroll’s works once a year.
Over in another group are all of Bob Heinlein’s historical patterns waiting for this war to end so Bob can finish the design. To my notion when you’ve got the stories I’ve named hid away in a comer of your library, brother, you’ve got something. Rogers for covers is A-1; Orban inside; Isip—both of ’em—are good, but fit Unknown a little better; Cartier can’t be beat for Unknown.  p. 109

He finishes with this pre-emptive, if ungrammatical, rejoinder:

You edit the two best mags—bar none—in the science-fiction and fantasy fields, and I know a few things about removing the teeth suddenly for any guy who disagrees.  p. 109

Charming.

A middling issue, and one let down by lacklustre artwork.  ●

_____________________

1. The only other Astounding appearances I’ve noticed from Bradbury are a couple of Probability Zero pieces, including the one above. Here is Bradbury’s ISFDB page for those that want to check.

2. Atypically for the time, van Vogt’s Imperial Battleship Star Cluster is not only commanded by a woman (Grand Captain Laurr), but the crew is mixed sex too (Lieutenant Nesslor is also a woman).

3. Campbell’s supposed insistence that humanity always gets the upper hand seems to have a had a few exceptions: from 1943 there is P. Schuyler Miller’s The Cave (January) and Moore’s novel in this issue. Even as late as 1953 we have Philip K. Dick’s Imposter (June).

4. The Analytical Laboratory results for this issue appeared in the November issue:

I’m surprised the Clement wasn’t further ahead of the van Vogt: longer stories usually do better than shorter ones.

5. The Wikipedia page for the V2 rocket.  ●

ISFDB link
Archive.org link

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Catherine Tarrant

Fiction:
Judgment Night (Part 1 of 2) • serial by C. L. Moore ∗∗∗+
The Mutant’s Brother • short story by Fritz Leiber ∗∗∗
One-Way Trip • novella by Anthony Boucher –
Endowment Policy • short story by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett] ∗∗∗
M 33 in Andromeda • short story by A. E. van Vogt ∗
When Is When? • short story by Malcolm Jameson ∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by A. Williams (x6), Frank Kramer (x4), William Kolliker (x3), Hall (x2)
Noncommunication Radio • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
The End of the Rocket Society (Part 1 of 2) • essay by Willy Ley
In Times to Come
Brass Tacks • letters
Book Review • by Anthony Boucher

_____________________

This issue leads off with the first part of Judgment Night by C. L. Moore. Her debut novel is set on the planet of Ericon, not only the seat of the Lyonese galactic empire but also the home of an enigmatic race of aliens called the Ancients. The opening scene introduces us to Juille, the Amazonian daughter of the Emperor, and one of the novel’s two main characters. She and her father discuss the H’vani insurgency at the periphery of their empire before she leaves for Cyrille, an orbiting pleasure planetoid. She is accompanied by her personal servant Helia, and a strange alien pet called a llar.

Arriving incognito on Cyrille she meets and becomes involved with the novel’s other main character, a young man called Egide. He, unknown to her, is the leader of the H’vani rebellion, knows who she is, and is there to kill her. However, after several days together their relationship develops and, even though at one point he has his hands gently round her throat, he refrains from killing her, and later tells his companion Jair that she is not the Emperor’s daughter but someone else. Juille does not learn of Egide’s identity at this point but she knows something is not quite right.
When Juille returns to the palace on Egide she goes to a council meeting where recent losses to the H’vani are discussed. She learns that one of the scientists on the recently overrun planet of Dunnar has developed a weapon that will turn the tide of the war, and is en route to the palace. When his ship arrives shortly afterwards it is pursued by three H’vani ships—the latter fly over the forbidden territory of the Ancients, and they are destroyed in a flash of light, the first defensive action seen in living memory.

The Dunnarian, a strange-looking man, arrives and tells them the weapon takes a “photograph” of an enemy, which can be used to kill them at any point afterwards.
The final part of this instalment has Juille organising assassins to kill the H’vani envoys invited to a peace conference by the Emperor. When they arrive Juille is shocked to see that Egide is their leader.
The assassins fail to strike, and Egide arrives safely at the palace where, at the meeting, Juille tries to kill him with a needle gun but fails (he is wearing a new type of body armour). Egide and Jair capture her and escape into a secret passageway. As Juille is taken down into the remains of the ancient city below the modern one, she learns that her servant Helia is part of an ancient Andarean resistance and has betrayed her, and that the latter organisation has also promised ancient advanced weapons to the H’vani to help them in their war against the Empire. They descend deep into the underground levels.
Synoptically, this may all seem like a standard Planet Stories type potboiler, but it is atypical for its time in a number of ways. First of all, the main protagonist is a strong woman (unusual if not unknown for Astounding):

There had been many tremendous changes in the Lyonese culture even in her own lifetime, but perhaps none greater than the one which made it possible for her to take the part a son might have taken, had the emperor produced a son. Women for the past several generations had been turning more and more to men’s professions, but Juille did not think of herself as filling a prince’s shoes, playing a substitute role because no man of the proper heritage was available. In her the cool, unswerving principles of the amazon had fallen upon fertile ground, and she knew her self better fitted and better trained for the part she played than any man was likely to be.
Juille had earned her military dress as a man might have earned it, through lifelong training in warfare. To her mind, indeed, a woman was much more suited to uniform than a man, so easily can she throw off all hampering civilian ideas once she gives her full loyalty to a cause. She can discard virtues as well as vices and live faithfully by a new set of laws in which ruthless devotion to duty leads all the rest.
For those women who still clung to the old standards, Juille felt a sort of tolerant contempt. But they made her uneasy, too. They lived their own lives, full of subtle nuances she had never let herself recognize until lately. Particularly, their relationship with men. More and more often of late, she had been wondering about certain aspects of life that her training had made her miss. The sureness and the subtlety with which other women behaved in matters not associated with war or politics both annoyed and fascinated Juille. She was, after all, a woman, and the uniform can be discarded as well as donned. Whether the state of mind can be discarded, too—what lay beneath that—was a matter that had been goading her for a long while.  p. 11-12

Secondly, the story is told in a lush visual style that would not be out of place in a work from the 1960s, and it has some startling images—here Juille first sees Egide on Cyrille:

Presently a flash of scarlet seen through the leaves of a passing platform caught her eye. She remembered then that she had noticed that same shocking cloak upon a young man on the stairs.
It was a garment so startling that she felt more than a passing wonder about the personality of the man who would wear it. The garment had been deliberately designed to look like a waterfall of gushing blood, bright arterial scarlet that rippled from the shoulders in a cascading deluge, its colors constantly moving and changing so that one instinctively looked downward to see the scarlet stream go pouring away behind its wearer down the stairs.  p. 20

She nodded the newcomer to a crystal chair across from her, studying him coolly from under the cobwebby veil. He was smiling at her out of very blue eyes, his teeth flashing in the short curly beard. He looked foppish, but he was a big young man, and she noticed that the cloak of running blood swung from very fine shoulders indeed. She felt a faint contempt for him— music, composing, when the man had shoulders like that! Lolling here in that outrageous cape, his beard combed to the last careful curl, oblivious to the holocaust that was rising all through the Galaxy.
She had a moment’s vision of that holocaust breaking upon Cyrille, as it was sure to break very soon even this close to the sacred world of Ericon. She thought of H’vani bombs crashing through this twilight sphere in which she floated. She saw the vast tree trunk crumbling on its foundation, crashing down in ruins, its great arms combing all these drifting crystal bowers out of the green perfumed air. She thought of the power failing, the lights going out, the cries of the suddenly stricken echoing among the shattered Edens. She saw the darkness of outer space with cold stars twinkling, and the vast luminous bulk of Ericon looming up outside through the riven walls of Cyrille.  p. 21

Third, there is subject matter that, one presumes, may not have been of peak interest for the typical teenage male reader of the 1940s—not only is there a leisurely development of the romantic relationship between Juille and Egide, but there are scenes that are even more atypical:

“With permission, I shall compose that gown,” the soft voice drawled, and Juille nodded coldly.
The dresser laid both hands on a section of wall near the alcove and slid back a long panel to disclose her working apparatus. Juille stared in frank enchantment and even Helia’s feminine instincts, smothered behind a military lifetime, made her eyes gleam as she looked. The dresser’s equipment had evidently been moved into place behind the sliding panel just before her entrance, for the tall rack at one end of the opening still presented what must have been the color-selection of the last patron.
Through a series of level slits the ends, of almost countless fabrics in every conceivable shade of pink showed untidily. Shelves and drawers spilled more untidiness. Obviously this artist was great enough to indulge her whims even at the expense of neatness.
She pressed a button now and the pink rainbow slid sidewise and vanished. Into its place snapped a panel exuding ends of blackness in level parallels—satin that gleamed like dark water, the black smoke of gauzes, velvet so soft it looked charred, like black ash.
The dresser moved so swiftly and deftly that her work looked like child’s play, or magic. She chose an end of dull silk and reeled out yard after billowing yard through the slot, slashed it off recklessly with a razor-sharp blade, and like a sculptor modeling in clay, molded the soft, thick stuff directly upon Juille’s body, fitting it with quick, nervous snips of her scissors and sealing the edges into one another. In less than a minute Juille was sheathed from shoulder to ankle in a gown that fitted perfectly and elastically as her skin, outlining every curve of her body and falling in soft, rich folds about her feet. The dresser kicked away the fragments of discarded silk and was pulling out now such clouds and billows of pure shadow as seemed to engulf her in fog.
Juille almost gasped as the cloud descended upon herself. It was something too sheer for cloth, certainly not a woven fabric. The dresser’s deft hands touched lightly here and there, sealing the folds of cloud in place. In a moment or two she stepped back and gestured toward the mirror.
Juille turned. This tall unknown was certainly not herself. The hard, impersonal, perfect body had suddenly taken on soft, velvety curves beneath the thick soft fabric. All about her, floating out when she moved, the shadowy billows of dimness smoked away in drapery so adroitly composed that it seemed an arrogance in itself.
“And now, one thing more,” smiled the dresser, pulling open an untidy drawer. “This—” She brought out a double handful of sequins like flashing silver dust and strewed them lavishly in the folds of floating gauze. “Turn,” she said, and Juille was enchanted to see the tiny star points cling magnetically to the cloth except for a thin, fine film of them that floated out behind her and twinkled away to nothing in midair whenever she moved.  p. 18

One suspects that any 1940’s reader experiencing a sense-of-wonder buzz from the above may also have been suffering a degree of cognitive dissonance as well!
There are other plus points too, such as the innovative use of virtual reality in Cyrille’s many rooms, something else that makes it seem ahead of its time. On the other hand, the novel is rather too slow-moving to start with, possibly a structural inevitability given the need to have the relationship section at the beginning of the story. Overall though, this is a promising beginning, and I’ll be interested to see if Moore can maintain this high standard in the second half.

If Moore’s story feels like something from the sixties, then The Mutant’s Brother by Fritz Leiber is like a claustrophobic and paranoid story from a 1950’s issue of Galaxy. It is set in a near future world that has Greer Canarvon on a flight to see a twin brother who he has never met. We learn a number if things during the journey: (a) the pair are probably mutants; (b) they were separated at birth, and Greer has only recently found out where his brother lives.
When Greer lands at Steelton, he buys cigarettes and sees a newscast which refers to the “Carstairs business” he heard other passengers discussing on the plane. He learns that this refers to Robert Carstairs—a dangerous criminal who the police are looking for—and then sees a photograph of himself or, more accurately, someone who looks like him on the huge screen in the terminal. He is recognised, and there then follows an exciting sequence where Greer has to mentally control several people to effect his escape.

After commandeering a taxi, and with the driver under his control, Greer learns about the nefarious deeds committed by the man on the screen—his twin brother—and sets out to track him down. The story comes to an exciting climax inside a police station.
This is quite a good piece, and was better than I had expected (it hasn’t been much collected or anthologized since it first appeared).¹

Most of the rest of the fiction is not up to the standard of the previous two entries, and that is particularly the case with One-Way Trip by Anthony Boucher. It is the worst thing I have seen from this writer so far, and it reads like one of Cleve Cartmill’s poorer efforts (i.e., an unlikely story unbearably padded). It is not helped by its confusing two page prologue which is about an artist, an accidental invention, and the artist’s subsequent murder.
The main story starts with the protagonist of the piece, a WBI (World instead of Federal) agent called Gan Garrett, who is on a rocket flight to Sollywood to investigate the increased use of a material called lovestoneite (one of the story’s gimmicks, previously touched on in the prologue). He is going undercover as a historian to advise a film project on the life of Depavura, a prophet who is responsible for this peaceful future world which emerged from the War of the Twentieth Century. Some of this information comes from a conversation he has on the flight with a woman passenger. After they land and disembark someone throws a knife at Garrett, but misses.

He goes to his new job and has five minutes with the boss S. B. (Sacheverell Breakstone) before meeting the scriptwriter of the Depavura epic, Hesketh Uranov. We learn more about this future Sollywood:

A red light glowed in front of one of the studios. Their plaques admitted them to the soundproof observers’ gallery. “This is an interior, of course,” Uranov explained. “Exteriors are all shot outside under dome, some of them here at the main plant, most of them on the various locations. You probably saw them from the ship?”
Garrett nodded.
“California’s amazing enough naturally, and after our landscaper’s went to work— It’s really extraordinary. We can shoot any possible aspect of the world’s surface, and we have a condensed replica of every city of any importance, from Novosibirsk to Luna City. Southern California is the world in miniature; destroy the rest of civilization, and an archaeologist could re-create it all from our locations.” There was a certain possessive pride in his voice, despite his avowed contempt for Sollywood.  p. 89

Cue Alfred Bester’s The Flowered Thundermug.

The rest of the story meanders endlessly through various events: Garrett is attacked again in a nightclub when out drinking with Uranov; the agent gets a lecture from a Dr Wojeck about lovestoneite’s optical properties (it can release absorbed light at varying rates); Garrett and Uranov go to see the painter mentioned in the prologue, where Garrett is ambushed yet again; finally, he is then framed for the murder of one of the ambushers and send on a one-way rocket trip (this peaceful society’s replacement for capital punishment).
All of this is not in the slightest bit convincing and it takes forever to get to this point (all this is about twenty pages worth). Worse, we then get a data dump about how this world’s society evolved on the rocket trip out.

Garrett then ends up landing (unknown to him) on the Moon. Here (spoiler) we find out that the lovestonite is being used by S. B. to make weapons to take over the world. Puzzlingly, the story morphs at this point into what can only be described as a farcical piece on megalomania:

“All Sollywood,” Sacheverell Breakstone began, “acknowledged my creative-executive supremacy. The Little Hitler, they called me. And I remember reading in a biography of that great man how he could have been a magnificent painter had he chosen to follow that line instead of creating in terms of meters and men. Even so, I could have been a great musician, but I instinctively turned away from the sterility of such purely artistic creation. I found my metier in Sollywood; but even there I was cramped, strangled by the limitations of peace. The man who would create with men needs weapons. The man who would create life must be able to mete out death.”  p. 110

The story finishes with Garrett managing to divert these violent extremist to Mars to colonise the planet.
A bizarre piece, and not in a good way.²
Endowment Policy by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore has a taxi driver called Holt sent to pick up a fare that has asked for him by name. After picking up a man called Smith, Holt is asked if he would like to make a thousand bucks. When Holt accepts, Smith then explains that he wants Holt to take him to the home of a particular physicist. At eleven o’clock they will be an explosion at the scientist’s lab, and Holt’s job will be to take a formula out of the safe and give it to the War department.

The bulk of the rest of the piece is a chase story that involves Holt and his (obviously time-traveller) passenger avoiding a group of men looking for them. When they finally arrive at the house, Holt (spoiler) attempts to retrieve the formula but fails.
There is a coda set in 2016 where Smith (his pursuers catch him and take him back to the future) is tried for attempted time-crime, and the story has a clever twist where we find out that Smith is the older Holt, and had gone back in time to deliver himself from his humdrum life. There is a pleasingly ironic last paragraph where the 1943 Holt contemplates the bright future that his thousand dollars will provide. . . .

M 33 in Andromeda by A. E. van Vogt is the second ‘Space Beagle/Nexialist’ series, and starts with a spaceship picking up vibrations and murmurings as it transits a volume of space. When a voice tells the captain the ship should turn back it becomes apparent that no-one else in the crew has heard it. The captain then asks them whether they should continue. Near the end of this process, metal-like beasts appear in the control room and a firefight breaks out. During the skirmish a Nexialist called Grosvenor (a generalist who has not really been accepted by the ship’s crew of specialists) saves the captain’s life.

After further discussion among the crew the ship continues exploring, eventually finding a buried city on one of several primeval planets they discover: the populations of these planets have been wiped out by an unknown attacker.

Grosvenor eventually discovers (spoiler) that this has been caused by a galaxy spanning creature that feeds on the energy given off by dying creatures. We get some back story about the evolution of this creature before the humans shoot iron projectiles into space to injure the creature and force it to a distant Galaxy. It ends with the Nexialist’s acceptance by the rest of the crew.
This is all very unconvincing, verging on ridiculous, and reads like something from the thirties. It is also written in similar quality prose. Here are a few random sentences:

But he found himself waiting for others of the score of men in the control room, to echo the empirical statement of him who had already spoken. p. 129

There was no reply; and, after a little, that was astounding.  p. 130

“I am glad to see that no one is even looking as if we ought to turn back.”  p. 130

“That’s a large order, commander.” [this last in reply to what the speaker thinks of the environment that they are headed into] p. 130

And so on. It reads like an badly written and uncorrected first draft.
When Is When? by Malcolm Jameson is the third and last of the ‘Anachron’ time travel series. This one starts off with Kilmer finding out that several of his time teams have gone missing. Barry turns up shortly afterwards, having emerged unscathed from a just completed disciplinary hearing. He looks at the dates the teams are in, and says he can sort the problem. He sets off for the America of Phillip I of Spain’s time.

Once he arrives he arranges a deal with a developed American nation (time travellers have altered the history of this timeline) to provide him an Armada of advanced warships. The (eventually revealed) reason for this is that Barry wants to (spoiler) apply pressure on the Pope, who changed the Gregorian calendar at this point. The Pope’s alteration of the calendar during this period caused missing dates, and some of the changes occurred at different times across the planet—this is what has caused the missing time teams.

