ISFDB link
Archive.org link

Other reviews:¹
Fred Smith, Once There Was A Magazine— p. 44-45 (Beccon Publications, 2002)
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, p. 144-146, The Annotated Guide to Unknown & Unknown Worlds (Starmont, 1991)

_____________________

Editors, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Kay Tarrant

Fiction:
Wheesht! • novelette by Cleve Cartmill ∗
The Wishes We Make • short story by E. Mayne Hull ∗∗
Blind Alley • novelette by Malcolm Jameson ∗∗∗+
A Bargain in Bodies • short story by Moses Schere ∗∗
Sriberdegibit • novelette by Anthony Boucher ∗
The Rabbit and the Rat • short story by Robert Arthur ∗
The Devil Is Not Mocked • short story by Manly Wade Wellman ∗
Eight Ball • short story by John B. Michel [as by Hugh Raymond] ∗
The Green-Eyed Monster • short story by Theodore Sturgeon ∗
The Hounds of Kalimar • novelette by P. Schuyler Miller ∗

Non-fiction:
Interior artwork • by Paul Orban (x6), Hall (x4), Frank Kramer (x5), Manuel Isip (x4), Newton Alfred , William Kolliker
Of Things Beyond: Gremlins Breed Fast • editorial
Book Reviews • by Anthony Boucher

____________________

This issue sees Unknown Worlds, like Astounding, revert to pulp format because of wartime rationing. The Cover design also changes, and probably for the worse with an untidy scroll design.
Wheesht! by Cleve Cartmill gets off to a pretty good start when an American counter-intelligence agent called Mike (who is impersonating a man called Hineman) arrives home with a fifth columnist contact called Gartz to find potatoes on the floor. Mike recognises this as the calling card of a leprechaun called Seag who is bound to the oldest member of his family. Mike also realises that his uncle must have died and, while he is getting a drink for Gartz, he finds the leprechaun asleep, coiled round a bottle of booze. When Hineman returns to the living room, Gartz cross-examines Mike and recruits him as a Nazi spy.
This is a quite involved but economical start, and it demonstrates that Cartmill can write concise and engaging material when he wants to. Unfortunately, the rest of the story eventually turns into one of his standard pulp plots (with Nazi spies rather than mobsters this time around). The tale is also not credible, best illustrated by the fact that, because Mike refuses to tell Seag he is working for the American government, the leprechaun thinks that Mike is a Nazi. This eventually leads to Mike arriving in Hell with a group of co-conspirators thanks to one of the leprechaun’s spells (that said, this scene actually starts off well before descending into bureaucratic shenanigans about Mike’s false identity which secures his—again unlikely—release):

They told me later I was in the Abandon Ye ward. Bokar was a couple of spiked beds away, and beyond him were Brown, Jones, and Professor Gartz: each held flat on the pointed spikes with glowing iron bands, as I was.
Smocked attendants came and went, along the aisles of beds. One was tall and lean, with nothing but a pair of ears where his head ought to be. This one wandered about, the long pointed ears twitching.
I shifted a shoulder blade off the point of a spike, and one of the ears pointed like a hunting dog, though the creature was twenty yards away. It snapped its fingers and a small Thing with fur scurried to my bed with a tray of instruments in one of its sets of hands.
The instruments were curiously shaped and gleaming—save one which was brown with rust. Rust? It jabbed me with a long shining fork and I twitched. That was about all I could do. My vocal cords seemed inoperative, and the bands were so tight that I couldn’t jump. But I twitched.
The Thing, which was mainly a large blue eye mounted on a nightmarish body, took a reading from the dial of the fork and did things to the band across my shoulders.
I shrieked. Not audibly, for I couldn’t make a sound. I shrieked, though. I could tell by the feeling inside that it was a shriek. It jabbed me again, but I didn’t move. I couldn’t. The bands were so tight I couldn’t even flex a muscle. I could roil my eyes across the mirrored surface of the ceiling and thus see the whole ward, but nothing else.
The fact that I could see reflections in that ceiling was somehow, worse than if my eyes had been taped shut. I had to look, and almost cried because I didn’t own enough will power to shut my eyes against the horrors that scurried from bed to bed with sadistic speed.  p. 20

After his release there is a scene where he returns to the restaurant he was in before going to Hell. His dining companions are still in the Bad Place so he has to pay for the meal (he does so using a magic purse that only produces a dime at a time—if you want a stellar example of Cartmill’s padding, this is the scene for you).
Needless to say (spoiler) all ends well: the spy ring is disrupted, and Mike gets the girl (yes, there is one in there at the start).
Noted in passing is the fifth columnist fear-mongering in a scene where Mike has found Gartz’s notebook and a list of names:

I opened the book and skimmed the couple of hundred names and addresses.
No classification indicated that these might be anything but names of personal friends. The addresses were scattered over the entire country, and were innocuous enough. Some were business addresses, others private.
But a surging emotion told me that here was the information the department had been seeking for several years. Here were the innocent-appearing agents, a widespread system of sharp eyes and ears. And clever mouths spreading rumor and dissension here and sending facts to their fatherland, for a highly important part of such an agent’s work is to spread disunity among the people.
America was now solidly all out in the war effort. But war is somewhat undramatic—away from home. For the vast majority of the population, war was a series of daily headlines. And, as time and the war dragged, on, little seeds of doubt, planted by solid citizens such as these agents must appear to be, would grow and propagate. Then, come the day when war was in our own front yards, it would find a less solid defense line than if the seeds had never been sown.  p. 30

The Wishes We Make by E. Mayne Hull starts with a man called Kennijahn on death row inadvertently summoning a demon called Drdr. Kennijahn gets six wishes from the demon, but the latter tells Kennijahn he cannot escape his fate which is to eventually die from hanging.
The rest of the story runs through Kennijahn’s various wishes and (spoiler) their failure to save him. His first wish transports him to South America—but when he sends a telegram to his girlfriend the American police intercept it, and the locals later turn up to arrest him.
The ending could have been relatively ingenious in that Kennijahn plans to inhabit the body of a man who attempts suicide by hanging but erroneously escapes his fate. Kennijahn possesses his body at the point of hanging, but he cannot get himself out of the noose. He then finds he has no wishes left as, apparently, unsaid wishes count as well as expressed ones.
This is, for the most part, an enjoyable enough read but the ending plainly doesn’t work.
Blind Alley by Malcolm Jameson is the highlight of the issue, and it begins with this:

Nothing was further from Mr. Feathersmith’s mind that dealings with streamlined, mid-twentieth-century witches or dickerings with the Devil. But something had to be done. The world was fast going to the bowwows, and he suffered from an overwhelming nostalgia for the days of his youth. His thoughts constantly turned to Cliffordsville and the good old days when men were men and God was in His heaven and all was right with the world. He hated modern women, the blatancy of the radio, That Man in the White House, the war—  p. 48

After this we learn more about Feathersmith’s dissatisfaction with the modern world, and the way he treats those who work for him. Then he has a mini-stroke, which he only just survives (after examining him in his office the doctor says he can go with him to hospital, or go with an undertaker). Feathersmith’s examination results make him realise that he has grown old and unhealthy, so he resolves to contact an acquaintance called Forfin, an unusual character who has alluded to The Fountain of Youth in previous conversations. While Feathersmith waits for Forfin to get in touch, he liquidates all his assets. The pair eventually meet for lunch:

“I want,” Mr. Feathersmith said, baldly, “to turn the hand of the clock back forty years. I want to go to the town of Cliffordsville, where I was born and raised, and find it just as I left it. I propose to start life all over again. Can you contact the right people for the job?”
“Phew!” commented Mr. Forfin, mopping his head. “That’s a big order. It scares me. That’ll involve Old Nick himself—”
He looked uneasily about, as if the utterance of the name was a sort of inverted blasphemy.
“Why not?’’ snapped the financier, bristling. “I always deal with principals. They can act. Skip the hirelings, demons, or whatever they are.”
“I know” said Forfin, shaking his head disapprovingly, “but he’s a slick bargainer. Oh, he keeps his pacts—to the dot. But he’ll slip a fast one over just the same. It’s his habit. He gets a kick out of it—outsmarting people. And it’ll cost. Cost like hell.”
“I’ll be the judge of the cost,” said the old man, stiffly, thinking of the scant term of suffering, circumscribed years that was the best hope the doctor had held out to him, “and as to bargaining, I’m not a pure sucker. How do you think I got where I am?”
“O. K.,” said Forfin, with a shrug. “It’s your funeral. But it’ll take some doing. When do we start?”
“Now.”
“He sees mortals only by appointment, and I can’t make ’em. I’ll arrange for you to meet Madame Hecate. You’ll have to build yourself up with her. After that you’re on your own. You’d better have plenty of ready dough. You’ll need it.”
“I’ve got it,” said Mr. Feathersmith shortly. “And yours?”
“Forget it. I get my cut from them.”  p. 53-54

Feathersmith waits to hear from Forfin, and meanwhile recalls the days of his youth:

He slept. He dreamed. He dreamed of old Cliffordsville, with its tree-lined streets and sturdy houses sitting way back, each in its own yard and behind its own picket, fence. He remembered the soft clay streets and how good the dust felt between the toes when he ran barefoot in the summertime. Memories of good things to eat came to him—the old spring house and watermelons, hung in bags in the well, chickens running the yard, and eggs an hour old. There was Sarah, the cow, and old Aunt Anna, the cook. And then there were the wide open business opportunities of those days. A man could start a bank or float a stock company and there were no snooping inspectors to tell him what he could and couldn’t do. There were no blaring radios, or rumbling, stinking trucks or raucous auto horns. People stayed healthy because they led the good life. Mr. Feathersmith rolled over in bed and smiled. It wouldn’t be long now!  p. 54

Forfin contacts Feathersmith and tells him where to find Madame Hectate. Feathersmith phones for an appointment, and then goes to the 13^th floor of a city tower block (initially he can’t find the floor, but eventually a sign and separate elevator appear). He has to see the credit controller first, and then meets Madame Hectate who, unexpectedly, is a vivacious brunette. She gives him a guided tour of the organisation while they wait for the Devil to arrive.
All of this ‘Hell as a modern organisation’ material foreshadows Alfred Bester’s later story Will You Wait? (F&SF, March 1959),² and it is no surprise that when Satan later appears he doesn’t want Feathersmith’s soul (“Dear me, no. We’ve owned that for years”) but all his money. Madame Hectate rolls up Feathersmith’s sleeve, rubs his arm with an alcohol swab, and uses a syringe to get the blood required for his signature. After the contract is signed, the Devil tells him to catch an evening train at Grand Central Station.
The final section describes Feathersmith’s train journey back to the Cliffordsville of his youth, and telegraphs the arc of the rest of the story:

He had undressed automatically and climbed into his berth. He let his feverish anticipations run on, getting dozier all the time. He suddenly recalled that he really should have seen the doctor before leaving, but dismissed it with a happy smile. By the time he had hit his upper twenties he was done with whooping cough, measles and mumps.
[. . .]
The Limited slid on through the night, silently and jarless. Thanks to its air conditioning, good springs, well turned wheels, smooth traction, rockballasted roadbed and heavy rails, it went like the wind. For hundreds of miles the green lights of block signals flickered by, but now and again another train would thunder by on an eastbound track. Mr. Feathersmith gave no thought to those things as he pillowed deeper into the soft blankets, or worried about the howling blizzard raging outside. The Limited would get there on time and with the minimum of fuss. That particular Limited went fast and far that night—mysteriously it must have covered in excess of a thousand miles and got well off its usual route.
For when Mr. Feathersmith did wake, along toward dawn, things were uncannily different. To begin with, the train was lurching and rocking violently from side to side, and there was a persistent slapping of a flat wheel underneath. The blizzard had abated somewhat, but the car was cold. He lifted the curtain a bit and looked out on a snow-streaked, hilly landscape that strongly suggested Arkansas. Then the train stopped suddenly in the middle of a field and men came running alongside with lanterns. A hotbox, he heard one call, which struck him as odd, for he had not heard of hotboxes for a long time.
After about an hour, and after prolonged whistling, the train slowly gathered way again. By that time Mr. Feathersmith noticed that his berth had changed during the night. It was an old-fashioned fore-and-aft berth with an upper pressing down upon it. He discovered he was wearing a flannel nightgown, too—another item of his past he had failed to remember, it had been so long since he had changed to silk pajamas. But by then the porter was going through the car rousing all the passengers.
“Gooch Junction in half a’ hour, folks,” he was saying. “Gotta get up now—dey drop the sleeper dere.”
Mr. Feather smith groaned and got up. Yes, yes, of course. Through sleepers were the exception, not the rule, forty years ago.  p. 61-62

As the journey progresses his environment becomes more and more primitive. The ablutions on the train are very basic and, as he has not yet been rejuvenated, he cannot eat the rough and ready food. He also notices that the other passengers smell. Matters do not improve when, after completing an uncomfortable two-mile journey by rig from the station to the town, he finds the hotel a “shattering disappointment”.
He then experiences almost permanent dismay—his boyhood house is not a vast mansion he remembered but is a rundown building in the middle of nowhere with no telephone or running water; he visits a girl he was sweet on in his youth but finds her “an empty-headed little doll”; on the way back to town he sees a number of yellow flags hung out of houses, a sign of smallpox.
He has other problems too as nearly all the ideas he has for making money will not work in that time period—the oil field he knows of would require wells six thousand feet deep, beyond the technology of the time; a suggestion to develop and market a starter motor for cars garners little more than a sarcastic comment about inventing perpetual motion from a garage mechanic.
The last part of the story finds Feathersmith still not rejuvenated, and with his health failing: because of the limitations of the time he has not been able to follow the doctor’s instructions as to diet and drugs, etc. Just before he dies a copy of the contract he signed with the Devil flutters down from above—it states he didn’t complain so “that lets us out.” This is an disappointingly weak ending to what is an otherwise superior story about how the past isn’t how we fondly remember it (and, perhaps, that you can never recapture your youth). What makes Jameson’s story even more poignant is that he died less than two years later in April 1945 (he had started writing in 1938 when complications due to throat cancer ruled out a non-writing career).³
A Bargain in Bodies by Moses Schere has quite a complicated setup that begins with two men arriving at a village store, one of whom is in a terrible state:

The man who stumbled into the Paleyville general store was hunched far over, his long lean body a bow of fatigue. Sweat had caked the dust on his face. His lips worked in a gray dirty film. His eyes were slits of hunted agony. Another man, slim, cool and elegantly dressed, came up behind him, waited with an air of amused patience for him to pass through the doorway.
Miss Thomkin, the store’s proprietress stared from her rocking chair in growing horror. For the stooped man obviously carried something—carried it with one hand wrenched around to hold the burden on his back—and it was the burden which stooped him, the burden which had worn illimitable tiredness into his gray-stubbled face.
But the burden was invisible.  p. 72

After the hunched over man has something to drink he identifies himself as Mr Oliver, and organises a wagon to the house the pair are going to. He later discreetly slips the woman who owns the store a note. As the two men leave Mr Oliver’s dapper companion shows off his horns and tail.
After the wagon goes Miss Tomkin reads the note. In it Mr Oliver asks for help to escape from the other man, a demon, and says the only way this can be done is by stealing the silvery half-egg object that it possesses.
The penultimate scene has the demon come down to see the townspeople and explain how Oliver got himself in into his predicament in the first place (a black magic experiment to transfer Oliver’s partner Ames into his body backfired, and Ames is now an invisible load connected to Oliver by ectoplasm, which the latter has to carry around).
Although this is an rather involved setup, the story actually works reasonably well to this point. However, it is more forced going forward when (spoiler) a tom cat the demon has been tormenting knocks the egg out of the latter’s hand. Miss Tomkins gets hold of it and she forces the demon to let Oliver finish his experiment to change Ames back to human form. The demon complies but the twist ending is that Ames now carries an ectoplasmic Oliver around.
There are a couple of good ideas here but it is unconvincing as  well as structurally awkward (the demon’s visit to the town seems to be entirely for data-dump and plot pivot reasons).
Sriberdegibit by Anthony Boucher starts with a drunk lawyer called Gilbert Isles drinking with a magician in bar. After some chit-chat the magician tells him about “wimps,” wish-imps, and how there is one flying round the bar at that moment that can make Isles’ wish come true. Iles unadvisedly says “may I be cursed” and finds his wish granted. When the magician summons the demon in charge of his curse Iles discovers he must commit a sin every day or be strangled by the demon at midnight.
This is a pretty good setup but the rest of the story is bulked out with Isles’ various sins (the first few require little effort as he is, after all, a lawyer). As matters become increasingly problematical his wife becomes involved (more padding).
The last section involves Isles’ “abduction” of a young woman who gets angry when he doesn’t do anything else to her, instead releasing her a few blocks away (it’s hard to believe this wasn’t considered poor taste “humour”at the time of publication, never mind now). She gets her brother to avenge her honour.
The story ends (spoiler) with a piece of legal sophistry that gets Isles off the hook (if he doesn’t sin he’s committing suicide, which is a sin).
After a good beginning this becomes a padded, contrived affair.
The Rabbit and the Rat by Robert Arthur begins with an awkward, info-dump sentence:

Dr. Nicholas Dete, late professor of the psychology of Westate University, recently retired to do research work in his own home following the tragic kidnaping and murder of his only child and the subsequent suicide of his wife, looked up as Jose, his clever Filipino assistant, entered the little office. In his pale-blue watery eyes there was a question which the other answered by nodding.  p. 102

Jose then tells the professor about a man called Banning, and his brutality to a pigeon that flew into his house (wing broken by a thrown book) and a dog that ran up to him (kicked and ribs broken).
The story’s point of view then changes to Banning, and we find him thinking about the professor:

Dr. Nicholas Dete! It had been funny enough to see the little man squawking around after they had snatched the kid. As if anyone could have loved a kid like that! A slobbering, hare-faced nuisance that yelled continually and would have grown up to look exactly like its father. Why, it was practically a public service to put the brat out of its misery.
Not that it had been as dumb as it looked, though. In spite of being only five, it had recognized him the one time he slipped into the hide-out and it had somehow wriggled its blindfold off. Recognized him from just seeing him that once, the day its old man had had it out walking; and Chuck Banning had stopped to talk to Dete. Sometimes kids were bright that way. Anyway, it had recognized him.
So after they’d collected from Dete, Chuck Banning had had to slap it silly with the butt end of a gun. Funny that anybody’s skull, even a kid’s, could be so thin a gun butt would go right in and the brains splash out like so much butter—
Never mind that. It was the kid’s own fault, wasn’t it? Nobody had meant to hurt it But that was how it turned out. Not that he gave a damn. And if the little roach’s mother wanted to go jump in the river afterward, that was her own business.  p. 103

After this unpleasant and brutal start Monk, one of Banning’s men, arrives with the news that another of their gang has disappeared. While they are talking a box arrives in the mail and Banning’s servant is told to go away and open it. Meanwhile, a frog hops into the room and meets the same fate as the pigeon and the dog. The servant returns with the opened box, which has three dead rats inside. Banning checks the postmark and realises that Professor Dete has sent the package.
The rest of this plays out as a mad scientist/mesmerism/soul transfer story (the three animals killed so far contained the souls of the missing gang members), and it all reads like a not particularly good Weird Tales story.
Another tale that could join Arthur’s piece in Weird Tales is The Devil Is Not Mocked by Manly Wade Wellman. This has a German general and a detachment of soldiers travelling to a castle in Transylvania with entirely predictable and bitey consequences.
Eight Ball by John B. Michel⁴ begins with a drunk American professor taken home by a colleague. When the pair enters the professor’s home, the colleague sees a rubber ball come bouncing towards him as if it is alive. The professor then recounts a story about visit to China where he saw a demonstration of how they put carved balls inside other carved balls. This leads on to a related anecdote about how a Russo-Chinese acquaintance learning how to do this accidentally turned himself into a rubber ball.
This has some good local colour but it doesn’t hold up as a story.
The Green-Eyed Monster by Theodore Sturgeon starts with Gus trying to help a white-haired woman pursued by somebody (or something). When Gus catches her she slaps his face. He sees her again a few days later in a bar, and this time it all goes wrong when he drags her out from under a giant sunflower, which then breaks and falls on a waiter with a tray full of drinks. Gus gets thrown out of the bar.
Gus later talks about both these events to Henry Gade, a psychologist friend who turns out to have treated the woman, called Iona; Gade later gives Gus her address (so much for patient confidentiality!)
When Gus goes to see Iona she invites him in, and the story’s gimmick is revealed:

“It started about two years ago. I had a slight crush on a fellow at a summer camp. He took me to a dance one night—one of those country square dances. It was a lot of fun and we danced ourselves tired. Then we went out onto the lakeshore—and he—well, the moon and all, you, know—he put his arms around me. And just then, a voice spoke to me. It said, ‘If you know what’s good for you, you’ll keep away from this fellow.’ I started back and asked the boy if he had said something. He hadn’t.’ I was scared and ran all the way home. He tried to catch me, but he couldn’t. I saw him the next day and I tried to apologize, but there wasn’t very much I could say. I tried to be nice to him, but as time went on he got more and more irritable. And he lost weight. He wound up in the hospital. Almost—died. You see, he couldn’t sleep. He was afraid to sleep. He had the most terrible dreams. I heard about one of them. It was awful.”  p. 130

She adds that, as soon as she stopped seeing him, he recovered, and she tells Gus about other men who have had similar experiences. She points at the cloves of garlic around the window and door, and concludes with the revelation that she is haunted by a jealous ghost.
Gus then suffers the same persecution as all the other men, and writes to a gossip columnist for advice: he learns that the ghost will only stop tormenting him when it is no longer attracted to Iona or finds someone else. Meanwhile, Iona decides not to see Gus to spare him the terrible ordeal the ghost is putting him through. Gus goes on a ten-day drinking binge.
For the first half or so this is a pretty good piece of quirky light fantasy, but it starts to fade after the midway point and has an exceptionally lame ending (spoiler): Gus takes her to get her white hair dyed as it, and her pale skin and dark eyes, make her look like a ghost—hence the real ghost’s attraction to her!
The Hounds of Kalimar by P. Schuyler Miller opens with the narrator and his Indian friend out on a hunting trip. They discover an unexplored valley and later make camp there:

We had an hour or two of daylight left, but our camp site was a good one and we stayed there. We sat with our backs against a huge fallen hemlock, a good four feet through the trunk. I had my pipe and Jim, who doesn’t smoke, was repairing the rim of his pack basket. His fingers were busy with the splints, but his eyes were on the forest, and pretty soon I found myself watching too.
His face gave no sign, but I knew he had seen something. I followed the direction of his gaze, and began methodically to study the face of the forest. Finally I saw it: a blue jay, its crested head cocked a little, one black eye fixed on us. It might have been carved out of painted wood, so still it was. A flick of motion caught the corner of my eye, and I saw a fox crouching in the shadows. And then I began to see them all. A lump near the top of a small balsam was a porcupine. A dead leaf caught in a fork was another squirrel. Little round shadows among the higher branches were chickadees and kinglets. The sinuous shadow of a hemlock root on the stream bank became a weasel. And their eyes were on us.  p. 139

A short time later two strange-looking (“monkey”) men turn up and force them to go to see the ruler of the valley, another odd-looking man called Kallimar, who seems to be some sort of human missing link. The animals that were watching them follow the narrator and his friend into the hall and, after some back and forth, Kallimar tells the pair that they will compete in a hunt against an otter, wolf, and eagle. They will have to win if they want to survive.
The rest of the story is pretty much an unpleasant slaughter-fest, with the pair eventually killing more than the other three animals, and capturing a couple of them as well. An albino puma helps them out in the latter stages.
This is readable enough stuff but it’s all a bit arbitrary and pointless (and as for Kallimar’s amphibious aircraft parked on the lake, completely anachronistic).

I’ve spoken briefly about the change of Cover design above. The Interior artwork in this issue is by Paul Orban, Hall, Frank Kramer, Manuel Isip, Newton Alfred , and William Kolliker, and I’ll withhold comment at the moment as I’m reading this one from an Unz.org scan, and some of the art work is very badly reproduced.
Of Things Beyond: Gremlins Breed Fast is a short editorial about gremlins that ends with this:

It looks as though the spread of gremlins was not only unopposed, but in some manner greatly aided by a universal, highly effective fifth column organization. As a matter of fact, there is every indication that the Ancient and Universal Order of Buck Passers is the organization behind their wide and rapid spread. It is a well-established fact that this truly Ancient and Universal Order assisted the spread and nurtured the growth of the brownie, the troll, leprechaun, goblin, cobald, nickel, jinx, and unnumbered other species of such invisible and omnipresent trouble causers. The equally Ancient and Honorable Order of Tall Tale Tellers has assisted in this work as innocent and unconscious agents in the spread of the trouble-makers, but has to some extent modified them under an uplift program designed to make them useful and-helpful citizens.
But the real reason for their wide and rapid conquest is the wholly conscious and malevolent fifth column work of the Buck Passers, beyond question. The Order can well claim to be Ancient and Universal, if not honorable. They claim, and rightly, we understand, that Adam was the originator of the Order, as well as of other things.  p. 6

Book Reviews by Anthony Boucher starts off with an examination of three books on prophecy. One these books, Prophets and Portents, Seven Seers Foretell Hitler’s Doom by Rolf Boswell (Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1942) has an interesting account of one seer’s predictions:

Boriska Silbiger, a Hungarian, who employed none of the paraphernalia of occultism but simply issued a forecast each year from 1933 until 1939, when she was imprisoned in a concentration camp. One sample of her work will indicate her quality; in 1935 she said: “In January of the ensuing year, the king of a great empire will die suddenly. He will be succeeded by his eldest son, but the reign of his successor will not last twelve months, whereafter he will renounce the throne.”
The ensuing year, 1936, brought the death of George V and the brief reign and abdication of Edward VIII.
This is not an isolated example. There are a half dozen others as good. And the last Silbiger utterance, the prophecy that brought down upon her the wrath of the Gestapo, reads: “The war will end with Hitler’s death and the collapse of Nazism. The world after the peace comes will be so different and-there will be such national and social upheavals that it impossible to describe it.”
Unfortunately in this, his most, impressive subject, Mr. Boswell’s documentation is even scantier than usual.
He mentions only that her forecasts were printed “in thirty-odd newspapers in various parts of the globe.” The New York Times Index, The Official Index to the London Times, The International Index to Periodicals, and The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature have never heard of her.  p. 159

The actual prophecy she made was, “The war will end in 1942 with Hitler’s death and the collapse of Nazism. But the belligerent Powers will be so exhausted that there will be no victor and no defeated in the common sense of the word. Whoever survives it will live to see a new and better world.”⁵
The last part of the column discusses The Magus by Comte de L’Avre, an encyclopaedia of magic—more mumbo-jumbo. I don’t understand why editors of fantasy magazines assume that readers of such material are interested in this kind of thing.

