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Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.
Fiction:
Men Against the Stars • novelette by Manly Wade Wellman –
Below—Absolute! • short story by Harry Walton ∗∗
The Legion of Time (Part 2 of 3) • serial by Jack Williamson ∗∗∗+
Philosophers of Stone • short story by D. L. James –
Seeds of the Dusk • novelette by Raymond Z. Gallun ∗∗∗
Isle of the Golden Swarm • short story by Norman L. Knight ∗∗
Three Thousand Years! (Part 3 of 3) • serial by Thomas Calvert McClary ∗∗∗
Non-fiction:
Men Against the Stars • cover by H. W. Wesso
Interior artwork • H. W. Wesso, uncredited, Charles Schneeman (x2), Jack Binder (x2), Eliot Dold (x3), uncredited (x2), Howard Brown (x2), Olga Ley (x4)
Fantastic Fiction • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
The Great Eye • science essay by R. DeWitt Miller
Monstrous Twin • science filler
In Times to Come
The Analytical Laboratory: April 1938
Witnesses of the Past • science essay by Willy Ley
Mars • cover artwork essay
Science Discussions • letters
Brass Tacks • letters
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This issue has the second astronomical cover that Campbell commissioned, produced by Wesso for the Manly Wade Wellman story Men Against the Stars. The top and bottom colour bars that were missing on last issue’s cover are back. John Campbell provides an accompanying essay to go with the cover:
As for the story itself, Men Against the Stars by Manly Wade Wellman1 starts with spaceship fifty-one on its way from the Moon to Mars. However, the atomic hydrogen fuel they are using is not stable and, as the crew are discussing their chances of surviving the trip, the ship explodes.
The story then switches its point of view to Tallentyre, the lunar base’s second in command, who has watched the ship explode and is now arguing with his hysterical superior. The latter is trying to deal with the mutinous crew of ship sixty-one, who are refusing to leave and, in any event, he doesn’t want to send another crew to their deaths. After some speechifying from Tallentyre about the sacrifice required to travel in space (I note that when this subject comes up it is usually someone else’s sacrifice), and the problems with atomic hydrogen and jet tubes, he knocks his boss out and goes to deal with the mutineers. Things do not go well:
Tallentyre’s right hand rested easily in the pocket of his tunic. The cold, gray eyes watched the big spaceman steadily. “You think you could get away with violence?”
The big man took a step forward with a hamlike fist clenched before him. “Think, brother? Hu-uh. I know I can,” he said softly. “You tried it yourself inside there.” Without turning his head, he spoke to the men behind him. “Come on, boys. Grab this guy. And one of you tail for the ship and that gun.”
Without relaxing his moveless, wooden face, Tallentyre drew his hand from his tunic pocket. Space volunteers have to have a queer, reckless courage. With a bull roar, the giant captain dove forward with outstretched hands, his face twisted with sudden hate. Tallentyre shot him between the eyes. The big body fell with exaggerated slowness under Lunar pull. p. 10-11
The other four crewmen, appropriately motivated, go on their flight: their spaceship blows up.
A female assistant, Noel, appears and tells Tallentyre she did love him but doesn’t anymore (he never knew that she did). Police arrive from Earth to arrest him for the killing but he escapes outside the base, giving Noel a chance to relent—she called the cops—and tell them what really happened with the mutineers. Tallentyre comes back and finds he is no longer being pursued for the killing, and that a ship is returning. He orders the police to arrest the returning mutineers—Tallentyre is nothing if not single-minded.
The last scene (spoiler) reveals that the arriving crew have actually returned from a base on Mars and, not only that, they have discovered what the problem with the spaceship jet tubes is (this is analogous to the properties of Prince Rupert’s Drop,2 a hard/brittle glass phenomenon mentioned briefly at the start of the story).
This is pretty dreadful fare, and it’s hard to believe that it comes from the author of Pithecanthropus Rejectus (Astounding, January 1938).
Below—Absolute! by Harry Walton starts with two spacemen providing a short data-dump about a dark spot between Alpha Centauri and Earth that they are going to investigate.
As they approach the anomaly there is an interesting description that is similar to the one you would expect for a black hole:
For space before them was empty, with an emptiness not of space. A black meteor, or a swarm of particles, they were ready to face, but sight recoiled from the sheer vacuum of non-spatial darkness which gaped ahead of the ship. This was nothingness made tangible, a canyon of blackness in which the stars were lost, incredibly empty and hostile in its very negation of all things normal.
[. . .]