This is a completely unconvincing ending: the idea that mankind’s artificial system of measuring time would lead to crews getting lost in “time holes” or whatever is completely nonsensical. Best read for its semi-historical adventure story.³

The Cover is, as usual, by William Timmins (I can stop saying repeating this sometime late in 1944 if I recall correctly). My favourites among this issue’s Interior artwork are probably by Williams (although the lizard illustration on p. 136 is rather amateurish). Kolliker’s are okay, and Kramer and Hall are a mixed bag (Kramer’s illustrations for the Jameson are okay but his first one for the Leiber features one of his standard “1940’s man in hat and raincoat”).
Noncommunication Radio by John W. Campbell, Jr. is an editorial that speculates on the amount of scientific knowledge that will become known to the public after the war before it spirals off into prediction—some accurate, some not.
The End of the Rocket Society by Willy Ley is the first part of a fascinating article about the beginnings and history of the German Rocket Society (it started in 1927) and their early publications and experiments. Ley was a founder member and, in his account, the organisation sometimes appears like something out of a farce:

So Oberth had to build a rocket in a hurry. He knew that he was no engineer and that he needed one. He could have asked any one of innumerable people he knew for an able assistant, he could have phoned one of the specialized employment agencies—but he put a classified ad into one or several newspapers. Several men responded, capable men, no doubt, and Oberth had to make a choice. There was one of the applicants whose appearance struck him like lightning. This was the man he had seen in that meteorite-inspired vision. He even bore that scar on his forehead, Oberth did not know that it was a result of reckless driving.
That individual was a small man with a hard face, a Hitler-voiced unemployed engineer, carefully dressed and with military posture. “Name is Rudolf Nebel, diploma-ed engineer, member of the oldest Bavarian student corps, World War combat pilot, with pilot’s license and rank of lieutenant, with eleven enemy planes to my credit.”
He was hired immediately.
I may add right here that Nebel told me himself later on that he had been graduated in a hurry during the war because he had volunteered for the air force and that after the war he had never worked as an engineer but as a kind of salesman for mechanical kitchen gadgets. Since jobs were almost impossible to find, all this was probably not his fault, but I often discovered later that I knew more about problems in his field than he did.
Oberth found himself another assistant whose name had come to his attention because it had been the by-line to a brilliant article in an aviation magazine. Via the editor of the magazine Oberth got hold of the writer, a Russian aviation student by the name of Alexander Borissovitch Shershevsky. Shershevsky had been sent to Germany to study gliders, but overstayed his kommandirovka and dared not go home again. But he was genuinely in favour of the Soviet government, not a “White Russian”—he was a refugee by accident.
Those three, the theorist who longed for the fresh mountain air of Mediash, the professed militarist Nebel and the Bolshevist Shershevsky worked together, or tried to. Shershevsky did not adore work overly much, Nebel was willing to work and waited for orders, and Oberth was not quite certain where he should start.  p. 73

Then I met Nebel accidentally one day. He knew me and, assuming that I did not know him, told me who he was and what he was going to do. It was: He was going to found a society in order to continue the rocket experiments, he was going to get somebody to write a book to attract public attention. After he had lectured for half an hour I managed to tell him that there were at last half a dozen books and that there was a society which would be able to do something if it could only get hold of its president. Who? Hermann Oberth! It is still hard to believe, but Oberth had never informed his assistant either about the society nor about the literature on the subject, save for his own book which Nebel had not read, after finding it too highfalutin. (He used an equivalent Bavarian term.) After this revelation Nebel said that he would do something with the society that existed. He did.  p. 75

In Times to Come Campbell trails Hal Clement’s 30,000 word novella, Attitude, and has this to say about the rest of Moore’s Judgement Night:

When I read it first myself, I felt the last half was the best of it—and the last single page carries an impact equal to all the rest of the story! It’ll stay with you for several days—I’ll guarantee.  p. 128

Brass Tacks has a letter from Hugh R. Wahlin of Madison, WI, that gives his opinions on the new size and artwork:

I have just seen a copy of the beloved mag in its “new” size, and believe me, nothing has done my poor old soul so much good for many a month. I never did like the large size because it was too clumsy for reading in bed, and besides the covers always got torn around the edges, and who wants to file away a messy copy? Seems to me that if you want to break into the slick field, the way to do it is by printing the mag on slick paper, not by making it of such size that it won’t fit into the racks reserved for pulps.
I’ve got some opinions on the new cover, too: Why, if you are going back to the old size, don’t you bleed the cover pic on three sides again? It makes the mag seem about five percent smaller as it is now. Another thing, why don’t you get rid of that obnoxious square box sticking up into the cover? It may be a good idea to have the story connected with the cover, but I ‘d rather have it up at the top where it used to be, and not
depriving me of any of the pleasure I get out of a really top-notch cover. This Timmins is turning out some stuff that stacks up pretty well beside Rogers’.
Why, oh, why, do you insist on letting Kramer illustrate your lead story? Maybe he gives you two for the price of one or something, but I certainly can’t see anything in his work. He is weak on composition, his interpretations are indefinite, and every face he draws looks like it needed a shave. I don’t mind it on the men so much, but even his heroines— or am I being too romantic for STF?—look like the bearded lady.  p. 156

Elsewhere, there are (as well as a letter from Chad Oliver) positive mentions for Mimsy Were the Borogoves and Timmins’ covers. The column ends with a long letter that uses Smith’s ‘Venus Equilateral’ stories as a springboard for a mini-lecture on how scientific development really works. This latter is from a “Caleb Northrup”—is this Campbell?⁴
The issue closes with a Book Review by Anthony Boucher of Moon Up—Moon Down by John Alden Knight. This latter is about solunar theory, the idea that the position of  the sun, moon and tides affect fish feeding times, etc.⁵
There is no Analytical Laboratory in this issue.⁶  ●

It is worth getting this issue for the Moore, Leiber, Moore & Kuttner, and for Ley’s article.

_____________________

1. The ISFDB page for The Mutant’s Brother by Fritz Leiber shows one 1953 anthologisation before it appeared in a Leiber collection in 2002.

2. The ISFDB page for One-Way Trip by Anthony Boucher unsurprisingly shows it has only ever been reprinted in The Compleat Boucher, 1999. No surprise there.

3. From the University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections website:

In 1582 Pope Gregory ruled that this new calendar – thereafter called the Gregorian Calendar—should be brought into use. By that stage, the Julian Calendar had added ten days too many to the calendar, so Pope Gregory decreed that the day after the 4th of October 1582 should be the 15th of October 1582, thus correcting the error.
[. . .]
In Great Britain, the new calendar was adopted in September 1752. In order to deal with the discrepancy of days, which by now had grown to eleven, it was ordered that 2nd September 1752 would be immediately followed by 14th September 1752. This led to crowds of people on the streets demanding, ‘Give us back our 11 days!’ It also explains why our financial year begins on 6th April. The official start of the year used to be Lady Day (25th March), but the loss of eleven days in 1752 pushed this back to 5th April. Another skipped day in 1800 pushed it back again to 6th April.

It’s worth reading the whole page.

4. The Northrup letter sounds like Campbell’s “McCann” missives, and has no address. By the by, there is a “Sara Northrup Hubbard” mentioned in Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding.

5. Wikipedia’s page on Solunar Theory is here.

6. The Analytical Laboratory results for this issue appeared in the October issue:

Putting the Boucher in second place is just ridiculous, and once again shows that the readership is essentially ordering the stories by length, not quality.  ●

This magazine is still being published (as Analog Science Fiction and Fact)! Subscribe: Kindle UK, Kindle USA or physical & digital copies.

ISFDB link
Archive.org link

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Catherine Tarrant

Fiction:
Hunch • novelette by Clifford D. Simak –
Unthinking Cap • short story by John R. Pierce ∗
The Great Engine • novelette by A. E. van Vogt ∗∗
The Renegade • short story by Lester del Rey [as by Marion Henry] ∗∗∗
Gleeps • short story by P. Schuyler Miller –
Gather, Darkness! (Part 3 of 3) • serial by Fritz Leiber ∗∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by A. Williams (x3), Paul Orban (x3), Elton Fax (x3), Frank Kramer (x5)
So It’s Impossible— • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
The Analytical Laboratory: May 1943 • story ratings
In Times to Come
The World of 61 Cygni C • science essay by R. S. Richardson
Brass Tacks • letters

_____________________

Hunch by Clifford D. Simak has as its protagonist a man called Chambers, chairman of the Solar Control Board. He is blind and “sees” by telepathically sharing the sight of Hannibal, an enigmatic alien—although only when the latter isn’t dreaming of home.

Chambers meets Allen, head of the Solar Secret Service, and they discuss the developing problem of men going mad (or “batty” as this unsophisticated story occasionally describes it) in the various colonies of the solar system:

For years now there had been a breakdown of human efficiency. It had started gradually, a few incidents here, a few there. But it had spread, had progressed almost geometrically; had reached a point now where, unless something could be done about it, the Solar System’s economic and industrial fabric would go to pot for lack of men to run it and the power plants and laboratories, the mills, the domed cities, the communication system men had built on all the planets encircling the Sun would crumble into dust.
Men were better trained, better equipped mentally, more brilliant than ever before. Of that there was no question. They had to be. Hundreds of jobs demanded geniuses. And there were geniuses, thousands of them, more than ever before. Trouble was they didn’t stay geniuses. They went insane.  p. 11

The two men then speak about an asylum on one of the system’s asteroids, the Sanctuary, free of charge to those that need treatment. Little is known about this shadowy organisation, and Allen’s agents have not been able to gather any intelligence.
At this point the story cuts to various scenes that set up elements that appear later in the story: a socialite loses her alien jewels at a party but, after screaming about it, seems to ignore the matter; a Plutonian scientist called Kemp walks in on Johnny Gardner and finds he has gone insane—the man goes to Sanctuary; an archaeologist called Monk is thinking about a Martian translation he has completed and the information it reveals about a fifth planet when he gets a delivery. This latter package is the stolen asteroid jewels. He hears a screeching violin play when he opens the box and dashes the jewels against a cabinet. He gets a glimpse of something like a crippled fairy before it vanishes.
At this point in the story none of this makes any sense, but matters become clearer as the story plods on. It eventually becomes (spoiler) a tale about an alien threat to Earth from the former inhabitants of the fifth planet, who the Martians (a dead race of whom Hannibal is one) destroy, turning their planet into the asteroid belt. Some of the natives survive as jewels however, their “encysted” form, and later find their way to Sanctuary, using it as a front to brainwash Earthmen. This threat is later revealed by Kemp who is sent there along with Hannibal by Chambers.

The last part of the story (Kemp escapes from Sanctuary and raises the alarm but goes mad) involves a message to Chalmers saying that some people have accurate hunches, and that this is a new or returning instinct that is developing in the human race. What this has to do with the madness and alien jewels, etc., I have no idea, and it sounds like one of Campbell’s hobby horses randomly stuffed into the story.
In conclusion, this is a terrible, clunky piece that has too many ideas, all ploddingly explained, and which Simak struggles to marshal efficiently. It reads like a poor story from 1938, and what is perplexing is that other writers who were producing similar material (Bond, Cummings, Williams, Rocklynne, etc.) are mostly or entirely gone from the pages of Astounding. Was Campbell short of material? Was Simak a friend? All I know is that, based on this and an earlier story, Simak was a pretty poor writer at this point in his career.¹
I note in passing that the prose is as clunky as the story, and that there are two clumsy/ungrammatical sentences on the first page: “. . . brought about by Hannibal’s frequent thinking of the place” and “Visual communication the picturing of actualities, yes—”. Should this be “frequent thoughts” and “Visually communicating”? On the next page there is “Geniuses is our trouble” followed at the end of the same paragraph with “And geniuses are screwy”. Only one of these can be right. I know this is dialogue, but still. . . .
Unthinking Cap by John R. Pierce is a forgettable squib about a man extracted from the present and used as a test subject in the future. To reward him for his service in that time the liaison man allows him to take an artefact back with him. The item he chooses is a cap that, when you press the attached button, makes the wearer forget a remembered memory or current thought.

Once back in his own time he experiments with the device and, (spoiler) while thinking about the machine, he accidentally presses the button and forgets what it does. He presses the button again and forgets everything. This latter step (multiple memory loss) doesn’t make much sense.
There is a coda that implies that the liaison man knew this would be the outcome (and there is a “borogove” reference in the last line, which presumably means something).
There is the kernel of a good story here—what would you forget if you could, and would you?—but this version just doesn’t work.
The Great Engine by A. E. van Vogt is the first of the ‘Pendrake’ series and starts with him finding a strange engine that has fallen out of the sky in into the countryside. Pendrake examines the machine, and nearly loses his one remaining arm when he pokes a branch into the maw of the machine and is thrown up into the air by the force of the branch’s subsequent rotation. The branch remains in the machine spinning rapidly.

Pendrake subsequently recovers the machine to his house, and we get some backstory: it is 1948, there are no stories in the paper about its loss of the machine, and there is mention of a failed relationship with a neighbour (we find out later that this is his estranged wife).
The rest of the story runs along two tracks: the first details Pendrake’s attempt to use the machine, which involves replacing the branch with a metal rod and then commissioning a machine shop to build a clutch so he can use the machine to power an aircraft; the second involves his rapprochement with his wife, something that begins when he goes to the bank for a loan to build the clutch and discovers that she secretly transferred most of their properties and money to him after they separated.
Matters become more complicated when, after flying his aircraft for the first time (how he does this with one arm is not explained) he is held up by four men on landing, and who give him money to cover his expenses before flying the plane away. Pendrake goes to the police but gets nowhere, so he contacts an old friend. By the time the latter and an Air Force contact turn up at Pendrake’s house, he has had threats about his wife’s safety, so he says nothing. Pendrake then goes to her and explains what has happened; she suggests that, as the machine is obviously an atomic engine, they research the whereabouts of current atomic scientists.

At this point what has been a relatively intriguing story turns into something much less convincing. Pendrake burgles a scientist’s office and, acting on information found there, and equipped with a flesh mask and an artificial arm, he and his wife infiltrate an organisation looking for farm settlers. They are drugged during the application process and put on a spaceship to Venus. Pendrake, however, is injected in his artificial arm so he recovers quickly after the launch. As he looks around he sees several engines, and realises they are acting as anti-gravity drives. He soon has control of the ship.

This story is an enjoyable and intriguing read until the last part with its far-fetched idea of press-ganging people to Venus.
Possibly of note is the emotional state that Pendrake exhibits throughout the story (his estrangement from his wife is on his mind throughout, and he tries on more than one occasion to reconcile with her before being successful). This particular theme is something I haven’t noticed in van Vogt’s fiction so far, and I believe it is also a feature of a forthcoming story, The Storm (October 1943).
Lester del Rey’s impressive debut story The Faithful (Astounding, April 1938) was an ‘Uplift’ story² about intelligent dogs and gorillas in a post-apocalypse Earth: The Renegade revisits this theme:

Harvey Lane squatted just inside the door of the chief’s thatched hut, his outward attention divided between the chief’s laborious attempts to sew on a button belonging to Lane’s only pair of shorts and the life in the village itself. Outwardly, it was little different from that of any other inland African community, though the cleanliness and the absence of a constant confused babble were strange, as was the lack of yapping cur dogs underfoot. But to anyone else, the huge females busy at their gardening or making the crude artifacts possible with the material at hand, the playing young, and the bulky guards squatting in the lower branches around would have been distinctly not normal.
Lane was used to it. In eight years a man can become completely accustomed to anything, even the sight of some hundreds of gorillas busy at work that would normally be men’s. He knew every one of the hairy, heavily muscled apes out there, so well that he no longer saw their faces as ugly things, but as the individual countenances of friends and students.
Now he leaned further back, brushing against a muscular shoulder while one of the bulls in the hut flicked a fan back and forth to keep the flies off his hairless hide until the chief finished the sewing and he could put on his tattered shorts again.
Ajub, the chief, had been thinking; now he picked up the conversation again, his voice thick and slow, and the consonants sometimes distorted; but his speech in the English for which they had so gladly exchanged their own primitive, [inexpressive] tongue was no worse than could be found in parts of the larger man-cities. “It was about fifty years ago, I think, when we decided to come here and build a village away from all the blacks; we’d been trying to learn from them before that for maybe a hundred years, but all they showed for us was hatred, fear, and a desire to kill us and eat us, so we gave it up as hopeless; the harder we tried, the more afraid of us they became. And the one white man we’d seen before you came, hadn’t been exactly friendly; he killed several of our tribe before we were forced to eliminate him and his group. Beyond that, our memory and our poor speech give no clue.”  p. 87-88

There is then some backstory about Lane’s history, his dissolute life in civilisation, and how he was lost in the jungle until he stumbled upon the uplifted apes. They took him back to their village and nursed him back to health. Little Tama, one of the younger apes, interupts his reverie and comes with news of books he has found in a drifting canoe. Lane goes to inspect the canoe and finds various items including a woman’s shoe. This disturbs Lane’s equilibrium, and memories of human life crash down on him. He gets in the canoe and leaves, much to Little Tama’s anguish.

The subsequent trip downriver is fraught with danger and, even though Lane avoids various hazards, he is almost killed when pursued by three canoes full of spear throwing black men. Only the intervention of an unseen group saves him, but during the battle he is knocked unconscious.
He eventually comes around to find himself in civilization, where an elderly white woman is nursing him. She tells him that he has had a fever for a week. Later, he overhears the woman and a man speaking about him, and that he has been missing for eight years and has been declared legally dead. At the end of their discussion Lane discovers he has revealed the secret of the apes’ village during his fever, and that an expedition is setting off to hunt and trap the apes. Lane dresses and leaves with the intention of warning the tribe, but soon realises he will find it difficult to get back unaided. Just as he is beginning to despair, Ajub appears from the undergrowth. The ape knows all about the expedition, and has sent one of the other gorillas home with a warning. He also reveals that apes from the tribe have watched over him since he left, and that they were the ones that saved him in the canoe attack.

Ajub offers to take Lane back home—the ape’s intention is to take him to his sick quarters—only to have Lane tell him that his home is to the north, where the tribe live.
This has a relatively slight plot but it is a smartly put together one and, if you like animal stories, or uplift stories where animals manifest humanity’s better virtues, then you’ll like this.
Gleeps by P. Schuyler Miller starts with a couple of pages of waffle where the narrator describes (at over much length) an alien called Gleeps:

It seems there were two Martians, Xnpqrdt and Tdrqpnx. Or maybe it was two Venusians—or even two Irishmen. You know how the thing goes as well as I do.
So these two Martians meet on a street somewhere—let’s say it was on Main Street in Plnth—and Tdrqpnx says to Xnpqrdt: “Who was that cysystk I seen you with last night?”
And Xnpqrdt—if it was Xnpqrdt—turns bright pea-green and answers: “That was no cysystk—that was Gleeps.”  p. 99

The rest of the story involves the narrator, who is an astrogator joining a tramp liner/spaceship for a cruise. He meets an old Martian friend on his arrival at the ship and promptly gets drunk with him (as you would when you are away to take off). He then gets in to trouble when he appears drunk in front of the captain with the calculations for the warp jump.