With the singular exception of the Jameson this is a very poor issue.  ●

____________________

1. Fred Smith, Once There Was A Magazine— p. 44-45 (Beccon Publications, 2002), notes the changes to the magazine and the front cover design before commenting on the fiction. “Best of the lot, by a narrow margin,” he says, “was Anthony Boucher’s novelette Sriberdegibit.” He notes that the story reintroduces the magician Ozymandias the Great from The Compleat Werewolf.
Blind Alley “was another winner for Jameson”, and he notes the same could be said for Cartmill’s Wheesht! Miller’s The Hounds of Kalimar was “a fairly average adventure story which would not have been out of place in the old Argosy.”
He thought the short stories a “mixed bag”, with Sturgeon’s the best, followed by Hull’s and Arthur’s.
Smith finishes by noting new artists Alfred and Hall, the latter “producing a couple of excellent full page illustrations for Sriberdegibit.”

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, p. 144-146, The Annotated Guide to Unknown & Unknown Worlds (Starmont, 1991) says that Cartmill’s Wheest! is “a quaint story, with some subtle digs at Hitler and the myth of Aryanism.”
He found the Arthur story “dreadful”, and the Miller story “terrible”. He adds that both of these pieces were in inventory for almost two years, and that “stories like this, combined with the lack of long fiction in this issue, give the impression he was trying to get rid of a lot of material from the inventory backlog in one fell swoop.”
He notes that A Bargain in Bodies by Moses Schere “was the only [Unknown story] that was ever optioned for a light opera”, and that Sriberdegibit by Anthony Boucher “is one of the few Unknown stories in which a man wins out against his demon through a loophole that is a natural part of the curse.”

2. One wonders to what extent Jameson’s story influenced Alfred Bester. Will You Wait? also has a ‘Hell as a modern business’ theme (that said, this may have been a relatively common trope in the magazine, but Jameson’s version is the first I can remember having come across). The other Bester story that was perhaps influenced by Jameson’s story is Hobson’s Choice (F&SF, August 1952), which has as its theme the pointlessness of yearning for other times.
Bester mentions Jameson in his Hell’s Catographers (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975) essay, My Affair with Science Fiction:

Mort Weisinger introduced me to the informal luncheon gatherings of the working science fiction authors of the late thirties. I met Henry Kuttner (who later became Lewis Padgett), Ed Hamilton, and Otto Binder, the writing half of Eando Binder. Eando was a sort of acronym of the brothers Earl and Otto Binder. E. and O. Earl died but Otto continued to use the well-known nom de plume. Malcolm Jameson, author of navy-orientated space stories, was there, tall, gaunt, prematurely grey, speaking in slow, heavy tones. Now and then he brought along his pretty daughter who turned everybody’s head.
The vivacious compere of those luncheons was Manley Wade Wellman, a professional Southerner full of regional anecdotes. It’s my recollection that one of his hands was slightly shrivelled, which may have been why he came on so strong for the Confederate cause. We were all very patient with that; after all, our side won the war. Wellman was quite the man-of-the-world for the innocent thirties; he always ordered wine with his lunch.
Henry Kuttner and Otto Binder were medium sized young men, very quiet and courteous, and entirely without out­standing features. Once I broke Kuttner up quite un­intentionally. I said to Weisinger, ‘I’ve just finished a wild story that takes place in a spaceless, timeless locale where there’s no objective reality. It’s awfully long, 20,000 words, but I can cut the first 5,000.’ Kuttner burst out laughing. I do too when I think of the dumb kid I was. Once I said most earnestly to Jameson, ‘I’ve discovered a remarkable thing. If you combine two story-lines into one the result can be tremendously exciting.’ He stared at me with incredulity. ‘Haven’t you ever heard of plot and counterplot?’ he growled. I hadn’t. I discovered it all by myself.  p. 50-51

3. Jameson’s great-granddaughter Wendy McClure has a website about him that provides a short biography.
Blind Alley became a Twilight Zone episode, Of Late I Think of Cliffordville, which aired in April 1963.

4. This was one of John B. Michel’s last stories. Only three more would appear before his death in 1968 according to ISFDB.

5. The Silbiger prophecies appear in a couple of wartime papers, such as this New Zealand one. ●

ISFDB link
Archive.org link

Other reviews:¹
Fred Smith, Once There Was A Magazine— p 43-44. (Beccon Publications, 2002)
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, p. 142-144, The Annotated Guide to Unknown & Unknown Worlds (Starmont, 1991)

_____________________

Editors, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Kay Tarrant

Fiction:
Conjure Wife • novel by Fritz Leiber ∗∗∗∗
The Golden Bridle • novelette by Jane Rice ∗∗
The Giftie Gien • short story by Malcolm Jameson ∗∗
No Greater Love • novelette by Henry Kuttner ∗

Non-fiction:
Interior artwork • by Frank Kramer (x9), Alfred (x2), Paul Orban (x4)
New Order • editorial by John W. Campbell Jr.
Book Review • by Anthony Boucher and A. Langley Searles

____________________

Fritz Leiber’s first published novel Conjure Wife, which appears entire in this issue, starts with this:

“I keep wondering if she knows about Us,” said the woman with black button eyes. She played the queen of spades.
The queen of hearts trumped the queen of spades. “You can put your mind at rest,” said the silver-haired woman sweetly, gathering in the trick. “She doesn’t. Tansy Saylor plays a lone hand. Like most women, she thinks she’s the Only One. Co-operation such as ours is rare.”
“But I’m afraid of her. Oh, I know she hasn’t upset the Balance, and uses only Protective Procedures. But she isn’t our kind. Neither is her husband. They don’t belong.”
The silver-haired woman nodded primly, peering through her thick glasses at the dummy with the empty chair behind it. “I agree. The Saylors are a disgrace to the Hempnell faculty. Modern. No sense of the traditional decencies.”
“Yes, and she wants to make him president of Hempnell. She wants him to dictate to our husbands. She wants to condescend to us.”
“This talk gets nowhere,” broke in the stout, red-haired woman gruffly. “The point is that her Protective Procedures are effective—many things would have happened to the Saylors during the last ten years if they weren’t. And she hasn’t made the mistake of upsetting the Balance. So what can we three do about it?”
“Oh, the Balance!” said the woman with black button eyes, throwing down her last two cards. “Sometimes I think we ought to upset it ourselves.” She evaded the shocked glance of the silver-haired woman. “We’ve our Sounds, and our Pictures, and our Numbers, and our Cards. We could finish the Saylors in a whiff. There’s such a neat trick with cards I’ve just learned. Here, let me show you—” She slipped a dozen shiny pasteboard oblongs out of her purse. They had the conventional backs, but their faces bore representations of a cryptic sort.
“Stop that!” The silver-haired woman stretched out fluttering hands.
“Put them away!” ordered the stout woman harshly. She glanced at the door. “Quickly!”
But the eyes of the little man who ambled in were not inquisitive. With white beard and amiable smile, he looked almost benign, in an absent-minded sort of way. “I don’t suppose you played much bridge while I was gone,” he observed with mild joviality.
The silver-haired woman’s laughter trilled sweetly. “It’s his little joke. He always pretends that all women are fearful gossips. Well, at least I made the contract, dear. Four hearts.”
His eyes twinkled. “Very commendable.”
He settled himself in the empty chair. “Still. I imagine the three of you managed to find time for some very dark and devious plotting—” He chuckled innocently.  p. 9-10

In this short opening,² which is missing in the book version of the novel,³ you have most of the story in an eggshell. The main conflict is between the three woman above and the oblivious Tansy Taylor, the wife of a member of the Hempnell faculty, Professor Norman Saylor. The three women are wives of other members of the academic staff and, more importantly, are witches. The wider conceit of the book is that all women are witches, gaining the knowledge from their mothers or discovering it themselves. Married women use their power to advance and/or control and/or protect their (amiable but doltish) husbands. This isn’t an idea that is entirely convincing but it works on the relatively small canvas that Leiber uses for his story, and should perhaps been seen more as a metaphor for spousal influence on faculty politics. Leiber obviously developed a caustic view of this and other petty politicking during his own time in a college environment.⁴
The rest of the novel is told from Norman Saylor’s point of view and we quickly find ourselves in the middle of events—he is rummaging in his wife’s dresser when he finds some unexpected items:

The dry, dark-brown granules shifted smoothly, like sand in an hourglass, as he rotated the glass cylinder. The label appeared, in Tansy’s clear script. “Julia Trock, Roseland.” A cosmetician? Was Roseland a part of the name, or a place? And why should the idea that it might be a place seem distasteful? His hand knocked aside the cardboard cover as he reached for a second bottle, identical with the first, except that the contents had a somewhat reddish tinge, and the label read, “Philip Lassiter, Hill.” A third, contents same color as the first: “J. P. Thorndyke, Roseland.” Then a handful, quickly snatched up, of three: “Emelyn Scatterday, Roseland.” “Mortimer Pope, Hill.” “The Rev. Bufort Ames, Roseland.”
The silence in the house grew thunderous; even the sunlight seemed to sizzle and fry, as his mind rose to a sudden pitch of concentration on the puzzle. “Roseland and Hill, Roseland and Hill, Roseland and Hill,” like a nursery rhyme somehow turned nasty, making the glass cylinders repugnant to his fingers.
“Roseland Hill—”
Abruptly the answer came.
The two local cemeteries.
Graveyard dirt.
Soil specimens all right. Graveyard dirt from particular graves. A chief ingredient of Negro conjure magic.  p. 10-11

There are some lovely phrases in that passage: “The silence in the house grew thunderous”; “like a nursery rhyme somehow turned nasty”.

Saylor finds many more strange items before his wife arrives home. He starts interrogating her, and quickly finds that her activities sprang out of his research years before into witchcraft and folk magic, and that she has experimented since then on a small but systematic scale. Eventually, after a long discussion, he pressures her to stop conjuring: she quickly agrees, and they clear the house of a multitude of charms, etc. When she goes to bed, and Saylor is sitting alone by the fire, he finds one last protective charm hidden behind a photo in a locket he wears. He burns it and, unknown to him, the protection it provided stops, and his life starts unravelling—he has exposed himself to the powers of the three women in the introduction. Almost immediately there is a phone call from an angry male student who complains about being treated unfairly, and who tells Saylor he is “not going to get away with it”.

Saylor’s next day at the college brings more bad news as he learns about an accusation of sexual abuse from a female student (this happens after various hassles from a number of colleagues and wives). The angry man phones again too. Saylor realises it all started going wrong last night, after he burnt the charm, but he shrugs off the connection as ludicrous.
The plot develops over the next few chapters: Saylor thinks that the stone dragon on the rooftop is moving down the roof towards his office; there is a bridge match that involves the three witches and Tansy and their husbands, during which Tansy’s diary (with notes of all her incantations and formulae) is stolen.
Saylor has a bad night’s sleep after the match. The next day, after again crossing swords with a couple of the other staff members, he gives a provocative lecture to his class that involves ribald comments about “premarital relations”. Saylor then learns he has lost the chairmanship position to another colleague (and husband of one of the three witches).
This is all developed in an engrossing and atmospheric way, and we get a good feel for the life and politics of campus life in this section. The novel is also gripping in places, and this is at its most intense in an excellent scene where Saylor is at home with Tansy, and he senses a large ‘presence’ behind him. Their cat Totem is missing as well, and (spoiler) they later find it outside with its “head mashed flat against the concrete”. Saylor buries the body and notices there is a large dog-shaped creature prowling around in the undergrowth. The climax of this scene takes place inside the house in the middle of a huge storm, with Tansy almost unconsciously stringing twine between her hands to produce a protective charm to ward off whatever creature is about to break in. There is an equally top-notch section later in the book when Saylor has to track down his wife and then gather the requirements to free her from the presence that had previously been shadowing him (but which she had managed to transfer to herself). He is not entirely successful, and she is left in a zombie-like condition. The rest of the book is an account of how Saylor confronts the three witches and retrieves her soul.

Overall the novel is a little uneven: the start is too compressed, essentially a data dump,² and the ending has a soul transfer switcheroo that didn’t convince me, and that I didn’t completely understand. There is also the odd longeur in the middle of the piece, such as the house-keeping chapter on the train back to Hempnell after Saylor’s wife loses her soul. On the other side of the ledger you have the aforementioned scenes that are among the best horror/dark fantasy I’ve ever read. The superior characterisation, the relationship between Saylor and Tansy, and the hints of adult sexuality are an added bonus.
A very good novel, and probably the best thing I’ve read in Unknown so far.
The Golden Bridle by Jane Rice has as its narrator the jockey ‘Jinx’ Jackson, who tells the story in a colloquial, conversational style:

Say, that is mighty white. I do not mind if I do, though I remembers the day when I would not of touched beer with a ten-foot pole. Weight. Jockeys has got to watch their weight like it is tombstones they is putting on instead of pounds.
Well, here’s luck, mister. May all your double parlays give the bookies fits.
What’s that? Yeah, sure I am a jockey. Was. There is not no point in giving you the old three and five. You look like a right guy. Why should I kid you? I have not been up on a horse for four years. Six months cold for a jock is a wide turn, but four years—say, four years is—what the devil, I am washed up cleaner than a choirboy’s ears.  p. 79

The story Jackson relates starts in Tijuana where he and his friend Winkie are riding in a race meet. While they are in town they come across a group of men harassing a strangely dressed woman and intervene. After the group of men are diapersed, she tells Jackson and Winkie that she has lost her horse and, when she hears it nearby, hands Winnie a golden bridle before disappearing up a dead-end alley.

It later becomes apparent that the woman was a Muse and the horse Pegasus. Winnie uses the bridle on his horse during the evening races, and wins that and every other race afterwards. Over the month and years that follow, Winkie becomes incredibly rich, but it does not bring him or his disabled sister happiness. Eventually he decides to ride one last race without the bridle to rid himself of the obligations and drawbacks of his wealth.
The ending that this final section produces is unclear, unconvincing and doesn’t entirely work (spoiler: the sister receives the bridle from Winnie, which somehow connects her to the race, and results in her death). The story is also longer than necessary. There is some compensation to be found in Rice’s entertaining storytelling and lively turn of phrase however, e.g. this description of Winkie’s disabled sister:

When I first sees Ditsy I also thinks it is true that she has turned into a red-hot momma. She has done something to her mouth so it looks like it has been swatted by a ripe plum, and she is wearing one of them “creations” that does not leave but very little to the imagination, and she is walking with two silver-headed canes, and her fingernails looks like they has been dipped in calves’ liver while it is still in the calf.  p. 89

The Giftie Gien by Malcolm Jameson is based on lines from Robert Burns’ poem To a Louse,⁵ “Ah, wad some power the giftie gie us, To see oursels as ithers see us—” It opens with a scene where an unpleasant sales manager bullies his salesmen and one of the secretaries. He then leaves the office to meet and important client and is robbed and killed in the park.
After his death he finds himself in the afterlife marching alongside many others:

Chisholm found himself on a vast gray plain under a dull leaden sky, marching, marching, marching. It was odd that it tired him so, for it was effortless and timeless and the distances, though interminable, seemed meaningless. It must have been the monotony of it.
And then, also, he found those marching with him strangely disturbing. Some were healthy looking men like himself, except that most of them were gashed or mangled in some way, as if hurled through plate glass or smashed by bombs. Others were haggard and pallid, as if coming from sickbeds. But it was the soldiers that got him most. He had forgotten about the war. It had touched him but slightly, though his impressions of it had been irritating, but not in a flesh and blood way. The silly business of priorities, price controls and sales taxes had annoyed him exceedingly, and the outrageous income-tax boosts had infuriated him. Now he was getting another slant on the conflict, for hordes—armies—of soldiers were marching along with him. They were of every kind—Russians, Japs, Tommies, Nazis, even American bluejackets and soldiers—and mingled with them were miserable-looking civilians of every race. A pair of wretched looking Polish Jews walking near him had obviously been hanged but a short time before.
Chisholm edged away from them in horrified disgust.  p. 98-99

Chisholm is eventually dealt with by a demon who forces him to experience others’ impressions of him:

The greatest shocks were to follow. He steeled himself for whatever opinions those first two wives held, but the current one had done a devastating job of analysis. Even the demon whistled. Interspersed between the major blows were minor ones, and not always shadowy. Bootblacks, waiters, taxi drivers—on almost every casual contact he had left a mark. Out of the lot there was only one that was glowingly heroic. He could not refrain from asking the demon about it. The demon bent his insight onto the wraith and pronounced:
“A girl you met once—a pick-up. You kissed her on the Drive that night, and then lost her phone number, you lucky dog.”
“Lucky?”
“Yes. She never had a chance to know you better.”  p. 102

This story has a neat idea, and the marching scene provides a memorable image, but overall it doesn’t amount to much of a story.
No Greater Love by Henry Kuttner starts with a lazy infodump beginning that tells us about the narrator Denworth’s spendthrift ways and his unsuccessful business ventures—the latter are funded by an unloved but shrewd wife (if she dies he gets virtually nothing). We also learn that Denworth has his eyes on another woman called Myra.
The fantasy element of the story is introduced when Denworth takes shelter from the rain in a shop. Although the proprietor tells him there is nothing for sale he steals a charm bracelet when unobserved. Later, while having a drink in a bar (given gratis by the bartender), Denworth hears a disembodied voice. We later find this is a pixie called “Turzee the Brawler”, and he tells Denworth about pixies, and Oberon, and that he should return the bracelet to its owner. When Denworth later discovers that one of the charms on the bracelet has the power to make everyone love him (the free drinks), he refuses, and hatches a plan to get rid of his wife so he will be free to be with Myra.
The rest of the story unpacks this plot: he goes home to a wife who is now willing to change her will; he hears again from Turzee the Brawler (this time he has Oberon with him too) and they try to take Denworth “under the hill”, but he is protected by the charm. Later, his wife attempts suicide, and at this point a cop called Fennel suspects something untoward is afoot.

When Denworth later goes to see Myra he finds that Turzee has used her as a way of getting to him. This is an effectively creepy scene:

“Myra!” he called.
Then, in a corner, something stirred. With a sense of abysmal shock Denworth saw that Myra had been crouching on the floor, on hands and knees. She stood up, with a slow, timeless motion. Shadows veiled her face. She did not speak.
And, behind Denworth, something tittered shrilly. The low whisper of Turzee said:
“So there is nothing you love, Denworth? Nothing?”
“Myra,” the man snapped, his voice harsh with fear. “Myra!”
“We cannot harm you, Denworth. But we have taken her Under the Hill.”
Denworth reached the girl in a stride, his fingers clamping cruelly on her arm. He dragged her into the light from the window.
She made no resistance, following him uncomplainingly.
The red glow of sunset fell on her face. In the horrible silence the eager, satiated sniggering of Turzee fell like the goblin laughter of a brooklet.
It was Myra’s eyes, mostly, that—
It was the look in her eyes.
It was the memory, in her eyes, of what she had seen.
And Turzee tittered. “Under the Hill. She has been Under the Hill. She has seen the splendors there. She has seen the hall where we toasted Eve on the night of wrath. Tell your lover what you have seen, Myra Valentine.”
Myra’s lips parted. She began to speak, softly and distinctly. Denworth said, “Don’t!”
She stopped, but he could still look into her eyes. Something quite horrible had happened to Myra.
The red sunlight flashed on the Love sigil. Myra saw it. She walked straight toward Denworth, her arms extended.
And that was unsupportable. Denworth felt that he knew something of the horror that had touched Eve, the ultimate blasphemy. There are changes too subtle and illogical to be more than sensed; Myra had suffered such a change.
Denworth stumbled back. Myra followed.
The Love sigil drew her.
Turzee, invisible above them, tittered maliciously.  p. 126-127

The final scene plays out back in the shop and involves a three-wish ring. Fennel the cop arrives at the shop to kill Denworth, and the latter (spoiler) uses his last wish from the ring to change into a spider and hide in the corner of the cellar—at which point a female spider, drawn by the love charm, comes for a deadly mating.

This story would have been okay if it hadn’t been for the padding, the clichéd selfishness and greed of Denworth, and the terribly contrived and silly ending. It is the latter that really drags it down. A pity, some of the fantasy stuff is quite good: it seems that when Kuttner gets away from contemporary settings the better his stories are (e.g. last issue’s Wet Magic).

The Interior artwork in this issue is mostly by Frank Kramer, who illustrates the Leiber novel, although there are also illustrations by Paul Orban, and another artist I haven’t heard of before, Alfred—nearly all of the artwork is lacklustre at best and poor at worst. Kramer does one decent illustration for Leiber’s novel (the beast behind the woman)—I would have added the double page illustration on p. 19-20, except that it is a completely inappropriate and inaccurate piece. Alfred provides a decent enough illustration for Jameson’s story. God only knows what Orban was doing this issue—these are the worst drawings I think I have seen him produce.
New Order seems to be the same editorial that appeared in the April issue of Astounding (except that any references to “Astounding” are replaced by “Unknown”), and which gives notice of a change of format from bedsheet to digest size (due to wartime rationing).
Book Review by Anthony Boucher and A. Langley Searles contains two separate book reviews. Boucher covers Out of Space and Time by Clark Ashton Smith, and produces a review that has an interesting fact or observation in just about every paragraph:

The Lovecraft influence is perhaps fading now, with the rise of the newer, school of fantasy exemplified by de Camp or Sturgeon or Rice; but the best of the Lovecraft school remains incomparable for the creation of the dire extremities of horror. And Smith, because he is a poet and a craftsman, has produced by far the best work in the Lovecraft tradition.
How much Smith himself has added to the field of fantasy is more difficult to estimate. In most of his work the echoes of Lovecraft and Dunsany drown out his own voice. Possibly two features, aside from the sometimes self-conscious, sometimes macabrely evocative poetic prose, are distinctively Smith.
One, which is odd in a man experienced in so many workaday fields, is the absoluteness of his fantasy. Lovecraft wove his mythos into our everyday life until we were haunted by the suspicion that the world was a dark and uncertain place. Smith rather transports us to dark and uncertain worlds and relates their appalling histories. These are wonderful and horrible; but they happened long ago or are to happen long hence—they do not bring you up against the choking realization that it is darker than you think.
The other, Smith’s most important contribution, is a guignol irony—a gentle skill in telling that which is so inhumanly fabulous as to be neither horrible nor farcical, but balances on the razor edge between the shudder and the titter. Read “The Monster of the Prophecy,” my own favorite Smith story, or “The Testament of Athammaus,” and try to analyze your reaction.  p. 103

A. Langley Searles’ review is of The Midnight Reader by Philip Van Doren Stern. Searles states that this volume is an excellent collection for new readers, but not so much for long time fantasy fans:

[While] I have no quarrel with the quality of “The Midnight Reader,” I could wish it did not rely so greatly upon the commonplace when such a wealth of good—even great—tales never before collected might be readily substituted. H. P. Lovecraft, the modern master; the practically unknown, yet almost as great William Hope Hodgson; the versatile E. F. Benson—these authors have never been adequately represented. And much classic material lies untouched amid the work of H. R. Wakefield, A. Merritt, Robert W. Chambers; M. P. Shiel, and others. But the editor either is not familiar with it, or shies away from its relative obscurity. It would be pleasant if a new anthology presented more of the less familiar. p. 104

There is no letter column this month.
A must read issue for the Leiber novel.  ●

____________________

1. Fred Smith, Once There Was A Magazine— p. 43-44 (Beccon Publications, 2002), says that Leiber’s Conjure Wife “must be considered one of the most outstanding pieces of work even by Unknown standards” and that it “is undoubtedly one of his best in a long career that lasted up to his death in 1992.” Smith adds that although there was not much room left for other material apart from the Leiber,* “we were given Henry Kuttner, Jane Rice and Malcolm Jameson, all in top form.”
Smith notes that Kuttner’s novelette, No Greater Love, has an ending that “is a strange and very unusual one which was probably dreamed up first, the rest of the story being built back from it.” He also notes that “the ending was revealed, unfortunately, by the ‘thumbnail’ drawing accompanying the blurb on the cover!”
Jane Rice’s The Golden Bridle is “a beautiful piece of writing” and is “definitely not one of this author’s more lighthearted efforts.”
[* Smith overestimates the length of the Leiber at 70,000 words—it is closer to 52,500 by my OCR count, and Dziemianowicz estimates its length at 55,000 words.]

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, p. 142-144, The Annotated Guide to Unknown & Unknown Worlds (Starmont, 1991) says: “Leiber’s suggestion that all humans are natural practitioners of black magic is the same sort of idea Jack Williamson explored in Darker than You Think, with his suggestion that man’s psychological dark side is actually a vestigial remnant of the blood of another race. Like Williamson, Leiber proposes that the so-called rational sciences are only deviations from magic. This sets up an interesting, although dry dénouement, in which Leiber merges witchcraft and science.”
He adds that “the story as a whole is so well-written, though, that one forgives Leiber for an occasional rough spot” and that “Leiber’s achievement here is the subtlety with which events turn against Norman Saylor.” He concludes by saying that, “Essentially, this is a love story in a small town setting. The other characters portrayed in the book are exactly what the reader would expect people in a small college town, with small town interests, to be like. But Leiber takes the petty social climbing of these characters and the age old battle of the sexes and shows that they have a terrible and sinister foundation. This story typified the spirit of the magazine, which held that the unknown could occur anywhere, anytime, for any reason.”
Dziemianowicz says this of Henry Kuttner’s No Greater Love—: “The ending is good, but like several of Kuttner’s other stories, it requires the introduction of a late, extraneous element to bring it about.”

2. Given Leiber’s theatrical background I wondered if this ‘three witches’ opening scene is a nod towards Macbeth. . . .

3. From a cursory look at the book edition, not only is the introductory passage above omitted, but the beginning appears to have been rewritten and expanded. In the serial, the point from where Saylor starts looking in his wife’s dresser to where he and Tansy agree not to talk further about the subject of conjure magic is most of Chapter 1 and runs to 2,500 words. In the book this section is 7,000 words long and takes us to the end of Chapter 2.
The OCR word count of the book version is 61,300 words compared with the serial’s 52,500.

4. According to Wikipedia, “In 1941[. . .] Leiber served as a speech and drama instructor at Occidental College during the 1941–1942 academic year.”