This was no dark body blotting out the stellar field beyond, no long-dead sun hurtling its cold way unseen through the burial place of the stars, no obscuring cloud of cosmic dust. Of that they presently felt certain. Its outline against the tapestry of the stars was that of an enormous, perfectly circular disk, and—although neither man would have admitted it—both felt it possessed of motion within itself. It crossed Holm’s thought that this was an all-absorbing funnel draining into unknown space and tune, a sucking vacuum of nothingness alien to space as they knew it. p. 24-25
As they approach they discover that the disc is sucking heat out of the universe, and the pair only just avoid freezing to death.
Aliens later take control of their subconscious and start talking to them with their own voices. The aliens are in another universe on the other side of the disc, one that has a lower energy state than ours, and which is dying. The reason that they have opened a passage between the two is to let energy flow from our universe to theirs: as a result of this Earth and the solar system are doomed.
The rest of the story (spoiler) concerns the two men’s struggle to fly their spacecraft into the Passage to destroy the link between the two universes. During this the aliens attempt to physically control them.
This is fairly standard pulp stuff, but there are one or two interesting ideas.
The middle part of The Legion of Time by Jack Williamson continues the story of the battle between the two possible timelines of Jonbar and Gyronchi, and it starts with the time ship Chronion struggling to reach Jonbar—the Gyrane have somehow reduced the probability of its future existence. The ship finally arrives at Jonbar two weeks later.
Lanning finally meets Lethonee, and they have dinner that evening on an outdoor balcony. She tells Lanning that Jonbar has only one night of existence left, but before they can discuss this further, Sorainya and Glarath, high Priest of the Gyrane, arrive to witness the end of the city. Lanning runs to the Chronion as Lethonee fades out of existence.
On the ship, McLan tells Lanning the reason Jonbar has flickered out of existence is that the Gyrane have managed to build a time ship too. With it they have gone back in time and taken someone or something, thus altering the future and assuring their existence. McLan also states that whatever they have taken will be kept under guard in Sorainya’s castle. The Chronion heads for Gyronchi. En route the Gyrane ship appears beside them in the time stream and they find themselves heavily outgunned. One of their crew is killed and two wounded before they manage to escape (the serial is notable for the large number of casualties).
In the next chapter they climb up a cliff to Sorainya’s citadel and gain entry. They move through the dungeons and come upon the guards, who raise the alarm.
This section (the climb up the cliff and the fight through the dungeon) is a great boy’s own adventure, fast-moving, bloody, and with lots of atmospheric description. One of the scenes shows Williamson’s Weird Tales licks:
A dreadful silence filled most of the prison. But from one cell came an agonized screaming, paper-thin from a raw throat, repeated with a maddening monotony. Glancing through a barred door, as he passed, Lanning saw a woman stretched out in chains on the floor. A crystal vessel swung back and forth, above her, pendulumlike. And drops of cold green fire fell from it, one by one, upon her naked flesh. With each spattering, corrosive drop, she writhed against the chains, and shrieked again.
The half-consumed body, Lanning thought, might once have been beautiful. Could this have been some rival of Sorainya’s? A cold hate turned him rigid, and quickened his step. A muffled shot echoed behind him, and the screaming stopped.
“Mon coeur!” whispered little Jean Querard. “She shall suffer no more.”
In another cell was a great squeaking and thumping commotion. And Lanning glimpsed huge, sleek rats battling over a body in chains, newly dead, or dying.
Once, beyond, that situation was reversed. A sightless, famished wretch had bitten his own wrist, to let a few drops of blood flow upon the floor. He crouched there, listening, and snatched again and again, blindly, with fettered hands, at the great wary rats that came to his bait. p. 46-47
The instalment finishes with another bloody fight in the great hall, which only Lanning and his old friend Halloran survive. They make their way to the trapdoor in Sorainya’s chambers, and in the vault below they find her embalmed ancestors, treasure beyond measure, and the object (a black brick) they are looking for.
On their way out they find Sorainya and her insect-like kothrin guards waiting. . . .
This serial continues to be a lot of fun and, given its age, a surprising page-turner.
Philosophers of Stone by D. L. James is a pretty awful story that has an inventor called Voorland regain consciousness to find that his transportation machine has malfunctioned and stranded him on an alien planet. The large crystal rock he had previously gathered as a specimen starts talking to him telepathically, and he learns that he will be taken to the Sigarians. On the way (the journey is by means of pseudopods that come out of the ground) the crystal chats away.