When the captain eventually engages the warp drive it causes a series of incomprehensible events, naked blondes, gun fights, etc., which the narrator then spends the last two or three pages explaining (apparently this is all caused by Gleeps, who can change shape).
This is all told in an irritatingly juvenile voice, and is structurally a mess. It is absolutely awful, and if I could give it negative stars I would.
Gather, Darkness! by Fritz Leiber ended last issue with the Goniface, the Archpriest of the fake religion that rules a future Earth, planning a Revival to quell the rioting fomented by the Witchcraft, a resistance movement dedicated to the church’s overthrow. This instalment begins with a restive crowd, pacified with parasympathetic rays, watching the churchmen arrive. For the first time in the novel we get a detailed idea of the extent and structures of the church:

The high doors of the Cathedral swung outward, and there issued forth, four abreast, a procession which incarnated the pomp and power of the Hierarchy. First two high-ranking priests, bearing censers. Then a contingent of black-robed deacons. Next, a column of First Circle priests, whose scarlet robes were without emblazonment. Tall, young men, and handsome. Their shaven heads imparted a strange unearthliness to their beauty. It was easy for their relatives in the crowd to forget—or almost forget—that these young demigods had ever been Commoners.
Following them, the higher circles. The crowd recognized them by their emblazonments, although they did not know the true significance of those emblazonments, thinking them mystic symbols confirming the frightening supernatural powers of their wearers.
Hand giving a blessing and at the same time grasping a stylus—emblazonment of the Second Circle. The circle of pastoral priests, clerks, minor confessors, minor technicians, minor everything else.
Diagram in silver and gold of the intertwined nervous and circulatory system—“the little bush,” the Commoners called it—emblazonment of the Third Circle of doctors, confessors, hypnotists and psychiatrists.
Lightning-and-coil—the insignia of the Fourth Circle. Very competent looking, clear-eyed priests, these. They were the technicians, engineers, and lesser managers who kept the scientific heart of the Hierarchy ticking. From this circle the ranks of the Seventh and the Apex were largely recruited.
And all the while, as they marched in stateliness and dignity from the Cathedral, circling the space the deacons had kept clear, before drawing up in ranks around the reviewing stand, the music strengthened and swelled, the original somberness brightened with the skirling of flutes and the clash of cymbals, enriched with the throaty tones of woodwinds and strings, as if the Great God were proceeding with the creation, and sun and stars and lush green grass were showing forth.
Atomic probe entwined by a reading tape—the Commoners thought it a rod and serpent— the Fifth Circle of research scientists, scholars, historians and professional artists. At this point the size of the contingents decreased sharply.
Human brain encircled by stylized equations in psycho-sociology—the Sixth Circle. These were the shrewd ones, the knowing ones. Experts in propaganda and social control. Research psychologists and psychiatrists.
Clenched fist with lines of force radiating from it—and that meant the same thing in any symbols. Power. The Seventh Circle of supervisors, major executives, general managers.
And as the priests marched, as the music grew ever more rich and warm and dazzling—as if it were climbing like the sun to the top of the sky—they seemed to tread under their feet all evil, all darkness, all rebellion, any and everything that presumed to lift its head against the Hierarchy.  p. 121-122

After this impressive arrival matters start to spiral out of control. First, there is the puzzling smell of goat and then, when the Great God bends over the crowd to bestow his manna upon the masses:

Slowly the Gargantuan hands stretched out over the Square, palms upward, in a gesture of tital generosity.
Then, from the right hand, ten thousand tiny fountains suddenly sprayed, while from the left cascaded down a rain of crusty flakes and tiny cubes.
A greedy, happy, excited, quite involuntary cry rose from the crowd, as the food and drink began to sprinkle them.
One second. Two. Three. And then the cry changed abruptly to a strangled spewing, and there swept through the massed ranks of the priests and across the reviewing stand a hideous stench that seemed compounded equally of putrid meat, rancid butter, moldy bread, vinegar and embalming fluid.
As from one giant throat, the crowd gargled, retched and spat. And still the noisome rain and noxious snow continued irrevocably to fall, drenching them, plastering them. Hands were ducked, hoods-pulled up. Those who had spread sheets crowded under them, while a few of those who had held up bowls now inverted them and clapped them on their heads. And still the dreadful stuff rained down, so thickly that the farther side of the Square was murkily obscured.
Snarls then, and angry cries. First a few, then more. Here and there the fringes of the crowd surged forward against the double line of deacons.  p. 124-125

After this there is rioting, and the priests who intervene to help the deacons find their repulsion fields have been reversed and they all clump together. Angels take to the sky but one crashes into the crowd, heralding the arrival of their Witchcraft equivalents.

At one point during the turmoil Brother Jarles realises that the voice of the Archpriest Sercival, leader of the Hierarchy’s Fanatic faction, is the same as the one he heard at the Coven—the hard-liner Sercival is Asomodeus, leader of the Witchcraft! Jarles fires his wrath-ray at him.
This chapter is an excellent set piece (albeit one that gets off to a slow start) but is spoiled a little when Goniface interrogates the dying Sercival, his questions more explanations of many of the story’s recent events, the way they spoiled the food, the pain in his hand during a previous interrogation of witches, etc., etc.
At the end of this cross-examination Sercival/Asomodeus dies.
The rest of this instalment (after a semi-comedic chapter where Mother Jujy finds an exhausted Dickon in the tunnels and feeds him) revolves around the (spoiler) telepathic influencing/hypnotising of Jarles and Goniface via their recently born familiars. The first of these is described in another long chapter where Jarles undergoes a mental struggle, sees visions, etc., that cause him to revert to his earlier self.

Later on in the story the same subliminal telepathic contact is used on Goniface while he is at the Web Center supervising operations against the Witchcraft. As the battle ebbs and flows he enters a heightened state of awareness, and comes to the conclusion that the Hierarchy is at its peak and will soon start to fail. He daydreams about his childhood and starts hearing a phrase “Come back, Knowles Satrick” (his former name). He then gets a message from one of his operatives that his voice has been heard in his apartments, so he leaves to investigate.
On his arrival there Goniface finds Naurya—along with the ghosts of all the people he murdered on his journey to the top of the Hierarchy. When he gets another message from the centre about the battle, he tells them to stop all counter attacks until tomorrow—the Witchcraft have finally managed to use these induced visions to manipulate him into making a fatal error in the fight against them.
Apart from moving the story on this chapter provides a convincing description of Goniface’s life, an effective account that creates a portrait of fully realised character. It is quite unlike the usual material you normally find in Astounding.
There are a couple of other points of interest in this last instalment. The first occurs between the chapters where Jarles and Goniface are telepathically manipulated by their familiars, where Jarles and others go to rescue the Black Man and the rest of the witches. This scene has a light-sabre (wrath ray) duel between The Black Man and Cousin Deth:

A door across the corridor opened and through it stepped Cousin Deth. In the next moment he proved Goniface’s wisdom in having chosen him as chief agent in matters requiring quick thinking. With almost incredible swiftness he recognized the situation and directed his wrath rod at the Black Man and Jarles.
But a familiar’s reactions are swifter than a man’s. In a blur of movement Dickon scuttled at him across the floor.
Deth’s sallow face was contorted suddenly with a fear that had only been there once before—when he fled panic-stricken from the haunted house.
“The thing in the hole!” he cried hollowly. “The spider!”
A moment more and he had realized his misapprehension, had regained control of himself, as the violet needle of his wrath ray was swinging down at Dickon.
But the Black Man had gained time to act. His own wrath ray lashed out, swished into that of Cousin Deth’s.
Since the two rays were mutually impenetrable, unable to cross through each other, Deth’s was fended off from Dickon.
Like two ancient swordsmen, then, the warlock and the deacon dueled together. Their weapons were two endless blades of violet incandescence, but their tactics were those of sabreurs—feint, cut, parry, swift riposte. Ceiling, walls, and floor were traced with redly glowing curlicues. Paralyzed deacons, seeming like spectators frozen in amazement, were burned down where they stood or stooped or sat.  p. 140-141

This Star Wars-esque light sabre duel may have been common in the pulps of this time, but it is the first one I have come across, and I wondered if this is where George Lucas got the idea for his movie.
The other thing I found interesting occurs in the last (washup) chapter. I’ve previously mentioned a couple of similarities between Leiber’s novel and van Vogt’s work, and I think that the ending may be another example. In this section Leiber opens out the story onto a much larger canvas: when a space ship arrives from Luciferopolis, the angels it discharges are black, and they are on the side of the Witchcraft. They come from colonies on Venus and Mars, and we learn that it was an interplanetary war that caused the Blasted Heath and almost destroyed the Golden Age. A story that has, until now, mostly played out in the capital of the Hierarchy suddenly spans the Solar System! (cf. “This is the race that will rule the Sevagram!”—the bootstrapping last line from van Vogt’s The Weapon Makers.)

The final scene of the novel describes the destruction of the Great God’s statue, and its head falling into the street (a missed opportunity for a great illustration).
This is a very good novel, and highly entertaining.³ I thought it better than Conjure Wife, and think it’s possibly one of the best things I’ve read in Astounding so far. If you haven’t read this yet I recommend that you do so.

The Cover, as ever in this period, is by William Timmins—one of his average efforts I think (it is a bit muddy for my taste). My favourites among this issue’s Interior artwork are two of the illustrations by A. Williams for the Simak story, and the third of Elton Fax’s illustrations for the van Vogt: this latter looks very much like something John Schoenherr could have produced years later. Paul Orban’s work is okay (I liked the first of his for the del Rey) but I’m beginning to find Kramer’s work lacking—it seems a little crude and is not improving unlike, say, Kolliker, who seems to have upped his game, as shown by recent work here and Unknown.
So It’s Impossible— by John W. Campbell, Jr. is a short science article about the development of a twenty million volt betatron (this produces very high energy electrons that are used in the likes of X-ray machines etc.) by Donald Kerst at the University of Illinois.⁴
The Analytical Laboratory: May 1943 was discussed in the review of that issue.⁵
In Times to Come discusses C. L. Moore’s new novel (a two-part serial) at some length:

The World of 61 Cygni C by R. S. Richardson starts off with the news that a planet has been found in the system of 61 Cygni C. There then follows half a dozen pages of material on telescope observations using micrometers that I found impenetrable (I even looked on the web for explanations but didn’t find much help) so I jumped to the section discussing the nature of the newly discovered planet. When I got to the part where its stated density was substantially different to anything then known I checked Wikipedia to find that modern observations have disproved the existence of a planet in that system—so an out of date article as well as a mostly unreadable one.⁶

Brass Tacks has a number of interesting letters this month. Robert C. Lee-Hanna, Washington, D. C., writes praising Mimsy Were the Borogoves and asking for a sequel based on the third verse of Jabberwocky. Frank Hobby, San Francisco, CA, asks why Campbell is referred to as “Don A. Stuart” in Boucher’s Rocket to the Morgue, and Campbell reveals that it is his pen name (was this the first release of this information to the wider SF public?) C. Hidley (a serviceman, so the magazine doesn’t print an address) says he used to preserve all his magazines with “maniacal care”, but his current footlocker can barely hold four issues—so he removes and keeps only the best material. That said, he finishes with this:

An issue that could remain intact after a sample of this new routine must really be something; “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” “Man in the Moon,” and the two serials accomplished that feat for their issue—it was really superior with only one blank. The covers are good by this new man and the pix still float along in old, bad fashion. I also saved “No Graven Image,” “The Hat Trick,” Bok’s poem and the editorials, and was rather shocked to omit “Wet Magic” and “The Witch” [all from the February 1943 issue of Unknown Worlds,⁷ Astounding’s companion magazine] from my new portfolio. Speaking of the master—Bok, of course—I should like to enter one more vote for his recent novel [in the December 1943 issue of Unknown Worlds⁷], an item not in his usual and best style, but mighty acceptable—even if it did not fit the mood of the mag. And his illustrations should prove to you that here is an artist who works to the meaning of the mag; why not drop the barrier and let Hannes in—and let the majority of the others out.  p. 115

There is also a letter from Harold T. Kay of London, which Campbell prefaces with the comment “Science-fiction under difficulties”:

This letter is taking a lot on trust, I know. Maybe you no longer hold the old office, maybe there is not even a magazine, but still, here is a word of greeting from England for you. That and a request that you would slip in ASF a note that any of the old gang, especially SFA members who get posted in or near Westminster, will be very welcome if they get in touch with me.
When taking part in “the next war,” one finds little time for relaxation, and, in any case, the only new mags that we see are the slashed British editions which Atlas produces now and then. For which much thanks.
“Barrier” I remember as a good idea, but do I miss the serials!
Remember our old squabbles over the “purpose of SF”? Personally l am sure that all that racket, stories, discussions, howls—even the Mitchelists [Michelists?], have had some value. They helped to give me an idea of what the world could be like, and even of how to change society to achieve that state.
You may have noticed that in our own mad way we are starting doing things over here already. As you were so fond of saying in editorials, SF is steadily becoming fact.
Yours for Union Now and damnation to all Huns of all colors.  p. 115

The column ends with a couple of positive comments about the new size from Bill Stoy of New York, and Harold Rogovin, also from New York. Rogovin has this about the format change:

To the improvement in make-up of the large size—which was its only virtue—you have added this extra attraction—small size! I hope you never go back to the old inconvenient large size: it was annoying to carry around, annoying to hold in your hand and read, annoying because of the terrific amount of wasted paper—each letter was a mile away from its neighbor, the borders were enormous, and there was a gigantic amount of blank space. It was also hard to file away in a bookcase or anywhere else, and the pages, being larger, ripped more easily.
This new issue is simply a masterpiece! Swell make-up, convenient small size, good stories, and no paper waste.  p. 117

Rogovin also puts the boot into Raymond F. Jones’ story Pacer:

Why is it that some people, such as the author of this mass of drivel, are permitted to continue living? Perhaps the most nauseating part of it is the ridiculous attempt to depict the father-son relationship, in a most unnatural and inconceivable manner. For eighteen years the son is a human being, in two years of training he becomes a military moron, and becomes human again after two minutes of tension. Believable, yes? NO! Not only that, but it was, to say the least, slightly overdone, and also rather hackneyed.
In addition, the plot itself was as vile a costume western as I ever had the misfortune of glancing over. I couldn’t bear it sufficiently to be able to read it thoroughly; just enough so that I could tell you what I thought of it.  p. 117

Stoy and Rogovin’s letters are almost mirror images of each other: they both like the new format and Leiber’s Gather, Darkness!, and both disliked Jones’ Pacer.

This would be a pretty weak issue if it wasn’t for Leiber’s serial.  ●

_____________________

1. Simak appeared in the March 1943 Astounding with Shadow of Life, another story involving inimical aliens that is mediocre at best. Rim of the Deep appeared in the May 1940 Astounding and is awful. Rule 18 in the July 1938 Astounding is the one good early Simak story I’ve read so far.
Whatever Campbell saw in Simak it would soon pay off: in 1944 the first four ‘City’ stories would appear.

2. Lester del Rey’s The Faithful is reviewed here.

3. Given that Leiber’s novel has a tyranny/resistance story, light sabre duels, a comedy witch, and familiars (house-elves) you rather wonder why Hollywood hasn’t snapped up the rights.

4. The Wikipedia page for the Betatron.

5. The Analytical Laboratory results for this issue appeared in September:

I think the del Rey (Henry) story should have ranked higher than the Simak and van Vogt ones.

6. The Wikipedia page for 61 Cygni C.

7. The February 1943 issue of Unknown Worlds is reviewed here; the December 1942 issue is reviewed here.  ●

ISFDB link
Archive.org link

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Catherine Tarrant

Fiction:
The World Is Mine • novelette by Henry Kuttner [as by Lewis Padgett] ∗∗∗
Pelagic Spark • short story by Anthony Boucher ∗∗∗
Competition • novelette by E. Mayne Hull ∗∗
Whom the Gods Love • short story by Lester del Rey ∗∗∗
Calling the Empress • novelette by George O. Smith ∗∗
Sanctuary • short story by Anthony Boucher [as by H. H. Holmes] ∗
Gather, Darkness! (Part 2 of 3) • serial by Fritz Leiber ∗∗∗+

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by A. Williams (x8), William Kolliker (x2), Paul Orban (x2), Elton Fax (x2), Frank Kramer (x3)
Long Arm of Solar Law • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
The Analytical Laboratory: March 1943 & April 1943
Sea of Mystery • science essay by Willy Ley
Brass Tacks • letters

_____________________

The World Is Mine by Henry Kuttner is the second of his ‘Gallegher’ stories, and starts with what appears to be three talking rabbits waking the hungover scientist from his sleep. He finds he isn’t imagining them (his visiting grandfather tells him they arrived via a time machine Gallegher built last night while drunk) and soon learns that they are not rabbits but Lybblas. The subsequent exchanges have an enchanting, almost Alice-in-Wonderland feel:¹

“You’re not—human? I mean—we’re not going to evolve into you?”
“No,” said the fattest Lybbla complacently, “it would take thousands of years for you to evolve into the dominant species. We’re from Mars.”
“Mars—the future. Oh. You—talk English.”
“There are Earth people on Mars in our day. Why not? We read English, talk the lingo, know everything.”
Gallegher muttered under his breath. “And you’re the dominant species on Mars?”
“Well, not exactly,” a Lybbla hesitated. “Not all Mars.”
“Not even half of Mars,” said another.
“Just Koordy Valley,” the third announced. “But Koordy Valley is the center of the Universe. Very highly civilized. We have books. About Earth and so on. We’re going to conquer Earth, by the way.”
“Are you?” Gallegher said blankly.
“Yes. We couldn’t in our own time, you know, because Earth people wouldn’t let us, but now it’ll be easy. You’ll all be our slaves,” the Lybbla said happily. He was about eleven inches tall.
“You got any weapons?” Grandpa asked.
“We don’t need ’em. We’re clever. We know everything. Our memories are capacious as anything. We can build disintegrator guns, heat rays, spaceships—”
“No, we can’t,” another Lybbla countered. “We haven’t any fingers.” That was true. They had furry mittens, fairly useless, Gallegher thought.
“Well,” said the first Lybbla, “we’ll get Earth people to build us some weapons.”
Grandpa downed a shot of whiskey and shuddered. “Do these things happen all the time around here?” he wanted to know. “I’d heard you were a big-shot scientist, but I figured scientists made atom-smashers and stuff like that. What good’s a time machine?”
“It brought us,” a Lybbla said. “Oh, happy day for Earth.”
“That,” Gallegher told him, “is a matter of opinion. Before you get around to sending an ultimatum to Washington, would you care for a spot of refreshment? A saucer of milk or something?”
“We’re not animals!“ the fattest Lybbla said. “We drink out of cups, we do.”
Gallegher brought three cups, heated some milk, and poured. After a brief hesitation, he put the cups on the floor. The tables were all far too high for the small creatures. The Lybblas, piping, “Thank you,” politely, seized the cups between their hind feet and began to lap up the milk with long pink tongues.
“Good,” one said.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” cautioned the fattest Lybbla, who seemed to be the leader.  p. 10-11

Gallegher continues to interrogate the Lybblas, and learns about their world and their advanced technology, and how they are familiar with the technical aspects of their society:

“We read everything. Technical books on science as well as novels. How disintegrators are made and so on. We’ll tell you how to make weapons for us.”
“Thanks. That sort of literature is open to the public?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“I should think it would be dangerous.”
“So should I,” the fat Lybbla said thoughtfully, “but it isn’t, somehow.”
Gallegher pondered. “Could you tell me how to make a heat ray, for example?”
“Yes,” was the excited reply, “and then we’d destroy the big cities and capture—”
“I know. Pretty girls and hold them for ransom. Why?”
“We know what’s what,” a Lybbla said shrewdly. “We read books, we do.” He spilled his cup, looked at the puddle of milk, and let his ears droop disconsolately.
The other two Lybblas hastily patted him on the back. “Don’t cry,” the biggest one urged.
“I gotta,” the Lybbla said. “It’s in the books.”
“You have it backward. You don’t cry over spilt milk.”
“Do. Will,” said the recalcitrant Lybbla, and began to weep.
Gallegher brought him more milk. “About this heat ray,” he said. “Just how—”
“Simple,” the fat Lybbla said, and explained.  p. 12-13

Gallegher promptly builds the device which, when tested, burns a hole in the door. The rabbits note that it can also be used to kill people, like what happened to the corpse in the back garden. Gallegher inwardly digests this information, and then he and the Lybblas go outside and look at the corpse of an elderly bearded man with a heat ray hole in his chest. The police turn up at almost the same time (the neighbours in the surrounding high-rises have noticed the body), and arrest Gallegher. Before this, his attempt to toss the heat ray gun into the bushes is seen by a corrupt cop called Cantrell, who pockets the device, and uses it to blackmail Gallegher into keeping silent about the invention.
Most of the rest of the story details Gallegher’s legal troubles. We eventually find that the body is an older version of Gallegher himself—or rather the bodies are older versions of Gallegher’s, as every time there is a key event in the story one body disappears and a different one appears in the garden (there is a multiple time-lines explanation).
After the first body vanishes, the police release Gallegher but, when a second body turns up, he has to get a lawyer. To get the money to pay for him, Gallegher builds another invention, a device that can transfer knowledge or skills from one person to another.