5. Robert Burns’ poem To a Louse is here.  ●

ISFDB link
Archive.org link

Other reviews:¹
Fred Smith, Once There Was A Magazine— p. 42-43 (Beccon Publications, 2002)
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, p. 140-142, The Annotated Guide to Unknown & Unknown Worlds (Starmont, 1991)

_____________________

Editors, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Kay Tarrant

Fiction:
Wet Magic • novella by Henry Kuttner ∗∗∗+
Thieves’ House • novelette by Fritz Leiber ∗∗∗+
The Angelic Angleworm • novelette by Fredric Brown ∗
The Ultimate Wish • short story by E. Mayne Hull ∗∗∗+
No Graven Image • novelette by Cleve Cartmill ∗
Guardian • short story by Cleve Cartmill [as by Michael Corbin] ∗
The Hat Trick • short story by Fredric Brown [as by Felix Graham] ∗∗
The Witch • novelette by A. E. van Vogt ∗∗∗+

Non-fiction:
Interior artwork • by W. A. Kolliker (x9), Frank Kramer (x3), Manuel Isip (x8), Edd Cartier (x2), Paul Orban (x2)
Of Things Beyond • editorial
The Ka of Kor-Sethon • poem by Hannes Bok
—And Having Writ— • letters
On Books of Magic • essay by L. Sprague de Camp [as by J. Wellington Wells]

____________________

This issue of the magazine has a distinctly Sword & Sorcery feel to start, courtesy of the first two stories, Wet Magic by Henry Kuttner, and Thieves’ House by Fritz Leiber, the fifth of his ‘Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser’ stories to see print in Unknown.

Kuttner’s Wet Magic is an Arthurian fantasy that starts with an AEF pilot called Arthur Woodley getting shot down by a pair of Stukas in Wales² and bailing out into a swirling grey fog. When he later looks for shelter he checks the hollow at the base of a tree for bears (!) and gets kicked twice by something unseen. He moves away.
Later, while Woodley is resting, he wakes when someone kisses him, and opens his eyes to see a young, dark-haired woman who wears a gold band in her hair, and a full length robe. After some back and forth we discover her name is Vivienne, that people cannot normally see her as she is invisible, and that, according to her, “he smells of Merlin”. She adds that she lives under the lake in Morgan’s (the Queen of Air and Darkness’s) castle, and that she will be his if he passes the testing. When Vivienne gets airborne to fly to the lake, Woodley trips, bangs his head, and passes out.

After this slightly clunky setup the rest of the story takes place underwater in Morgan’s castle. Woodley wakes to find a translucent green woman (a naiad) attending to him. She explains where he is and that he will have to pass a test set by Morgan that evening.
Before Woodley can find out more, an angry knight called Sir Bohart interrupts them, and challenges Woodley to a sword fight (he is jealous that Woodley has Vivienne’s affection). Vivienne arrives and banishes Sir Bohart from the room.
Vivienne explains Woodley’s situation:

The girl laughed softly. “You have no gills. Morgan’s magic works more subtly. You have been—altered—so that you can live under water. The element is as air to you. It is the same enchantment Morgan put upon this castle when she sank it in the lake, after Camelot fell and the long night came upon Britain. An old enchantment—she put it upon Lyonesse once, and lived there for a while.”
“And I thought all that was just legend,” Woodley muttered.
“How little you mortals know! And yet it is true—in some strange paradoxical way. Morgan told me once, but I did not understand. Well, you can ask her tonight, after the testing.”
“Oh—the testing. I’m not too happy about that. What is it, anyway?”
Vivienne looked at him with some surprise. “An ancient chivalric custom. Before any man can dwell here, he must prove himself worthy by doing some deed of valor. Sir Bohart had to slay a Worm—a dragon, you know—but his magic cuirass helped him there. He’s quite invulnerable while he wears it.”
“Just what is this testing?”
“It is different for each knight. Morgan has made some being, with her sorcery, and placed it behind the Shaking Rock. Ere sundown, you must go and kill the creature, whatever it is. I would I knew what manner of thing lairs there, but I do not, nor would Morgan let me tell you if I knew.”
Woodley blinked. “Uh . . . suppose I don’t want to take the test?”
“You must, or Morgan will slay you. But surely you are not afeared, my lord!”
“Of course not,” he said hastily. “Just tell me a little more, will you? Are we really living under water?”
Vivienne sighed, pressed Woodley down to a sitting position on the bed, and relaxed comfortably in his lap. “Kiss me,” she said. “There! Now— well, after the Grail was lost and the table broken, magic went out of Britain. There was no room for the fairy folk. Some died, some went away, some hid, here and there. There are secrets beneath the hills of Britain, my Arthur. So Morgan, with her powers, made herself invisible and intangible, and sank her castle here under the lake, in the wild mountains of Wales. Her servants are not human, of course. I had done Morgan a service once, and she was grateful. So when I saw the land sinking into savagery, I asked to go with her to this safe place. I brought Bohart with me and Morgan took Merlin’s old master, Bleys the Druid. Since then nothing has changed. Humans cannot feel or see us—or you either, now that you have been enchanted.  p. 13-14

After Vivienne leaves he quizzes the naiad about what is behind the rock, and learns it is an undine, a tendrilled beast. Woodley goes to see the Druid Bleys for advice. . . .
At this point the story becomes a faster paced and more enjoyable tale (even with some more world-building) of Woodley’s underwater adventures. He goes on a tour of the castle with Bleys the Druid and they end up on a balcony overlooking the castle’s dragon (it keeps the fish out). Bleys falls asleep, and then Woodley is knocked over the balcony (Sir Bohart again) and finds himself outside the castle. He tries to make his escape to the surface but cannot breathe in air: a result of the “wet magic”. At this point, Woodley realises he will have to undertake the test and sets about outsmarting the various factions in the castle to do so. The rest of the story involves (spoiler) an unlikely alliance between Woodley and Sir Bohart, Vivienne’s discovery of his plan to escape the castle, Merlin the wizard hiding in his tree, the reappearance of King Arthur, and a final confrontation with Morgan.

This is lively, clever and amusing tale that uniquely exploits the Arthurian myths. It is also written in better prose than you normally get from Kuttner (which makes one wonder if C. L. Moore had a hand in it—perhaps the fate of every good story the man wrote). One of the other things I liked about it is that it keeps Morgan, and the threat of being forced to “play chess” with her—a terminal event—offstage most of the time. When (spoiler) Sir Bohart eventually falls foul of this game there is a skilful piece of writing that leaves the results to the reader’s imagination:

Slowly Woodley rose and began to descend the slope of the lake bottom. A green twilight surrounded him.
Then he saw—something—slowly stirring at his feet.
For a moment Woodley’s shocked eyes could not quite comprehend what he saw. He gave a little choking gasp of nausea. It was not the actual appearance of the—thing—so much as the unmistakable fact that it had once been Sir Bohart.
And it still lived, after a fashion.
Morgan’s chess game was finished.
Woodley shut his eyes, squeezing the lids tight together, as he fought down the sickness of his human flesh, revolting from that which Morgan had done. Through the dark came a voice.
“She plays at chess with Bleys now,” it said.
Woodley tried to speak, but could not. That which should have had no voice went on thickly:
“She dared not slay him before, since he held Excalibur for Arthur. But the hour for Arthur’s coming has passed, she said to me before I died, and she has no more fear.”
The thing did not speak again, for it had disintegrated.  p. 31

Recommended.

Thieves’ House by Fritz Leiber is perhaps not quite as good as the Kuttner but it is structurally superior: the writer uses his stage experience to construct a story that is essentially a selection of key scenes tied together with a minimum of connecting material.
The first of these scenes has three thieves, two men and a woman, discussing the recruitment of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser to steal the bejewelled skull and hands of a long dead master thief. After the robbery Fissif, one of the thieves, is to double cross the pair.
The story then cuts to after the event:

The ten remaining days of the Month of the Serpent had passed, and the first fifteen days of the Month of the Owl, since those three had conferred. And the fifteenth day had darkened into night. Chill fog, like a shroud, hugged ancient stony Lankhmar, chief city of an ancient barbaric world. This night the fog had come earlier than usual, flowing down the twisting streets and mazy alleyways. And it was getting thicker.  p. 35

Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser are pursuing the double-crossing Fissif to the Thieves’ House. The pair fight their way in past concealed traps and assassins, and arrive to see a red-haired woman (one of the three from the initial meeting) disappear with the skull and hands. The current master thief sits motionless in the corner, strangled.

The pair pursue the woman but, when she blocks her escape route, they hide in an alcove and listen to the thieves convene a court to try Fissif, who they think has double-crossed them. Later, when one of the latter reports to the new master thief that the pair have not left by any of the exits, the thieves realise that Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser are still in the house. The pair spring out from their hiding place to take advantage of the surprise, and there is a fight and pursuit.
During this Fafhrd gets separated from the Grey Mouser, and finds himself in a dark underground chamber. Voices speak to him, and he realises they come from the skeletons of long dead thieves. They are affronted by the theft of the master thief’s remains, and tell him that he is to return the skull and hands to them or he will die. Before he can do anything Fafhrd is captured by his pursuers. The Grey Mouser meantime escapes and later gets a ransom note for Fafhrd.

The rest of the story (spoiler) details how the Mouser achieves Fafhrd’s release: he cross-dresses as an old witch, recovers of the bones from the redhead’s house, and uses a convenient connecting passage to the Thieves’ House (she was the master thief’s mistress). Meanwhile, Fafhrd tells his story to the thieves as time runs out. The Mouser uses the skull for a spot of mummery, and there is a final fight scene where the skeletons take their revenge against the current crop of thieves. . . .
This is an atmospheric and entertaining sword and sorcery tale.

The Angelic Angleworm by Fredric Brown starts with a short scene that describes the main character Charlie Willis getting up in the morning to go fishing with a friend called Pete. The first fantastic element appears when he is digging for worms while waiting for the latter to turn up:

He took his jackknife out and knelt down beside the flower bed. Ran the blade a couple of inches in the ground and turned over a clod of it. Yes, there were worms all right. There was a nice big juicy one that ought to be tempting to any fish.
Charlie reached out to pick it up.
And that was when it happened.
His fingertips came together, but there wasn’t a worm between them, because something had happened to the worm. When he’d reached out for it, it had been a quite ordinary-looking angleworm. A three-inch juicy, slippery, wriggling angleworm. It most definitely had not had a pair of wings. Nor a—
It was quite impossible, of course, and he was dreaming or seeing things, but there it was.
Fluttering upward in a graceful slow spiral that seemed utterly effortless. Flying past Charlie’s face with wings that were shimmery-white, and not at all like butterfly wings or bird wings, but like—
Up and up it circled, now above Charlie’s head, now level with the roof of the house, then a mere white—somehow a shining white—speck against the gray sky. And after it was out of sight, Charlie’s eyes still looked upward.  p. 50

In between scenes that take place at Charlie’s job at a printers, or involve his girlfriend Jane and their upcoming marriage, the story subsequently details other fantastic events in Charlie’s life: he challenges a brutal teamster who is mistreating a horse, passes out, and finds himself in hospital with sunburn; at a museum exhibition he sees a teal duck flapping around in a hermetically sealed cabinet until it finally expires; on the golf course he sees a lei (wreath) where he thought his golf ball should be; when he goes into the jewellers to pick up a wedding ring he smells ether and passes out.
Later, he works out that the events occur every fifty-one hours and ten minutes and, after another event, he works out the connection. He positions himself at the town line in a place called Haveen for the next episode and, when this occurs, he (spoiler) finds himself in Heaven talking to the Chief Compositor. We learn that the problem has been a technical error in the typesetting machine that writes Charlie’s life: he got an angelworm and not an angleworm, heat instead of hate, lei instead of a lie, teal instead of a tael, etc. This also explains him going to Haveen to enter heaven. The problem is sorted and his life revised: he is happy to miss the wedding ceremony but wants to go back in time for his wedding night.

This is a clever gimmick but it is one that the reader has little chance of guessing, and any writer would struggle to turn it into a decent story. The tale (tael?) is also dreadfully padded—at half its length it might have stood a chance.

The unexpected treat of the issue (I was not impressed by two of her earlier collaborations) is The Ultimate Wish by E. Mayne Hull. Initially this does not get off to a promising start with its unpleasantly stereotypical portrayal of Lola Pimmons, a hunchback who, it is implied, is as twisted on the inside as she is on the outside. Further, her work colleagues are unpleasant and cruel people. Then, as the latter are talking about her:

There was a green flash in the air, and a small creature stood before her. Two red horns grew out of the forehead of its semihuman green face; the thing snapped at her.
“Don’t get scared. I told you the first time that I could never appear twice in the same shape to a human being. And don’t worry about these others. Time stops for you when I come. They can’t hear or see us talking.”
Lola’s spasm of fear dwindled. The funny part was that she was not afraid of the creature. It had been the same that morning, when it had first appeared, as she finished dressing—she had actually managed to suppress the scream that formed in her throat.
She licked her lips now with a smacking sound of purest animal elation; behind that joy was a swift kaleidoscopic mind picture of all the frustration wishes that had ever distorted her daydreams and nightmares. She said:
“No, I haven’t decided yet; and I’m not going to rush it. I want the best wish there is, and you said that I had till six o’clock.”  p. 72

The rest of the tale tells of the further appearances of the demon (in a different guise each time) and Lola’s detailed questioning about what her various possible wishes will result in. The demon explains the hidden downsides each time, and has this to say about her potential wish for the love of her employer, a good-looking man of thirty-five:

“Ah, I see you’ve made your wish.”
“I want to know first how you’d do it.”
The crone leered: “You’re a sharp one, eh? Well, all right. What do you want? Love or marriage?”
Lola tightened her lips, narrowed her eyes, snapped: “Don’t try to kid me. I want enough love for marriage.”
“Nope. That’s two wishes. One’s spiritual. The other’s physical.”
The old one wrinkled her long, hideous nose, added:
“I guess the likes of you won’t be wanting the first.”
“What do you mean?” Lola said, stung. Her eyes flashed a darker blue, with abrupt, easy hatred.
“The kind of love you can get,” said the old wretch coolly, “doesn’t pay dividends.”
Lola was thoughtful. Her round, her too-round face twisted with a sullen moue. “What kind of love can I get?” she demanded.
“Better than the kind you give, my dear,” smirked the other. Her voice softened, glowed a picture into words: “He’ll start feeling sorry for you. Bring you an occasional box of chocolates, talk to you oftener; it’ll be a sort of pity love,” she finished.
Lola waited, then as the other made no attempt to go on, she said, amazed: “Is that all?”
The black eyes snapped; the old woman said: “I can only work with the material you offer. I might manage a kiss for you every Christmas.”
Lola squirmed with a curious, unsightly movement of her body. She was not aware of the graceless action, and she would have been amazed if someone had told her that the maneuver was a physical expression of the thought that had come into her mind.
“Suppose I wanted to be his mistress?”
The moment she had spoken, she shivered.
She hadn’t intended to put it so baldly. For the barest instant she had the feeling that her soul had come out of her body with the words, and it was lying in the waste-paper basket beside her, a dirty, crumpled thing, for all to see and shudder at.
The grisly feeling passed, as the old woman chuckled slyly, and, seeming to understand what had passed through her mind, said: “Don’t worry, my dear, we have no secrets from each other.”
All reticence gone, Lola sat with open-mouthed eagerness. “Well?” she urged.
“An accident would do the trick,” was the chilling answer. “Both his legs amputated, his face torn and scarred for life. Afterward, he’d feel that you were the best he could do.”
“Ugh!” said Lola, and looked sick in her unbeautiful way. “What do you think I am?”
“My dear,” crooned the old woman, “I know what you are. Let’s not go into that.”  p. 73

The story cycles through this scenario a few times, during which the demon repeatedly tells Lola there is one ultimate wish he can grant that will give her the contentment she desires, but he cannot tell her what the wish involves. . . .
The ending is, perhaps, obvious (spoiler: she is hit by a truck).
I think people’s responses to this story will be split. Some will find this an unpalatably grim—even brutal—story that treats its unfortunate heroine badly (part of my reaction to the piece). Hard not to when there are passages like this:

Across the street from the restaurant, Lola stopped abruptly before the gleaming window; and her eyes, weakly blue behind the owlish spectacles, peered with abrupt covetousness at a slinky black gown that draped a lean Judy against a background of fine furniture.
For a long, trembling moment, it was enough that the gown itself was a sheeny, lovely creation that she could own at the snap of a finger; and then, as the sun burst from a bed of clouds above, its brilliance emphasizing the shadows inside the window, and starkly reflecting the slight, crooked image of her body—she shuddered.
“Beauty,” she thought with a pang that stabbed along her nerves. “If I had beauty—”  p. 75

If you can overlook a badly used protagonist, and an ending that perhaps comes off the boil a little, it is an impressive and relentless little piece that is a bracing antidote to more run-of-the-mill ‘Wish’ stories.
This is probably the best story in the issue, and one I’d have in my “Best of the Year”.

No Graven Image by Cleve Cartmill uses the old superstition that every time a camera takes a photo of someone they lose a piece of their soul. This phenomenon has finally caught up with movie star Norman Courtney, who is catatonic in hospital. The three characters who come to his rescue are Al, his agent/manager, Lily Kung, a Chinese woman who is a script girl cum Asian sorceress, and Pat, Al’s fiancée.
By the quarter way point I was beginning to get a little impatient with the lack of progress (the piece has the usual Cartmill padding, with lots of running around and dialogue). However, it picks up in the central section, which involves among other things: a ghoul called Dr Barq in charge of the hospital treating Courtney; Lily creating a zombie doll of a producer they want to force into helping them retrieve a number of film masters; the threesome’s attempt to rescue Courtney from the hospital armed with the local market’s supply of garlic; etc.

None of this really makes much sense to be honest, but Cartmill manages to keep the plates spinning entertainingly for a while—until the end that is, when they all fall to the floor (Lily uses her birth charm and some Chinese symbols on a car tyre to vanquish Dr Barq the ghoul: I’m not entirely sure why they didn’t do this to start with).

By the way, Lily is, for the period, an atypically strong, capable character, so I’m not quite sure why Cartmill has her breaking into “coolie chatter” every now and then:

So we bought practically all the garlic in Hollywood.
The Hollyfax Market: arc lamps on the sidewalk, stabbing a veil of fog; hillbilly entertainers, stabbing your eardrums with sharp blades of nasal harmony.
“We want some garlic,” I told the Japanese vegetable man.
He spread a smile between his ears. “Garric, how much, prease?”
“All you’ve got.”
“Ah? Have too much. Busher basket full. How much you want?”
“The whole works.”
“Ah, so? Will never use, misser. Too much.”
“Wassa malla you?” Lily snarled. “You savvy Inglis? Gollic you got, gollic we buy. You savvy? You bring, chop chop!”
As he scurried away, I said, “Cut out that coolie chatter. You speak better English than I do.”
“I think it’s cute,” Pat said.
“That’s just the trouble. She’s got a Ph. D in languages, and uses the sloppiest English in town. Cute!”
“Hush yo’ mouf,” Lily said fiercely. “Time’s a-wastin’.  p. 92

Guardian, also by Cleve Cartmill, is a pseudonymous effort. To begin with I thought it was by Frederic Brown:

INTEROFFICE COMMUNICATION
.
To—Secretary, Recording Office
From No.—1,234,567,890,123
Rank—Guardian Angel
Subject—Resignation
Remarks—See Below
.
I should have followed my hunch and gone into the Harp & Halo Corps when I re-enlisted this time. But some of the other Guardians said this was a fairly soft touch, this watching over a man till the Sands & Time department sends out his Day-is-done order.
Well, the job is about what I expected, and I handled my first assignment discreetly. Look at my card; you’ll see.
So I can’t see any reason for my suspension—“pending an investigation.” And the semiofficial suggestion that I resign and be forgiven smells like office politics to me.
Every time you turn your back around here, you’re likely to get a flaming sword between your shoulder blades. I’m not going to resign, even if I get Hell for it.  p. 102

Although this sets up the story as a light piece it gets darker by the minute. The plot is that Bonnie Camber, the above guardian angel’s ward, is running for election as the DA against the incumbent, and Bonnie has evidence of his corruption. The plan is to reveal this two days before the election.
However, things start going badly for Bonnie. He is visited by the DA’s thugs and given a systematic and brutal (and fully described) beating to try to force him to hand over the evidence. The next day he meets Ellen, his campaign manager Harry’s fiancé, and discovers the DA has bought Harry off. Next, Ellen and Bonnie discuss their feelings for each other (there is a bit of a love triangle thing going on between the three). Bonnie says that he is too old for her and that she will be better off with Harry. He asks Ellen to tell Harry that he won’t be publishing the evidence.
Bonnie then hires a car and goes to the house of one of the thugs who beat him up, and knocks him out. He intends to give the thug a serious revenge beating but concludes there is no point, and leaves.

The rest of the story (spoiler) has a despondent Bonnie going to a bar, and later drinking himself to death in a hotel room. The guardian angel’s only intervention, and the one that got him in trouble, is to stop Bonnie being killed in a car accident involving Ellen driving his car. Ironically, she is on the way to tell him Harry has changed his mind.
This is essentially an unpleasant, nihilistic piece bookended with some standard ‘Guardian Angel’ patter. Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, it’s not.

The Hat Trick by Fredric Brown is a brief and slight story, but it has a central scene that is well done: two couples are together in one of the women’s homes with the two men needling each other over card tricks. During this one of them goads the other into producing something from a top hat:

He left the top hat right on the table, but he reached out a hand toward it, uncertainly at first. There was a squealing sound from inside the hat, and Walter plunged his hand down in quickly and brought it up holding something by the scruff of the neck.
Mae screamed and then put the back of her hand over her mouth and her eyes were like white saucers. Elsie keeled over quietly on the studio couch in a dead faint; and Bob stood there with his cane-yardstick in midair and his face frozen.
The thing squealed again as Walter lifted it a little higher out of the hat. It looked like a monstrous, hideous black rat. But it was bigger than a rat should be, too big even to have come out of the hat. Its eyes glowed like red light bulbs and it was champing horribly its long scimitar-shaped white teeth, clicking them together with its mouth going several inches open each time and closing like a trap. It wriggled to get the scruff of its neck free of Walter’s trembling hand; its clawed forefeet flailed the air. It looked vicious beyond belief.
It squealed incessantly, frightfully, and it smelled with a rank fetid odor as though it had lived in graves and eaten of their contents.
Then, as suddenly as he had pulled his hand out of the hat, Walter pushed it down in again, and the thing down with it. The squealing stopped and Walter took his hand out of the hat. He stood there, shaking, his face pale. He got a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped sweat off his forehead. His voice sounded strange: “I should never have done it.” He ran for the door, opened it, and they heard him stumbling down the stairs.  p. 112

The coda suggests (spoiler) that Walt may be an extra-terrestrial.

The Witch by A. E. van Vogt³ is a story about Marson, the headmaster of a school, and the unwelcome lodger that he and his wife have inherited, his great-grandmother Mother Quigley.
The story starts with Marson watching the old woman sitting outside in the sun, near the couple’s house beside the sea. He glances away for a moment, and by the time he looks back, she has vanished. Quigley cannot work out how she got past him and back to the house without him seeing her. Matters become even more peculiar when he goes back to the house and his wife tells him she was inside the whole time.
This unsettles Marson more than it normally would as he has also received a letter from a distant village stating that Mother Quigley died and was buried last year. He wonders who the woman staying with them really is.
When the point of view then switches to the old woman we learn that she is planning to leave her old body and transfer to Joanna’s young one. While she is sitting in the lounge thinking about this she screams when she realises that the Marsons have not closed the blinds: she has a terrible fear of the night (and, we find out later, the sea). Marson’s resentment towards the old woman—there are undertones of unwanted elder relatives here—comes out into the open when he later challenges her about the letter he received. She tells a story about how she impersonated the dead woman to take her money.

That afternoon, and in response to Marston’s awkward questions, Mother Quigley decides to make sure that she can quickly possess Joanna when the time arrives (there is a full moon due in a few days). However, Marson catches her trying to force feed a green powder to Joanna while the latter is having an afternoon nap. There follows a fantastical scene when Marson grabs the old woman:

And then, Marson was on top of her. That loathsome mindwind was blowing stronger, colder; and in him was an utter, deadly conviction that demonic muscles would resist his strength to the limit. For a moment, that certainly prevailed even over reality.
For there was nothing.
Thin, bony arms yielded instantly to his devastatingly hard thrust; a body that was like old, rotten paper crumbled to the floor from his murderous rush.
For the barest moment, the incredibly easy victory gave Marson pause. But no astonishment could genuinely restrain the violence of his purpose or cancel that unnatural sense of unhuman things; no totality of doubt at this instant could begin to counterbalance his fury at what he had seen.
The old woman lay at his feet in a shapeless, curled-up blob. With a pitiless ferocity, a savage intent beyond any emotion he had ever known, Marson snatched her from the floor. Light as long-decayed wood, she came up in his fingers, a dangling, inhuman, black-clothed thing. He shook it, as he would have shaken a monster; and it was then, when his destroying purpose was a very blaze of unreasoning intensity that the incredible thing happened.
Images of the old woman flooded the room. Seven old women, all in a row, complete in every detail, from black, sacklike dress to semi-bald head, raced for the door. Three exact duplicates of the old woman were clawing frantically at the nearest window. The eleventh replica was on her knees desperately trying to squeeze under the bed.
With an astounded gasp, brain whirling madly, Marson dropped the thing in his hands. It fell squalling, and abruptly the eleven images of the old woman vanished like figments out of a nightmare.  p. 122

After a further period of self-doubt, Marson goes on a trip to the Mother Quigley’s previous home village to disinter the coffin; he also asks a teacher colleague to do an analysis of the green powder. After Marston returns (spoiler) from an empty grave, he is told the results of the tests:

“Grainger identified it as a species of seaweed, known as Hydrodendon Barelia.”
“Any special effects if taken into the human system?” Marson was all casualness.
“No-o! It’s not dangerous, if that’s what you mean. Naturally, I tried it on the dog, meaning myself, and it’s rather unpleasant, not exactly bitter but sharp.”
Marson was silent. He wondered whether he ought to feel disappointed or relieved. Or what? Kemp was speaking again:
“I looked up its history, and, surprisingly, it has quite a history. You know how in Europe they make you study a lot of stuff about the old alchemists and all that kind of stuff, to give you an historical grounding.”
“Yes?”
Kemp laughed. “You haven’t got a witch around your place by any chance?”
“Eh!” The exclamation almost burned Marson’s lips. He fought hard to hide the tremendousness of that shock.
Kemp laughed again. “According to ‘Die Geschichte der Zauberinnen’ by the Austrian, Karl Gloeck, Hydrodendon Barelia is the modern name for the sinister witch’s weed of antiquity. I’m not talking about the special witches of our Christian lore, with their childish attributes, but the old tribe of devil’s creatures that came out of prehistory, regular full-blooded sea witches. It seems when each successive body gets old, they choose a young woman’s body, attune themselves to it by living with the victim, and take possession any time after midnight of the first full moon period following the 21st of June. Witch’s weed is supposed to make the entry easier. Gloeck says . . . why, what’s the matter, sir?  p. 125-126

Marston later decides that he cannot just kick Mother Quigley out of his house and put her in an old folk’s home as that will leave the real problem unresolved, so he decides on a more permanent solution. This plays out in a tense and creepy finale.
This is an entertaining and engrossing novelette, and if this is what van Vogt was capable of in the fantasy field it is a pity he didn’t produce more stories of this type.

The Interior artwork for this issue is quite surprising. Normally I’d be berating Kolliker (who provides illustrations for the Kuttner and Cartmill stories) and praising Edd Cartier, but Kolliker produces the best illustrations in this magazine and Cartier the worst. One wonders if Kolliker read all the criticism in the letter columns of Astounding and resolved to do better.
Manuel Isip’s illustrations for Cartmill’s second story Guardian are better than the ones for the other two stories he illustrates: he uses a multiple line style of shading that gives them a certain something. The other illustrations by Frank Kramer and Orban are also-rans.
Of Things Beyond is a short but interesting editorial about how different times and places develop different mythologies and myth-beings:

The myth-people live on chance and luck, good or ill. When it was purely a question of luck whether a crop grew or died, the brownies and the fairies lived. When it becomes a matter of lead arsenate and pyrethrum dust against the insects, and soil analysis to determine the best type of crop and most suitable type of fertilizer—
Of all the cultures man has evolved, only one has not developed its own generation of myth beings. The steel-and-stone cities of today alone of all man’s housings offer shelter to no pixies.  p. 6

The Ka of Kor-Sethon by Hannes Bok is an okay poem about a spirit, a ka, trapped in an Egyptian tomb.
—And Having Writ— is a short letter column this time around that has positive mentions for Hannes Bok’s novel The Sleeping Sorceress, and Alfred Bester’s Hell is Forever. It also has this from Mary McGregor, the wife of Astounding and Unknown regular Malcolm Jameson:

Dear Mr. Campbell:
The last thing in my mind is to start a feud with Malcolm Jameson, but it goes against the grain to pick up the magazine containing my very first brainchild to see the light of print and find him hogging the spotlight on the cover and pretending it was his own.
Now don’t misunderstand me. I admire his work extravagantly, and needless to say like him, too. Otherwise I wouldn’t have lived with him all these years, raised his kids and kept his house and traipsed all over the seven seas trying to keep up with him, but it seems to me he has glory enough without cutting in on my poor maiden effort. Or was it your own fault? Did you think that “Mrs.” on the return address was a misprint or something?
They say you can’t unscramble eggs, so I don’t know what you are going to do about it now that it has happened, but I know darn well I don’t want my first and maybe only story to go down the chute as just another Jameson yarn. Outside of that, I think Unknown is a pretty good magazine. This story is more autobiographical than you think. The only place I could find to rent in Washington, when my husband went off to sea in the last war, was a haunted house in Georgetown. I don’t recommend ’em except in emergencies.
—Mary MacGregor (Jameson).

Campbell replies “We wuz wrong—and she wuz robbed!”.
On Books of Magic by L. Sprague de Camp is an interesting and informative review of Witchcraft by Charles Williams (Faber & Faber, 1941), a history book on the subject of witchcraft and the witchcraft trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Another good issue, the third one in a row.  ●

_____________________

1. Fred Smith, Once There Was A Magazine— p. 42-43 (Beccon Publications, 2002), says that “the reader [is] once again transported into the world of Arthurian legend courtesy of Henry Kuttner’s Wet Magic”, and that the “story is smoothly written but, as with some others, blends an uneasy mixture of whimsy, horror and adventure.” There is “no such problem” with Fritz Leiber’s story.
As for the other two novelettes, Frederic Brown’s The Angelic Angleworm is a “light-hearted tale” but one which ultimately turns out to have a “shaggy dog” ending. No Graven Image by Cleve Cartmill is “original and entertaining”.
Smith notes that Edna Mayne Hull (A. E. van Vogt’s wife) makes her first contribution to Unknown with The Ultimate Wish. There is no comment about the quality of this story or the others, bar The Hat Trick by Fredric Brown, which was not “Brown at his best but is an early example of his speciality: ultra short fiction”.
The artwork was “passable with M. Isip up to standard, one Cartier drawing and Kolliker and Kramer slightly better than usual”.
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, p. 140-142, The Annotated Guide to Unknown & Unknown Worlds (Starmont, 1991) says that the first half of Kuttner’s Wet Magic “has several good slapstick scenes. Then the story takes a none-to-successful serious turn, when a wizard proposes that maybe Woodley was fated to end up where he is because he is the latter-day incarnation of King Arthur. The ending sputters inconclusively.”
He goes on to add that “Kuttner’s use of the “laws of compensation and revision” to describe how it’s possible for a person’s actions in the present to affect the past is reminiscent of the laws of “similarity and contagion” in the Harold Shea stories.”
As to the other novelettes, he notes that the Grey Mouser’s cross dressing scene in Leiber’s Thieves’ House “is one of the first flashes of the humor that was to become a trademark of this series.” Brown’s The Angelic Angleworm “proceeds to a witty conclusion”, whereas Cartmill’s No Graven Image “thoroughly exhausts the originality of its idea very early.” He adds that “the characterization is surprisingly poor for Cartmill”.
Dziemianowicz thought that Hull’s The Ultimate Wish was “an unusually cruel story”. Cartmill’s Guardian has a “portrayal of guardian angels as invisible G-men [that] is original and effective”.
Finally, he says this of A. E. van Vogt’s The Witch: “At Campbell’s request, van Vogt built a story around a character who resembled Granny in Slan. [. . .] This story tries to be as complex as The Ghost [Unknown, August 1942] but the ending is nowhere near as good.” He adds that the story was televised on Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.

2. The Stuka was a dive-bomber and not a fighter, so it is highly unlikely that a pair of them would be dog-fighting over Wales (if they had the range to get there from France). Further, the World War 2 Database site says in its timeline, “20 Aug 1940: Luftwaffe leadership ordered that no more Ju 87 Stuka aircraft were to be sent into action over Britain, after suffering unsustainable loss rates; almost 60 were shot down in the past 11 days.”
There have been no wild bears in Wales since the (at the latest) the early Middle Ages, according to this BBC webpage.
I am surprised that neither Kuttner nor Campbell caught these errors.

3. As noted above, van Vogt got the idea for The Witch from Campbell. He had this to say in his 1980 interview with Robert Weinberg:

Campbell offered me an occasional idea. But the fact is that it takes me a long time to organize someone else’s story thought into my own system. He suggested the concept of a wizened old witch, which I eventually evolved into “The Witch” for Unknown Worlds. What I principally utilized Campbell for was information. When I was writing “The Storm” I wrote him and asked him if there was a possibility that some equivalent of a storm could exist in space. He wrote R.S. Richardson, and the result was what appears in the story. Campbell wrote me long letters loaded with information whenever I queried him, or if he had some thought stimulated by a story of mine.

The rest of the interview is at Sevagram, a website dedicated to A. E. van Vogt.  ●

ISFDB link
Luminist.org link

Other reviews:¹
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, p. 130-132 The Annotated Guide to Unknown & Unknown Worlds (Starmont, 1991)
Fred Smith, Once There Was A Magazine— p. 36-37 (Beccon Publications)

_____________________

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

Fiction:
Prelude to Armageddon • novella by Cleve Cartmill
Jesus Shoes • short story by Allan R. Bosworth ∗∗
The Compleat Werewolf • novella by Anthony Boucher ∗∗∗∗
The Room • short story by L. Ron Hubbard ∗∗∗
Census Taker • short story by Frank Belknap Long ∗∗+
Pobby • novelette by Jane Rice ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Interior artwork • Kramer (x8), Kolliker (x2), Manuel Isip (x7), Paul Orban, Ed Cartier
The Science of Magic • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
—And Having Writ— • letters
Book Review • essay by Anthony Boucher

_____________________

One of the stories I read for my last review was Cleve Cartmill’s With Flaming Swords (Astounding, September 1942), which I thought was the best story in the issue. So, when I started Prelude to Armageddon I had high hopes for it; initially these were met.

The story starts with a prologue where Ira Rafel, a fallen angel, meets others of his kind, and tells them to inform the Old One that he has found a hybrid human. If this hybrid mates with a certain woman and produces a child, it will be immortal; Armageddon will be forestalled, and the Old One saved from the Bottomless Pit.
The story then cuts to an editor/reporter called Brad McClain, the protagonist, who is in a barber’s shop having a vision:

“Blood shall cover the earth,” said the angel.
“This must be prevented. Armageddon must never come. You, McClain, and you alone may prevent it. You have the power. Find your mate! Take her, and bring forth a son! He shall live forever, rule forever, for you have eternity in your loins. You are the hybrid with whom we may communicate, and we tell you this—find your mate!”
Brad McClain snapped out of the lethargy these visions always produced, and tore the facial towel from his face. His wide dark eyes wheeled about the barber shop for a moment.
This was the third time within the week, the hundredth—thousandth?—time in his life the angel had appeared and told him he was destined to be the father of an immortal. He looked at Sam, the grizzled barber.
“Sam, do you think I’m crazy?”
“Sure,” Sam said tolerantly. “Want anything on your hair?”
“I mean it,” Brad insisted. “I either dropped off while I was under that towel or else I saw a vision.”
Sam eased Brad back in the chair and dried his face. “Shucks, Brad, people always do that sort of thing. They just don’t talk about it.”  p. 9

McClain goes from the barber to a bar, and meets two of the other main characters, a beat cop called Balaam (who hardly ever goes to his work during the story—there is a semi-jokey aside about this later), and his secretary Sherry. McClain gets a racing tip from Balaam that later wins (it emerges that the cop has a certain precognitive ability).
When McClain gets back to his newspaper office with Sherry, he finds Boles, a religious crank (who is later revealed to be a “good” angel) squaring off against Rafel (the “bad” angel from the prologue). McClain gets rid of Boles and speaks to Rafel. Compelled by a strange impulse, McClain hires him.
McClain and Sherry then go out for dinner with the money he has won from the race. They drive around and end up in a restaurant below the cave where Rafel spoke to the other fallen angels. Inside, a very tall violinist plays a hypnotic tune, and McClain reflects on life. He has another vision where he is again told that he will marry and produce an immortal. He speculates that the woman he is to marry is Sherry and almost proposes, but then suspects he is under a malign influence and starts to leave the restaurant. He is intercepted by Balaam, who tells McClain he isn’t destined to marry Sherry, but will meet his his intended bride tomorrow.
The next day McClain meets the woman by an odd route: Rafel brings him evidence that a respected community businessman called Homer Windsor is running a drug business. As there isn’t enough there to print a story McClain arranges to see the man to feel him out. While he is there he meets the daughter Clare, and realises that she is his bride. Now McClain has a problem: if he reveals her father’s shady doings, he’ll lose the girl. (I note in passing that there are relatively explicit references to the drug trade and addicts at this point in the story, and there are later references to an addict as a “cokie” and “snowbird”—I can’t remember seeing these kind of drug references in other contemporary fantasy or science fiction of the time.)
McClain later gets a visit from Fiero, the violinist from the bar, who reveals his interest in Sherry. He mentions Balaam sent him, and tells Brad a story about a race of giants called the Nephilim who lived thousands of years ago. He also tells Brad that he has discussed this matter in the past with a knowledgeable, one-eared drug addict called Gerald. Brad goes to see Balaam and asks him about Fiero’s story, and where he can find Gerald. Brad goes to the park to try to find the man, and has a vision of a giant walking on a vast plain—his son.

This takes the story up to the quarter-way mark and, at this point, I thought that Cartmill’s vaguely Jonathan Hoag-ish story was moving along well, but wondered if he would be able to sustain this for another forty pages.
The short answer is no. There are a couple of subplots that rumble on from this point: the first is one that involves Windsor and his gangsters warning McClain from seeing Clare; the other involves Mr Jerrold (not “Gerald”) and a scroll that has information about the Nephilim but which kills everyone who tries to translate it. Both of these subplots go round and round in circles.
McClain takes Clare across the state line to marry her but is arrested when she says she has been abducted; later, she changes her mind, and McClain has her stay with Sherry. Meanwhile, he goes and gets drunk and is picked up by Windsor’s heavies, etc., etc.; McClain also blows hot and cold about getting the mss translated before a professor acquaintance of Balaam’s attempts it (and dies) before partially completing it—then the mss is stolen by Windsor’s heavies anyway.
There is a lot of other padding—there are what seem like pages of Sherry’s attempts to convince McClain to go out on the lash²—as well as McClain’s constant change of mind or mood about what he is going to do next. Every now and then Boles, the good angel, has a one-sided conversation with a pillar of light. There is also material about Satan never having had a fair hearing.
And then, at the end of all this waffle (spoiler), McClain infuriatingly marries Sherry not Clare! She was supposed to have been his bride all along! This makes the previous forty or so pages of material about Clare a complete and utter red herring.

The epilogue flashes forward a few months to Boles and Rafel, the two opposing angels, talking over McClain’s baby in the couple’s house. Boles tell Rafel that even though the hybrids have bred they will never win.
This is easily the worst thing I can remember reading in Unknown.

Jesus Shoes by Allan R. Bosworth is a story about a religious young black man called Pettijohn, who joins the crew of a ship called the Vermont. The crew torment him with the usual pranks, errands to get patterned paint, etc., until he almost drowns in one incident, and an order comes to stop the hazing.
Later, Pettijohn gets in a fight and kills a man in self-defence. While Pettijohn is treated by the pharmacist’s mate (who is the narrator) the latter kids him (obviously he didn’t get the memo) that a pair of Dutch clogs he owns are “Jesus Shoes” and that they enable the wearer to walk on water. The narrator gives Pettijohn the shoes and afterwards the man escapes out the cabin porthole. He is presumed drowned, as he can’t swim and they are twenty miles from shore.
The story above is related by the narrator many years later, after he gets a note from a parson asking him to come and see him about Pettijohn. Of course (spoiler) the narrator is given back his clogs.
There is some period racial description in this piece: the narrator refers to Pettijohn as a “shine” in one place and a “darky” in another.

The Compleat Werewolf by Anthony Boucher, the first of the ‘Fergus O’Breen’ series, was one of this year’s 1943 Retro Hugo novella finalists (and my reason for reading the issue). It is the best story in the issue and was my choice for the award.³
The protagonist is a college professor called Wolfe Wolf who, upon receipt of a message from his film star girlfriend which upsets him, goes to a bar to get drunk. There he meets a magician called Ozymandias, who performs a couple of tricks for him before identifying Wolf as a werewolf. The latter isn’t convinced:

The statement was so quiet, so plausible, that Wolf faltered. “But a werewolf is a man that changes into a wolf. I’ve never done that. Honest I haven’t.”
“A mammal,” said Ozymandias, “is an animal that bears its young alive and suckles them. A virgin is nonetheless a mammal.”  p. 72

The next part is probably the weakest part of the story, and has the narrative jump to a black mass organised by one of Wolf’s professor colleagues, something mentioned to Wolfe at the beginning of the story. There, Wolfe bites someone and Ozymandias appears with a blue aura in lieu of the devil. This part is a little random but, fortunately, the rest of the story is considerably more sure-footed.

Wolf wakes up the next day and uses the magic word that Ozymandias taught him to change himself into a wolf again, only to find that, as a wolf, he doesn’t have the vocal cords to say the other magic word to change himself back. Ozymandias, having anticipated this, turns up to help.
Other elements are then added to the mix, including a supposed private detective called O’Breen who is working for Wolfe’s film star girlfriend Gloria—this thread develops later in the story into an opportunity for Wolfe to get closer to her by auditioning for the part of a dog in one of her upcoming films.

Meanwhile, Ozymandias helps Wolfe with his changes, and during one werewolf patrol Wolfe finds a two-year old, who he takes home. For his trouble, he almost gets put in the pound by a police officer. During this adventure, Wolf chats to a cat while he is hiding from the pursuing policeman:

Wolf became aware of another scent. He had only just identified it as cat when someone said, “You’re were, aren’t you?”
Wolf started up, lips drawn back and muscles tense. There was nothing human in sight, but someone had spoken to him. Unthinkingly, he tried to say “Where are you?” but all that came out was a growl.
“Right behind you. Here in the shadows. You can scent me, can’t you?”
“But you’re a cat,” Wolf thought in his snarls. “And you’re talking.”
“Of course. But I’m not talking human language. It’s just your brain that takes it that way. If you had your human body, you’d just think I was going meowrr. But you are were, aren’t you?”
“How do you . . . why do you think so?”
“Because you didn’t try to jump me, as any normal dog would have. And besides, unless Confucius taught me all wrong, you’re a wolf, not a dog; and we don’t have wolves around here unless they’re were.”
“How do you know all this? Are you—”
“Oh, no. I’m just a cat. But I used to live next door to a werechow named Confucius. He taught me things.”
Wolf was amazed. “You mean he was a man who changed to chow and stayed that way? Lived as a pet?”
“Certainly. This was back at the worst of the depression. He said a dog was more apt to be fed and looked after than a man. I thought it was a smart idea.”
“But how terrible! Could a man so debase himself as—”
“Men don’t debase themselves. They debase each other. That’s the way of most weres. Some change to keep from being debased, others to do a little more effective debasing. Which are you?”  p. 78-79

The cat then interrupts their conversation by calling Wolfe’s attention to a mugging that is about to happen in the street; Wolfe intervenes and gets shot four times. He isn’t killed but finds that it makes him tired, and he has to find somewhere to sleep.
When he wakes up he can’t get back into his hotel to see Ozymandias (the doorman has changed) so he goes in early to one of his university classes and chalks the reverse change word onto the blackboard. His plan works when one of the students comes into the class, sees the word, and says it out loud. He turns back into a man. Unfortunately he turns back into a naked man and gets fired.
The rest of the story ties together Wolfe’s film audition and relationship with Gloria to the Black Mass group (spoiler: she is an Axis agent involved in a magnetic bombs plot) and Wolfe’s subsequent recruitment by O’Breen into the FBI.

There is a clever last paragraph that ties Ozymandias’s rope-trick disappearance (this happens at a film party before the union guys strike the set leaving him stranded) and the repeated Darjeeling references that the character makes throughout the story.
This is a slick, witty, and clever piece.

Every now and then you get a glimpse of L. Ron Hubbard as the writer he might have been if he didn’t need to crank out the pulp to make a living. The Room opens with Joe, who is adopted, discussing with Aunt Cynthia the disappearance of Uncle Toby. The first part of the story goes on to describe the domestic setup of the three, Joe’s unsuccessful search for his uncle, and the latter’s room.
The second part of the story starts with a lawyer turning up on the sixteenth day after Uncle Toby’s disappearance. He tells the pair about Uncle Toby’s will: everything will go to Aunt Cynthia except his room and everything in it, which goes to Joe.
Joe later takes over his uncle’s role as a veterinarian, and also starts acquainting himself with the room. He finds that it has a bottle of bourbon that refills itself (and flies through the air to pour a drink) as well as other charmed objects:

There were other knicknacks now that he looked. From lord, king, duchess or ladies. And all to their dearest, or respected and admired Toby, or Uncle Toby. There was a perfume container which played music as it sprayed and made rainbows in its mist. There was a little ring which spread a sphere of light. There was an apple which, no matter how often or hard it was bitten or eaten, always remained itself. There was a little golden monkey which did tricks endlessly and wittily and finished up by grinning for applause and then resumed its metallic inanimacy. There was a book which read poetry aloud in a soothing, feminine voice and a little muzzein which called out a strange tongued phrase and turned ever in a certain direction no matter which way he was set down.  p. 97

The last part has Joe discovering that one of the room’s doors is a portal to different worlds. The first is an underwater one, where he can breathe normally; the second is a desert, where people come to meet him and give gifts.
While this is going on, his aunt starts declining:

Aunt Cinthia was very quiet these days, her eyes lighting only when a step sounded upon the back porch—to darken when she discovered it was not Uncle Toby. She grew thin and preoccupied and the veins stuck out on her huge red hands and little spots of unnatural color stood high on her cheekbones in sharp contrast to the gray hollows below. Joe began to worry about her for it was very plain to him at least that Aunt Cinthia, inch by inch, was pulling a shroud over herself.  p. 97

Years after his aunt’s eventual death, Joe also disappears.
There is a postscript that (spoiler) involves Aunt Cynthia’s coffin and how, when the church is rebuilt and her remains are moved, it is found to be empty. This doesn’t entirely fit with the disappearance of the two men, but it does add a slight frisson to this comparatively languid and descriptive tale, a piece that is much more oblique than others of its time.
It is an unusual if not totally successful story.

Census Taker by Frank Belknap Long (which is missing off the contents page) starts with a man called Phillip who is reading when interrupted by an odd man who comes to the door. He tells Phillip that he is a census taker and asks him how many wives he has:

Phillip’s jaw jiggled downward, and his cigarette fell to the floor. He retrieved it, a slow flush mounting up over his face. A lunatic! Not an income-tax investigator, but a raving lunatic sitting there opposite him.
“It’s a nice place you’ve got here,” the little man reiterated, staring about him admiringly. “I’ve never seen a fireplace quite like that, and these chairs—antiques, of course. Bless my soul, where did you pick up that rug?”
With lunatics you had to be careful. It was best to humor them, pretend to agree with them one hundred percent.
Phillip’s jaw was rigid now. Pretending wasn’t going to be easy. His heart had started pounding, and his throat felt dry and tight.
“I’ve been expecting you to call,” he said. The steadiness of his own voice surprised him. “I’m afraid I haven’t even one wife. You see—”
The little man leaped up with a startled cry. “Not one wife ! But you couldn’t . . . you couldn’t pay that kind of tax.”  p. 100

After some further exchanges, the census taker vanishes. Phillip, fearing for his sanity, phones Claire, and asks her to come over but before she can arrive four large men appear at the door and take him away. Something doesn’t seem right about them, and when Phillip punches one of them his hands sinks all the way into his attacker’s stomach.
In the middle of this scuffle, Claire arrives, and before long they are both being driven away in a van and experiencing some odd reality effects:

Phillip screamed and flattened himself against the bench. The telephone pole had passed right through the vehicle, leaving a misty glimmering in its wake. Fortunately it had zigzagged, grazing Phillip’s knees and not touching Claire at all.
Phillip sat very still for a long time, and all Claire did was gulp, and look at him.
The man must have been walking in the middle of the road, because he didn’t zigzag. He whisked past Phillip with his chin thrust out and rain cascading from the brim of his hat.
It was horrible after that. A cemetery came in. That is to say, three or four tombstones skidded erratically between the benches, missing them by inches.
“We must have left the road,” Phillip said.  p. 103

Ultimately they end up in a swamp watching the van disappear into the sky.
The coda (spoiler) has the census taker at home in the Purple City, reflecting on the new sleeping cabinets that he and the other four men have just used, how realistic their dreams were, and how all of the city’s citizens will soon be using the devices.
Essentially this is an ‘I woke up and it was all a dream’ story, but it is quite interesting for all that, and has some good lines and a lightly humorous touch: I look forward to reading more of Long’s work.

Pobby by Jane Rice is another of this writer’s humorous novelettes, and one that was probably inspired by L. Ron Hubbard’s Typewriter in the Sky, which had appeared in the magazine in 1940 (the protagonist of that book finds himself as a character in a friend’s book, which is set in the Caribbean during the 17^th Century).
In this story Hugh Gibbons is a writer who has one of his characters turn up on his doorstep. This happens when Gibbons is out, however, and his man-servant Smuthers is left to deal with the situation. Smuthers invites Pobby (a simple farming type) into the library and gives him a drink:

Smuthers summoned his courage about him and said, “Could I ask the nature of your call, sir?”
“You mean what do I need of Mr. Gibbons?”
“Yes, sir.”
Pobby unclenched his fist and extended it, palm upward, toward Smuthers. “I wanted to talk to him about this here.”
Smuthers peered down his nose at the calloused and none-too-clean hand. He blinked. He peered again. On the man’s palm reposed a bean-shaped seed.
Smuthers didn’t know why he, suddenly, should be filled with loathing except that, somehow, it was nasty-looking. A kind of slimy green and covered with fine, silvery hair.
“He’s a-going to make me plant it, lessn I can stop him,” Pobby continued, “and I got to stop him.” He beat the words out with the flat of his hand on his knee. “I got to,” he said desperately. “I jest got to.”
Smuthers had the distinct sensation that his wits had all performed an abrupt about face and had marched out the back of his head.
[. . .]
“I’m afraid, sir—”
“You’re afraid,” said Pobby grimly, “what do you think I am! I got the trembles so bad I act like a chicken with the tizic. Get the dry sweats, so I have, jest thinking about it. It ain’t right for Mr. Gibbons to do this to me. I ain’t never harmed him none. It’s agin the rights of Magna Carta, that’s what it is, so it is.”
Smuthers looked from Pobby to the seed and back to Pobby again.
“Magna Carta?”
“Yessir. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Mr. Gibbons ain’t got no call to send me to my death this away, ’thout so much as a by your leave.”
“Your death, sir!”
“You don’t think I’m going to live after I’m chewed up, et, swallered ’n’ digested, do you? Why I ain’t got a fighting chance.”
“Et—eaten by what, sir?”
“Why, by this here”—Pobby indicated the seed.
Moisture dewed the Smuthers’ brow and Smuthers’ eyes grew slightly glazed.
“I’ll bring your drink, sir.”
“Thankee. I declare I’m plumb whooed from worrying. Ain’t nothing like worry to squz out a man’s innards.”
“No, sir.” Smuthers departed.
Hurriedly.  p. 112-113

This establishes one of the elements of the story (and metastory), which is that if Pobby plants the seed and allows it to grow, it will turn into a monstrous plant which will eat him. The other element is established when Gibbons arrives home, goes straight to his study and starts typing a new part of the tale—this causes Pobby to disappear (we find later he goes to his farm, which is hundreds of miles away). The next part of the story is a loop where Pobby tries to get hold of Gibbons at one of the latter’s lady friends but is again forestalled by the further progression of the story.
Eventually Gibbons figures out what is happening (he keeps getting told about the strange character that is looking for him) and he and Pobby meet, whereupon the latter lists a number of grievances: his impending death at the tendrils of the plant, the fact he has no reflection or shadow, that he is always having to hoist his trousers, etc.
There are further complications, which variously involve Pobby being taken to a society party and causing a fight, and Gibbons writing a short note to get rid of Pobby before a wedding he must attend—only to have Smuthers burn it and negate the effect. Gibbons finally goes to Pobby’s farm to see the plant for himself.