Cantrell the cop finds out about this invention and, to further his megalomaniacal plans, demands that Gallegher use the device to transfer multiple abilities to him. This last section provides the story’s amusing but logically inconsistent dénouement (and one which conflates skills or knowledge with compulsion—as part of the transfer (spoiler) Cantrell unwittingly learns the skills of a high-dive circus act and subsequently jumps out of a plane to his death).
This story has an excellent start with its back and forth between Gallegher and the Lybblas, but it turns into a more routine albeit inventive story for its remainder. It is a pity about the weak ending but the talking bunnies are a delight (they pop up throughout to demand milk and cookies, and to proclaim “The World is Ours”). Enjoyable but flawed.
Pelagic Spark by Anthony Boucher starts with a clever if contrived scene where fellow SF writer L. Sprague de Camp is talking to his wife Catherine about Nostradamus’s prophecies, and also about McCann (Campbell’s alter-ego) and Boucher’s opinions on that subject. He then writes his own nonsense prophecy to finish off one of his articles:

“Every man his own Nostradamus, that’s my motto,” he went on. “I am, personally, every bit as much a prophet as Mike ever was. And I’m going to prove it. I’ve just thought of the perfect tag for my debunking article.” His wife looked expectant.
“I’m going to close with an original de Camp prophecy, which will make just as much sense as any of Mike’s, with a damned sight better meter and grammar. Listen:
.
“Pelagic young spark of the East
Shall plot to subvert the Blue Beast,
But he’ll dangle on high
When the Ram’s in the sky,
And the Cat shall throw dice at the feast!”  p. 32

He adds, sarcastically, that several hundred years in the future it will no doubt be claimed that it has come true.
The story then skips forward in time to an army sergeant in the jungle tearing the article out of a magazine. When he is later captured Japanese soldiers question him about the prophecy, and it eventually ends up with Hirohito’s astrologer. Next stop for the prophecy is a victorious Hitler in 1951 (who has by this time crushed Japan), before we end up at the main part of the story which takes place in 2045. A plot to assassinate the Hitler XVI during a visit to Java then plays out, and satisfies the predictions.

Although most of the prophecy can ultimately be mapped against various events, the last line has such a convoluted explanation that this can’t be easily done. The conclusion by the story’s narrator, therefore, is that his great-grandfather de Camp must have been a prophet!
This is a clever if somewhat contrived piece, and amusingly in-jokey too.
Competition by E. Mayne Hull is the second of her ‘Artur Blord’ series. In this one a wealthy and powerful businessman blackmails a kidnapped secretary and plants her into Blord’s organisation. She is to help organise Blord’s kidnap, or will die from a seven-day poison whose only antidote belongs to her abductor.
These events all takes place on the planet of Delfi II, in the Ridge Stars system. One other exotic element hinted at early in the story is an alien being that lives on Delfi I:

The dark Castle of Pleasure stood on the Mountain of Eternal Night on the dead moon that was the companion planet of Delfi II. Remnant of a forgotten civilization, its scores of towers pierced the heavens like gigantic swords. No man had ever delved into all its labyrinthian depths, for men entered that antique place only by permission of the one living relict of its long-dead builders, by the permission of the Skal thing.  p. 55

Most of the story concerns the shenanigans involving the planted secretary and Blord’s kidnap (Blord is entirely aware of the intrigue and plotting, and the reason for it—which is a competitive tender for a space drive that his company looks like winning). In the final section he decides he will allow himself to be kidnapped after getting his doctor to do some mental preconditioning that will help him withstand any hostile questioning.

After Blord is drugged by his secretary he is taken to the Castle of Pleasure. There he is briefly mind-probed by the alien Skal but finds, during a discussion with the beast, that he cannot buy its loyalty. He then deals with the men who have abducted him and ultimately agrees to joint ownership of his drive—providing they give him all their inferior spaceship drive patents and designs in return. Needless to say (spoiler) his drive, which doesn’t actually exist, is then developed from all of theirs.
This is the second story in which Blord has shown himself to be too clever by half, and it all feels somewhat contrived. That said, I thought it okay story: it was only a day or two later that I realised that the Ridge Stars, alien planets, the Skal, and all the rest of it is only van Vogtian stage-dressing for a rather slight tale.
Whom the Gods Love by Lester del Rey reads like a mainstream story but starts off with a tantalising hook:

At first glance the plane appeared normal enough, though there was no reason for its presence on the little rocky beach of the islet. But a second inspection would have shown the wreckage that had been an undercarriage and the rows of holes that crisscrossed its sides. Forward, the engine seemed unharmed, but the propeller had shredded itself against a rock in landing, and one wing flopped slowly up and down in the brisk breeze that was blowing, threatening to break completely away with each movement. Except for the creak and groan of the wing, the island was as silent as the dead man inside the plane.
Then the sun crept up a little higher over the horizon, throwing back the shadows that had concealed the figure of a second man who lay sprawled out limply on the sand, still in the position his body had taken when he made the last-second leap. In a few places, ripped sections of his uniform showed the mark of passing bullets, and blood had spilled out of a half-inch crease in his shoulder. But somehow he had escaped all serious injuries except one; centered in his forehead, a small neat hole showed, its edges a mottle of blue and reddish brown, with a trickle of dried blood spilling down over his nose and winding itself into a half mustache over his lip. There was no mark to show that bullet had gone on through the back of his head.
Now, as some warmth crept down to the islet from the rising sun, the seemingly dead figure stirred and groaned softly, one hand groping up toward the hole in his forehead. Uncertainly, he thrust a finger into the hole, then withdrew it at the flood of pain that followed the motion. For minutes he lay there, feeling the ebb and flow of the great forces that were all around him, sensing their ceaseless beat with the shadow of curiosity.  p. 61

These “great forces” that have brought the man to life also give him other powers: later, he partially repairs the skin damage to the plane, removes the engine, and alters the undamaged wing so it too can flap. He then gets into the aircraft and flies away. A striking image.
The rest of story is, on one level, a routine war adventure, but one that involves a powerful alien entity. When he engages a group of enemy aircraft after being attacked (he is, at the time of the attack, floating inside the stationary aircraft asleep), he finds he is out of ammunition, so summons blue light to gather at the tips of his guns. These beads of energy then fly off, acting like particularly destructive bullets. He then finds a Japanese fleet and wreaks havoc with much larger droplets of the blue light.

When he finally comes upon an Allied air base memories and pain overwhelm him—he still has the bullet in his brain, so repairs the cleft it has made and forces the slug out of his head. At this point he becomes his old self again, and bales out of the (by now useless) aircraft.
This isn’t an entirely successful piece—the story pretty much just stops at the end—but it is an interesting one for its mature, mainstream voice and lack of dated dialogue and SF hardware. It is also quite unlike the other stories in the magazine. Taken together with his début piece, it makes me think that if del Rey had wanted to he could have become a crossover writer like John Wyndham or John Christopher.
Calling the Empress by George O. Smith is the second in the ‘Venus Equilateral’ series about the space station/communications centre. In this one Channing, the director of the station, gets an urgent request to try to contact a spaceship that has just launched from Mars to Venus but will be quarantined if it arrives there, which will ruin its perishable cargo. Contacting a spaceship in transit has never been attempted before, and the story tells of their efforts to point the station’s communication beams at it while it is millions of miles away, even though it isn’t equipped to pick up the signals!

They chip away at the problem, which involves building a machine to swing their beam to match the path of the spaceship, etc. Eventually, (spoiler) they send Morse code on the ship’s meteor detection wavelength, causing some very odd changes to its flight path. When the spaceship crew realise it is a signal they find that the only person on board who can understand Morse is one of the passengers, a thirteen year old boy!

This is a very dryly written and sometimes rather dull piece, an archetypal Science Discussions story (i.e. one with rivets). It has too many passages like this:

Jim, the beam-control man, sat down and lighted a cigarette. Freddy let his flitter coast free. And the generators that fed the powerful transmitter came whining to a stop. But there was no sleep for Don and Walt. They kept awake to supervise the work, and to help in hooking up the phase-splitting circuit that would throw out-of-phase radio frequency into the director-elements to swing the beam.
Then once again the circuits were set up. Freddy found the position again and began to hold it. The concentric beam hurled out again, and as the phaseshift passed from element to element, the beam swept through an infinitesimal arc that covered thousands of miles of space by the time the beam reached the position occupied by the Empress of Kolain.
Like a painter, the beam painted in a swipe a few hundred miles wide and swept back and forth, each sweep progressing ahead of the stripe before by less than its width. It reached the end of its arbitrary wall and swept back to the beginning again, covering space as before. Here was no slow, irregular swing of mechanical reflector, this was the electronically controlled wavering of a stable antenna.  p. 81

I found this a bit of a struggle to get through, but if you can persist it’s an okay story I guess.
Sanctuary by Anthony Boucher has an American man in Paris at the start of WWII deciding to make his way out of the country. On his way an undersecretary in the Foreign department asks him to talk to a Dr Palgrave about his time theories.
At the doctor’s villa, surprisingly, he finds himself not only having dinner with Palgrave but with the head of the local Gestapo.

During their meal, the three talk about various things, including a story about a black-faced ghost who appeared at the house in 1937 and stayed for six weeks. The colonel leaves, and the narrator speaks to Palgrave about his time theory work—until, that is, he gets annoyed by Palgrave’s lack of patriotism. The scientist is not interested “in the affairs of men.”
When the pair retire to have coffee they are interrupted by German soldiers looking for an British commando from a group that have landed nearby. Then, after the soldiers have left, they are then interrupted by the commando himself. When the Germans come back Palgrave hides the commando by sending back in time.
There is another wrinkle or two to the story but this is an unlikely and contrived piece (spoiler: the commando is the black-faced ghost but, after six weeks in the past he returns looking completely different, so they tell the Germans he is another American guest).
Boucher’s other story in this issue also mentions the war: did people really want to read about this stuff in their fiction magazines as well as hearing about it everywhere else?
Gather, Darkness! by Fritz Leiber continues the its tale of a future Earth ruled by a fake religion set up by scientists many years before. It starts with Goniface, the leader of the ruling Hierarchy Council, revealing some of his back story in a dream (he is the child of a priest and a fallen sister, and entered the priesthood illegitimately, attempting to kill his half-sister, Sharlson Naurya to keep his secret). When he wakes he thinks he sees a familiar, and later notices a spot of blood on his sheets.

The Black Man meantime tails Brother Jarles, watching him from the roofs as the latter walks towards a rendezvous point: Jarles has decided to join the Witchcraft (who oppose to the ruling Hierarchy). Both are caught, the Black Man ambushed by an “Angel”, a drone like vehicle that is piloted by a priest. Jarles later goes to Brother Dhomas for brain-washing.
While Dhomas works on Jarles, the Black Man is telepathically contacted by his familiar Dickon, who has been searching the Hierarchy building for him. The familiar is almost exhausted, and needs to feed. The Black Man tells it what to do to scare away the two superstitious priests guarding him. After doing so, Dickon joins him:

The Black Man heard Dickon pattering toward the bed. Over the edge appeared a red-furred paw, whose suctorial palm was edged by five sharpclawed fingers. Slowly and laboriously now, for the familiar had suddenly come to the end of its strength—the Black Man could sense dazed exhaustion in the quality of the vague telepathic impulses—the little creature pulled itself up into view.
Like a spider monkey it was, but with a much smaller torso and even skinnier. Downy, reddish fur covered what seemed the merest outline or sketch of an animal—a tracery of pipestem bones and ribbonlike muscles. The incarnation of fragile nimbleness, though at the moment sluggish with exhaustion. The head was more like a lemur’s with large, peering eyes, now filmed and groggy.
A wraithlike, elfish thing.
But for the Black Man, the sight of it woke a pang of deep affection and kinship. He knew why its reddish fur was the same shade as his own hair, why its high-foreheaded, noseless face looked like a caricature or odd simplification of his own. He knew it, loved it, as his brother. More than his brother. Flesh of his flesh.
He welcomed it as it crept feebly to his side and applied its strange mouth to his skin. And as he felt the suction and faint pricking, and knew it was drawing fresh blood from him and simultaneously discharging vitiated blood into his venous capillaries, he experienced a dreamy gratification and relief.
“Drink deep, little brother,” he thought.  p. 128

Dickon then leaves carrying a message from the Black Man to the Witchcraft.
The rest of the story tells of Jarles betrayal of the Witchcraft at a coven meeting, where many witches are arrested; Asomodeus, their leader, only just escapes using an angel-like device next to him.
Goniface then stages a coup at the Apex Council meeting, and a rival priest called Frejeris is excommunicated for his resistance (this involves having all his senses shut off). The captured witches are brought in and questioned, and Goniface experiences the same terrible pain as them. News of rioting reaches the Council, and Goniface suggests a Grand Revival, a religious festival cum proproganda event to appease the masses.

The latter section drags somewhat and so does the next one, which involves a psychobabble discussion between the newly promoted Jarles and his prisoner Naurya, during which her familiar attacks him and is killed.
This instalment ends with the Dickon’s return to the Black Man. The familiar tells him of the raid on the coven and the arrest of the witches, and that he has taken the dispossessed familiars to the Breeding Place to feed. Dickon finishes by mentioning the birth of Jarles’ and Goniface’s familiars. The Black Man tells Dickon to bring them to him.
This instalment isn’t as good as the first, but it still has its moments.

The Cover for this issue is a bit of a comedown from Timmins’ effort last month, and it is also rather uninspired compared with début artist A. Williams’ Interior artwork for Kuttner’s story.² Williams also provides better than average work for a couple of the other stories: they aren’t great art, but they are interesting and/or dynamic pieces. My favourites among the others are Paul Orban’s first illustration for the Hull story and Elton Fax’s³ second for the del Rey. Kramer’s pieces for the Leiber are okay too, bar the one with the badly drawn wolf.
Long Arm of Solar Law by John W. Campbell, Jr. is not so much an editorial as a short science essay about the extent of the Sun’s gravitational influence, how it spreads out beyond our nearest stellar neighbours, and its effect on comets.
The Analytical Laboratory: March 1943 & April 1943 covers two months, and I discussed these results in the reviews of those issues.⁴
Sea of Mystery by Willy Ley is an interesting article on the Sargasso Sea, how it features in history and literature, its ecology, and so on. It concludes with an account of the life-cycle of eels, which lay their eggs on the ocean floor in that region.
Brass Tacks only has a few letters this issue. New reader Art Rapp, from Saginaw, MI, notes that, judging by the way copies of Astounding disappear from his newsstand, he doesn’t expect his comments to have any influence. He has this to say about Kramer’s artwork:

Although I don’t usually care for serials, anything of Van Vogt’s is bound to be good—and this promises to be no exception. Alas, however—it is losing much of its effect through poor illustration. Kramer has talent for depicting machinery, but why does the poor guy in the Page 30 cut wear the same costume as his remote ancestors?  p. 160

I think I may have made a similar observation. Rapp later raves about Mimsy Were the Borogroves.
Bill Buhmiller of Eureka, MO, however, doesn’t:

Maybe in my undeveloped stage of adolescence I have not yet developed the necessary imagination that is required for the consumption of some of the stories that are printed in your “sometimes” excellent magazine. I am referring to the stories like “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” and “The Twonky,” neither one which made very much sense. But what’s the idea? I don’t get the drift.  p. 162

Campbell replies (or pre-replies) that he thinks they are “interesting, off-trail ideas, rather neat little horrors.”
The last letter is from Anthony Boucher and comments on his story Pelagic Spark:

I’ve been noticing how often science and fantasy fiction writers use for their setting a future world resulting from an Axis victory; and I’d like to put in a word of defense before the Writers’ War Board or some such jumps on us as defeatists.
We are not, thank God, prophets. We don’t write what we feel sure is going to happen, but what, under certain circumstances, might happen. Our futures are so many possible Worlds-of-If evolving out of this present.
Now we aren’t expecting an Axis victory, any more than we are expecting world-wide tidal waves or planetary collisions or the invasion of little green men from Alpha Centauri. These disasters are all, with varying probabilities, present in one or more of the possible Worlds-of-If.
And the more we write about ingenious ruses by which the Axis secures victory—in this story the development of a race-conscious American appeasement party—the less apt those ruses are to succeed, and the more certain we can be that my sons and your daughter will inherit, in deepest truth, the best of all Possible Worlds.  p. 162

This is quite a good issue. Although there is nothing that particularly stands out (apart from Leiber’s serial), there is a lot of good if minor and/or flawed work.  ●

_____________________

1. Kuttner and Moore based their recent story Mimsy Were the Borogoves (Astounding, February 1943, my review here) on Lewis Carroll’s poem Jabberwocky. Along with the beginning of this story (talking rabbits), you rather wonder if they were on a Charles Dodgson kick at the time.

2. ISFDB seems to have conflated A. Williams with English fan Arthur Williams, who did a couple of covers for the fanzine Futurian War Digest. The difference in style is probably enough to indicate they are not the same person (and the idea that an English artist was doing interior illustrations for Astounding from the other side of a U-boat infested Atlantic isn’t likely either).

3. Elton Fax may be Astounding’s first black contributor. He appeared in the magazine from November 1942 to November 1943, and would reappear briefly in Weird Tales during 1944. He has a page at ISFDB, and there are articles about him at Flying Cars and Food Pills, Pulp Artists, and Black Past.

4. The Analytical Laboratory results for this issue appeared in the September one:

I think that the del Rey story should have been where Smith’s is.  ●

ISFDB link
Archive.org link

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Catherine Tarrant

Fiction:
Gather, Darkness! (Part 1 of 3) • novel by Fritz Leiber ∗∗∗∗
Ghost • short story by Henry Kuttner ∗∗+
Pacer • short story by Raymond F. Jones ∗∗
Fifth Freedom • short story by Lester del Rey [as by John Alvarez] –
Let’s Disappear • novelette by Cleve Cartmill ∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by Frank Kramer (x7), Paul Orban (x6)
“—Wrap It Up—” • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
In Times to Come
The Old Ones • science essay by Willy Ley
Brass Tacks • letters

_____________________

With this issue Astounding reverts to a smaller size due to wartime rationing and other restrictions. The size of the magazine now appears to be, judging from the images of the scan I read, about 6 inches by 9 inches.