The story ends (spoiler) at Pobby’s farm where Gibbons is relieved to find him burying the plant. He discovers that Pobby brought matters to a head by writing his own version of the story and adding THE END to prevent it being changed. Some may find this a weak ending, but I thought it not bad, and there is a nice little half-twist in the final paragraphs which bootstraps the story up a level.
This is more of a mixed bag than the other stories of Rice’s I’ve read (probably because I am coming to them in reverse order). It is a little flabby in places and could probably have done with a bit of tightening. Also, the writer’s attitude to Pobby is initially not much more than disinterested amorality, and his post-meeting indifference seems little more than a plot device to extend the story. That said it is almost a three and a half star story courtesy of some neat one-liners and amusing parts. It had me chortling throughout.

There is a lot of Interior artwork in this issue but none of it is particularly noteworthy: I thought the Manuel Isip illustrations for the Boucher were probably the best. I also realised something about his style when I was looking at his illustrations for the Rice story: these pieces are spoiled a little by the simple comic book faces he gives the characters, the simplicity of which is at odds with the rest of the illustration (see the plant illustration above for an example of what I mean, the face is considerably less detailed than the rest of the picture).
The Science of Magic is a rambling editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr. about what the title says: the spells and evocations used by magicians and priests. Campbell ends up comparing this with modern-day electricity.
—And Having Writ— has a long and eye-glazingly dull letter from L. Sprague de Camp about a previous article on Nostradamus by Anthony Boucher. There are a couple of moderately interesting letters—one is from LeRoy Yerxa, who was just about to start a prolific career in the pages of Amazing and Fantastic Adventures. He would be dead within four years from a stroke, aged thirty.
In his Book Review of The White Wolf by Franklin Gregory, Anthony Boucher provides an interesting essay on the werewolf subgenre as well as reviewing the book (which he conditionally recommends as nothing new but literately written):

Is it possible now, at this late date, to write a good fantasy novel strictly on a werewolf theme? When the werewolf was as fresh material as the vampire was in 1897, it should have been possible to produce the Dracula of the field. But instead of one striking masterpiece, the werewolf has fathered a dozen or so novels and hundreds of short stories, many of them unbelievably bad and some few good.
[. . .]
Jack Williamson, in his “Darker Than You Think”—an admirable novel surely deserving book publication—escapes from the conventionality of lycanthropy by broadening its scope immeasurably. His daring concept of Homo lycanthropus, his extension of the metamorphic process to cover all forms of animal life for one individual, these give the story tremendous freshness and power. But excellent though the novel is, it remains a treatment of a new, imaginative and peculiarly Williamson concept, rather than a true novel of traditional lycanthropy.
By the way, may I propose to fantasy writers the term therianthropy, which would apply to any man-into-animal transformation, and suggest to Mr. William son that his horribly plausible species might be more appositely christened Homo therianthropus?  p. 108

A mixed issue, which would have been a lot better but for the Cartmill novella.

_____________________

1. Stefan R. Dziemianowicz’s review says that the Cartmill story is “interesting for its idea that the battle in heaven was not so much one of good versus evil as one with winners who considered themselves good and who stigmatized the losers as evil. It also offers some subtly caustic commentary on man’s responsibility for the state of his world and his delusions regarding his free will.” He adds that “one tires quickly of the chain of unusual coincidences necessary to keep the story moving and the characters confused. This probably would have worked much better as a shorter story.”
Dziemianowicz states the story is 49,000 words long (versus Fred Smith’s 56,000 words, and the 43,000 words of my uncorrected OCR scan).
He adds that Boucher’s The Compleat Werewolf “affectionately spoofs both the fantasy and mystery story”, and Rice’s Pobby is “too obviously padded”.
Fred Smith found the issue “an exceptional all-rounder”, stating that Cartmill’s novel was “the best thing he had so far written for Unknown and was distinctly different from anything previously featured in its pages.” He adds that “Cartmill introduces many twists in the plot and presents an authentic-seeming newspaper background—probably from his own experience. It’s an intriguing, unusual yarn which holds the reader’s interest right up to the final denouement.”
Of the two novelettes he says, “[The Compleat Werewolf] is a joy to read and has been deservedly reprinted down the years. The Jane Rice piece, Pobby, is likewise a joy and shows this writer at the top of her form”. The latter story also has “little touches of Thorne Smith and P G . Wodehouse” and “she introduces many nice touches into her story (including excerpts from Hugh’s ‘novel’) and would appear to have had a lot of fun writing it. It’s certainly fun to read and in fact is one long chuckle from beginning to end. One of the best!”
He finishes with a comment that the artwork “was handled in passable fashion by M. Isip and Orban and in mediocre style by Kramer and Kolliker (as if one Kramer was not enough!)”

2. To go out on the lash is to go out drinking (usually to excess).

3. Robert Heinlein’s Waldo (Astounding 1942), my second choice pick, won the novella category. The full 1943 Retro Hugo Award results are here.

ISFDB link
Archive.org link

Other reviews:¹
Fred Smith, Once There Was A Magazine— p. 40-41 (Beccon Publications)
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, p. 136-8 The Annotated Guide to Unknown & Unknown Worlds (Starmont, 1991)

_____________________

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

Fiction:
The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag • novella by Robert A. Heinlein [as by John Riverside] ∗∗∗+
The Frog • short story by P. Schuyler Miller ∗
Magician’s Dinner • novelette by Jane Rice ∗∗∗
Letter to an Invisible Woman • short story by Hannes Bok ∗∗
Are You Run-Down, Tired— • short story by Babette Rosmond and Leonard M. Lake [as by Babette Rosmond Lake] ∗
The New One • short story by Fredric Brown ∗∗∗+
The Lie • short story by Richard Louis
The Goddess’ Legacy • short story by Malcolm Jameson ∗∗∗+
Compliments of the Author • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Henry Kuttner] ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Interior artwork • by Frank Kramer (x10), Kolliker (x3), Smith (x4), M. Isip (x2), Orban (x7)
Of Things Beyond • editorial
Poetry • by Ruth Stewart Schenley, Arte Harbison, Marvin Miller
—And Having Writ— • letters

____________________

This issue leads off with one of the 1943 Retro Hugo novella finalists, The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag by Robert A. Heinlein (run under the ‘John Riverside’ pseudonym for some reason). This long weird tale starts with Hoag at the doctors, where he is trying to find out the nature of a reddish substance found under his nails. Doctor Potbury tells him it isn’t blood but refuses to offer Hoag any more information, and brusquely tells him to get out. Once Hoag is outside he suffers several other unpleasant encounters with various people, and eventually seeks sanctuary at an anonymous hotel. Once in his room he realises that he can’t remember what he does for a living. Hoag leaves the hotel that morning to go home, but does not arrive until six in the evening. As he washes even more of the red substance from under his nails, he realises he cannot remember what he has been doing during the day.
Hoag then goes to see a hard-boiled husband and wife detective team, (Teddy) Randall & (Cynthia) Craig:

Randall helped him off with his coat, assuring himself in the process that Mr. Hoag was not armed, or—if he was—he had found somewhere other than shoulder or hip to carry a gun. Randall was not suspicious, but he was pragmatically pessimistic.  p. 14

Randall interviews Hoag, who recounts his missing days, a previous stay in a rest home, incurable amnesia, etc. Hoag tells Randall he wants to be watched continuously during the day, so that Randall can report back on what he does during his blackouts. Randall feigns reluctance but agrees when a large fee is offered. After Hoag leaves them, the couple find that he has managed to avoid leaving any fingerprints where he sat, or on the glass he handled, and they find that the hospital he told them about does not exist.
The next day Randall tails Mr Hoag to a tower block, and Cynthia tails them both. During this Cynthia sees Hoag speak to Randall before they enter a tower block.
When Randall reports back later to Cynthia, he tells her that he tailed Hoag to a jewellers on the thirteenth floor, saw him at work there, and that the red substance is jewellers’ rouge. When Cynthia asks Randall about the conversation outside the tower block, he tells her he remembers nothing of the sort. When the couple decide to investigate Hoag’s place of work, they find the tower block has no 13^th floor (only a 12^th and 14^th), and that there is no jewellers business in the building. Disturbed, they decide to give up the case but, before they can do so, Hoag visits them at home that night. He tells them about the garlic he wears to ward off an unknown and indescribable presence, and that he thinks he is being watched from mirrors.

That night Randall has a waking dream where a man in the bedroom mirror summons him to a board meeting on the 13^th floor of the tower block the couple visited earlier that day. After he is introduced to the men at the table, their Chairman tells him about “The Bird” and “The Sons of the Bird”:

“In the Beginning,” Stoles stated, “there was the Bird.” He suddenly covered his face with his hands; all the others gathered around the table did likewise.
The Bird—Randall felt a sudden vision of what those two simple words meant when mouthed by this repulsive fat man; no soft and downy chick, but a bird of prey, strong-winged and rapacious—unwinking eyes, whey-colored and staring—purple wattles—but most especially he saw its feet, bird feet, covered with yellow scales, fleshless and taloned and foul from use. Obscene and terrible—
Stoles uncovered his face. “The Bird was alone. Its great wings beat the empty depths of space where there was none to see. But deep within It was the Power and the Power was Life. It looked to the north when there was no north; It looked to the south when there was no south; east and west It looked, and up and down. Then out of the nothingness and out of Its Will It wove the nest.
“The nest was broad and deep and strong. In the nest It laid one hundred eggs. It stayed on the nest and brooded the eggs, thinking Its thoughts, for ten thousand thousand years. When the time was ripe It left the nest and hung it about with lights that the fledglings might see. It watched and waited.
“From each of the hundred eggs a hundred Sons of the Bird were hatched—ten thousand strong. Yet so wide and deep was the nest there was room and to spare for each of them—a kingdom apiece and each was a king—king over the things that creep and crawl and swim and fly and go on all fours, things that had been born from the crevices of the nest, out of the warmth and the waiting.
“Wise and cruel was the Bird, and wise and cruel were the Sons of the Bird. For twice ten thousand thousand years they fought and ruled and the Bird was pleased. Then there were some who decided that they were as wise and strong as the Bird Itself. Out of the stuff of the nest they created creatures like unto themselves and breathed in their nostrils, that they might have sons to serve them and fight for them. But the sons of the Sons were not wise and strong and cruel, but weak and soft and stupid. The Bird was not pleased.
“Down It cast Its Own Sons and let them be chained by the softly stupid— Stop fidgeting, Mr. Randall! I know this is difficult for your little mind, but for once you really must think about something longer than your nose and wider than your mouth, believe me!
“The stupid and the weak could not hold the Sons of the Bird; therefore, the Bird placed among them, here and there, others more powerful, more cruel, and more shrewd, who by craft and cruelty and deceit could circumvent the attempts of the Sons to break free. Then the Bird sat back, well content, and waited for the game to play itself out.
“The game is being played. Therefore, we cannot permit you to interfere with your client, nor to assist him in any way. You see that, don’t you?”
“I don’t see,” shouted Randall, suddenly able to speak, “a damn thing! To hell with the bunch of you! This joke has gone far enough.”  p. 24

The Sons of the Bird then show him Cynthia in a mirror and warn him to leave Hoag alone.
Randall wakes up the next morning thinking the episode was a nightmare, and suggests to Cynthia that they both go with Hoag to his work.
Most of the rest of the story deals with the various plot interactions of Hoag, Randall & Cynthia, and The Sons of the Bird, both in and out of the mirror world.
The climax comes when (spoiler) Hoag is eventually dosed up on scopalimine by the couple so that they can question him. At this point a different personality emerges. He writes a list of things he wants the couple to get for him, and tells them to meet him at a certain place. When they later rendezvous, Hoag explains to the couple that, essentially, their reality is an art work and he is an art critic sent to assess it. He also tells them that The Sons of the Bird are revenants from an earlier version of the work, and they are to be eliminated. Hoag leaves, but not before telling the pair to drive South. They are not to stop: reality will be undergoing a transformation:

A few blocks later Randall saw a patrolman standing on the sidewalk, warming himself in the sun, and watching some boys playing sand-lot football. He pulled up to the curb beside him. “Run down the window, Cyn.”
She complied, then gave a sharp intake of breath and swallowed a scream. He did not scream, but he wanted to.
Outside the open window was no sunlight, no cops, no kids—nothing. Nothing but a gray and formless mist, pulsing slowly as if with inchoate life. They could see nothing of the city through it, not because it was too dense but because it was—empty. No sound came out of it; no movement showed in it.
It merged with the frame of the window and began to drift inside. Randall shouted, “Roll up the window!” She tried to obey, but her hands were nerveless; he reached across her and cranked it up himself, jamming it hard into its seat.
The sunny scene was restored; through the glass they saw the patrolman, the boisterous game, the sidewalk, and the city beyond. Cynthia put a hand on his arm. “Drive on, Teddy!”
“Wait a minute,” he said tensely, and turned to the window beside him. Very cautiously he rolled it down—just a crack, less than an inch. It was enough. The formless gray flux was out there, too; through the glass the city traffic and sunny street were plain, through the opening—nothing.  p. 58

I found this reality altering finale quite sophisticated (for the time) but I realise that, for some readers,² this may turn the entire piece into a huge shaggy dog story.
An intriguing and readable tale, if an occasionally uneven one.

The Frog by P. Schuyler Miller gets off to an interestingly discursive start with a passage about precocious children, which leads on to the machinations of a wizard’s apprentice, a nasty piece of work called Shagsu. A large part of this story involves him mistreating and generally torturing a frog god required by his master. At the end (spoiler) the biter is bit.

Magician’s Dinner by Jane Rice starts off in her usual lively style:

I have just this minute finished reading an article entitled, “How to Stay Happily Married.” The authoress, though I strongly suspect there should be an “a” before those two “s’s” instead of an “e,” says plain, right out that the reason she has stayed happily married for umteen years is a simple one. She has, forsooth, never had any secrets from her husband.
Before I get into this any deeper I would like to bet any and all takers a case of Scotch against a bottle of sarsaparilla that he isn’t happily married. She may trot about humming merrily and being the essence of sweetness and light but I’ll wager he gets a three-inch layer of goose bumps every time he closes the garage doors and starts his trek to the back porch, thinking as he stumbles along—head sunk on his chest—“Oh, Lordy, what is she going to tell me now?”  p. 65

The story is about Clare, who is organising a dinner for her and her stage-magician husband’s friends. When she faces insurmountable problems Little Allie, a long dead family cook from her childhood, materialises and takes over. Matters proceed in a relatively ordered way until Clare realises that all the requirements for the dinner come from the past:

I leveled an agitated forefinger at the punch bowl. “That,” I squawked, “is the punch bowl my mother used to borrow from my aunt Lena when we had the family reunions.”
“Yes’m.”
“And ten years ago my cousin Robin tipped it over and broke it.”
“Yes’m.”
“Into a thousand pieces.”
“Yes’m.”
“What, in the name of Heaven, is it doing HERE?”
“There wasn’t nothing else big enough.”
“But it was broken and swept up and thrown in the ash can!”
“Yes’m.”
“But it couldn’t be here.”
“No’m.”
“But it is.”
“Yes’m.”
“How . . . how did you . . . did you get it?”
“ I materialized it.”
“I don’t foll— Wait, you mean you said, ‘Abracadabra,’ and it . . . it appeared?”
“No’m. I didn’t say nothing. I just materialized it.”
“Out of thin air!”
“No’m.”
“Out of what?”
“Out of what it was.”
“What was it?”
“Your aunt Lena’s punch bowl.”
“But how, Little Allie? Where?”
“Where? You mean where was it to materialize?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not much account at explaining things, Miss Clare.”
“Try.”
“It’s like this, Miss Clare.” Little Allie drew her brows together in profound concentration. “If something was, it can’t ever not have been, could it?”
“No.”
“And if it can’t ever not have been then it has got to have been a something that was a is once, ain’t it?”
“Yes.”
“And once it has been a is it can’t ever not have been a not be, can it?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s all.”
“But it was broken.”
“Yes’m.”
“But once it was broken, don’t you see, it became a was.”
“Yes’m.”
“Then how—”
“Miss Clare,” Little Allie interrupted, sighing at my lack of intelligence, “to be a was it has to be a is first—there’s no getting around it—and if it was a is no matter if it is a was it is a is where it was and it always will be a is even when it is a was as long as this here punch bowl of your aunt Lena’s has been a is that was.” She halted triumphantly. “I reckon that’s clear, ain’t it?”  p. 73-74

Initially, the dinner is a success, but matters spiral out of control when one of the guests suggests a séance. She is unaware that Little Allie the cook has also assembled, for advice on the visiting guests’ dining preferences, the spirits of their various dead cooks and servants . . . .
Structurally, and in terms of suspension of belief, some of this is slightly shaky (the ghost of Little Allie just turns up out of the blue, for instance), but there are compensating factors. Apart from Rice’s lively style, there is the word play above as well some amusing observation:

The wives continued to arrive and soon the house rang with that peculiar sonance that arises whenever two or more women are gathered together. Like a Chinese talkie run backward, or a group of delirious linguists speaking phonetics from which all the vowels have been painstakingly deleted, or a flock of extremely nervous poultry.
I’m not poking fun at my sex and don’t think it for a minute. We can’t help our group noises any more than men can help theirs and they have a brilliance of tone that is unequaled, except by a bunch of hungry grizzly bears mulling over the badly battered carcass of a mountain goat.  p. 72

Finally, there is an effectively creepy last scene where, during the séance, Clare is transported to the land of the dead:

I can’t describe it. It was like the hush before a dawn. Or the queer, deep, pervading quietness that makes oneself seem the very heart and core of one of those slow, heavy snowstorms that leave the shrubs puffy and white and the tree boughs bent with their cottony burdens and the whole world breathless with spent strength. It was a silence that could be tasted, thick on the tongue as clotted cream. A silence, one felt, that could be fingered like the rich pile of velvet or closed to like Stygian portieres weighted with dust and forgotten yesterdays and the musty smell of dead wood fires. A smothering, stilled silence. The silence of shrouds and tombs and the silence of earth. The earth of grass roots and blind worms. It grew and it grew and it grew like some gigantic black tulip or a pressure gauge going up and up and up[.]³  p. 77

An uneven piece, but one with some impressive parts.

Letter to an Invisible Woman by Hannes Bok is a vignette, in the form of a short letter, about a man falling for a woman who can slow down time (and give the impression that she has disappeared, etc.). It is an okay, if slight and undeveloped piece: I’m a little surprised that Campbell didn’t ask Bok to turn it into a longer story.
After this début piece there is a short teaser for Bok’s novel in the next issue, The Sorcerer’s Ship.

Are You Run-Down, Tired— by Babette Rosmond and Leonard M. Lake concerns a man who finds a wizard who dispenses vitamins and not magical cures. The man later develops a vastly improved physique and stamina, can see in the dark, etc. The one drawback is that his appetite for food substantially increases, which becomes a problem for his new girlfriend at the office. . . . This has (spoiler) a grisly and nonsensical end.

The New One by Fredric Brown starts off with a well done data dump that sets up the story’s premise about how human thought creates mythical beings, as explained by a fire elemental parent to his child:

“But what, papa, if [humans] conceive of a new mythological being? Would he come into existence down here?”
“Of course, kid. That’s how we all got here, one time or another. Why, look at poltergeists, for instance. They’re newcomers. And all this ectoplasm you see floating around and getting in the way, that’s new. And—well, like this big guy Paul Bunyan; he’s only been around here a century or so; he isn’t much older than you are. And lots of others. Of course, they have to get invoked before they show up, but that always gets done sooner or later.”
“Gosh, thanks, papa. I understand you a lot better than I did Ashtaroth. He uses big words like transmogrification and superactualization and what not.”
“O. K., kid, now run along and play. But don’t bring any of those darn water elemental kids back with you. The place gets so full of steam I can’t see.”  p. 87

The rest of the story is about Wally Smith, a man who has struggled with pyromania throughout his life. The reason for his compulsion is supernatural of course—fire elementals from the realm of thought exert influence over him at key moments, and have big plans for him later in his life. Wally has, for the moment, his compulsion under control:

He’d seen a movie newsreel that showed the new flame throwers. If he could get one of those things to operate—
But that desire was subconscious; he didn’t know that it was a big part of the reason he wanted to get into uniform. That was in the fall of ’41 and we weren’t in the war yet. Later, after December, it was still part of the reason he wanted to get in, but not the major part. Wally Smith was a good American; that was even more important than being a good pyromaniac.
Anyway, he’d licked the pyromania. Or thought he had. If it was there, it was buried down deep where most of the time he could avoid thinking about it, and there was a “Thus Far, No Farther” sign across one passage of his mind.
That yen for a flame thrower worried him a bit. Then came Pearl Harbor and Wally Smith had it out with himself to discover whether it was all patriotism that made him want to kill Japs, or whether that yen for a flame thrower figured at all.
And while he mulled it over, things got hotter in the Philippines and the Japs moved down Malaya to Singapore, and there were U-boats off both coasts and it began to look as though his country needed him. And there was a fighting anger in him that told him the hell with whether or not it was pyromania—it was patriotism even more, and he’d worry about the psychiatry of it later.  p. 88

Wally eventually ends up working in a war munitions factory that manufactures TNT (telegraphed earlier in the fire elementals’ conversations about him). Later, he has an ominous conversation with another worker about what would happen if the factory went on fire, and they speculate about the huge conflagration would spread throughout the surrounding area. Shortly after this conversation Wally literally struggles with his demons. Although he tries to resist, Davreth the fire demon exerts control over him, and an attempt at fire setting is described in an effective passage narrated in the second person:

Here it comes. The match was in his hand; his hand was striking the match. The Same. As the first flame he had ever seen, dancing on the end of a match in his father’s hand. While Wally’s stubby little fingers, all those years ago, had reached out for the thing on the end of the stick. The thing that flared there, ever-shapechanging; yellow-red-blue wonder, magic beauty.
The flame.
Wait until the stick has caught fire, too, wait until it’s well ablaze, so stooping down won’t blow it out. A flame’s a tender thing, at first. “No!” cried another part of his mind. “Don’t! Wally, don’t—”
But you can’t stop now, Wally, you can’t “don’t” because Darveth, the fire demon, is in the driver’s seat. He’s stronger than you are, Wally; he’s stronger than any of the others in that nightmare world you’re looking into. Yell for help, Wally, it won’t do you any good.
Yell to any of them. Yell to old Moloch; he won’t listen to you. He’s going to enjoy this, too. Most of them are. Not all. Thor’s standing to one side, not particularly happy about what’s going to happen because he’s a fighting man, but he isn’t big enough to tangle with Darveth. None of them are, over there.
Fire’s king, and all the fire elementals are dancing a dervish dance. Others watching. There’s white-bearded Zeus and someone with a head like a crocodile standing beside him. And Dagon riding Scylla—all the creatures men have conceived, and conceiving—
But none of them will help you, Wally. You’re on your own.  p. 95

Needless to say (spoiler) Wally manages to save the day by mentally yelling for help, and conjuring up a mythical being who arrives to rout the fire elementals. That deity is, of course, Uncle Sam.
This last part is a bit corny, to be honest, but it’s a pretty good read otherwise.

The Lie by Richard Louis is about a man making a deathbed confession to incriminate an innocent man. The last line is a tacked on one that makes no sense, and the whole thing reads like a Probability Zero piece for Unknown.

If there are passing references to the war in other stories (such as Frederic Brown’s), it is front and centre in The Goddess’ Legacy by Malcolm Jameson. This starts in wartime Greece with the narrator observing a Greek waiter paying a bribe to a Gestapo officer:

The part played by Herr Scheer in the furtive transaction was no mystery at all. He was simply a murderous, blood-sucking leech of the type all too frequent in Europe these days. I had known him for some time as the traveling representative of an optical house in Berlin and as such had often had business dealings with him. But with the coming of the troops of the occupation forces he promptly dropped the mask and showed himself in his true colors. Anton Scheer had been the advance man of the dreaded Gestapo. It was from his long-prepared secret lists that hundreds of victims for arrest and spoliation were selected, and from those same lists that the few Hellenic Quislings were appointed to puppet administrative posts. Now that he was the resident chief of Hitler’s secret operatives, his cruelty and rapacity knew no bounds. It was also common knowledge that his zeal for his beloved Fuehrer and Fatherland was not untinged by keen self-interest. In other words, Herr Scheer could be “had.” Enough money, discreetly conveyed, would unlock the tightest prison gates.  p. 100-101

The narrator knows the waiter, called Mike of the Acropolis, from his moonlit visits to those same ruins, and the story goes on to detail Mike’s interaction with the corrupt Nazi and Italian occupiers. These latter subsequently (spoiler) fall foul of his Mike’s Goddess, Pallas, and a well-known mythological monster.
This smoothly written story demonstrates an intimate knowledge of Greek mythology and also chillingly illustrates the realities of Axis occupation (a bleaker view than I expected). Given these attributes I’m surprised this one didn’t appear in the slicks.

Compliments of the Author by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore has a shake-down artist called Tarbell accidentally killing a magician, thereby coming into possession of a special book that gives the owner ten ‘lives’, or warnings of imminent peril. The magician’s familiar, a cat, tells Tarbell he will need them as it is going to kill him.
Between this novel setup and a good last line Tarbell uses up his lives in a number of stock pulp situations: there are scenes in a newspaper office, a high stakes card game, and a stockbroker’s office. The one non-standard scene is where Tarbell goes through a door and finds himself in a surreal landscape with three demons.
This is entertaining if fairly standard pulp fare.