The Cover is William Timmins’ best effort for the magazine so far, and illustrates Fritz Leiber’s second novel Gather, Darkness! (this appeared a month after his first, Conjure Wife, in Unknown Worlds, April 1943). The scene depicts the Hierarchy’s archpriests watching Brother Jarles preaching revolution to a crowd in the square while holding up his priests’ robe with the repulsor field activated.
You can probably gather from the aforementioned that this is one of those ‘Science as Religion’ stories, where scientists are fake priests, and their “miracles” are achieved by using advanced science and technology. We soon learn that this “religion” is a result of scientists of a previous Golden Age acting to avoid humanity’s descent into barbarism. Unfortunately, the ruling Hierarchy has turned into a tyranny (the priests not only have robes which have repulsor fields but also have “wrath-rays,” etc.) and they preside over a population reduced to medieval serfdom. A resistance movement called the Witchcraft is growing and the novel is about the struggle between these two sides.
This all gets off to a cracking start (just like Conjure Wife), and begins in the Great Square of Megatheopolis where Brother Chulian and Brother Jarles are handing out work assignments to the masses. We quickly learn a lot about the future world when Mother Jujy passes by to calls of “Witch” from a small boy in the crowd, and Jarles raises his eyes to the buildings of Sanctuary in the middle of the city:

Megatheopolis was magically different. For there rose the gleaming buildings of the Sanctuary, topped by the incredible structure of the Cathedral, which fronted the Great Square.
Jarles looked up at the Great God, and for a moment felt fingering through his anger a touch of the same awe and reverence and pious fear that vast idol had used to awaken in him when he was only a Commoner’s child— long before he had passed the tests and begun to learn the Secrets of the Priests.
Could the Great God see his blasphemous rage, with those huge, searching, slightly frowning eyes? But such a superstitious fancy was unworthy even of a novice in the Hierarchy.
Without the Great God, the Cathedral was still a mighty structure of soaring columns and peaked windows tall as pine trees. But where one might expect a steeple or a pair of towers, began the figure of the Great God—the upper half of a gigantic human form, terrible in its dignity and serenity. It did not clash with the structure below, but was an integral and indisseverable part of it. The heavy folds of its drapery became the columns of the Cathedral, and it was built of the same smooth plastic.
From where it stood, it dominated all Megatheopolis, like some vast sphinx or unbelievable centaur. There was hardly an alley from which one could not glimpse the stern yet benignant face with the glowing nimbus of blue light. And as for the Great Square immediately below, one felt that the Great God was minutely studying every pygmy creature that crossed it, as if he could at any moment reach down and pick one up for a closer scrutiny.
As if? Every Commoner knew there was no “as if” about it!
But that massive figure did not rouse in Jarles one atom of pride at the glory and grandeur of the Hierarchy and his great good fortune in having been chosen to become part of it. Instead, his anger thickened and tightened, becoming an intolerable shell about his emotions—as red and oppressive as the scarlet robe he wore.  p. 12

Jarles’ colleague, Brother Chulian, is in the process of telling a woman called Sharlson Naurya that she will serve in the Sanctuary, but Naurya refuses and, after some back and forth, Chulian loses his temper:

Chulian bounced up from the bench he shared with Jarles. “No Commoner may question the judgments of the Hierarchy, for they are right! I sense more here than simple stubbornness, more even than sinful obstinacy. There is only one sort of Commoner who would fear to enter the Sanctuary when bidden. I sense—Witchcraft,” he announced dramatically, and struck his chest with the flat of his hand. Instantly his scarlet robe ballooned out tautly, until it stood a hand’s breath away from his body at every point. The effect was frighteningly grotesque, like some incredible scarlet pouter pigeon. And above his shaven head a violet halo glowed.
There was a sibilant hiss of terror, and the faces of the Commoners grew more pale. But Naurya only smiled very faintly, and her green eyes seemed to bore into Chulian.
“And that, once sensed, is easily discovered!” the swollen little priest continued triumphantly. He stepped quickly forward. His puffy scarlet glove clutched at her shoulder without seeming quite to touch it, yet Jarles saw her bite her lips against sudden hurt. Then the scarlet glove flirted downward, ripping the heavy smock, so that the shoulder was uncovered.
There were three circular marks on the white skin. Two burned angry red. The other was rapidly becoming so. Jarles thought that Chulian hesitated a moment and stared puzzlingly at them, before gathering himself and shrilling out, “Witchmarks! Witchmarks! Proof!”  p. 12

At this point Jarles activates his own robe and attacks Chulian, knocking him unconscious. After depowering his robe he climbs on a table and proceeds to harangue the crowd, and reveals the Golden Age origin of their world, and that their religion is fake. He tells them there is no God, and that he does not have divine powers as a priest, taking off his robe and holding it up with the repulsor field and halo activated. When he throws it towards the crowd it comes to rest two feet off the ground.

Eventually, his long tirade is interrupted when the huge plastic statue of the Great God leans forward and extends a huge finger towards him. Jarles is saved from the discharge of the crackling blue energy by what appears to be two black hands that materialise out of nowhere and whisk him away. Gales of satanic laughter accompany the rescue.
This huge (albeit cleverly done) data dump is followed by just as much information in the next chapter, where we see inside the Sanctuary, and witness a meeting of the Apex Council’s archpriests. Their leader is Brother Goniface, and we learn about the politics and factions of the Council, and that Goniface himself has fomented the crisis in the town square to flush out a growing unrest in the population, and to seize power for himself.
During this meeting several country priests appear before the council with reports of huge wolves prowling outside their towns and villages (these prove to be solidographs—holograms essentially—projected by the Witchcraft to destabilise the regime). After dealing with this issue the archbishops then view a holographic recording of Brother Jarles in the town square. Goniface recognises the woman accused of witchcraft—Naurya is really Knowes Geryl, a woman from his past. Goniface orders his cousin and chief scientist Deacon Deth to take her prisoner but keep it a secret.

The rest of the novel keeps up this pace of information and invention, and falls into two main threads. The first is from the viewpoint of Goniface and the Apex Council, and their attempts to stamp out Witchcraft; the other involves Brother Jarles (it turns out that the Witchcraft have rescued him, but he refuses to join them, and is hunted by the Heriarchy on his release until Mother Jujy gives him shelter). This latter thread also deals with the activities of the Black Man (so-called because of his radiation absorbent clothing) who, when he is not being a prankster in church upsetting collection trays, runs the Witchcraft’s resistance activities for an unseen leader called Asmodeus; the last main character is Sharlson Naurya.
There are many parts of this I would like to talk about at length but I’ll restrict myself to the section that describes the arrest of Naurya by Brother Chulian. When he and another priest go to her house to apprehend her she seems she seems unconcerned but, before they leave, there is an extraordinary event:

“Run, Puss!” she cried with an almost mischievous urgency. “Tell the Black Man!”
A glittering talon ripped at the waist the gray homespun of her dress—from within. There was a rapid disturbance of the cloth. Then through the slit something wriggled and sprang.
Something furry, big as a cat, but more like a monkey, and incredibly lean.
Like a swift-scuttling spider it was up the wall and across the ceiling, clinging effortlessly.
Chulian’s muscles froze. With a throaty gasp his companion lunged out an arm. From the pointing finger crackled a needle of violet light, scorching a shaky, zigzag track in the crude plaster of wall and ceiling.
The thing paused for a moment in the air hole, looking back. Then it was gone, and the violet beam spat futilely through the air hole toward the black heavens, where one star glittered.
But Chulian continued to stare upward, his slack jaw trembling. He had gotten one look at the tiny face. Not when the thing moved, for then it had been only a rippling blur, but when it paused to glance back.
Not all the features of a face had been there. Some were missing and others seemed somehow telescoped into each other. And the fine fur encroached on them.
Nevertheless, where the features showed through the fur, they were white, and, in spite of all distortions, they were a peering, chinless, hellish, but terribly convincing caricature of the features of Sharlson Naurya.  p. 32

This is the first explicit appearance of a “familiar” in the novel—these are Witchcraft creatures bioengineered from their owners flesh, which feed on the their progenitor’s blood, and stay in telepathic contact with them. They are an inventive and entertaining part of the novel, as indeed are all the other witchy bits and pieces that Leiber introduces as part of the Witchcraft, such as old Mother Jujy, the Covens, etc.
After taking Naurya into custody, Chulian and his brother priest wend their way back through the city streets with their prisoner. They then find their way blocked by an inky blackness (another solidograph projection) that not even their halos can illuminate, and are forced to change their route,  having to pass a “haunted house,” an unsettling building left over from the Golden Age. When the group arrive in front of the house the blackness surrounds them completely and prevents further progress. Naurya escapes through the door but the priests are locked out. The blackness dissipates and Cousin Deth (Brother Goniface’s henchman) arrives—he is not impressed.

The siege of the house that follows is a set-piece that nods towards a similar one in A. E. van Vogt’s story The Weapon Shop. We have, of course, the usual problems with doors:

Then one of the young priests strode with great dignity toward the house, bearing his rod of wrath above his head like a gleaming sword. Heads turned as, breathlessly, every Commoner watched his approach.
“This place is evil!” he cried suddenly in a great voice, “it is offensive to the nostrils of the Great God. Tremble, Sathanas! Cower, ye fiends! For, lo, I inscribe above the door the brand of the Hierarchy.”
He stopped directly in front of the oddly wrinkled doorway or entry-sphincter. A violet brilliance gushed from the extended rod, of the same hue as his halo, which was almost invisible in the sunlight. Slowly he traced a burning circle.
What happened next was not part of the program. He leaned forward suddenly to peer through the irregular orifice in the doorway, leaving the fiery circle unclosed. He must have seen something of exceptional interest, for he thrust in his head. Instantly the doorway puckered and snapped tight around his neck, leaving him frantically kicking and plunging, while his rod, still gushing violet light, set the green weeds smoking.
There were gasps and scattered screams and a few shrieks of hysterical laughter from the crowd. The three other young priests dashed forward to help their companion, one of them snatching up the fallen rod, which instantly ceased to flame. They tugged and pushed at him violently, and pried at the doorway. The wall gave a little, as if semielastic. That was all.
Then the door opened wide of its own accord and they all sprawled backward in the smoking weeds. The young priest who had been trapped sprang up and darted into the house before the others could stop him, even if they had tried to. The door clenched shut behind him. The house began to shake.
Its slack walls tightened, bulged, were crossed by ripples and waves of movement. Its windows all squeezed shut. One wall stretched perceptibly, another contracted. There were other distortions.
An upper window dilated and through it the young priest was ejected, as if the house had tasted him and then spat him out. Halfway down he exerted his Inviolability. so that his fall was slowed and cushioned. He bounced gently.
This time the laughter of the crowd did not sound entirely hysterical.
The house became quiescent.  p. 41-42

Cousin Deth brings forward more advanced weapons (“Unlimber the zero-entropy spray, Brother Sawl!”) to “exorcise” the house, but is initially matched by its Golden Age technology.
All of this gets Leiber’s novel gets off to a hugely entertaining start, and it is probably the most fun I’ve had since reading Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Time.
Ghost by Henry Kuttner is another story that has supernatural references but, unlike the Leiber, all these do is serve to confuse matters. After a talking-heads start about a modern-day ghost in a computing facility in the Antarctic we find that the machine isn’t haunted but has absorbed a case of manic depression from a previous operator who committed suicide. It is now inducing the same madness in its current operator Crockett.

To “cure” the machine a psychologist called Dr Ford goes to the station with a patient who has a similar manic-depressive condition. The plan is to cure the patient, and induce a similar cure in the machine.
While this therapy takes place we get a feel for the oppressive and claustrophobic nature of the station:

There were shadows in the station. After a few days Dr. Ford noticed those intangible, weary shadows that, vampiric, drew the life and the energy from everything. The sphere of influence extended beyond the station itself. Occasionally Crockett went topside and, muffled in his heat-unit parka, went off on dangerous hikes. He drove himself to the limits of exhaustion as though hoping to outpace the monstrous depression that crouched under the ice.
But the shadows darkened invisibly. The gray, leaden sky of the Antarctic had never depressed Crockett before; the distant mountains, gigantic ranges towering like Ymir’s mythical brood, had not seemed sentient till now. They were half alive, too old, too tired to move, dully satisfied to remain stagnantly crouching on the everlasting horizon of the ice fields. As the glaciers ground down, leaden, powerful, infinitely weary, the tide of the downbeat thrust against Crockett. His healthy animal mind shrank back, failed, and was engulfed.  p. 65

At the end of the story the psychologist effects a cure in both patient and machine but, unknown to the former, another problem remains. . . .

The talky start, computer jargon, and outdated psychology theory do not help the story get going but it improves later, there is some effective description, and it also has a neat twist ending.
I think there is a better story in here where the ghost stuff is dumped—this is really about sanity or insanity, and the latter would have been a better title.
Pacer by Raymond F. Jones is an okay piece of space opera that starts with Commodore Ed Ingraham tearing strips off the men in his fleet. Further vexing him are the orders he has to intercept a slow-moving freighter and escort it to Earth.

Before that rendezvous there is some back story about Ingraham’s past with his father on a commercial ship, and how the latter has supposedly retired to Earth. Surprise!—when they meet the freighter it is Ingraham’s old ship, and his father is piloting it. Cue much embarrassment for Ingraham when, in front of his men, his father calls his martinet son “Kid”, etc. Relations further deteriorate when Commodore Ingraham tries to force his father to transfer his valuable cargo of crystallium so the convoy won’t be slowed down by his ship, which would become the “pacer,” or slowest vessel. Needless to say his father refuses and threatens to blow up his ship (as you do when dealing with rebellious children: stop fighting in the back seat or I’ll blow up the car).

The last act is a space battle with the alien Correne, who are currently wiping out humanity as they progress through the solar system. Ingraham’s Dad has a plan to defeat them that involves his mysterious crystallium cargo, and (spoiler) the speed that it can safely be transported.
Fifth Freedom by Lester del Rey starts off with Tommy Dorn in a future American labour camp during a war with “Centralia,” whose forces have pushed forward to the English Channel. He is a conscientious objector, and therefore despised by his bunk mates and estranged from his family.
Part of the beginning is interestingly meta-fictional:

He tried again to cut the blaring radio out, with its news and propaganda that neither interested nor impressed him, hut dinned remorselessly into his ears, and turned back to the latest Astounding; it had arrived for him only today, and as yet he’d only glanced at the cover and readers’ corner. Hopefully, he began on the cover story:
.
Major Elliot glanced up from the papers as the captain entered, nodded, and went on reading through the reports. “Centralia’s moving up; big offensive at midnight tomorrow, Captain Blake. I want you to take six volunteers—”
Damn! The boy’s lips tightened and he threw the magazine under his bunk, his raw nerves whipped by the fresh insult; even there, war! All day, he’d been counting the hours and minutes until his shift went off and he could find release from the horrible reality, only to find science-fiction as filled with it as all else. He jerked the lumpy pillow up, threw his head against it, and tried to drown out the mutter of voices behind him and rest.  p. 109-110

After a promising beginning Dorn’s story turns into a manipulative, by-the-numbers soap opera that involves a bunk mate called Jimmy, who is crippled by polio, and Alice, a girlfriend from the woman’s camp (sensitive Tommy meets her when he is playing his violin up on the hill). When New York is later radiation bombed by Centralia, Jimmy saves Tommy from a beating at the hands of a group of the camp thugs.

Later, an Air Force recruiter tries to get Tommy (a qualified pilot) to fly the new rocket ships, but he refuses. Shortly afterwards the camp is attacked by enemy bombers and Alice is seriously injured. The Air Force man returns with a rescue team and once again tries to convince Tommy to join the military. When he fails he gives Tommy a respectful homily about how the country is a democracy and that people aren’t forced to do things against their conscience. The Air Force man adds that he’ll have him shipped out to a better place in the Mid-West.
The bombers return later, and Tommy watches as three of the new American rocket ships intercept them: two intentionally blow up their ships, destroying the enemy fleet.

The last scene has Tommy at Alice’s deathbed. After she passes away he decides to volunteer. I hope he turned out a better combat pilot than he was a conscientious objector.
I realise that this was written in the middle of a World War but it is a manipulative piece, and irritatingly sanctimonious—as well as an obvious early example of “pushing Campbell’s buttons” (i.e. pandering to that Editor’s beliefs or hobby horses). Avoid like the plague.
Let’s Disappear by Cleve Cartmill has an overly padded beginning that has an investigator called Thorne Raglan (who owns and runs a company called Hunt Inc.) pick up a contract to find a man called Colin Fane. Fane is one of the beneficiaries of a dead man’s estate, but there are parties who do not want him found.

Apart from Raglan having to deal with being followed by persons unknown, he also has to deal with Hubert Davenport (a relative of Fane’s, and not very helpful), his niece Emily, and a rabble-rousing politician called Coffman, who espouses anarchist ideals and, unknown to Raglan, wants to get hold of a force field weapon that he believes Fane possesses.

None of this really matters as it is a typical Cleve Cartmill piece—an excuse for a lot of running around punctuated with the odd fist fight or, on this occasion, a wildly acrobatic flight/chase in an air taxi.

In the last fight of the story (spoiler) a sword belonging to Hitler is used to slash Coffman’s throat, presumably to give the story some contemporary colour. It ends with one of those “this knowledge is too dangerous to survive” endings where they decide to destroy the weapon and burn the plans.
I’m beginning to dread seeing Cartmill’s byline in the magazine.

The Interior artwork continues to be rather lacklustre: I thought that Paul Orban’s work was much better than Frank Kramer’s—some of the latter’s work has a very perfunctory feel to it (look at the first illustration for the Lester del Rey story, “Man sits beside filing cabinet in office”).
“—Wrap It Up—” by John W. Campbell, Jr. is an editorial about the results of war science, focussing particularly on rubber substitutes, elastomers, etc., and their uses.
In Times to Come refers to production problems and the lack of an Analytical Laboratory feature:

This being the first issue in which the new type face and new format are used, our calculations slipped a bit; this space was supposed to be some three times as great. The lack of Analytical Laboratory is not due to lack of space, however—it’s due to lack of letters.
The March issue had been on the stands only a few days when this issue went to press. Trying to offset the inevitable delays of transportation, we are pushing our press dates ahead; this lack of Lab, or a held-over Lab, is apt to be more frequent in the future.  p. 59

I don’t know why Campbell just doesn’t just do the obvious and slip the results by a month.
The last sentence mentions a new ‘Gallagher’ story from Henry Kuttner, “a nice, if slightly cockeyed, yarn—”

The Old Ones by Willy Ley is an article about zoological geography, the distribution of animals around the globe due to historical land mass change. This has some interesting parts but is overlong, and too often descends into endless lists of animals by continent or area—I started skimming before the end. There should also have been an illustration rather than a page of text describing the original three continents (p. 93, etc.)

Brass Tacks has a long and considered letter (see above) from J. V. Lewis which is rather (shallowly) dismissed by Campbell. The letter before this, from Edmond M. Clinton Jr., San Francisco, CA, is about how SF is extrapolation not prophecy. A later letter from Chandler (Chan) Davis,¹ Cambridge, MA, has a top ten for 1942 that omits Nerves and The Twonky. I note that there has been little enthusiasm in either the Analytical Laboratory or Brass Tacks for that latter story. One wonders how it became a “classic.”

It is definitely worth getting this issue for the Leiber serial, and Kuttner’s story is worth a look, too.  ●

_____________________

1. Chan Davis would start publishing in Astounding in 1946. He would go on to publish thirteen stories, half a dozen of which Campbell published. He seems to have drifted away from that editor when he returned to writing after a five-year gap (1953 to 1958). See Davis’s page at ISFDB.  ●

ISFDB link
Archive.org link

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Catherine Tarrant

Fiction:
Swimming Lesson • novelette by Raymond F. Jones –
Open Secret • short story by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett] ∗∗
Escape • novelette by Joseph Gilbert and Fred W. Fischer –
Abdication • short story by A. E. van Vogt and E. Mayne Hull [as by E. Mayne Hull] ∗
The Weapon Makers (Part 3 of 3) • serial by A. E. van Vogt ∗∗∗+
Probability Zero:
Corpus Delicti • short fiction by Henry Kuttner –
Miraculous Fluid • short fiction by Wilson Tucker [as by Bob Tucker] –
Downfall • short fiction by Malcolm Jameson *
Camouflage • short fiction by John Aiken [as by John K. Aiken] –
Ultimate Opposition • short fiction by Roscoe E. Wright –
“A Snitch in Time” • short fiction by D. C. King –
Double, Double, Toil and Trouble • short story by Nelson S. Bond ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by Paul Orban (x5), Elton Fax, Manuel Isip (x4), Frank Kramer (x4)
New Order • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
In Times to Come
Space Fix (Part 2 of 2) • science essay by R. S. Richardson
Tyrannosaurus Was No Killer • science essay by Willy Ley
The Analytical Laboratory: February 1943

_____________________

I mentioned last issue that the Simak story therein read like a refugee from an early 1930’s Astounding—well, so does Swimming Lesson by Raymond F. Jones.
You can tell this from the opening conversation: an unrealistic, shouty affair between a military man called Hardin, and a scientist from “Radiation Asteroid” called Pete Wilson. Hardin is trying to convince Wilson about a threat to the Earth and its colonies from the Venusian Korphs, who apparently have a weapon called “Artificial Sky” which can form an impenetrable barrier around a planet or asteroid. A small artificial sun orbits inside the barrier, burning the enclosed body to a crisp (it can also freeze colder than Pluto as well, although this is never explained). The conversation is interspersed with abusive comments from Hardin to Wilson about him being a “stupid ass” and that there “must be something besides purple mush between those ears”, etc.
Wilson maintains that Artificial Sky is impossible, even when Hardin shows him an impenetrable sphere surrounding a suspended apple. When Wilson fires a gun at it, the bullet comes to a halt just before it gets to the sphere and hangs in mid-air.

Wilson then goes back to his science buddies on Radiation Asteroid, adamant that the theories disproving Artificial Sky are correct.
On the spaceship trip home we discover something about the captain of the ship:

“Captain Underhill”—Marla’s voice trembled—”I didn’t know you are part Korph—”
He bowed low as if acknowledging a great compliment. “My great-grandfather was the first of his race to receive the Earth explorers and open the world of Venus to interstellar commerce. I thought everyone knew. It’s an ancestry of which I am very proud.”
“Yes, I should imagine—”
They began walking toward the dining room.
“You see,” Captain Sam Underhill went on, “in those days my father’s people were a very backward race. All Venus was divided into little tribes, each one selfishly clinging to its own traditions and accomplishments like adolescent children. It was not until the Earthmen came that they saw the advantages of the exchange of ideas. It was not until then that they understood the advantages of—shall I say learning?—in contrast to their old ways of conserving the tiny, insignificant accomplishments they had built up through centuries—most of them built on error, as are almost all traditions.”
“Venus is pretty grateful to Earth for changes that have resulted through this new contact, isn’t she?” said Pete. “Indeed—that’s why the day of the landing of the first spaceship from Earth is a national Venusian holiday. The Korphs give tribute to the Earthmen who came and showed them a vision of new worlds. But here we are . . . the dining room is ready.”  p. 14

Needless to say, Underhill is only in the story so he can get thrown out of a burning spaceship by Wilson later on, after the scientist’s asteroid is (surprise!) surrounded by Artificial Sky. At least Underhill does a half decent evil-Korph scene, mwuh, mwuh, mwuh, before he plummets to his death.
Wilson discovers that the barrier is caused by a “time jam”, which is why objects slow down as they approach. This is followed by much running around and then, to keep the pace up during the denouement, his wife is revealed as a traitor who planted a generator powering the Artificial Sky!

In a final twist (spoiler) Underhill learns that she is one of Hardin’s double agents; the latter wanted Wilson to solve the problem and save Earth from an impending Korph attack.
This is an awful story, and I really struggled to finish it.
Open Secret by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore is about a man called Jerrold who stumbles on robots secretly working in a tower block office when he inadvertently gets off the elevator on the wrong floor. He watches for a short time but, surprisingly, both they and the human receptionist ignore him, so he gets back in the elevator and goes to the twenty-first floor for his appointment with a psychiatrist.
Afterwards Jerrold goes back to the fifteenth floor, and challenges the receptionist there about what he has seen. She freely admits that they are robots, and more ominously adds that the robots don’t care about anyone knowing. He arranges to take her for a drink after she finishes work.

Later, when they are at a restaurant, she freely answers all the questions Jerrold has. In particular she lays out the way the robots manage to control those who learn of them and who become a problem. Every time he shows concern or irritation in response to one of her answers she tells him that he will feel differently after he is “processed”.
The next day Jerrold decides he is not going to accept these robot overlords and will resist. However (spoiler), when he goes to their office and attacks them, he discovers that guns and acid have no effect on them. The end of the story is left hanging in the air, albeit with the suggestion of Jerrold’s ultimate failure, and potential processing.
This is an interesting story of what I suppose you would call ‘Secret Controllers’ paranoia, the kind of thing that would become more prevalent in the commie-scare 1950’s Cold War.
I note in passing that it is written in fairly perfunctory prose (my guess is that it is a Kuttner solo effort) but, that said, it has this striking passage (for both for its sexual frankness and the way it pauses the narrative) from when Jerrold and the receptionist first arrive in the bar:

She set down her glass, ran the tip of a pointed tongue across her lips, and said, “Well, Mr. Mike Jerrold?”
“Well?”
“Question. Are you trying to make me?”
He said, “No,” with a frankness that was disarmingly inoffensive.
“That’s good. You see, Mr. Mike Jerrold, I’m hoping I’ll get a taxi ride home. I live in Brooklyn. If you’ve ever been on the Brighton Express at the rush hour—”
“Taxi it is. Drinks, dinner, and a ride home. Does that suit?”
“Uh-huh.”
It was a cool, dim hideaway place, Jerrold reflected, sipping his sidecar and feeling the tingling warmth move slowly through his body. Seldom was it possible to get out of the world. At times these moments came. Outside was New York; here was nothing but the moment. There was—as yet, anyway—nothing sexual about the situation, nothing to stimulate Jerrold; rather it was the delicious feeling of being able to stop, to rest on his oars and drift. The girl’s presence was subtly effective; she, too, had stopped. For the moment, the driving force that makes up life had ceased. They relaxed in the twilight.  p. 36

Escape by Joseph Gilbert and Fred W. Fischer¹ opens with a broadcast to a future Earth about the fugitive Adam Goodman:

“Adam, it will be remembered, was the son of Richard Goodman, and a mutation as a result of his father’s experiments with short hard radiations on the human embryo. After Goodman’s death, his nearest relative, Stanton Rascoe, took over the guardianship of Adam, and, as you know, subjected him to a rigorous mental and physical course of training from his earliest childhood in hope of producing a ‘Superman,’ as Rascoe expressed it.”

Well, if this is “as you know” or “will be remembered”, why are you telling us again? This is the first of many talking heads sections in a story interwoven with passages of almost cartoon-like action.

Anyway, back to the story: Adam steals a spaceship and makes his way to Jane, a female friend who lives in a city on the inside of the asteroid Gravite. As Adam’s escape plays out there is lots of derring-do, and I thought that the story seemed a bit Buck Rogers (although I’m not that familiar with the latter). Sure enough, Jane hints at this after Adam surprises her later in her room:

“—[Adam], you aren’t at all like what I’d imagined you to be. I’d read all the ancient fictional books about supermen preserved on microfilm at the Gravite library, and the result was a rather weird combination of Odd John, Victor Scott and Buck Rogers. Horrible thought, isn’t it?”  p. 48

After they talk each other to death (and Adam tells her to call him “Stinky”—God only knows why) she agrees to help him kidnap the uncle that has exploited his genius while keeping him captive. They then set of for Earth and chat/datadump a bit more. We learn that her dead parents owned a hollowed out cave on Ganymede, where they can keep his uncle Rascoe after Adam has captured him.

The rest of the story involves Adam making his way to Rascoe’s compound, and energetically beating up nearly all of his security men before arriving in the uncle’s office. We learn that the latter is a “midget”. He is initially pleasant and avuncular towards Adam—until, that is, his inner megalomaniac eventually bursts out:

The whisper from behind [Adam] was almost machinelike in its monotonous repetition; but no machine could ever express that black hate that crawled in that voice.
“She laughed at me, damn her soul. Laughed. Laughed at me, damn her. I’ll get her; I’ll get them all. Laughed at me—”
Without looking behind him, Adam asked with grim intensity, “What are you up to, Rascoe? What are you up to?”
Rascoe said, “I’m going to be God.”
“You’re mad,” said Adam. His voice wasn’t steady.
Rascoe laughed horribly.
“I’ll play God. With you, Adam, with you. With all mankind. Your germ plasm. I’ll impregnate all the women with it artificially, and create a race of supermen, and be king of them all. Me! The undersized, pitiful little runt she laughed at. Me, Adam. And my scientists will take the embryo of the new supermen and work with them if they are not perfect, and the supermen will have giants and other monstrous things to be amused by and to work for them. They’ll all grow up under my training and I shall make them obedient and they shall know me as their god and their only god forever and ever and—”
“You’re mad, Rascoe,” repeated Adam. “You’re mad.” There was sweat glistening on his forehead, and a harsh uncertain edge to his breath. “You can’t interfere with natural selection that way, it can’t be done. The horrors you would produce by forced breeding would be—”  p. 59

As Adam tries to take Rascoe away, the security men eventually overpower him and he is rescued by Jane. During the kerfuffle, Rascoe goes over the balcony and plummets to the ground floor.
Rascoe’s death is soon forgotten as the pair escape in a fast patrol spaceship for the hollow asteroid, and they talk about other issues—Adam tells Jane that he can’t marry her because:

“My gene pattern is so absolutely different, that marriage with another person, genetically average, might produce horrors beyond conceiving—”  p. 63

Jane then reveals that she has the same genetic pattern as Adam, and that her middle name is Eve!
As they leave Earth, Adam transmits a farewell message to its citizens:

“To a world lost in effeminacy and forgotten glory, farewell. Some day, centuries hence, when our new strain has been tempered and found keen in the fire of hardship and struggle, our children’s children’s children will return, bringing with the will to conquer, the old careless courage, the indomitable initiative that now lies dormant. For then the degeneracy that is upon you will have run its course, and man will again look to the stars, and in his restlessness throw off the decadence of his ancestors. When that happens, when the human race again seeks the things without which it is nothing—beauty, achievement, adventure, and the true Utopia founded upon the quest for truth, upon the privation and sudden death of research and exploration—when it learns once more that man must fight or stagnate in complacent boredom, then the new man will return to lead the race to the limitless potentialities that are its very justification for existence—the realization of which is the only omega that the spirit of man can ever truly know.”  p. 64-65

I thought, up to this point, that this was just a bad, if occasionally fast-paced, pulp story, but the last part made me wonder if Adolf Hitler was writing SF in his spare time (vide Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream) and submitting his stories under a pseudonym.
Abdication by A. E. van Vogt and E. Mayne Hull is the first of the Artur Blord series (which would be continued by Hull alone).²
The story starts with the narrator meeting a wealthy self-made man called Rand on a spaceship to Earth. While the narrator is talking to Rand, another man called Tansy comes up and addresses the former as “Artur Blord”.
There then follows some rather confusing intrigue involving, in no particular order, (a) Rand’s retirement to Earth and details of an arranged marriage, (b) a dead body in Tansy’s room, (c) the arrival of Tansy while the narrator and Rand are standing over the body in their invisibility suits. When Tansy enters the Room and finds them there, he mentions a planet called Zand II. There may be other moving parts which I have forgotten in my bewilderment.

This resolves (spoiler) with Rand disembarking on Zand II, his retirement abandoned as he resolves to et to the bottom of this intrigue. Meantime, the narrator, who has aided Rand throughout, gets a part share in anything that Rand manages to set up On Zand II (given for his help on the ship).
The coda to the story occurs three years later, and has the narrator—who we find out is the real Artur Blord—married to Rand’s one-time fiancée, and the owner of a twenty-five percent share in Rand’s uranium mine on Zand II. Blord had manipulated events to get Rand to do what he wanted, i.e. set up a business there.
This is an unlikely and contrived story, and has one of those plots that barely makes sense.
The last part of The Weapon Makers by A. E. van Vogt continues with both the Hedrock and Neelan threads told in alternating chapters. In the first of these, the Weapons Shop’s no-man Edward Gonish meets an incognito Empress Innelda in a gambling and entertainment area of town (you wonder if van Vogt was just back from Vegas) to discuss the giant man’s attacks. At the end of the meeting Gonish realises that Hedrock is hiding in the Empress’s apartments.
The story then jumps forward to after the Weapon Shops have attacked the palace, and Hedrock—who has married Innelda in the meantime—has been taken prisoner. The Empress quizzes her officers and discovers that Hedrock previously went through a six feet by two sheet of metal in the cellars, and then returned before the attack.
Gonish later tells Innelda that Hedrock is an immortal, and has been part of the family line several times over the years, and may have been one of the early Emperors! The Empress orders Prince de Curtin to negotiate with the Weapons Makers to get him back.

Meanwhile, the story’s other protagonist, Neelan, becomes consciousness after twenty-two days on the lifeboat (there is no explanation of why he hasn’t died of dehydration). He eventually slows the boat down when a fleet of mile long spaceships appear around him.
Things get strange when he tries to flee from the ships, and the lifeboat ends up floating inside one of them. When he opens the airlock he looks out on a staggering sight:

He was staring down at a city from a height of about two miles. The city glittered and shone from a very blaze of hidden light, and it was set in a garden of trees and things in bloom; and beyond was green countryside, alive with a profusion of brush and meadows, and sparkling streams.
The whole curved gently upward into a haze, of distance on the three sides that he could see.
Except for the obviously limited horizon, it could have been Earth.
The second tremendous shock struck Neelan at that point. A city, he thought, an Earthlike city in a ship so big that— His mind couldn’t grasp it. His brain throbbed like a tuning fork. The spaceship, which had seemed a mile long, was actually at least fifty, and it was cruising through space with several hundred of its kind, each machine the size of a planetoid, and manned by super-beings.  p. 102

He takes the boat down to the surface and goes into the city, where a number of strange things happen. First he sees a vision of himself in bed after having been interrogated by the Empress, then he sees himself operating the ship just before the alien contact.
It becomes apparent that the aliens are sifting through his memories.

The vision of the city fades away, and he finds himself looking at what the inside of the ship really look like: there are webs everywhere, and he realises the aliens inhabitants are spider-like beings.
Things get even weirder after this: he connects mentally with Gil, and learns that he and his stranded crew are dying as the planet they are on gets closer to the sun. The aliens then question Neelan about his memories (and show a noticeable lack of emotion as they do so) before telling Neelan that Gil is dead. Neelan shoots himself in the head, and finds himself back on his lifeboat.
At this point in the story I was beginning to wonder where all this was going: the spider-aliens seem a completely unnecessary kitchen sink subplot—and a slightly confusing one—that takes the novel away from my preferred ground of the Empire/Weapon Shops conflict. However, in the next Hedrock chapter the story moves back on to this territory and provides most of the book’s finale (although there are another couple of chapters that follow).
In this climactic chapter Hedrock is once again interrogated by the Weapon Shop Council but quickly gains the upper hand: when he went through the metal door before the attack, he went into no-space and, time-shifted, now watches himself in front of the council. His no-space self quickly disarms the councillors while the real-space Hedrock tells them they are, and have always been, under permanent observation by the “Watchers” (just Hedrock really) since their foundation. As the Council has broken its own laws, Hedrock orders them all to resign, but only after they have negotiated with the Empress for his release.
When Cadron, the Council leader, later tells him they have negotiated a better deal than expected, Hedrock’s response is not what they expect:

“We have received from the empress a most remarkable offer. Recognition for the Shops, a share in the government. It’s a surrender of the first order—and all we’ve got to do is deliver you up alive, as you yourself have stipulated.”
Hedrock said grimly. “You are refusing, of course.”
“Eh?” Cadron’s image stared.
Hedrock went on in a steely voice, “Cadron, you don’t really tell me that your council is excited about such a thing. Don’t you realize that there can never be a common meeting ground between two such diametrically opposed forces?”
[. . .]
“Cadron, the Weapon Shops constitute a permanent opposition. The trouble with the opposition of the old days was that they were always scheming for power; all too frequently their criticism was dishonest, their intentions evil; they lusted for control.
“Never must the Weapon Shops allow such emotions to be aroused in their followers. Let the empress rebuild her own chaos. I do not say she is responsible for the corrupt state of the empire, but the time has come for her to attempt a vigorous housecleaning.
“Throughout, the Weapon Makers will remain aloof, interested but maintaining their great standards for the relief throughout the galaxy of those who must defend themselves from oppression.
“The gunmakers will continue to sell their guns and stay out of politics.”  p. 116-117

At the end of this cracking chapter, Hedrock returns to the palace and talks to Gonish. The latter predicts that Innelda will die in childbirth: she overhears the conversation and tells them to leave and never return.

The last two chapters tidy up the Hedrock thread and tie in the spider-aliens to the rest of the story. Neelan negotiates with the aliens to resurrect his brother and colleagues, and later spreads information about the aliens existence that ensures the small group’s freedom (there is now no point in killing them again). Finally, Hedrock goes to see Innelda on the day of her child’s birth. She dies, but the aliens (who have turned up to observe Earth) witness her death and decide to resurrect her to record her emotional reactions. The story concludes with this classic line from the spider-aliens, and one that must have appealed to Campbell’s ideas about human exceptionalism:

“This much we have learned; here is the race that shall rule the sevagram.”  p. 130

To be honest this work is, structurally, a bit of a mess. Whereas the Hedrock/Weapon Makers thread is largely well done you rather wonder what the Neelan/spider-aliens part of the book is doing here—it feels like another story wandered in by mistake. That said, the novel is compulsively readable and entertaining tale for much of its length and, at points, it is very good. If you are one of those people who can turn off the analytical part of your mind and go with the flow you’ll find it a lot of fun.

Nearly all the Probability Zero stories are as bad as usual. Corpus Delicti by Henry Kuttner (multiple spoilers follow) has a scientist take a greedy man into the fourth dimension where he ends up eating his 3D body; Miraculous Fluid by Wilson Tucker is a nonsense story about light that is so strong it leaves an image on the wall (normal not laser light); Downfall by Malcolm Jameson tells of an implosion bomb dropped on Germany, and the freak weather that follows; Camouflage by John Aiken has a country that is about to be invaded paint the sky to look like the ground (and the ground the sky) to confuse the enemy; Ultimate Opposition by Roscoe E. Wright has an irresistible force which meets reverse entropy (I didn’t understand this one); “A Snitch in Time” by D. C. King has a man use the fourth dimension get to a bank vault to rob it, but he collides with himself on the way back and is destroyed.
The last effort, Double, Double, Toil and Trouble by Nelson S. Bond would have made a good Unknown story at greater length and with a plot. Written in letter format, it has missives from the writer to Campbell that appear to arriving in duplicate, before we eventually find out that Bond has a doppelgänger. None of this stands up to close examination, but some of it is quite fun:

Dear John:
Here’s that story I promised you. Hope you like it.
Yours,
Nels Bond.
Willow Road,
Roanoke, Virginia,
July 26,1942
.
Dear Mr. Campbell:
Inclosed is the new short story, “Test Case,” which I sincerely hope will meet with your approval.
Very truly yours,
Nelson S. Bond.
.
STREET & SMITH PUBLICATIONS, INC.
Astounding Science-Fiction
July 26, 1942
Mr. Nelson S. Bond,
Willow Road,
Grove Park,
Roanoke, Virginia.
Dear Nelson:
What on earth’s the matter with you? Have you been writing too many fantasies? I’ve just read “ Test Case,” and it’s a buy, but whatever possessed you to send me two copies?
And what is the meaning of your recent letters?
Yours,
J. W. C.
.
Willow Road,
Grove Park,
Roanoke, Virginia,
July 28, 1942
Dear John:
Glad “Test Case” is O. K. Thanks for the check. The letters? And the other manuscript? Why, I suppose they must be what I tried to warn you about. You see, there’s a wingding living down the road from me a way—somehow or other he’s got the idea he can knock off an easy living copying my stories and submitting them under my name. Just pay no attention to him; I’ll straighten matters out somehow or other.
Ever thine,
Nels Bond.
.
Willow Road,
Roanoke, Virginia,
July 30, 1942
Dear Mr. Campbell:
Did you receive my story, “Test Case”?
The one marked with an “X”? Have heard no word from you.
Nelson S. Bond.
.
Willow Road,
Roanoke, Virginia,
August 3, 1942
Dear Mr. Campbell:
Did you receive my manuscript, “Test Case”? This is vitally important. Please answer immediately!
Nelson S. Bond.
.
RKEVA: 815P842
MR. JOHN W. CAMPBELL, JR.,
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION,
79 SEVENTH AVENUE,
NEW YORK, NEW YORK.
DID YOU RECEIVE MANUSCRIPT “TEST CASE”? TERRIBLY IMPORTANT. PLEASE WIRE REPLY MY EXPENSE.
NELSON S. BOND.
NYCNY: 932A842
.
MR. NELSON S. BOND,
WILLOW ROAD,
ROANOKE, VIRGINIA.
OF COURSE RECEIVED MANUSCRIPT AND FORWARDED CHECK AS PER LETTER JULY 26TH. WHAT’S GOING ON? YOU’RE DRIVING ME NUTS. . . !
JOHN W. CAMPBELL.  p. 91-92

The Cover by William Timmins illustrates the burning spaceship scene from Jones’ story and is Timmins’ best work yet.
The Interior artwork, like the fiction, is rather lacklustre, and this is not helped by the fact that there are no title illustrations: for some reason they all appear as individual spots in this issue.
The illustrations by Paul Orban, and Kramer’s (for the van Vogt, anyway) are okay; Manuel Isip’s are more cartoonish than usual, but then that is appropriate for the story he is illustrating.