There is a huge amount of Interior artwork in this issue, probably the most I’ve seen in any of the issues of Unknown I’ve looked at so far. All of it, bar a two-page piece by Orban for the Kuttner/Moore novelette is spot, quarter, or half page work. None of it is bad but none particularly grabbed me either. I note in passing that the Jameson story has a spoiler illustration—makes a change from spoiler blurbs I guess.⁴
Of Things Beyond, Campbell’s editorial, begins by talking about the sciences and shortly afterwards the “nonsciences”. There is then a section on hypnotism before it ends with this:

Telepathy exists. There are too many of those accidental, freak occurrences, plus the studied, mathematical evidence of scientific experimenters, to make it possible to doubt. Meteor falls were reported for centuries before science would admit that meteors existed, and did fall. No one who saw a meteor fall could point to a falling meteor and say, “There, that is what I saw.” But when tens of hundreds of reports come in—something real lies behind them.
Clairvoyance exists—and has been reported too frequently for doubt.
It seems fairly probable that levitation is possible. What gravity is, we don’t know—only that an indefinable, but tangible and measurable something pulls us downward. There have been a considerable number of reported, detailed instances of controlled levitation, of men who lifted and floated in air, or lifted weights without material Prevision and prophecy has been reported, and checked, a goodly number of times. Some men can, somehow, not controllably and at will, however, see the future.
What other powers lie among the immaterial sciences—no one is even trying very hard to find out!  p. 6

An early sign of years of Campbellian nonsense to come.
There is Poetry by Ruth Stewart Schenley (this one has an affecting finish), Arte Harbison (I didn’t get it), and Marvin Miller. The latter is a gloomy one where the narrator reflects that, if he was sure there was no afterlife, he would kill himself. I think we can take it from this that Marv wasn’t a party animal.
—And Having Writ— has a couple of positive mentions of Boucher’s The Compleat Werewolf (another of the 1943 Retro Hugo finalists) and a complaint about a story called Census Taker (by Frank Belknap Long in the April issue) that is missing from the contents page. Campbell replies, “We forgot to make sure the census of stories checked the contents page.”
Finally there are number of ‘wartime’ advertisements, but these are just an excuse for companies to flog the stuff they sell:

Quite a good issue.  ●

_____________________

1. Fred Smith’s review of this issue, in Once There Was A Magazine— (Beccon Publications), states that The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag is “not quite peak Heinlein” but “is a page-turner full of rather startling ideas”. He adds that the “original plot [. . .] would not be susceptible to close scrutiny!” Of the novelettes he thought the Kuttner was the better, finding the Rice “strictly lightweight”, but admits that the latter is “a nice contrast to some of the more grisly stuff!” He thought that Brown’s short story was the best of that group, finding the rest “fairly minor”, before adding that Jameson’s piece is “slightly more substantial”.
Smith has this comment to make on the pseudonym used for the Heinlein piece:

Robert A Heinlein at this time used the pseudonym ‘Anson MacDonald’ when writing science fiction which did not fit into his planned ‘future history’ and it was slightly surprising, therefore, that he used his own name for his first Unknown pieces. It was even more surprising then that his second novel for the magazine should have been published under the byline ‘John Riverside’ considering how popular he had become and what a ‘draw’ his given name would be.  p. 40

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, in The Annotated Guide to Unknown & Unknown Worlds (Starmont, 1991), says of the Heinlein piece, “Although there are several paper tigers running through the story—e.g. seemingly important clues turn out not to be not so important by the end—and although Hoag’s realization dawns on him a little too abruptly for it not to seem merely convenient, the story has impressive philosophical underpinnings.” Of the others, the Frederic Brown piece is the only one he really seems to rate: “One of the few witty war stories to appear in the magazine that wasn’t rendered obsolete with the armistice.” I presume he means “surrender”. He seems to have also liked the Rice: “Touching and amusing, though one has to appreciate Rice’s talent for spinning a fantasy story out of almost nothing fantastic.” Of the others, the Miller has “an unremarkable idea”, the Bok is “forced”, and the Jameson is “very formulaic”.
Dziemianowicz gives the length of Hoag as 40,000 words (and my OCR gives 40,300, so it is probably only just a novel).
I also learned from his review that Babette Rosmond “became editor of Doc Savage in 1944 and The Shadow in 1946.”

2. When I originally read The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag millions of years ago I noted that “the nature of reality part at the end doesn’t work as well as the [rest].” The other thing that I noticed from those old scribblings is how little of Heinlein I’ve read: half a dozen novels and about a collection’s worth of short stories. I think giving up half way through Stranger in a Strange Land put me off him.

3. This passage from Rice’s story finishes with the line “and I thought wildly, “This is how it feels in a dive bomber.” See what I mean by uneven?

4. The cover image above is a colour-shifted and manipulated version of the December copy (after changing and filling in the background texture I copied and pasted the text and date). I did this as there are no decent images on the internet. If anyone can provide a decent scan of a very good or fine issue, front and back, I’d appreciate it (uncompressed tiff format image, 300 dpi, no preprocessing by the scanner, and lean on the issue so it is perfectly flat, thanks).  ●

ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Fred Smith, Once There Was A Magazine— p. 41-42. (Beccon Publications)

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

Fiction:
The Sorcerer’s Ship • novel by Hannes Bok ∗∗∗
Transients Only • short story by Mary MacGregor ∗∗∗
The Golden Age • short story by Elmer Ransom
The Wall • short story by Robert Arthur ∗∗
The Hag Séleen • novelette by Theodore Sturgeon and James H. Beard ∗∗
It Will Come to You • short story by Frank Belknap Long
The Elixir • novelette by Jane Rice ∗∗∗+

Non-fiction:
Interior artwork • by Hannes Bok, Frank Kramer, Kolliker (2), Edd Cartier, M. Isip, Paul Orban¹
Of Things Beyond: Aeronautical Pixies • essay by The Editor
Watch Dog • poem by Frances Hall
Book Review • by Anthony Boucher
—And Having Writ— • letters

I hadn’t planned on reading this issue but I recently bought a few pulps and this was one of them. It is one of the large format (bedsheet) Unknowns and it is a hefty publication, with 128 eight and a half-inch by eleven and a half-inch (215 x 290mm, roughly A4 size) pages. Each of these two-column pages (the Rice story has three for some reason) is probably equal to three in a paperback book.² After holding it and smelling that wood-cuttings aroma, and looking at the contents and the artwork, etc., I knew that I had to read it. (That said, I soon—and sadly—reverted to the tiny type of a scanned issue on my iPad for the ability to highlight text for quoting later).

The Sorcerer’s Ship by Hannes Bok is the debut novel³ of the well-known artist. Bok had just started professionally publishing fiction in 1942 (although there had been a few amateur pieces in Ray Bradbury’s fanzine Futuria Fantasia during 1939 and 1940) and there were a couple of stories in each of Future Combined with Science Fiction and Weird Tales, a novella in Science Fiction Quarterly (Future’s companion magazine, and also edited by Robert W. Lowndes) and a story in the previous issue of Unknown.

The novel starts with a man waking up on a raft in the middle of the sea. He cannot remember what has happened to him, and is later picked up by a sailing ship. When he next awakes, he is visited by one of the ship’s company, a hard-faced man called Froar. After some preliminary questions, he tries to recruit Gene (who has remembered his name) to his cause (he advocates supplication to an aggressor nation called Koph, the place they are sailing to) and asks him to kill Kaspel, one of the men who rescued him. When Gene equivocates, Froar puts a few drops of poison in his wine.
It is only the appearance of Princess Siwara and Kaspel that stops Gene from finishing the wine, but he is paralysed and cannot talk. After Froar leaves, Kaspel realises what has happened and discusses this and the looming war between Nanich and Koph with Princess Siwara, who says:

“Do you think I want to go to Koph and bargain with the war lords? But Nanich can’t possibly survive another war. I must do everything that I can to maintain peace.”
Kaspel groaned softly. “Better for Nanich to give up every last one of its lives than pay tribute to Koph! Why can’t I make you understand that once we submit to Koph, Nanich will lose its identity? It will mean the end of our system—no more schools, no more research, only economic slavery, turning out the products that Koph dictates to us. Our young men will become slaves in the fields. Our women will be taken from us to Koph—” p. 15

Given the times in which this was published you wonder what war it is they are talking about.
These initial events typify the first part of the novel. Gene decides to join Kaspel’s side, and later narrowly avoids being stabbed while he is sleeping. He is later questioned by Siwara and, in the course of their discussion, she asks where he comes from. There is a jarring Fortean explanation for this, presumably shoe-horned into the tale because of the discussion of these phenomena in the magazine:

She returned her eyes to him. “[. . .] It sets me to wondering—what kind of a doorway could you have fallen through? A door through time? [. . .] A door which was a flaw in the elements which make your world and this? Who knows? Have you such tales in the place from which you came?”
“A lot of them,” he said. “A man named Charles Fort compiled books of them, but I can’t remember them much. Everyone’s heard of rains of fishes and frogs, and sometimes there are dust storms miles away from desert areas. Several centuries ago a woman appeared in England who spoke a language that no one understood— I think that she was exploited as having come from Mars.” p. 20

There is more skulduggery. After meeting for dinner Froar leaves and then reappears, stating the lodestone has been tampered with and they are off course. Kaspel is suspected as he wants to stop them getting to Koph. He and Gene are arrested and confined to a cabin; Siwara is too, for her protection. Almost immediately afterwards (you get the impression there is a missing chapter here) they get a note from Siwara saying she realises she has been duped. Gene manages to turn the guards and, after some further shenanigans, they imprison Froar. The ship then endures a storm that lasts for a few days, and lose an enemy ship that has been following them and turn towards home. On the way they see an island and investigate.
Up until this point I thought the novel was competent but fairly routine stuff, albeit with some nice writing here and there:

Lai stood with him, peering out into the erratic rags of rain and black night. There was no sign of the other ship’s lights. Spume lay like lace on the waves; flying spray filmed the window. Lai shook his head in silent comment of the storm; Gene clapped a friendly hand on his back and returned to Siwara. The lamp was lit, swinging wildly from its bracket, and the shadow of the bed’s canopy expanded grotesquely on the wall, contracted and swelled again. p. 32

The last two-thirds of the novel is also of variable, but better overall quality.
After they get to the island Siwara, Gene and Kaspel hear an unsettling report about huge, dust-filled and deserted buildings; they then decide to go there themselves. After moving through its streets, they eventually come to a colourful and vibrant garden. They hear a voice and find a creature that looks like a fish-man playing with clay figures by a stream.

The stranger tells them he is Yanuck. They learn that a powerful being called Orcher built the city and left the immortal Yanuck behind with orders to send for him should others of his race arrive. Siwara demands that Yanuck summons Orcher. They go to the strange wall in the temple and Yanuck starts the process.

They reached the huge slab that was the altar. Yanuk’s arm brushed off the dust as he moved around the edge of it. The six-inch layer of glass housed intricate machinery that vaguely resembled the insides of a clock. Having brushed off the dust as far as he could reach, Yanuk climbed on the glass and walked on his knees, sweeping the slab comparatively clean. This done, he dismounted and stood peering at the device. It was ten by thirty feet, six inches thick.
“It has no starting lever,” he explained to Gene, softening his voice as the tail of his eye glimpsed Siwara, her face in her hands. “The controlling switch is inside, so no one can accidentally start it. Only I know how to operate it. Thus!”
He pointed. Again the blue luminosity appeared at his fingertips. The sphere of light floated like a bubble from his fingertips and to the glass, sinking through it without difficulty. It touched one of the cogs, and faded away. But the cog whirled with a faint clicking, setting in motion the other wheels. The ticking increased in varying rhythms, spreading like a ripple of sound over the slab’s pond of silence as the motion of each wheel started a fresh one turning. The clicking loudened, running the gamut of audibility, swift and shrill, slow and deep, until it seemed that all the clocks that had felt the hand of man had been assembled in that place. p. 42

Orcher arrives.

Orcher’s musical voice was enlivening, like a psychic wind which fanned the fires of life into a fiercer heat. Though it was tainted by nothing remotely resembling humanity, it was colored with passions, but passions no human could ever hope to know, so intense that at their faintest they would have blasted a mortal’s body into atoms. And though the strange entity was only a great splash of light, Gene knew that it had eyes. They were fastened on Yanuk, who lifted an apologetic claw. p. 43

Gene discovers that he arrived in this strange world due to an error committed by Orcher in creating a new universe, but refuses an offer to go home. Later in Orcher’s long monologue he states he has no interest in the affairs of men. However, he consents to aid Siwara one time only, at a time of her choosing, and gives Yanuck a spiky, blue jewel and orders him to accompany her. They return to the boat. Froar tells Siwara the Koph war fleet left port the same time as they did and will be arriving at Nanich shortly.
There are several more incidents on the way back: Yanuck makes a bird out of paper and flies it while in a trance to reconnoitre the route back to Nanich, before he is incapacitated by poison; the enemy ships catch them and they lose the battle; etc.
Eventually the three make their way back to Nanich, where another battle is lost. However, the climax comes when Siwara manages to break the jewel and Orcher is summoned. His arrival and the bloody carnage he inflicts to punish the warring troops from Kosh makes for gripping reading:

The air splintered as a trumpet blared, one that no man could blow. It was possible to see the sound-pulsing ripples of air packed together by the sound’s vibration.
All over the fallen city, the mounds of the slain stirred. The bodies rolled, tumbling off each other, lay moving slowly, lifting hands jerkily, flexing their legs. They clambered to their feet—not alive, but like fleshly puppets jangling on unseen strings. Their closed eyes opened, glazed and without life. And the living in the streets stared in horror.
The bodies arose and took sides. They had no weapons; their hands curved like claws. Those from this mound crept forward to those of that, stealthily, pantherishly, crouched, swaying from side to side, preparing to pounce.
They leaped! It was gruesome, that battle of the dead! They tore at each other, rending garments, scratching skin, and no blood flowed. They could not die. Bones snapped, eyes were gouged—but the fighters did not fall. The watchers drew back, frantic with fear.
Orcher laughed! The sound was deafening, drumming. His contours wavered, threads of light unraveling, drifting leisurely over the city. They touched the fighting corpses, played over them like a sculptor’s fingers pressing clay. He crushed the bodies together, squeezing them, smoothing the flesh.
And now there were giants on the streets—headless giants molded from dead flesh and contending against each other! Orcher’s tendrils touched them; some of them merged into each other, producing monstrosities with many arms, many legs. p. 66-67

Eventually, all the giant bodies merge into one huge figure which sets off across the ocean to destroy Koph. In the aftermath of this, and chastened by Orcher’s bloody lesson, the survivors of the two nations set their differences aside and set up a democratic government in both countries. However, the people still fear Siwara, Gene and Yanuck, and they are asked to leave. They decide to go back to Yanuck’s island.

There is a bittersweet but uplifting ending as Gene considers the life that awaits them:

If we can learn—everything is ours. And we’ll study. Yanuk will teach us; if Orcher is satisfied, he will teach us. One day we’ll leave that island. But not in a ship, or like this! Unhindered by fleshly bodies—free to roam the Universe on wings of thought. Free to make, to break—like gods!” p. 70

This a novel of two parts. The first third or so is competent enough but a little dull. Once it gets going at the island it is a much more interesting and enjoyable piece, considerably so when Orcher is on stage. Worth a look.

Transients Only by Mary MacGregor⁴ has three acts. In the first we are introduced to Charles, whose mother interrupts him reading a book on ghosts (one of many he owns) to berate him as a ne’er do well. She asks him why he can’t help his grandmother (who owns a large house and lets out rooms) with her mortgage and rent control problems.
Charles sets out to solve the problem in his own way and tells his mother he is ‘going out for a while.’
The next, and most entertaining, part of the story occurs after Charles travels for several days and finds a haunted house with a particularly alarming reputation. He decides this is ideal for his plans to help his grandmother and goes to visit the house. On his arrival and entry he experiences ectoplasmic slime, huge toads, decapitated bodies, etc. etc. It culminates (at least for the first night) with this:

Charles tried the door to one of the rooms. It gave before his touch and. he looked in. That time he shrieked without reserve. Prepared though he was by the sages Lindemyth and Strobius, the inhabitants of that room were more than mortal eyes could endure. What he saw was unutterably horrible, indescribable. He backed away, leaned against the jamb of the door and vomited freely and frankly. After a short spell of violent trembling he took up his quest again.
The next room was filled with scores of pairs of balefully gleaming eyes that glared at him in the darkness. He shut that door, too, and passed on. Every room but the last was stuffed with weird horrors. Even that one; but its horror was relatively moderate, both in conception and execution. In the middle of a large four-poster bed lay a giant skeleton, calmly reading a newspaper by the light of his own luminous bones. He stirred clackingly as Charles entered, bent his eyeless gaze upon him for an instant, and then went back to his reading.
“Sorry,” said Charles, walking straight to him, “but you’ll have to scram. I’m getting tired of the show and want your bed so I can sleep a while. You can carry on again tomorrow.”
“Oh, yeah?” said the skeleton, without looking up.
“Yeah.”
Charles reached over and got a good grip with one hand on the vertebrae of the neck and with the other grabbed the pelvis. He straightened up and heaved the collection of bones hard against the wall. It flew apart at the impact and its pieces scattered over the floor. As their illumination faded out, Charles crawled into the bed and pulled the covers up. Then he turned over and went fast asleep. p. 75

Over the next few days Charles manages to wear down the resident ghost by absorbing all the scares thrown at him. He then manages to convince the ghost to come back to Washington and haunt his grandmother’s house by asking a salient question:

“Ghosts lead lonely lives, don’t they? And the only fun they can ever hope to get out of it is scaring people, isn’t it?”
“Er, yes,” admitted the phantom grudgingly. p. 76

The third act has Charles letting his Gran’s rooms to guests who (after paying a week’s rent) never stay the night. Further, he sells the possessions they leave behind when they don’t return for them. Although I realise the writer is playing this for laughs, this rather amoral ending took some of the shine off of it for me.
The Golden Age by Elmer Ransom is an immortality serum story where (after some irrelevant stage-setting action) a Dr Smith reveals to the local vicar that he and his wife are a hundred and eighty years old. It materialises that they were injected with an immortality serum but have lived to regret it. Smith can never be older than twenty-eight, and has worked constantly trying to develop a method of reversing the process. There is a load of waffle at this point about what age is best: forty is mentioned, so is seventy, but the entire premise is idiotic: it seems to assume that physical age is the only factor that determines who you are.
The Wall by Robert Arthur gets off to a good start. A lawyer visits a man on death row and brings him some painting materials. He finds out how the inmate got permission for these from the warden:

“I blackmailed him,” he stated. “I told him I’d commit suicide if he didn’t let me have them, but if he did I’d promise on my honor to make no trouble and not to attempt to injure myself in any way.
“He was skeptical at first, pointing out that the precautions here against suicide are rather effective. So I gave him a demonstration. I swallowed my tongue—another useful little trick I learned in Tibet—and almost choked to death before the prison doctor could reach me. After that the warden agreed to take my word of honor. Besides, he seems to have become interested in art since I arrived. Not at all a bad chap.” p. 91

The prisoner then spends the rest of his time painting a mural on his cell wall—a double door that is partly ajar, with a woman looking out. The rest of the story is well enough done but the ending is far too predictable (you can probably guess what happens from the little I’ve said).
The Hag Séleen by Theodore Sturgeon and James H. Beard⁵ is about a father and his daughter whose boat is upended by a black-tentacled ‘river-spider’ from the depths of a bayou. They manage to make it to the shore and, as they recover on the river bank, they meet an old woman who says she sent the creature:

I found myself staring into the blazing eye of the most disgusting old hag that ever surpassed imagination. She looked like a Cartier illustration. Her one good eye was jaundiced and mad; long, slanted—feline. It wasn’t until long afterward that I realized that her pupil was not round but slitted—not vertically like a cat’s eyes, but horizontally. Her other eye looked like—well, I’d rather not say. It couldn’t possibly have been of any use to her. Her nose would have been hooked if the tip were still on it. She was snaggletoothed, and her fangs were orange. One shoulder, was higher than the other, and the jagged lump on it spoke of a permanent dislocation. She had enough skin to adequately cover a sideshow fat lady, but she couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds or so. I never saw great swinging wattles on a person’s upper arms before. She was clad in a feathered jigsaw of bird and small animal skins. She was diseased and filthy and—and evil.
And she spoke to me in the most beautiful contralto voice I have ever heard.
“How you get away from River Spider?” she demanded.
“River Spider?”
She pointed, and I saw the sawyer rising slowly from the bayou. “Oh—that.” I found that, if I avoided that baleful eye I got my speech back. I controlled an impulse to yell at her, chase her away. If Patty woke up and saw that face—
“What’s it to you?” I asked quietly, just managing to keep my voice steady.
“I send River Spider for you,” she said in her Cajun accent.
“Why?” If I could mollify her—she was manifestly furious at something, and it seemed to be me—perhaps she’d go her way without waking the child.
“Because you mus’ go!” she said. “This my countree. This swamp belong Séleen. Séleen belong this swamp.” p. 98

The Cartier reference rather breaks the suspension of disbelief.
The rest of the story concerns the Séleen’s attempt to get hair samples from the family (via the daughter and a hollow tree where Séleen conceals herself). Once she has the hair in her possession there is a final struggle at the bayou during a storm, where she attempts to cast a spell to set the river-spider on the family. The spunky daughter (spoiler) eventually gets the upper hand.

Overall this is an OK bogeyman story, but it’s not entirely successful. The parts of the story that didn’t entirely work for me were (a) the character of the daughter—her temperament, wilfulness and magical competence range from slightly irritating to unconvincing, and (b) the initial description of Séleen made me feel rather sorry for her (even if she had just tried to drown them); I felt this even more after the father knocks out some of her teeth during an argument. I couldn’t help but think that there is a more interesting story where her soul is grey and not black. Yes, I know, I’m turning into a snowflake.
It Will Come to You by Frank Belknap Long concerns a man called Cromer who can’t hold down a job. Despite this, he always seems to have another job lined up, courtesy of a man called Bannerman.
While he out dancing with his fiancé, Cromer is summoned by Bannerman, who is angry that Cromer has lost his latest job as a food-taster. It then materialises (spoiler) that Bannerman is Lucifer and Cromer is a ghoul. This doesn’t make any sense.

The best fiction in the issue is The Elixir by Jane Rice, which has a woman called Amy going to a Halloween party at her friend’s house dressed as a witch. Her house servant expresses her opinion of the outfit:

Eliza, ebony jewel that she is, on learning of my intended costume put her hands on her more than ample hips, and said, “Humph.”
Eliza has been with me for fourteen years and regards me with a jaundiced eye. By turns the eye is stern, disapproving, admonitory, occasionally indulgent, but always jaundiced. To Eliza any woman forty-two years of age who hasn’t been able to GET married—the capitals are Eliza’s; there’s a moral somewhere in that upper case “GET” and lower case “married,” but I wouldn’t know where—and a woman who—to top it off—makes no attempt to hide the light of her graying hair under a henna bushel, and who will wear flatheeled shoes, and who openly likes Limburger cheese, and who makes her living writing mystery novels, is beyond all hope. That “beyond all hope” barely got in under the wire, didn’t it? p. 115

She gets to the party early and decides to make the mother of all cocktails, which she then drinks, unknowingly, from a 17^th century witch’s cup. This has calamitous results, as she finds herself travelling back to 1692 Salem. Needless to say, arriving dressed like a witch doesn’t do her any favours, as she finds out when she enters the Blue Boar tavern looking for help:

I pressed down the catch and pushed open the door and stepped inside. There were long benches, and tables, and a beamed ceiling, and a shelf of tankards that Clare would have sold her grandmother for, and there was an immense fireplace, and a beery, smoky, woody smell which was delightful.
I summoned up my Indian Missions smile and advanced toward a group of men who evidently had stopped off on their way to a masked ball or else belonged to the same lodge. They all wore queer clothes, more or less alike, and had on wigs.
“Could you tell me where the telephone is?” I inquired sweetly.
If I’d said, “Could you tell me how to get to the nearest nudist colony?” the effect couldn’t have been more startling.
They stopped talking whisssst and their mouths fell open and they goggled at me. One man in a satin waistcoat seemed to be trying to swallow his Adam’s apple.
“The telephone,” I said.
“T-e-l-e-p-h-o-n-e. I want to call a cab.”
The man who was trying to swallow his Adam’s apple got to his feet and pointed at me and tried to say something, but didn’t succeed. He just sort of chopped his teeth at me. Thinking he might be giving me the lodge high sign, I chopped my teeth at him and went him one better by putting my thumbs in my ears and waggling my fingers at him.
The next thing I knew, there was a pounding as of stampeding cattle and I was alone with the tankards and the tables and the heavy oaken beams that vibrated some dust down on me. p. 118

The rest of the story tells of her imprisonment and eventual trial, along with another woman called Prudence Symonds, for witchcraft:

Be that as it may, proceedings got under way with much pomp and ceremony and consulting of documents. We were formally charged with witchcraft, and we pleaded not guilty, and everybody in the courtroom rustled at us and muttered. I could see that we weren’t going to be voted Misses Popularity of 1692 and, if the expressions of the jurors meant anything, the undertakers’ association was going to have a short run on caskets.
I don’t know when I’ve seen so many glacial pairs of eyes outside an oculist’s window, and the temperature of the crowd was about the consistency of a Deep Freeze Unit and it got no warmer fast.
[. . .]
Mistress Faith Trow asserted that Prudence Symonds had made the Trow cow stop giving milk, and one Lucius Banbridge vowed that she had made his teeth loose, his hair fall out and had afflicted him with chills and fever. If ever a man had malaria, Lucius Banbridge was he.
We were accused of putting “blood on the moon,” of causing birds to molt, of laming horses and sending weevils to live in Madam Seabright’s flour bin. A corpulent dowager with wattles said we had given her grandchild colic, and a bulbous-nosed, paunchy fellow with spots on his vest asserted that he had seen the devil sitting on a tree limb in front of the Blue Boar Tavern picking his teeth with a smoking splinter and, ostensibly, waiting to keep a rendezvous with me.
That testimony I didn’t doubt. From the hue of the witness’ nose and the habit he had of twitching spasmodically, I rather imagine he had seen the devil and, subsequently, had ridden home on a pink elephant with gauze wings and its trunk done up in a baby-blue snood. p. 124

Needless to say (spoiler) she manages to free both of them. This last part is weakest section of a very lively story due to its rather routine manoeuvring, but there is a nice twist when she discovers she has witch’s powers. There are echoes of de Camp & Pratt’s novella The Roaring Trumpet here, but this really is a different type of story, its focus the exuberant central character and her turn of phrase.
Rice has a modern and entertaining narrative style, and the story hasn’t really dated significantly—I am surprised that it has never been anthologised.⁶

Bok contributes the Interior artwork for his own novel: these illustrations are the best in the issue. One can only wonder at what he would have produced for a cover if Unknown was still using colour artwork. Cartier has one good illustration but the other two are rather scribbly. The other illustrations are from Frank Kramer, Kolliker, M. Isip, and Paul Orban. The latter is the best of that group.
Of Things Beyond: Aeronautical Pixies by John W. Campbell Jr. is about the subject of aeronautical gremlins:

The first gremlin reported in an American plane rode the flying fortress Big Punk when the waist gunner, Sergeant Z. E. White, of Dallas, Texas, reported his guns jammed just as he got a German Focke-Wulf 190 fighter plane in his sights during last Friday’s battle over the North Sea.
When he landed, Sergeant White told his story to Pilot Officer Oscar Coen, of Murphysboro, Illinois, one of the original three members of the R.A.F.’s American Eagle Squadron and a noted gremlinologist. Coen nodded his head and said, “Gremlins,” making it official that they were working on Uncle Sam’s men.
There seem to be little boy as well as little girl gremlins. There are no “good gremlins” or “bad gremlins” as such. They are just hell-raisers, more mischievous than irresponsible, who might do a good turn or precipitate a disaster, depending on their current mood.
A. F. experts say the gremlins get inside carburetors and put their thumbs over the jets, “conking” out the motors. Then, just when the pilot is somewhere over Bremen with a German searchlight on him, the gremlins remove their thumbs and the motors start up again.
A common type of gremlin, according to the experts, is the one who hangs on the aileron with his feet flapping and gives the entire ship a slight flutter. That gremlin has a brother who sits on the pilot’s shoulder making sounds like a motor knocking when the plane is hitting on all cylinders.
The most annoying gremlins are those who like to get into the instrument board. They play seesaw on the automatic horizon or merry-go-round on the compass. They get their greatest kick out of such antics when the pilot is flying “blind” through clouds. p. 6

This was written months after the USA’s entry into the war.
Watch Dog by Frances Hall is a poem about what it says and, apparently, a dangerous dog at that.
Book Review by Anthony Boucher is an interesting essay about A Book of Prophecy from the Egyptians to Hitler, ed. by John Cournos, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942. It is, apparently, a sloppily put together and badly copy-edited book on prophecy.