New Order by John W. Campbell, Jr. is his promised editorial about the changes coming to the magazine. He explains that wartime rationing of metal requires a change from electrotype to stereotype process and, as they can’t get a large-page-size machine for the latter, they will have to produce a smaller size publication. They will also use glue and not staples to bind the magazine.
For those who want to read Campbell’s detailed explanation, click the image above.
In Times to Come has further comment about the change in size, which will bring a crowded look with its smaller typeface and margins. Campbell ends with a note about the writing plans of Astounding’s military authors after the war:

But from what I hear in letters from the men who are in the war now, there’s going to be a sudden flood of more than top-notch yarns as soon as the nasty business of squashing Hitler, Tojo & Co. is done. The yarns they want to write now—and haven’t the time. Will Stewart’s got an idea about those Aliens of the seetee ship, and their inscriptions that talk—Heinlein wants to tell the story of the Blind Singer of the Spaceways; you may remember mention of some of his poems in Heinlein stories—E. E. Smith is working out the tremendous and intricate plot of the last of the Lensman series, a true explanation that Kinnison was never able to grasp—³  p. 65

Space Fix, R. S. Richardson’s space navigation essay, concludes with a short second half that examines effective or energy distances to the other planets in the solar system. It starts by demolishing a common SFnal trope:

One of the favorite devices for introducing the solar system to the uninitiated is by means of a broad plain on which divers fruit and vegetables are placed at the proper intervals to represent the Sun and planets.
On the scale generally adopted, the Sun is a large pumpkin or squash. Mercury thirty-six feet away is by tradition a small pea.
Venus and the Earth are larger peas. The Moon nine inches from the Earth is a radish seed, although some authors favor mustard seed for the Moon. Jupiter a quarter of a mile away is an orange. Saturn a smaller orange, and Uranus and Neptune are plums at distances of a mile and a mile and one half. Pluto at two miles from the central pumpkin is still an uncertain quantity, but probably in the pea class with the Earth and Venus.
The writer first became aware of this model at about the age of twelve in one of Sir Robert Ball’s numerous monographs on astronomy. Since then it has been turning up regularly in the popular star books about once or twice a year until now a pronounced allergy has been developed to these fruit-and-vegetable solar systems. There is something irritating about the smug assurance with which each author goes around depositing oranges and radish seeds over that two-thousand-acre field. (A ritual that would certainly cause anyone to be regarded with suspicion of lurking insanity if observed in the act). You wish somehow there wasn’t such a finality about the whole performance. That just as the author was laying down the final pea for Pluto you could grab his arm and cry, “Your neat little solar system is all wrong! Uranus is closer to the Earth than Mercury and Pluto is not the farthest planet. Distance is more than merely a matter of miles!”  p. 66

Unlike last issue’s confusing illustrations, there is a particularly good diagram which illuminates this idea (N.B. the vertical energy scale is logarithmic):

Tyrannosaurus Was No Killer by Willy Ley is an article about T. Rex which is a mixture of outdated and partially correct material (he gets the fact that it was a scavenger wrong but gets close to its T-shaped posture while moving, for instance).

The Analytical Laboratory: February 1943 was discussed in that issue.⁴
Unusually, there is no Brass Tacks letters column this issue.

A fairly dreadful issue, probably due to the number of writers in military service who are not contributing.  ●

_____________________

1. Joseph Gilbert’s ISFDB page is here (it shows a couple of Probability Zero pieces, and a handful of stories in secondary magazines), and Fred W. Fischer’s ISFDB page is here (only this story is listed apart from a couple of letters, making him a half-shot wonder).

2. The ISFDB page for the ‘Artur Blord’ stories is here.

3. The three stories referred to are probably Jack Williamson’s Seetee Shock (Astounding February-April 1949), Robert A. Heinlein’s The Green Hills of Earth (The Saturday Evening Post, February 8, 1947), and ‘Doc’ Smith’s Children of the Lens (Astounding, November 1947-February 1948).
Strange how they all took until well after the end of the war to appear.

4. The Analytical Laboratory for this issue appeared in Astounding, June 1943:

I’m surprised the Jones was so far ahead of the Padgett (Kuttner/Moore).  ●

ISFDB link
Archive.org link

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Catherine Tarrant

Fiction:
Clash by Night • novella by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lawrence O’Donnell] ∗∗∗∗
Shock • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett] ∗∗
Shadow of Life • novelette by Clifford D. Simak ∗
Q. U. R. • short story by Anthony Boucher [as by H. H. Holmes] ∗∗
The Weapon Makers (Part 2 of 3) • serial by A. E. van Vogt ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by Paul Orban (x3), Manuel Isip (x2), Frank Kramer (x9), Elton Fax
Mutually Exclusive • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Photographic Plate Finds Kepler’s Nova • science essay by R. S. Richardson
The Analytical Laboratory: January 1943
Evolution Designs Instinct Patterns, Too • science essay
Space Fix (Part 1 of 2) • science essay by R. S. Richardson
In Times to Come
Brass Tacks • letters

_____________________

Clash by Night by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore is the first of their stories under the ‘Lawrence O’Donnell’ pseudonym and it is the highlight of the issue.
The introduction to the story sets it in Montana Keep, a domed city under the depths of Venus’s seas, during a carnival to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Earthmen landing on the planet. Earth has been destroyed in a nuclear conflagration, and the survivors inhabit this and other similar keeps. The reason humanity has settled under the sea is because of the inimical Venusian wildlife on the land.

We are also introduced to the Free Companions, small military groups or clans of a few thousand, who are based in land forts on the surface and who work as mercenaries for the various keeps. These latter do not fight each other directly but outsource their conflicts to the Companions, who wage war against each other on the surface in semi-ritualistic but nonetheless lethal battles.
The story proper starts with one of these Free Companions, Captain Scott, in a tavern where he is dealing with a problem between one of his officers and the locals. They are interrupted by a mobilization message that comes over the “hot-box”: his company, the Doonemen, are required. He leaves his “free-wife” Jeana, and makes his way through the city to the administration station. During his journey we learn more about what happened to Earth:

Glancing up, Scott was reminded of the catastrophe that had unified science into something like a freemasonry. Above him, hanging without gravity over a central plaza, was the globe of the Earth, half shrouded by the folds of a black plastic pall. In every Keep on Venus there was a similar ever-present reminder of the lost mother planet.
Scott’s gaze went up farther, to the Dome, as though he could penetrate the impervium and the mile-deep layer of water and the clouded atmosphere to the white star that hung in space, one quarter as brilliant as the Sun. A star—all that remained of Earth, since atomic power had been unleashed there two centuries ago. The scourge had spread like flame, melting continents and leveling mountains. In the libraries there were wire-tape pictorial records of the Holocaust. A religious cult—Men of the New Judgment—had sprung up, and advocated the complete destruction of science; followers of that dogma still existed here and there. But the cult’s teeth had been drawn when technicians unified, outlawing experiments with atomic power forever, making use of that force punishable by death, and permitting no one to join their society without taking the Minervan Oath.  p. 11

Scott arrives at the President of Montana Keep’s office and meets his commander, Cinc Rhys. After the President excuses himself, Scott discovers that Virginia Keep has hired another company called the Helldivers to attack, and that Rhys is trying to negotiate with a smaller unit called the Mob to help the Doonemen defend Montana Keep.
At the meeting Scott also meets the President’s nephew Norman Kane, who wants to join the Doonemen, and his sister Ilene. Scott isn’t required until dawn so he ends up going for a drink with Ilene, even though his free-wife Jeana is waiting at home. At this point the story switches deftly from world building to character examination as it explores Scott’s dissatisfaction with life, and the social mores of the Companions:

His relationship with [Jeana] was the peculiar one rendered advisable by his career. Free-marriage was the word for it; Jeana was neither his wife nor his mistress, but something midway between. The Free Companions had no firmly grounded foundation for social life; in the Keeps they were visitors, and in their coastal forts they were—well, soldiers. One would no more bring a woman to a fort than aboard a ship of the line. So the women of the Free Companions lived in the Keeps, moving from one to another as their men did; and because of the ever-present shadow of death, ties were purposely left loose. Jeana and Scott had been free-married for five years now. Neither made demands on the other. No one expected fidelity of a Free Companion. Soldiers lived under such iron disciplines that when they were released, during the brief peacetimes, the pendulum often swung far in the opposite direction.
To Scott, Ilene Kane was a key that might unlock the doors of the Keep—doors that opened to a world of which he was not a part, and which he could not quite understand.  p. 14-15

There were nuances, Scott found, which he had never known existed. A hedonist like Ilene devoted her life to such nuances; they were her career. Such minor matters as making the powerful, insipid Moonflower Cocktails more palatable by filtering them through lime-soaked sugar held between the teeth. Scott was a uisqueplus man, having the average soldier’s contempt for what he termed hydroponic drinks, but the cocktails Ilene suggested were quite as effective as acrid, burning amber uisqueplus. She taught him, that night, such tricks as pausing between glasses to sniff lightly at happy-gas, to mingle sensual excitement with mental by trying the amusement rides designed to give one the violent physical intoxication of breathless speed.
Nuances all, which only a girl with Ilene’s background could know. She was not representative of Keep life. As she had said, she was an offshoot, a casual and useless flower on the great vine that struck up inexorably to the skies, its strength in its tough, reaching tendrils—scientists and technicians and sociopoliticians. She was doomed in her own way, as Scott was in his. The undersea folk served Minerva; Scott served Mars; and Ilene served Aphrodite—not purely the sexual goddess, but the patron of arts and pleasure. Between Scott and Ilene was the difference between Wagner and Strauss; the difference between crashing chords and tinkling arpeggios. In both was a muted bittersweet sadness, seldom realized by either. But that undertone was brought out by their contact. The sense of dim hopelessness in each responded to the other.  p. 15-16

At the end of their night together, Ilene asks Scott to join her permanently in Montana Keep. He agrees, but will only do so once the current battle is over. Scott then goes home, and Jeana guesses that he has met someone else. She tells him that it won’t work out, and why:

He was wondering how to broach the subject of Ilene to Jeana.
She saved him the trouble.
“If it’s a girl, Brian, just take it easy. No use doing anything till this war’s over. How long will it take?”
“Oh, not long. A week at most. One battle may settle it, you know. The girl—”
“She’s not a Keep girl.”
“Yes.”
Jeana looked up, startled. “You’re crazy.”
“I started to tell you,” Scott said impatiently. “It isn’t just—her. I’m sick of the Doones. I’m going to quit.”
“Hm-m-m. Like that?”
“Like that.”
Jeana shook her head. “Keep women aren’t tough.”
“They don’t need to be. Their men aren’t soldiers.”
“Have it your own way. I’ll wait till you get back. Maybe I’ve got a hunch. You see, Brian, we’ve been together for five years. We fit. Not because of anything like philosophy or psychology—it’s a lot more personal. It’s just us. As man and woman, we get along comfortably. There’s love, too. Those close emotional feelings are more important, really, than the long view. You can get excited about futures, but you can’t live them.”
Scott shrugged. “Could be I’m starting to forget about futures. Concentrating on Brian Scott.”  p. 18

He later leaves for the battle and she is left praying that he returns safely.
This section of the story seemed rather atypical/adult/risqué for the Astounding of 1943!
Scott is then sent by Rhys to see Cinc Mendez of the Mob to negotiate a deal for their help. He goes to the surface and gets on a flitterboat driven by Ilene’s brother Norman. En route to the meeting they only narrowly escape a volcanic eruption at sea. After they arrive, and Scott negotiates a deal with Mendez, we learn more about this strange surface world when the boat disintegrates on the way back and the two end up in the sea near the shoreline. They manage to get to the beach and then have to walk overland to their fort, a perilous task:

Clearings were unusual in the forest. There was one here, twenty feet wide, slightly saucershaped. Scott gingerly extended the pole and probed. A faint ripple shook the white mud, and almost before it had appeared the captain had unholstered his pistol and was blasting shot after shot at the movement.
“Shoot, Kane!” he snapped. “Quick! Shoot at it!”
Kane obeyed, though he had to guess at his target. Mud geysered up, suddenly crimson-stained. Scott, still firing, gripped the boy’s arm and ran him back at a breakneck pace.
The echoes died. Once more the distant elfin drums whispered through the green gloom.
“We got it,” Scott said, after a pause.
“We did?” the other asked blankly. “ What—”
“Mud-wolf, I think. The only way to kill those things is to get ’em before they get out of the mud. They’re fast and they die hard. However—” He warily went forward. There was nothing to see. The mud had collapsed into a deeper saucer, but the holes blasted by the high-x bullets had filled in. Here and there were traces of thready crimson.
“Never a dull moment,” Scott remarked. His crooked grin eased the tension. Kane chuckled and followed the captain’s example in replacing his half-used clip with a full one.  p. 27

Eventually they are spotted and a flitter picks them up. Back at the fort Scott talks to his elderly orderly about leaving the Company, and later leaves for the battle with the Helldivers. The next section of the story is more formulaic than most of what precedes it, but contains more soul-searching on the part of Scott.
The Doonemen (spoiler) win the battle after a deception plan of theirs succeeds. Rhys is killed however, and Scott becomes the new Cinc.

At the end of the story Scott decides that, although the Free Companions’ purpose in life is futile, and that one day the companies will cease to exist, he is first and foremost a soldier.
I found this piece particularly interesting for a number of reasons. To start with it is the first of the Kuttner/Moore collaborations where I’ve felt that there is definitely another writer involved in the process. This comes over here particularly at the start of the piece, with prose that is  more complex and fluent then anything I’ve noticed so far in previous ‘Kuttner/Moore’ stories. Further, the world-building and characterisation in the first three-quarters or so is much more complex and realistic than normal. Both of these aspects make me wonder if the story is mostly Moore’s work (apart from, maybe, the battle scenes at the end, which are flatter, more routine fare, and seem similar to the work I’ve read hitherto—I’m now wondering if these have been mostly or all Kuttner’s work).¹ In future I’ll be examining more closely the stories that have the Kuttner/Moore byline.²
This is a rather uneven piece, and it also has too straightforward a finish—but there is a lot here that is quite impressive, which is why I finally decided to give it four stars rather than three and a half.

Shock by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore is another story that has a Twonky-ish time-portal start—on this occasion a strange-looking man crawls from Gregg’s apartment wall:

“Who are you?” Gregg demanded, recovering the use of his tongue.
The man spoke an odd sort of English, slurred and with an extraordinary tonal range, but recognizable. “I’m a mugwump,” he announced, balancing on his middle. “My mug’s in . . . eh? . . . in 1943 and my wump’s in . . . uh!” He gave a convulsive wriggle and burst through, sprawling on the carpet and breathing hard. “That was a nardly squeeze. The valve isn’t quite big enough yet. Forthever.”
It made sense, but not much. Manning Gregg’s heavy, leonine features darkened. He reached out, seized a heavy book end, and rose.
“I am Halison,” the newcomer announced, adjusting his toga. “This should be 1943. Norvunder soverless.”
“What?”
“Semantic difficulty,” Halison told him. “I am from about . . . well, several thousand years in the future. Your future.”
Gregg’s gaze went to the hole in the wall.
“You’re talking English.”
“Learned it in 1970. This isn’t my first trip into past. Many of them. Looking for something. Important—skandarly important. I use mental power to warp space-time pharron, so valve opens. Lend me clothes, if you please?  p. 40

You get the impression the writer (or writers) have just read Anthony Boucher’s The Barrier (Astounding, September 1942).³
The time traveller is then off-stage for most of the story and, in the meantime, Gregg goes through the portal to the traveller’s apartment. He can see an intriguing world outside its windows but can’t find a door. He does, however, find a number of strange toys and devices in the room.
After a number of visits to this future world, both with and without his ex-playboy neighbour, and as the portal periodically opens and closes (spoiler), Gregg ends up permanently trapped on the other side.
The traveller has previously mentioned that he is expecting a visitor at his ‘apartment’ around the time that Gregg is trapped—and the twist ending is that this turns out to be a medical robot coming to treat the traveller’s mental illness with shock therapy.

Shadow of Life by Clifford D. Simak reads like a refugee from a 1933 Astounding—and so it sticks out like a sore thumb in this 1943 issue.
Initially, it gets off to a reasonable start, with Lathrop, the narrator, on a spaceship with an alien who is warning him about an existential threat to Earth:

“You can’t fight them,” said the thing. “There is no way to fight universal evil. The best you can do is hide from it.”
The Earthman shrugged. “None of them will reach us for a long time. Now that we know about them, we’ll be ready.”
The thing at the controls concentrated on the setting of more studs, then said: “You’ll never be ready. You’re like a candle in the wind, waiting for a gust that will put you out.”  p. 50

We then learn that the alien has spent the last two decades showing Lathrop the malevolence spread through the universe by the Bad Aliens, and the way it infects all the races it encounters. The alien hopes that Lathrop will go back to Earth and tell his people to prepare for their demise. Lathrop, however, has had enough of being forced to watch things he never wanted to see, and having twenty years of his life wasted, so when he learns that the spaceship is on an automatic course back to Mars, he kills the alien by “squeezing the life out of it”. You avoid giving trigger-warnings to millennials at your peril.
The story then cuts to Mars where we meet Carter, Latham’s old research partner. Carter has finished twenty years of research of Mars and his written a book about the strange disappearance of the Martians and any information about them. We are also introduced to Buster, a robot who works for Elmer, a Martian “ghost”—really the residual personality of the missing Martian race. We also learn about the Preachers, a group that has a strange cautionary message for humanity, and Alf, Carter’s assistant, who is in jail for searching a forbidden Martian reservation for a mythical purple jug. There is also a visiting artist called Harper. As you can imagine, this section is quite busy setting up its multiple moving parts.

Lathrop then arrives back in the Martian city—after his arrival the spaceship shrinks in size and disappears. Buster has meantime stolen Carter’s manuscript and taken it to Elmer, who wants to suppress Carter’s discoveries and protect the hiding Martians. Lathrop also knows too much, so Elmer sends Buster to bring Lathrop to him, but the latter is suspicious. After talking to Buster about the Martians hiding from the Evil Ones, Latham finally agrees to see Elmer. Buster then rushes him, and Latham uses a weapon he took from the dead alien. Buster shrinks in size.

This story has an ending where all the bits click together (deep breath for spoiler summary): Alf returns with the purple jug which Harper (really one of the Bad Aliens) tries to steal. Harper/Bad Alien does this as he knows that the Martians have shrunk their civilization and have hidden it in the jug (all that extra mass is put into the fourth dimension). Latham uses his weapon on Harper but it melts him to a puddle rather than shrinking him (you can see why the Bad Aliens wanted the jug and the 4D tech).

After this a tiny spaceship comes out of the jug and grows in size. A Martian comes out of the ship and is rather patronising about humanity’s chances against the Evil Ones, before it steals the jug and rushes back into the spaceship which promptly re-miniaturises itself—this means the Martian civilisation is now doubly miniaturised!
Lathrop and the others shrug their shoulders and decide to mass produce the weapon so they can kill all the Bad Aliens.
This has a ridiculous plot and uses the already outdated trope of miniature worlds but, that said, it is well enough told, and some nice touches. It’s still pretty bad though.⁴
After reading three of Boucher’s recent stories (The Compleat Werewolf, The Barrier, and Elsewhen) I was looking forward to Q. U. R. It’s rather disappointing though, having little of the style and wit of previous work.
It starts off with an account of how the robot repairman narrator meets Quincy as they intervene to stop a group of factory workers mistreating a Venusian. After some fighting, the narrator offers Quincy a job fixing robots, and on his first assignment the latter radically modifies an android (all robots have human form), getting rid of several of its unused human functions and limbs, etc. The narrator realises that this is the solution to the many robot malfunctions that are currently occurring, and quits his job to form a new company with Quinn—Q.U.R. (Quinn’s Usuform Robots—a play on Rossum’s Universal Robots, R.U.R., I guess.).
Their company and the idea of building non-human form robots is initially stalled by a law that gives patents on all robots to Robinc., the narrator’s former company, so they go to see the Head of the Council to see if they can convince him to change the law. He says he’ll help if they can mix a very specific type of drink to impress a visiting Martian politician.

So off they go to their local Martian bartender Guzub to see if they can learn how he mixes the drink. It isn’t as simple as they think—there is a lot of experimental drinking done—but they prevail, and build a robot to do the job.
This is a rather unlikely story, and it has the feel of middling pulp:

Now,” I said to Quinby, “tell me how you got this unbelievable idea of repair?”
“Why, isn’t it obvious?” he asked simply.
“When Zwergenhaus invented the first robot, he wasn’t thinking functionally. He was trying to make a mechanical man. He did, and he made a good job of it. But that’s silly. Man isn’t a functionally useful animal. There’s very little he can do himself. What’s made him top dog is that he can invent and use tools to do what needs doing. But why make his mechanical servants as helplessly constructed as he is?
“Almost every robot, except perhaps a few like farmhands, does only one or two things and does those things constantly. All right. Shape them so that they can best do just those things, with no parts left over. Give them a brain, eyes and ears to receive commands, and whatever organs they need for their work.
“There’s the source of your whole robot epidemic. They were all burdened down with things they didn’t need—legs when their job was a sedentary one, two arms when they used only one—or else, like my house servant, their organs were designed to imitate man’s rather than to be ideally functional. Result: the unused waste parts atrophied, and the robots became physically sick, sometimes mentally as well because they were tortured by unrealized potentialities. It was simple enough, once you looked at it straight.”  p. 83-84

Clunk, clunk, clunk.
At a push, I’d describe this story as okay. I’d note in passing that this otherwise light piece has a couple of unnecessarily sour notes: the maltreatment of the Venusian is one, and the other is that the punishment for breaking robot patent law is “sterilisation”. Harsh.⁵
The Weapon Makers by A. E. van Vogt ended last issue with Empress Innelda re-ordering the arrest of the immortal Captain Hedrock. On the roof security staff intercept him before he can get to a flyer, but they turn out to be Weapon Shop operatives, and he is taken to the Hotel Royal Ganeel (a Weapon Shops front) where he meets the no-man Edward Gonish. Hedrock learns that he is under arrest and is to go on trial before the full Weapon Shop council.
When Hedrock appears in front of the latter they question him and eventually show that his decision to stay for lunch with the Empress reveals he is not who he claims: this action would have required a considerably braver man. Cadron, the leader of the council explains:

“Here is what happened: When the psychologists discovered the variation, two cerebro-geometic figures were set up on the Pp machine. One used as a base the old record of your mind; the other took into account a seventy-five percent increase in every function of your mind, EVERY FUNCTION, I repeat, not only courage.
“Among other things, this brought your I. Q. to the astounding figure of two hundred seventy-eight—”
Hedrock said: “You say, every function. Including idealism and altruism, I presume?”
He saw that the men were looking at him uneasily; Cadron said: “Mr. Hedrock, a man with that much altruism would regard the Weapon Shops as merely one factor in a greater game. The Weapon Shops cannot be so broadminded. But let me go on:
“In both the cerebro-geometric figures I have mentioned, the complicated figurate of the empress was mechanically woven into the matrix; and because speed was an absolute essential, the possible influence on the situation of other minds was reduced to a high level Constant, modified by a simple, oscillating Variable—”
In spite of himself, Hedrock found himself becoming absorbed.  p. 103

I found my reaction to the above passage rather ambivalent: part of me thought “Oh dear, what dreadful super-science gobbledygook”; another part of me thought “Yeah! An immortal superman with an IQ of 278!” I think what you have here is the same kind of reaction that summer movie blockbusters produce, and this probably tells you what van Vogt, E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith, etc., were to Astounding.
As the council’s inquisition draws to an end, and it looks as if Hedrock is going to be executed, he goes to a pre-planted ring hidden in one of the walls, activates it, and uses it to travel through a vibratory transmitter to a hidden lab. Once there he destroys the portal and all the devices he has left behind in the hotel—he realises that he will only escape once from the Weapon Shops. Then a twenty-foot high monster attacks him.
Meanwhile, in the other story thread, Neelan is eventually sent to the ship by the Empress Innelda to distract Greer (he is given an invisibility cloak, and a telestat device that will let the Empress observe his actions. This latter device is also lethal and she will use it to kill him if he betrays her.) Meanwhile a giant man attacks one of the cities.

Once Neelan gets to the ship he plays for time, and tries to get down to the control room to start the engines and get away. Once he gets rid of the telestat, the Empress realises he has betrayed her and orders her big guns to open fire on the ship. Before Neelan can get to the control room the Empress’s men enter the ship.
The next chapter is exciting and fast-paced one that has Neelan doing a lot of running about both in and around the ship before stealing a lifeboat. Once airborne he is surrounded by Imperial cruisers, so he points the boat at Centaurus and engages the infinity drive.
The Empress later watches the giant man destroy parts of several of the Empire’s cities (we later learn that the buildings that are destroyed are empty ones owned by Hedrock’s shell companies) before finally getting one of her princes to contact the Weapon Shops for help and co-operation. She also tells them to find Hedrock and bring him to the palace.
The instalment finishes with Hedrock scaring off the giant creature in his lab—it is an enlarged rat which he returns to its normal size. We learn that the machine which causes this effect is linked to Hedrock’s immortality and his research to rediscover the process.
Although I more or less enjoyed this part, I was rather disappointed that the story has drifted away from the Empire/Weapon Shop dichotomy set up in both the first part of the serial and in the previous story The Weapon Shop. The novel appears to be degenerating into a fast-paced and entertaining, but ultimately trivial super-science tale.

The Cover, once again, is an average effort by William Timmins, and illustrates the spheres in Clash by Night that take people from the undersea Keeps to the surface.⁶
I like most of the Interior artwork in this issue: the first of the Orban and Isip illustrations are good, as are Kramer’s illustrations for the Simak (particularly the robot ones: personally, I’d like to see more robots with boxy heads and rivets). I note that Kramer is usually criticised along with Kolliker in Brass Tacks’ letters, but I think this is a little unfair as some of his work isn’t bad. Or not as bad as Kolliker’s, anyway. That said, his second set of illustrations for the van Vogt are as dreary as last issue’s. Fax’s robot drawing is a bit retro, but I liked it nevertheless.
Mutually Exclusive by John W. Campbell, Jr. is an interesting editorial that begins with a discussion of mutually exclusive conditions:

The classic example [. . .] is, of course, “You can’t eat your cake and have it, too.” There’s another set of mutual exclusives that science fiction has not recognized as such—has, in fact, joyously stirred together in an incompatible mixture time and again. The two are tied together in a favorite descriptive phrase about an immense city of the future, with skytowering buildings laced through with planes and airships floating through the sky without visible support.
The two are mutually exclusive, as thoroughly so as the above.  p. 6

He quickly outlines the problems with sky traffic (flow control for one) and quickly disposes of airships and planes. He has this about helicopters:

Sikorsky has invented a fully practical, genuinely workable type of helicopter. It can hang still in the air, rise vertically, move in any direction whatever, or any combination of directions. It can rise and lower itself at speeds as low as one foot a minute. The helicopter could settle easily onto a city building’s roof, park between two—or in the midst of four or eight already parked—machines. It has the ability to wait that an automobile has. It certainly appears to be capable of creating the vast urban air traffic of fiction.
It can’t. The propeller—and the helicopter hangs on a giant vertical-lift propeller—is a mechanical device for creating a jet of air; it derives its pull from the reaction of that jet. The propeller wash of a plane is a familiar thing today; the prop-wash of a helicopter’s lifting blades will be, soon after the war. Remember that that helicopter’s prop-wash is going to represent the reaction of the whole weight of the machine. It will be a huge jet of air on which more than a ton of steel and aluminum alloys is floating. That prop-wash is going to be an item to reckon with—and the prop-wash from ten or a dozen such ships waiting at an air-traffic light would be enough to make the air lanes for five or six hundred feet below a cyclonic jumble of twisting winds in which no pilot could maintain control of his machine.  p. 6

I am impressed that Campbell had a better understanding of these issues in 1943 than the media do today—a media that doesn’t let any critical thought interfere with their endless “Any day now!” coverage of Amazon’s drones flying their deliveries straight to our doorsteps. They won’t.⁷
Campbell goes on to look at anti-gravity devices before making the point that this would lead to massive decentralisation: so still no future cities with vehicles flying above them.
Photographic Plate Finds Kepler’s Nova by R. S. Richardson is a half-page science filler about a new type of photographic plate (which is red rather than blue sensitive) detecting Kepler’s nova of 1604.
The Analytical Laboratory: January 1943 was discussed in the review of that issue.⁸
Evolution Designs Instinct Patterns, Too is another half-page science filler, uncredited but presumably by Campbell, and is about why horses didn’t evolve to cope with broken legs like wolves/dogs did.

Space Fix by R. S. Richardson is the first part of a science essay about navigating in the solar system, and is fairly heavy going. It starts with a naval example that I didn’t entirely understand (I must buy a sextant and practise). I was then stumped by the solar system example:

I finally figured out that the method is (a) measure that angle between the sun and Rigel—this gives you your radial (or “longitude”) from the sun—and then measure the angle between Mars (or any other visible planet) and the sun—this will give, from pre-calculated tables, your distance along the previously calculated radial.
The rest of the article is about the different ways you can get to Mars (low to high energy) and is almost as impenetrable. These diagrams aren’t as helpful as they could be:

In Times to Come is mostly about next month’s Raymond Jones story, Swimming Lesson, but the passage ends on an ominous note:

The editorial next month needs mention here, too. Astounding undergoes another change, one I haven’t space to describe here. You won’t like it. We don’t like it. Three guesses as to what three megalomaniacs are responsible for it. Full explanation in the April issue will be followed by the change-over beginning with the May number.  p. 78

Fans of the time may have thought the magazine was changing to bimonthly or quarterly publication but it was going to change from bedsheet size back to its old, smaller pulp format.
Brass Tacks is another short column like last issue’s. It has more negative comments about the artwork (aimed at Kramer and Kolliker) and has another ‘Best of the Year’ list from Bill Stoy, Jamaica, New York. Elsewhere, E. Everett Evans of Battle Creek, Michigan, hopes no more of his fan friends go into the military: he has to buy four issues of Astounding a month, “and that’s money.”

The Moore/Kuttner and van Vogt stories make this a worthwhile issue.  ●

_____________________

1. As already noted in the January review, Moore was ill around this time. Campbell wrote to his friend Robert D. Swisher about Kuttner and Moore in a May 1943 letter (Fantasy Commentator #59/60, edited by Sam Moskowitz & A. Langley Searles, Lulu.com):

“They’ve been having troubles; they’re in Hollywood you know—were in the Heinlein’s house as renters while Bob and Leslyn were here. They moved out, with the intention of coming East, because Kat was expecting, (first anyone ever heard of C.L. Moore being pregnant) was homesick, and didn’t think an air-raid shelter at a critical moment was satisfactory. Kat evidently had a mild hysteria attack—wouldn’t let anyone but Hank in the house, took to her bed, more or less, and demanded constant attention. Hank, being the breadwinner, had his hands fullish. Also, just as they were about to get started East, after selling their car. Kat had to be hospitalized for a period vaguely diagnosed as a month or so. They’d leased the house—it’s miles from town, and carless.
Hank couldn’t stay anyway. Hank had to have a minor neck operation. He supervised moving day, resettled an apartment and wrote stories. With Kat, from what I can piece together in letters to me, explaining and apologizing for delay on promised scripts. And the Heinleins were complaining that he wasn’t visiting her at the hospital.” p. 142

2. After reading Clash By Night I started rooting around looking for interviews, etc., by C. L. Moore (it looks like, according to ISFDB, no-one ever interviewed Kuttner). I didn’t have much luck as they are all (except one) in hard to find fanzines like Chacal (#1), Etchings & Odysseys (#4), and The Diversifier (#22, #28/29). If anyone has these, I’d appreciate a scan (or even a readable mobile phone photo).
However, I did find this comment by Moore in the introduction to Fury (the 1947 sequel of sorts to Clash By Night):

Yesterday I reread Fury for the first time in many years, and I’m not surprised, but interested, to see in it the two recurring themes which emerge quite explicitly in nearly everything we wrote. Hank’s basic statement was something like, “Authority is dangerous and I will never submit to it.” Mine was, “The most treacherous thing in life is love.” In Fury these two ideas underlie everything that happens. I can identify which parts I contributed and which he did by this alone.
Fury was written by about one and an eighth persons. We collaborated on almost everything we wrote, but in varying degrees. It worked like this. After we’d established through long discussion the basic ideas, the background and the characters, whichever of us felt like it sat down and started. When that one ran down, the other, being fresh to the story, could usually see what ought to come next, and took over. The action developed as we went along. We kept changing off like this until we finished. A story goes very fast that way.
Each of us edited the other’s copy a little when we took over, often going back a line or two and rephrasing to make the styles blend. We never disagreed seriously over the work. The worst clashes of opinion I can remember ended with one of us saying, “Well, I don’t agree, but since you feel more strongly than I do about it, go ahead.” (When the rent is due tomorrow, one tends toward quick, peaceful settlements.)
In Fury, which is a good example of this process, I wrote comparatively little of the copy. The idea was basically Hank’s and I didn’t identify very strongly with it. I didn’t identify with Sam Reed, the lead character. But what I did contribute I can recognize instantly, after all these years, by the passages in which color-images predominate, and in which my dramatically gloomy theme appears.

I counted the colour adjectives in the next story of theirs I read, Open Secret (Astounding, April 1943). It has (these are all quick counts and are complicated by “green eyes” “red hair” type repetitions) nine in nine and a half pages. The first chapter of Clash by Night has thirteen in six pages; chapter five is interesting in that the first three pages or so have seven, and the last five pages have three. I also noticed this in the first half of that last chapter (this is when the fleet are sailing out to meet the opposition, but before the battle has started):

One had to believe in an ideal before devoting one’s life to it. One had to feel he was helping the ideal to survive—watering the plant with his blood so eventually it would come to flower. The red flower of Mars had long since blown. How did that old poem go?
.
One thing is certain, and the rest is lies;
The flower that once has blown forever dies.
.
It was true. But the Free Companions blindly pretended that the flower was still in blazing scarlet bloom, refusing to admit that even the roots were withered and useless, scarcely able now to suck up the blood sacrificed to its hopeless thirst. New flowers bloomed; new buds opened. But in the Keeps, not in the great doomed forts. It was the winter cycle, and, as the last season’s blossoms faded, the buds of the next stirred into life. Life questing and intolerant. Life that fed on the rotting petals of the rose of war.  p. 33

Does this image-rich passage, and the colour adjective word-count above, suggest that Moore wrote the first part of this chapter and Kuttner the rest? Or am I chasing shadows?

3. Anthony Boucher’s Barrier is reviewed here.

4. According to this ISFDB page Simak’s story has—unsurprisingly—never been reprinted.

5. This story by Boucher made it—why I do not know—into The Great SF Stories #5, edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg (DAW, 1980) along with the Moore/Kuttner piece:

7 • Introduction (The Great SF Stories 5 (1943)) • (1981) • essay by Martin H. Greenberg
11 • The Cave • (1943) • novelette by P. Schuyler Miller
30 • The Halfling • [Earth (Brackett)] • (1943) • novelette by Leigh Brackett
57 • Mimsy Were the Borogoves • (1943) • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett]
91 • Q. U. R. • (1943) • short story by Anthony Boucher
113 • Clash by Night • [Keeps • 1] • (1943) • novella by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lawrence O’Donnell]
172 • Exile • (1943) • short story by Edmond Hamilton
178 • Daymare • (1943) • novelette by Fredric Brown
219 • Doorway Into Time • (1943) • short story by C. L. Moore
238 • The Storm • [Mixed Men] • (1943) • novelette by A. E. van Vogt
271 • The Proud Robot • [Gallegher (Henry Kuttner)] • (1943) • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett]
306 • Symbiotica • [Jay Score / Marathon • 3] • (1943) • novelette by Eric Frank Russell
352 • The Iron Standard • (1943) • short story by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett]

6. This cover is a bit of a Frankenstein job cobbled together from a number of images. There is not a decent hi-resolution image on the web.

7. Campbell barely scratches the surface of the problems with city air traffic. To New Yorkers you would just have to say “9-11”. Will people elsewhere put up with the constant noise of drones flying around and over their houses? And don’t get me started on critical failures and performance planning. (Commercial aeroplane passengers are probably are unware that, in the event of an engine failure, their plane has to be able to continue its take-off run (after V1*) and climb away, stay level (or have a planned drift down) above safety altitude, and land without damage to the aircraft or passengers. Given that those Amazon boxes can potentially land on you, your kids, your car, or your house,** it is difficult to imagine more relaxed regulations.)
* V1 is the speed beyond which you are committed to take-off even if an engine fails (there isn’t enough runway to stop safely).
** Millennials will just have to worry about themselves as they won’t be able to afford kids, a car, or a house.

8. An abbreviated Analytical Laboratory for this month appeared in the June issue:

I expected Kuttner and Moore’s story to have taken first place.  ●