—And Having Writ— is a fairly short letters column this time around. The plaudits are mostly for the Cartmill and van Vogt stories in the August issue, and there is also a letter from Boucher (more about prophecy) that accompanied his review for this issue.

An interesting issue.

1. The first three illustrations above (illustrating The Sorcerer’s Ship) are by Bok; the other two are by Cartier.
2. Bok’s novel is printed on approximately 56 pages of the magazine, and contains around 52,000 words. The book version from Ballantine runs to 205 pp.
3. Lin Carter, in the introduction to The Sorceror’s Ship, Ballantine Books, 1969, has this:
   Bok moved to New York in 1940 and began turning out a wealth of cover paintings and illustrations. Unfortunately, the word “wealth” in this context does not refer to money. Magazines in those days, pulp magazines at least, paid miserable prices for their illustrations—$5 or $10, was a typical fee.
   Before long, Bok turned to a more lucrative side of the world of fantasy and science fiction—writing. As a boy, he had fallen completely under the spell of A. Merritt, and the Merrittesque word-magic rubbed off on him—possibly because he once copied out in longhand the entire text of The Ship of Ishtar. He had borrowed the copies of Argosy All-Story in which it was serialized and had to return them, but couldn’t be sure he would ever find a copy of the novel again.
   His first published novel was Starstone World appearing in Science Fiction Quarterly, Summer, 1942, followed very shortly by Sorcerer’s Ship in Unknown, December, 1942.
   ISFDB lists Starstone World as a novella, and a rough OCR is 27,000 words.
4. There is some confusion about who wrote this story. The cover has it as by Malcolm Jameson, whereas the contents page has it as by Mary MacGregor. A letter that appeared in the February 1943 issue of the magazine explains:
   Dear Mr. Campbell:
   The last thing in my mind is to start a feud with Malcolm Jameson, but it goes against the grain to pick up the magazine containing my very first brainchild to see the light of print and find him hogging the spotlight on the cover and pretending it was his own.
   Now don’t misunderstand me. I admire his work extravagantly, and needless to say like him, too. Otherwise I wouldn’t have lived with him all these years, raised his kids and kept his house and traipsed all over the seven seas trying to keep up with him, but it seems to me he has glory enough without cutting in on my poor maiden effort. Or was it your own fault? Did you think that “Mrs.” on the return address was a misprint or something?
   They say you can’t unscramble eggs, so I don’t know what you are going to do about it now that it has happened, but I know darn well I don’t want my first and maybe only story to go down the chute as just another Jameson yarn. Outside of that, I think Unknown is a pretty good magazine. This story is more autobiographical than you think. The only place I could find to rent in Washington, when my husband went off to sea in the last war, was a haunted house in Georgetown. I don’t recommend ’em except in emergencies.—Mary MacGregor (Jameson). p. 115
   It’s a pity this promising debut was her only story.
5. The story notes in Killdozer!, Volume III: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, ed. Paul Williams, 1996, (Amazon UK/USA) have this to say about The Hag Séleen:
   When the story was included in D.R. Bensen’s 1964 anthology The Unknown Five, Sturgeon was given sole credit. The editor noted that the story had been credited in the magazine to Sturgeon and Beard, but added: “All the same, it’s a Sturgeon story—Beard, who collaborated sometimes with Sturgeon on other pieces, supplied the background information for this one, and Sturgeon did the writing.” In the 1978 Sturgeon collection Visions and Venturers, the story title is followed by the line “(written with James H. Beard)”.
   In a letter dated March 22, 1941, Beard wrote to Sturgeon:
   “In case you elect to do the River Spider story, I think you had better have a copy of the rune used by devotees of the spider when launching their tiny canoes on the river.
   “These canoes by the way are often delicately and beautifully made, sometimes carved of cedar or cypress, sometimes made of bark, brightly colored with dyes which are prepared from various plants growing in the swamp.
   “The rune follows:
   River Spider, black and strong
   Folks round here have done me wrong.
   Three fat flies I’m sending you
   Human blood, they’ve all been through.
   First fly, he named Willie Brown,
   River Spider, drag him down!
   Second fly, she is Alice Jones,
   River Spider, crack her bones.
   Third fly, he named Willie Flood,
   River Spider, drink his blood.”
   Beard in the letter invites Sturgeon to visit him, and in a letter to his mother dated April 6, 1941, Sturgeon mentions that in the next week he and Dorothe have plans to: ‘drive forty miles to Suffern, N.Y., where lives Captain Beard, my collaborator on a new series for Unknown.’
   In the Sturgeon Papers at the Spencer Library at the University of Kansas there is an incomplete manuscript of a longer version of this story, typed by Sturgeon, and an attached letter from TS asking his wife to edit it down from 13,500 words to 6,000 (presumably at Campbell’s request), retyping and rewriting as necessary. He asks her to drop the first 9½ pages and suggests a couple of other possible cuts, but leaves the decision-making to her discretion. He also provides instructions on how to mail it to the magazine when she’s finished.
   The missing manuscript pages (14–19, 29–33, and 40 to end) are probably absent because they weren’t rewritten and could be included as is in the final manuscript. If Dorothe did in fact cut and edit the story from the surviving manuscript (we don’t know for certain that Sturgeon didn’t do the job himself in the end), she did an extraordinary job. Whole paragraphs of exposition have been added, plus connecting sentences here and there, that sound very much like Sturgeon, and indeed the finished work is one of his better-written stories of the period.
   As for the circumstances of his asking her to do the edit (without even his final review), he may have been traveling for a few days, though from what I know of his biography it’s not easy to imagine where or why. More likely is that he had been awake for days, finishing up writing assignments to get the money to pay for their trip to Jamaica (this writing was done sometime between April 1941 and the end of June, when they left New York), and he was giving her this assignment to carry out while he collapsed into ten hours’ sleep. There’s no reason Campbell would have been in a rush to have the story; but Sturgeon was always in a rush to collect his payment, and all the more so if this was done just before their departure.
   The story was significantly improved by being shortened. The published version is between 7,500 and 8,000 words (evidently 6,000 was not possible).
6. Jane Rice at ISFDB.

Other Reviews:
Fred Smith: Once There Was A Magazine— p.20-21.

Fiction:
But Without Horns • novella by Norvell W. Page
The Kraken • short story by L. Ron Hubbard [as by Frederick Engelhardt] ♥♥
Transparent Stuff • short story by Dorothy Quick ♥♥
The Man from Nowhere • short story by Frank Belknap Long ♥
Master Gerald of Cambray • novelette by Nat Schachner ♥♥♥+

Non-fiction:
But Without Horns • Cartier
Interior artwork • Cartier, Kolliker, Quick, F. Kramer, M. Isip
Of Things Beyond • editorial by The Editor
Dying Tramp • poem by Edgar Daniel Kramer

This month’s issue has the last full colour artwork that Unknown would feature on its covers. Campbell uses most of his editorial, Of Things Beyond, to discuss the change to a sober text-based cover:

Unknown, simply, is not an ordinary magazine. It does not, generally speaking, appeal to the usual audience of the standard-type magazine. We have decided on this experimental issue, because of this, in an effort to determine what other types of newsstand buyers might be attracted by a somewhat different approach.
To the nonreader of fantasy, to one who does not understand the attitude and philosophy of Unknown, the covers may appear simply monstrous rather than the semicaricatures they are. They are not, and have not been intended as illustrations, but as expressive of a general theme.
To those who know and enjoy Unknown, the cover, like any other wrapper, is comparatively unimportant. For the others—we’re trying an experiment. Your comments—cracks or otherwise—appreciated. p.6

More information is given about the change a couple of pages further on:¹

We’ve made the July cover look very dignified. We’re going to ask your dealer to display it with magazines of general class—not with the newsprints. P.8

The covers would never go back to the way they were. I’ll be interested to see what the readership think of the possibility of no more Cartier covers in future issues.

Given the desire to reach out to a more upmarket readership the first of the stories this issue is a peculiar choice, given that it is a dreadful pulp potboiler. Perhaps Campbell was just getting it out of the way before the new ‘slick’ readership arrived.
But Without Horns by Norvell W. Page opens with FBI agent Walter Kildering trying to enter a barricaded FBI headquarters and finding considerable resistance. Agents have been murdered in Metropolis and bankers who have been robbed have gone insane. The FBI chief fears for his life and/or sanity. Kildering attempts to talk his way in as he knows the villain’s identity and needs to tell his boss:

“I mean, sir”—Kildering’s voice was cold with urgency—“that he destroys whoever opposes him, either by death or by insanity! We must reach the chief at once!”
For an instant, Overholt’s eyes strained wide with the shock of the words. He began an oath that didn’t quite come out. Then he shook his head. He smiled, even chuckled a little.
“I can’t argue with your logic, Kildering,” he said. “As usual, it is faultless. But there’s one thing you can’t get past. No man can drive another man insane at will—and certainly he can’t do it unless he can get through our guard to reach the chief! It just isn’t possible. What have you been doing, Kildering, reading ghost stories?” p.12

There are several pages of this kind of thing, as well as a lot of bluster, gymnastics and unlikely gunplay involving his fellow agents before Kildering manages to force his way into the chief’s office to tell him he can save him from the super-villain John Miller. Needless to say at this point the chief turns mad and attempts to shoot Kildering.
The rest of this very, very long story tells of Kildering and two other agent’s renegade attempt to find and neutralise John Miller, who we later are told is a mutant who has not only been killing agents and robbing banks but has also been abducting young woman to breed a new race like himself. Miller also has the ability to asphyxiate people by some form of electrical induction, known to the citizenry as the ‘blue death’: anyone near electrical equipment is vulnerable. As it happens only the ubermensch are killed off: part of Miller’s plan is to form an utopian, moneyless society.
This last is one of the story’s more interesting aspects and, for the record, here are some of the others in no particular order. The first is from when the agents tail three female associates of Miller after they kill a number of electrical plant workers. As the women return home one of their number, who died from the blue death at the power plant, is thrown out of the car. The agents recover the body and then use it as a means of entry into the women’s house by tossing it through the window before entering and smacking the other two around in an attempt to get information. I didn’t approve of any of this but the weirdness of it certainly got my attention. Miller’s ability to drive people insane also provides a couple of interesting moments: there is an attempt by Miller to drive Kildering insane while he is driving that produces a good scene, and the long-term result of this attack is that later on all three agents start shooting up morphine to prevent further assaults. As you would. The other two things I liked were the descriptions of the mass pyres of ‘blue death’ bodies in the city, and the fact that the supervillain John Miller never appears: he is always off-stage.
Don’t let these intriguing snippets fool you: they are needles in a haystack of shredded pulp (at a rough guess 38,000 words of it).

If I felt I was being overly mean to Page’s story those thoughts vanished on reading the next one. It isn’t brilliant but The Kraken by L. Ron Hubbard is a noticeable improvement in quality. This contemporary story is about a U-boat dodging a destroyer depth-charge attack only to fall into the arms, or tentacles, of a giant kraken. After a short fight the kraken drags the U-boat back to its lair in a massive underwater cavern. This is all quite realistic, apart from the lack of compression sickness at the end, and maybe the captain’s final act.

Transparent Stuff by Dorothy Quick is the second of her ‘Patchwork Quilt’ stories. The quilt in question is a witches’ one that lets the holder touch a panel of it and experience an historical life. In this one the woman touching the quilt inhabits the body of a Babylonian princess called Star. Star is to be married off by her father to one of the royal men of the neighbouring states, but she does not care for any of her suitors. With the help of a priest called Abeshu she summons the goddess Ishtar and asks for her help. Subsequently, she meets a young man called Belzar and falls in love, but there is still much palace intrigue to come.

The Man from Nowhere by Frank Belknap Long concerns a man called North meeting a painter of some strange artwork at a party. He later walks home with him whereupon he observes several minor events that appear to be either a time or causality reversals:

From a cellar honkatonk a man and woman emerged, staggering backwards The man was slurring his syllables, his voice raised in drunken protest.
“I thoush we wash having asnother,” he complained. “Whash the idea?”
“It wasn’t my idea,” shrilled the woman. “We just went into the place.”
The man ceased suddenly to stagger. As he moved with the woman across the street his shoulders straightened and his voice shed its sibilancy.
“Listen, Jane,” he pleaded. “I’m all right now. I can take care of myself. Stop pulling me backward.”
“What happened to us?” exclaimed the woman. “ We were pie-eyed and now we’re . . . we’re completely sober.” p.115

After he leaves the artist he finds that he has a tingling in his hand and sees that his fingers have bent and coiled backwards. Immediately after this he survives an automobile accident and the story cuts to the next day, and a conversation between North and Revell, the artist:

“You say I was run down before the car struck me. Good heavens, man, do you realize what you’re saying?”
“I realize perfectly […] The accident happened incompletely. That’s why you were merely shaken up a bit.”
“But my hand—”
“Your hand’s all right now, isn’t it? Stop worrying. I’ve told you what happened. I was feeling a little high last night and I let myself go. One gets tired of working with pigments exclusively. I knew a little of the . . . the instability would flow into you when I shook your hand. But I also knew it would wear off in a few hours. You don’t seem to realize that I saved your life.” p.116-117

After this, North’s girlfriend gets involved and there are other surreal occurrences. These are explained, and the story rather perfunctorily wrapped up, in a letter from the painter to North at the very end. This story has a potentially intriguing idea which is rather confusingly and disappointingly executed. It has a nice first line though:

Beyond the fact that he had never been born, Revell was no different from other men. p.112

I came to the last piece of fiction, Nat Schachner’s long novelette (borderline novella) Master Gerald of Cambray, with some trepidation. I found the author’s Cold in the March 1940 Astounding a rather crude pulp story and thought that this would be the same. I was pleasantly surprised.
It starts in mid-thirteenth century Paris with the Englishman Guy of Salisbury being woken by the beadle to tell him he has been summoned to the Rector’s Court:

“It is true, Master Guy” he said. “The noble rector of the university demands your presence immediately you are ready. There is a complaint.”
Guy rubbed his pate a moment to dispel the mingled fumes of wine and sleep. Then he heaved slowly to his feet and stared—six-feet of bone and whipcord muscles—at the beadle.
“The Rector’s Court?” he demanded sharply. “What wish they of me?” His eye flicked to the illicit unsheathed sword that stood in a corner, its point embedded in the unpainted floor. Bright flecks of spilled wine had dried upon its hilt; but near the tip there were darker, more somber spots of rusty brown.
The beadle turned his discreet gaze away from the weapon. He knew better than to see that which the rules of Paris forbade to students. He gripped his wand of office more firmly.
“The man, Hugues, innkeeper of La Cloche Perse,” he explained in apologetic fashion, “died past midnight.”
Guy shrugged. “The more fool he. I did but pink him when he rushed on me with screams and tirades.”
“You do not know your strength,” Jean Corbin declared, eying his comrade’s gigantic dimensions with admiration. “You pierced him clean through the body.” p.126

This provides an accurate idea of both Master Guy’s character and the violent times he lives in.
Guy is dealt with leniently by the court, the greatest of his punishments being the payment of some wine to them. It is at the court that he notices an odd looking fellow who is also being dealt with. Gerald Cambray is dressed oddly, speaks awful Latin, and claims to teach at a university called ‘Harvard’ in ‘America.’ After being ridiculed by the court for his speech, dress and supposed university, Guy takes him in hand and agrees to enrol him in the English nation and set him up as a professor of astronomy.
The rest of the story develops as you would expect: Cambray is an inadvertent time-traveller and struggles to cope with the squalor and violence of the times. In due course his heretical teachings attract the wrong kind of attention, with predictable results. What sets this story apart from similar tales is that Schachner provides a vivid, visceral and engrossing account of university life in Paris in 1263. He had published a non-fiction book in 1939 called The Mediaeval Universities, and it is obvious that some of the research from that book was used for this readable and entertaining story.²

The only other non-fiction is this issue is an OK poem, Dying Tramp by Edgar Daniel Kramer.

I couldn’t make a judgement on the artwork as I was reading a poor quality unz.org scan, but I noticed some lousy layout on p.33, where one of the pictures has a couple of column lines of story quotation at the bottom of the left hand column and a couple of lines of the story itself at the bottom of the right. There is no need for this given there is space at the end of the story.

It is worth digging out this issue for the Schachner story.

1.  The page with next month’s cover information:
2. The Mediaeval Universities (as by Nathan Schachner) is available at Hathi Trust. Chapter seven (Paris—A University of Masters) is the most pertinent chapter. I was surprised to see this story has never been reprinted, so if you want to read it you’ll probably have to go to unz.org.

Other Reviews:
Fred Smith: Once There Was A Magazine— p.19-20.

Fiction:
The Roaring Trumpet • novella by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt ♥♥♥♥
Mad Hatter • short story by Winston K. Marks
Well of the Angels • novelette by E. Hoffmann Price ♥♥♥
The Pipes of Pan • short story by Lester del Rey ♥♥
The Reign of Wizardry (Part 3 of 3) • serial by Jack Williamson ♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
The Roaring Trumpet • cover by M. Isip
Interior Artwork • Edd Cartier, Don Hewitt, R. Isip, Charles Schneeman
Of Things Beyond • essay by The Editor
Eighty Percent • essay by Willy Ley

This month’s cover¹ by Manuel Isip illustrates the lead novella, The Roaring Trumpet, and is a much better work than his bland effort for March. The interior illustrations are also better than normal, largely due to a couple of particularly stunning images by Ed Cartier.²

Before L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt were known for their ‘Gavagan’s Bar’ stories,³ they collaborated on their ‘Incompleat Enchanter’ tales of which The Roaring Trumpet is the first.⁴
This is a superior fantasy novella that tells of a modern American psychologist, Harold Shea, transported to the world of Norse myth during Fimbulwinter. After a set-up chapter where he meets with his colleagues, and they discuss the matter of travelling to other realities, Shea decides to give it a go. Using logic formulae, he ends up in a grey, misty world where it is snowing and almost immediately meets a one-eyed man on a horse who turns out to be the god Odinn. Shea finds out his identity at an inn at the Crossroads of the World, where he also meets the gods Thor, Loki and Frey amongst others. Soon he is travelling with them to find lost hammers and swords, fighting Giants, escaping the attentions of dragons, being imprisoned by Trolls, etc., all against the coming of the Time, of Ragnarok.
This has a strong start and finish with some parts which are premium fantasy storytelling. Indeed, much of the entertainment value of this is watching Shea trying to fit into this strange world and usually failing dismally, such as the scene in the inn where Shea comes by the name ‘Turnip Harald’. Eventually, in a later scene in the dungeons where he attempts to hoax a troll jailor by ‘magically’ reducing the size of his nose, he most spectacularly does fit in. The other thing this has going for it, compared with the SF of the time, is that it hasn’t dated at all.

Mad Hatter by Winston K. Marks leads off the short fiction and is as bad as the previous novella was good. A man who designs hats for a living has a small man (referred to as a pixy) appear from one of his drawers. There then follows a lot of alcohol abuse in an attempt to make him disappear—some of which is recommended by a doctor friend:

“You know, I shouldn’t be at all surprised that what you really need is a good bender. Buy yourself a quart and drink it all yourself. You artists need relaxation. Get yourself really plastered, and I bet that when the hangover wears off you’ll find out you’ve had some fun.”

This story is more preposterous for its attitude to drink than for the fantasy elements.
The novelette by E. Hoffman Price, Well of the Angels, is quite a good story about an expat oil employee who is stuck in Iraq and cannot leave because of his contract. He gets the middle-aged Arab office boy to take him to ruins in the desert to learn to be a magician. Unexpectedly, he is granted the magical power to leave by Harut and Marut, two fallen Angels who were tempted by Satan. Subsequently, a woman he met at the entrance to the pit where the Angels were, and an old school friend who is an archaeologist, come into his life. This is a well told piece and has a convincing sense of time and place. Strange, though, how words that would have been exotic and largely unheard of by readers in the 1940s: ‘Mosul’, ‘Kurd’, ‘Yezidi’, etc. are so commonplace now.
The final piece of short fiction is The Pipes of Pan by Lester del Rey. This story starts off with the god Pan at the deathbed of his last believer. After the man’s death Pan is a god no more and has to enter the world of humanity and get a job. This all becomes increasingly unlikely towards the end of the story but it is a pleasant enough journey getting there.

Jack Williamson’s serial The Reign of Wizardry has its third and final part in this issue. Thesis discovers that the bull in the cave (spoiler) is actually Cyron, a pirate crewmember, armed with a horn. Together they manage to use Thesis’ sword Northstar to find their way out of the cave, and they eventually exit at the small temple of Cybele where Thesis retrieves the magic charm given to him by Ariadne. Next, they go to Amir’s encampment to rescue the enslaved pirates and start a rebellion. Finally, they head to Knossos for a showdown, which involves perhaps a bit more than is necessary of people and gods not actually being who or what they seem.
This part was not as good as the first two and stretches credulity at points, but it is a reasonable end to what was, for the most part, a pretty good read.

There are only a couple of pieces of non-fiction⁵ in this issue. As ever, Of Things Beyond, is mostly puff for the next issue, specifically Norvell Page’s Without Horns, and goes into detail about mutations and modern X-Ray’s, radium, etc., at some length. At the end of the column Campbell states that the next issue will:

[Include] shorter material, of course, to total our usual eighty thousand words of fantasy.
Incidentally, that fact—that one copy of Unknown contains considerably more text than the average two-dollar book—rather surprises most people. You’re invited to check it if you don’t quite believe that the rather slim-seeming magazine can contain so much.

It is certainly a chunky publication with a lot of reading in it: possibly the nearest modern equivalent for wordage would be the bimonthly The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. However, Unknown came out every month, and so did Astounding and there were plenty of other magazines around as well (but no TV or computers to distract).
The essay by Willey Ley, Eighty Percent, is a rather rambling piece that starts with the fact that we only use 20% of our brain and it leaps from there to telepathy and clairvoyance, etc. Some of the assertions seem dubious:

If a needless organ should be brought into existence, so to speak as a by-product, the body would soon thrust a duty on it.

What, like my appendix? Some of the conclusions drawn seem debateable as well, such as the body finding a function for the eighty per cent of unused brain or getting rid of it: I don’t think evolution works that way.

In conclusion, the de Camp & Pratt, Price and Williamson stories make this the best 1940 issue of Unknown so far.

1. This cover is another edited image from Siren in the Night on flickr.com.
2. The two illustrations that really caught my eye were:
3. See The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction #2, Winter-Spring 1950.
4. For the background to how de Camp and Pratt met, and for details of their collaboration, see Fletcher and I, an essay by de Camp that can be found in various editions of the ‘Enchanter’ stories (mine was in the 1979 Sphere edition of The Incompleat Enchanter). One quote is of particular interest: “I will say only that they were heroic fantasy, or swordplay-and-sorcery fiction, long before these terms were invented. While Robert E. Howard is justly hailed as the major American pioneer in this subgenre, neither Pratt nor I, when we started the Shea stories, had ever read a Conan story or ever heard enough about Howard to recognise his name.” (p.xiii) In another part of the essay, de Camp mentions that Pratt “despised” the Conan stories: “He had no use for heroes who merely battered their way out of traps by their bulging thews, without using their brains.” (p.ix)
   Two other points regarding this story: a quick cut and paste of de Camp & Pratt’s story from the PDF to Word gives a count of 36,000 words: a long novella. It also contains a line describing how magic works: “Another is the law of contagion: that things once in contact continue to interact from a distance after separation.” (p.11) Compare and contrast to the recent news headlines about quantum entanglement…
5. Adverts aren’t non-fiction but sometimes they can be almost as fascinating. One from this issue urges women to: “ENLIST In the Women’s Field Army of the American Society for the Control of Cancer, and help in the intensive war against this disease. EDUCATE yourself and others to recognize early symptoms that may indicate cancer. SAVE some of the 150,000 who will die this year unless promptly treated. Early cancer can be cured” (p.154) And there was me thinking that the idea of early detection and treatment of cancer was a modern thing.

Other Reviews:
Fred Smith: Once There Was A Magazine— p.18-19.

Fiction:
The Indigestible Triton • novella by L. Ron Hubbard [as by René Lafayette] ♥♥
The African Trick • short story by Howard Wandrei [as by H. W. Guernsey] ♥
All Is Illusion • short story by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Henry Kuttner]
He Shuttles • short story by Theodore Sturgeon ♥
The Reign of Wizardry (Part 2 of 3) • serial by Jack Williamson ♥♥♥+

Non-fiction:
The Indigestible Triton • cover¹ by Edd Cartier
Interior Artwork • Frank Kramer, M. Isip², Flessel, Edd Cartier
Of Things Beyond • essay by The Editor
—And Having Writ— • reader’s letters by Harry A. Stern, Bob Tucker, Isaac Asimov

This issue has another good Cartier cover and the internal illustrations are of a better standard, with Kramer, Cartier and Flessel the best (and noting my usual poor scan quality caveat).

L. Ron Hubbard’s long,³ pseudonymous fantasy novella The Indigestible Triton starts with an unnecessary introduction about the delusions of sane psychiatric patients. Interestingly, it references Hubbard’s Death’s Deputy from earlier this year.
The story itself pretty much falls into two parts. In the first half or so, Bill Greyson pretends to be crazy to avoid a marriage arranged by his rich family. This lands him in the asylum temporarily where he becomes so bored that he arranges to get out and go fishing. During this he hooks Trigon, a Titan from Neptune’s court. Trigon takes great exception to this and physically enters Bill taking possession of him. Back on land the police are hunting for Bill, and when he returns from the fishing trip Trigon makes sure that they and the doctors (who want Bill to remain committed for the money he makes them) think he is properly crazy by the way he talks and his superhuman strength: bursting out of straight-jackets, bending lampposts, etc.
A lot of this is pulpy stuff, quite corny and a bit juvenile. For instance:

“See here,” said Trigon, suddenly exasperated, “you’re nothing but a !!&&?(??)&&! man! Where do you get off telling me what to do and what not to do? If you think I’d kill you now you’ve got another thought coming. Why, you kelp-headed freak, you got to remember that you’re talking to Trigon!”

The quality improves in the second half where Bill, still possessed by Trigon but with Bill able to hypnotise him, ends up in the depths of the ocean. There follow more adventures with sharks, a helpful pilot fish, a Scylla, etc.—at one point I got the feeling that parts of this were like a belligerent Finding Nemo, but that would be misdescribing it. Eventually, Bill makes his way to Neptune’s court and seeks a solution to his troubles.
Overall, this story has its shortcomings but it also has flashes of inventiveness and humour. I imagine that in 1940’s America this would have been thought quite an entertaining yarn.

As usual, unfortunately, the short fiction is dismal. I had high hopes for the Howard Wandrei contribution after last issue’s The Black Farm but The African Trick just doesn’t work as a story for me. It tells of an explorer in Africa, Dr Leyden, who sends a strange seed back to a Russian man in America who is blackmailing him over the murder of his wife. Vladimir, the Russian, plants the seed and a young woman ‘grows’ from it overnight. She strangles Vladimir when he gets back home and makes it look like a suicide. Running parallel to this, Dr Leyden is in a strange village where the headman is controlling the girl from afar as payback for the Doctor saving his life. There is a further development as the doctor leaves to return home. These separate parts just didn’t convince.
Matters do not get any better with All Is Illusion, a short story by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. This starts with a man who goes into a supernatural bar while waiting for his sister’s train. He ends up in an argument with a hairy midget and is cursed. He then ends up smelling of violets, has a whistling sound come from his stomach, smells of fish, turns into a duck, etc. Eventually, after a court trial, he goes back to the bar to get the curse lifted. All of this seems completely pointless, writers flogging a not particularly good idea for far too long: even if you got rid of all the padding it wouldn’t be much better at a shorter length.
I was hoping that Theodore Sturgeon’s novelette He Shuttles would improve the batting average for the short fiction but I didn’t think this ‘Three Wishes’ story was successful. To me, this type of tale depends on a clear explanation of the rules governing the wishes and then a clever avoidance or pitfall, and Sturgeon’s story doesn’t do that. An unpleasant tycoon uses one of his wishes to get people to obey him and then sets out to murder someone, using another wish to escape punishment for what he does. As it happens (spoiler) matters do not work out to his satisfaction, but I had to go back and reread part of the earlier story to work out why this happened. There is also some unnecessary authorial framing at the beginning, middle and end of the story.

This issue has the second part of The Reign of Wizardry by Jack Williamson. This is a fairly short offering compared with last issue’s and comprises three main sections. The first part (spoiler) tells of how Firebrand escapes from his cell with help from the wizard Snish after assuming the form of Admiral Phaistro; the next has him meeting Adriadne as Phaistro; the final part has Firebrand sent down into the pitch-black labyrinth and tells of him attempting to find his way out. He ultimately ends up circling back to where he started and meeting something that may be the Bull! The first and last sections are the strongest. You will get an idea of the overall quality, though, if I tell you I meant to read five or ten minutes of this before sleeping but finished the entire instalment just over an hour later.

As well as the usual blurb about upcoming stories in Of Things Beyond, Campbell encourages readers to give their finished copies to those who may enjoy it—an attempt to increase circulation as he feels it isn’t getting off the news-stand to the kind of people who may be receptive.
He also touches on short fantasy fiction:

Generally speaking, shorts in the fantasy field have more difficulties, for the author, than longer yarns. They have to build up a mood and tell a story in rather limited space. More difficult—but also more fun, when the author makes it tick.

An interesting comment given that over the last four issues I have found the short fiction quite weak and easily outperformed by the longer material.
The letter column —And Having Writ— is fairly short this issue containing only three letters that generally comment on Unknown’s first year. It ends with Isaac Asimov giving his top ten.⁴

Overall, an OK issue held up by the Williamson serial and the Hubbard novella.

1. This cover is an edited version of one from Siren in the Night on flickr.com.
2. Thanks once again to Fred Smith’s book for catching the misattribution of M. Isip’s work to R. Isip. Now that I’ve examined some of their other artwork, M. Isip’s signature seems to look like an ECG trace, whereas R. Isip’s seems to be a more conventional signature with what looks like ‘Rey’ as the first word (his full name was Pagsilang Rey Isip). There is more information about Rey Isip on Lambiek Comiclopedia  and Pulpartists.com—although I think the latter has his brother Manuel’s cover displayed. Talking of his brother Manuel, there doesn’t seem to be anything on the web about him, certainly no further links on ISFDB.
3. A quick cut and paste of Hubbard’s story from the PDF to MS Word gives a word count of 39,000 words, almost novel length.
4. Asimov’s letter:
   

Other Reviews:
Fred Smith: Once There Was A Magazine p.17-18.

Fiction:
The Reign of Wizardry (Part 1 of 3) • serial by Jack Williamson ♥♥♥+
Philtered Power • short story by Malcolm Jameson ♥
The Black Farm • novelette by Howard Wandrei [as by H. W. Guernsey] ♥♥
The Living Ghost • short story by E. A. Grosser ♥
Gateway • short story by Robert Arthur ♥♥
“Derm Fool” • short story by Theodore Sturgeon ♥
On the Knees of the Gods (Part 3 of 3) • serial by J. Allan Dunn ♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
The Reign of Wizardry • cover by M. Isip
Illustrations • Ed Cartier, M. Isip, Frank Kramer, Paul Orban, Koll.
Of Things Beyond • in times to come by The Editor
The Drug That Kills the Soul • essay by Edward Podolsky
A Few Notes on the Reliability of Newspaper Clippings Without Additional Remarks About Charles Fort and Others • essay by Willy Ley
—And Having Writ— • reader’s letters

This issue’s cover¹ by M. Isip has a bland, washed-out appearance and it is wrongly credited on the contents page to Ed Cartier. As well as not being too keen on Isip’s cover, the B&W illustrations inside the magazine from the same artist are too much at the comic book end of the art spectrum for my taste. As for Cartier, his illustrations for the Williamson piece are fine but I’m not sure his talents are best matched to the straight adventure of that piece: I would imagine he is a better fit for humorous or light fantasy. The best of this issue’s illustrations are probably by Kramer. They look better to my eye (even in this poor unz.org scan) and the one on p.85 is probably my favourite of the issue.²

Moving on to the fiction, this issue is dominated by the two serials: it opens with a good chunk of Jack Williamson’s new serial The Reign of Wizardry and closes with the last part of J. Allan Dunn’s On the Knees of the Gods. Coincidentally, both are set in classical periods: Williamson’s in Knossos, and Dunn’s in Olympus.

Williamson’s serial, The Reign of Wizardry, is a pretty good story about a pirate, Captain Firebrand, going to Knossos to depose the Minos and the sorcerers who hold power there. The story starts out at sea where Firebrand’s boat engages two war vessels from the Knossos fleet, and sinks them, before boarding a trading vessel. At this point Firebrand picks up a minor wizard called Snish, who has the ability to cast spells that can change the appearance of people so they look like others—Snish initially had the form of a golden-skinned princess. Soon after, the sorcerers of Minos send a storm and more of their navy to seek revenge and, before long, Firebrand is wrecking the trading ship on the rocks of Crete. The pair escape a metal man called Talos, and make their way to Ekoros, where the games to select the Minos are held. En route they pass through a slum area:

They crossed a stone bridge, and came into Ekoros. This was the poor section of the city, where dwelt the lesser artisans, small shopkeepers, and laborers from the docks. Flimsy buildings, three stories high, confined a powerful stench to the five-foot street.
Most of the street was a foul, brown mud, the rest a shallow open sewer in which a thin trickle of yellow slime ran through piles of decaying garbage and reeking manure. Flies made a dark cloud above the ditch, and their buzzing was an endless weary sound.

This economical but descriptive prose drives the story forward.
In the narrow slum street Firebrand skirmishes with Ariadne’s (the Minos’s daughter) guards: after defeating them, Firebrand forces her to pick up a dead child, killed by her charging chariot. This is a nice scene, one of many juicy nuggets that are embedded in this instalment and which make this is an engrossing heroic adventure: a more humane and intelligent Conan story if you will. One minor criticism: I am not sure the foreword at the start of the story is necessary.

The other serial is the last instalment of On the Knees of the Gods by J. Allan Dunn, which brings this novella to a satisfying close. Peter manages to convince forge-God Hephaetus to make the horseshoes and, after spending a night there, returns by boat to the centaur Cheiron. Satisfied, Cheiron tells him where Python can be found. Peter makes his way into the lair of Python (spoiler) and manages to recover the jewel and rescue Ephryne after piping the snake to sleep. As they leave he realises that Python is shedding his skin and depart quickly with Pan’s help. Peter had summoned Pan as Ephryne was pressing her affections on Peter with a view to marrying him.
The final section is on Olympus where Peter has one final audience with Zeus and is granted his boon of returning to his own world. There is one final complication before he achieves this.
Not as strong an instalment as last month’s perhaps, but overall a fairly good serial, and, as I said before, worth a read for Thomas Burnett Swann fans.

Unfortunately, the short fiction rather disappoints this month. The strongest candidate is The Black Farm, the novelette by Howard Wandrei. This is actually a pretty good Weird Tales-type story to start with. It tells of a farmer, Anton, that has an creature on his property he calls Mr Zero. It is a large, spherical and almost completely invisible and thus far has killed his wife and various livestock, including a cat and her litter of five kittens. He monitors its movement with help from his dog Smoke who has an acute sense of where this monster is. As the story develops his sister-in-law—initially looking for vengeance for her sister, who she believes was murdered by Anton—becomes involved. There is also a criminal on the run who goes missing in front of the eyes of his pursuers. This is a well told and absorbing story but unfortunately it comes to a fairly abrupt halt.
Philtered Power by Malcolm Jameson is a weak tale of a state assayist’s assistant first making a love potion to get a girl, and then making a potion to help his boss get money to sort their office roof.
You may have better luck with The Living Ghost by E. A. Grosser than I did—if you understand what happens at the end of this story about a lawyer who visits an elderly couple and their granddaughter. The grandparents can’t see her—she is a ghost—but other people can.
Gateway by Robert Arthur is actually OK. It is about a man (‘Horace Golder’) who is out in the park and hears an iron door open. A strangely dressed man eventually materialises out of nothing and starts oiling the joints on the door. Golder joins the man on his journey to service the rest of the doors. Along the way they have lunch and Golder picks up hints of the elysian delights that may be on the other side of these doors. When they end up in his apartment, where the last gate is, he is given the opportunity to cross over. Golder hesitates, and, as he does so, hears his wife and children coming into the apartment…
Finally, “Derm Fool” by Theodore Sturgeon tells of a couple who have been bitten by a strange snake and now regularly shed their skin. They monetise this affliction and investigate the physical process with a view to controlling it. This would probably have read slightly better at the time than it does now, but its light, slangy 1940s style dates it.

There is not much in the way of non-fiction this issue. After the usual Of Things Beyond puffing next issue’s contents, there are a couple of short essays, very short in the case of The Drug That Kills the Soul by Edward Podolsky, an unlikely ‘factoid’ about zombies supposedly. Willy Ley’s A Few Notes… is a short article debunking more far-fetched newspaper items, probably a side swipe at Fortean phenomena. Don’t believe everything you read in the papers is its message.
—And Having Writ—, the letter column, has praise for L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall and Unknown’s first year of publication amongst other comments. The last letter is interesting. The correspondent discusses The Swamp Thing, which appeared in the January issue, and which he liked more than me. He says of the story:

It brought back memories of a not so distant childhood, some scant eight years or so ago, of when I lived in a small country town and often found such scenery and such atmosphere as was described so well in Walton’s yarn. There was feeling in that story. I don’t know how to put over the idea, but it was the sort of thing that makes you draw a bit nearer the fire or jerk suddenly around to look at the darkness just outside your window or perhaps stiffen at the sound of dry leaves clacking on the panes… Walton’s yarn had IT.
It speaks with the melancholy of old memories of country nights, of deserted places and cold moonlight. It is so close to reality as to be REAL in my mind. I have experienced exactly those same feelings.

What this correspondent wrote touched me, and made me think that across the decades there was a connection between us: hadn’t we both just read this story? And, as I read his letter, weren’t we both thinking about it?
I read on: the rest was about the other material in the January issue of Unknown, and then, at the end of his letter was the name of the person who had sent it in:

Ray D. Bradbury, Editor of Futuria Fantasia, Los Angeles, Calif.

In conclusion, good serials in this issue but disappointing short fiction: I am beginning to wonder if the only good stuff in Unknown is going to be long form.

1. This cover is an edited version of one from Siren in the Night on flickr.com. Also, thanks to Fred Smith’s review (which I read after I had written mine) for pointing out the misattribution of the cover to Cartier: I had commented on the marked difference in quality from his cover work last issue. Doh.
2. This isn’t a very good scan of the Kramer artwork on p.85 but it gives you an idea:

Other Reviews:
Fred Smith: Once There Was A Magazine— p.16-17.

Fiction:
Death’s Deputy • novella by L. Ron Hubbard ♥♥♥
Call of Duty • short story by Laurence Bour, Jr. ♥
The Wisdom of an Ass • novelette by Ulysses George Mihalakis [as by Silaki Ali Hassan] ♥♥♥
The Psychomorph • short story by E. A. Grosser ♥
On the Knees of the Gods (Part 2 of 3) • novella serial by J. Allan Dunn ♥♥♥+
When It Was Moonlight • short story by Manly Wade Wellman ♥♥

Non-fiction:
Of Things Beyond • essay by The Editor
—And Having Writ— • Letters
Lurani • poem by Robert A. W. Lowndes [as by Paul Dennis Lavond]

This issue has what must be one of the best Unknown covers ever:¹ I can see why people say that Cartier’s artwork suited the humorous aspects of the magazine. The interior artwork is by Edd Cartier, R. Isip, Virgil Finlay and M. Isip. Once again, the poor unz.org scan of the magazine makes it difficult to appreciate the artwork, especially one of the Finlay illustrations.

The lead fiction this month is a novella by L. Ron Hubbard, Death’s Deputy. I think this is probably the first work I’ve read by Hubbard and tried to think back to why that was. Initially I thought it was that his Dianetics and Scientology connections may have put me off but it was pointed out to me that the more pragmatic reason was probably Hubbard’s patchy reprint record in the 1960s and 70s.
Whatever, this long novella (about 30,000 words) tells of a Canadian Air Force Spitfire pilot², Clayton MacLean, who is shot down, badly injured and left with disabling injuries. He ends up back in America as a civilian where one night he is transported into the presence of Destruction (who is effectively Death) and asked to work for him. When he refuses he is told he has no choice and he will either serve or die.
The rest of the story tells of the numerous people who subsequently die in his presence (including one aeroplane crash). Matters are complicated when he falls in love with Laura — but he decides he must leave her to keep her safe. Having been cured of his disabling injuries in the meantime by a doctor’s experimental technique (which the doctor subsequently takes to the grave with him) he re-enlists and ends up causing a troopship to be sunk.
After a number of high casualty bombing missions he meets up with his wife and determines to come to an accommodation with Death. I thought this a fairly good, readable pulp pot-boiler.

Laurence Bour’s Call of Duty concerns a WW1 U-boat commander who has a milky haze affecting his vision. The story develops fairly slowly to the climax, rather telegraphing the ending (doubt about the time as their position doesn’t make sense, target ships looking oddly modern, etc.) where they sink a passenger ship and then sink themselves.
The twist end (spoiler) is that the ship is the Athenia, the first casualty of WW2. A ploddingly done weird story.

Ulysses George Mihalakis’s The Wisdom of an Ass is an Arabian ‘legend’ that tells of Brahim becoming the Visier of Yafri and the appalling judgements he hands down in court. Kassim, a cobbler in the town, who had previously been dealing with disputes in a low-key local manner, is drawn into a case of poor merchandise and ends up at the wrong end of one of Brahim’s judgements. Fortunately he manages to avoid the punishment. Subsequently he encounters a djinn, repels him, and is then gifted special powers by Allah.
Kassim turns himself into an ass, places himself in the centre of a dispute between two farmers and manages to ingratiate himself into Brahim’s court, where he helps him formulate judgements. Matters come to a head when the Mufti arrives with two Caliphs on the brink of war over a valley.
This is a fairly good Arabian Nights type story for the most part, but the denouement isn’t as good as the rest of the story.

A. Grosser’s The Psychomorph is a poor short story about a creature who turns up in a ship’s cabin where both men think it looks like their wife/lover. When the wife and lover return matters have already progressed to the point where one of the men is dead and the remaining one has resolved to kill the creature. A twist end that you can see coming from miles back.

This second part of J. Allan Dunn’s serial On the Knees of the Gods gets into its stride in this instalment. Peter meets with the centaur chief Cheiron but the gift of the salve for their hooves doesn’t provide sufficient incentive for his help. Peter suggests horseshoes for the centaurs and Cheiron dispatches Peter to another of the Gods, Hephaestus, who is capable of making them.
First though, Peter has to go to Poseidon to negotiate passage across the Mediterranean. Whilst at the latter’s temple he actually meets with Poseidon’s wife, Amphitrite, who tries to seduce him. He mentally calls out to Pan, who arrives and takes his place, also arranging a sea vessel to take him to Hephaestus.
At this point I found myself quite enjoying this story and it struck me that it would be very much be enjoyed by the admirers of Thomas Burnett Swann. Allan wrote over a thousand stories and novels, half of them Westerns. I suspect this may have been a labour of love, for no book version has ever been published.
The final section of this part is the actual sea journey to Hephaestus, which is equally enjoyable.

The fiction is rounded off by Manly Wade Wellman’s When It Was Moonlight, an OK short story about Edgar Allen Poe investigating a case of premature burial in his town and finding a vampire.

The non-fiction this issue is similar to last month’s: an editorial puffing next month’s contents (the start of an interesting sounding Jack Williamson serial), a poem about a mermaid that is OK, and the letters column which, inelegantly, has one page on p.6 and has the rest from p.122 onwards. The latter is rather dull and starts with a long letter about Eric Frank Russell’s article on Fortean phenomena.

A better issue than last month’s but still little in the way of the stand-out fiction I have been expecting.

1. This cover image comes from Siren in the Night on flickr.com. Well worth a look.
2. Hubbard obviously didn’t wear himself out on the aviation research. He refers to the Spitfire as the ‘Vickers Spitfire’, odd given that Spitfires were called just that or ‘Supermarine Spitfires’. Also his fateful initial encounter is with half a dozen H.126s: a recce plane unlikely to be flying in formation and they were not armed with 20mm cannons. Also, that calibre of shell would have probably ripped his arm off rather than injuring it.
   At the end of the story he needs help when back in the cockpit of a Spitfire and is told that several Lysanders are on the way to help him. The Lysander is probably best known for its SOE clandestine operations: it was slow and wasn’t armed until the Mk3 entered service in July 1940, several months after this story appeared.
   This information brought to you by a misspent childhood reading Commando comics and the modern wonder of Wikipedia.

Other Reviews:
Fred Smith: Once There Was A Magazine— p.15-16.

Fiction:
Soldiers of the Black Goat • novella by Marian O’Hearn ♥♥
Swamp Train • short story by Harry Walton ♥♥
The Sea Thing • short story by A. E. van Vogt ♥♥♥
Doubled in Brass • short story by Lester del Rey ♥
On the Knees of the Gods (Part 1 of 3) • novella serial by J. Allan Dunn ♥♥

Non-Fiction:
Soldiers of the Black Goat • Cover by H. W. Scott
Artwork • Charles Schneeman, Frank Kramer, Paul Orban, M. Isip
Of Things Beyond • essay by The Editor
—And Having Writ— • Letters
Look About You • poem by Theodore Sturgeon
It Happens Twice at Least • essay by Willy Ley

I recently read a blog piece¹ that listed all the magazine issues that would have fiction eligible for the 2016 Retro Hugo Awards (covering 1940). I thought it might be an idea to have a look at some of them so I would be able to cast a meaningful vote. Since then my progress has been nothing short of glacial, but I read a few of them and this was the first to fall under my eye.

This issue of Unknown, the legendary companion magazine to Astounding, is the first I have read. Although I have one or two physical copies of the magazine this one was a digital copy that seems to have originally been posted on unz.org.² Unfortunately, the scan quality is not great, which is not a problem for the textual matter but the interior illustrations have been reproduced badly.

Beyond the striking cover by Scott, there are adverts (which give the impression that all people did in the forties was apply for correspondence courses and strap themselves into rupture corsets in between swigging Listerine), a contents page, and an editorial that isn’t much more than a puff piece for the next issue’s contents. After that there is a letter column that includes correspondence from P. S. Miller and Eric Frank Russell (the latter involves some argy-bargy pointed at L. Sprague de Camp about introspection, science and the rumblings of war). A number of strong opinions are expressed about the interior and exterior artwork (the illustrations in this issue seem fine to me with the exception of the Orban ones for the van Vogt story, which seemed a little crude).

The fiction starts with Marian O’Hearn’s long novella Soldiers of the Black Goat. The writer’s real name was Anita Allen, and she would contribute a further three part serial to Unknown (Spark of Allah, July-September 1940) and then would never be heard of again in the fantasy field.³ This long novella tells of the Salem witch, Hester Gurney, and how she saves a woman who is accused of witchcraft by secreting her away. Gurney proceeds with a long campaign of manipulation of various individuals: the executioner, the judge, etc. Subsequently, she finds out that they are part of a group who have been benefiting from the confiscated property and land of various accused woman after they have been burnt at the stake. While this story is quite readable and moves at a decent pace it is nevertheless too long and also suffers for a fantasy novella of having very little actual witchcraft/fantasy in it: most of the manipulation she does is by force of will or reputation, or by the use of Cannabis sativa or other drugs.
In some respects more a story of local politics than anything else, but worth a look.

Next up is Harry Walton’s Swamp Train. This is an atmospheric story that starts with a con-man, Rister, murdering his accomplice in a marsh and disposing of the car. He walks to a local town where he has a strange encounter with a man outside the local store before leaving on a train. Onboard he meets the father of a friend of his. The friend was sent to the electric chair, and the father still blames Rister for leading him astray.
Unfortunately, the denouement of this didn’t really work for me as it doesn’t really fit together, and requires coincidental. Readable, though.

A. E. van Vogt’s The Shark God is fairly good story about a shark-God who takes human form to come ashore and murder a group of men who are shark fishing. He manages to dispose of one of the men before matters become increasingly difficult. Towards the end the men realise what it is that they are dealing with and a struggle ensues.

Lester del Rey’s Doubled in Brass, is a series story about an elf who is a coppersmith. He helps his human partner’s son to get his girl. Slightly fey uncomplicated story that has little going for it apart from the rabbits going on bicycle trips with the elf. Oh, and this prescient quote:

Things had indeed changed since the day when he awoke in the hills where his people had retired in sleep to escape the poisonous fumes of coal. p.108

The serial by J. Allen Dunn that starts in this issue, On the Knees of the Gods, is based on what I presume is standard Greek mythology. Peter Brent is an American archaeologist-hobbyist travelling through Greece who comes across a village. There he becomes embroiled in a dispute between a young boy and a thug. Rescued from his predicament by one of the locals, an artist called Burton, they arrange to journey to together to Arcadia.
At this point there is something of a discontinuity in the narrative as Burton the artist is not present in the next chapter where Peter is lured ‘through the laurel’ by the God Pan. On the other side of the laurel bush he finds himself in the world of Greek mythology. Nectar and a visit to Zeus follows, and he is given the task of recovering a jewel and a female hostage from Python. Pan takes him to where he can try to find Cheiron, the chief of the centaurs who may assist him with his task.
OK start apart from the discontinuity (which makes me wonder if the text was trimmed for size) and a bit too much data dumping about the Gods, their relations and feuds.

Willy Ley’s article is about series of events, like the ‘things come in threes’ phenomenon. Ley believes that this happens and discusses patterns he has noticed. I think he is mistakenly trying to impose a pattern on chaotic events. Also, the article does rather seem to stop in mid flow: I flicked the page and found myself in the letter column. There is also a short poem by Theodore Sturgeon which I did not care for.

In conclusion, this issue was something of a disappointment. Not only was there no stand-out fiction but the whole issue had a rather dated feel to it: perhaps not surprising for a magazine that is over 75 years old! Perhaps it isn’t possible to go this far back in SF magazine history and still find material that is worth reading.

1. Amazing Stories blog.
2. There are a number or websites and forums that provide digital copies of old pulp magazines: unz.org, archive.org, etc. I realise that the copyright status of some of the work included in these scans is questionable, but it does make available a vast amount of work that would be a lot harder to source.
3. Will Murray’s article The Unknown Unknown shows a short novel by O’Hearn titled No Soul, No Death had been accepted by John Campbell for Unknown but did not appear before that magazine folded. Believed lost.