Voorland later discovers (spoiler) that the rock is actually using him to gain access to a spaceship that has crash-landed and is buried underground. He manages to escape, and finds that the spaceship crew are humanoid. They need “red metal” to refuel their ship before they can escape—which is conveniently provided by the copper cable of Voorland’s machine.
Seeds of the Dusk by Raymond Z. Gallun1, 3 starts off in third-person omniscient, and describes a spore drifting between the orbits of Mars and Earth in the far future. The spore eventually lands on Earth and starts growing:
The spore had become a plant now. First, it was no bigger than a pinhead. Then it increased its size to the dimensions of a small marble, its fuzzy, greenbrown shape firmly anchored to the soil itself by its long, fibrous roots. Like any terrestrial growth, it was an intricate chemical laboratory, where transformations took place that were not easy to comprehend completely.
And now, perhaps, the thing was beginning to feel the first glimmerings of a consciousness, like a human child rising out of the blurred, unremembering fog of birth. Strange, oily nodules, scattered throughout its tissues, connected by means of a complex network of delicate, white threads, which had the functions of a nervous system, were developing and growing—giving to the sporeplant from Mars the equivalent of a brain. Here was a sentient vegetable in the formative stage. p. 78-79
The point of view then switches to Kaw, an intelligent crow. As the bird is flying overhead the plant he sees it begin to spore and goes down to investigate. There are dead ants all around the plant, and Kaw receives an electric shock from one of its spines. As the plant sends out more spores Kaw realises the threat to life on Earth and flies to the Iterloo, the descendants of humanity. After he tells Zar, one of their irritable representatives, he gets shot for his trouble.
Zar goes to see the plant for himself. When it shocks him, he promptly flames it to the ground with his pistol. He returns to his underground home where the remnants of humanity are preparing to leave the dying Earth for Venus. Despite this, and after discussions among the Iterloo, they decide to build generators to irradiate the surface and kill the plants (and all other life as well).
Meanwhile, we find out that Kaw isn’t dead but only injured. He slowly makes his way back home and, one night when he goes into a ravine to sleep, he does not notice the alien plants that are there and ends up under their hypnotic power. The plants then use Kaw to lure Zar to them, and the Iterloo in turn comes under their hypnotic power. After being encircled by vines for days he eventually escapes, and goes back to the city where the preparations for a move to Venus continue, as do the plans to irradiate the surface.
The story ends (spoiler) some time in the future, with Kaw and all the other surface life still alive: the plants infected Zar with a plague that subsequently wiped out humanity.
This is quite a good piece, and one that I enjoyed for the detailed writing and the far-future Earth setting. However, I wondered why the humans were bothering to make the effort to wipe out the plants when they were planning on going to Venus anyway.
Isle of the Golden Swarm by Norman L. Knight starts with a passenger on a ship watching two natives help a badly injured man aboard:
McGrath came aboard the ship at Port Said, in the middle of an afternoon of withering heat. Two swarthy, white-turbaned men carried him up the gangplank and into his cabin; his legs dangled inertly as if paralyzed. They passed within a few feet of my deck-chair, where I lay baking and sweltering in the shade of an awning. McGrath’s appearance shocked me out of a semi-stupor and into a state of observant wakefulness.
He seemed a youngish man, and yet he was extraordinarily emaciated. His hands were bony talons resting on the shoulders of the two porters. His clothes hung and flapped loosely upon him. Half of one ear was missing, and the tip of his nose had been sliced oft obliquely. The scars were dark red, and obviously recent. His face was the thinly masked face of a skull, the eyes retracted into cavernous sockets and haunted by the shadow of some abysmal fear. p. 97-98
The narrator later meets McGrath on deck and they talk. He listens to a story about the injured man’s adventures in a remote part of the jungle, where he had gone to study apes. After his tribal guides left him (with a warning to keep out of a nearby part of the jungle called the “haunted forest”) he had set up camp in a cave, and later established a relationship with a young male gorilla, “Gunga Din”. They spent a lot of time together and, strangely, the creature forcibly prevents McGrath from entering the “haunted forest”.
Needless to say, the gorilla finds a mate and spends an increasing amount of time away. At this point, McGrath makes another attempt at entering the forbidden area. He is successful, but there is a strange atmosphere there, and a number of animal skeletons with a spiral hole bored in their skulls. The story comes to a climax (spoiler) when he stumbles on a lake with bone-littered shores, and an islet covered in tiny alien buildings. As he watches, a swarm of golden insect-like beings take flight towards him. They shoot tiny, paralysing darts at him when they arrive:
“They were insects! They were giant hornets, the size of humming birds, and their bodies and limbs seemed wrought of burnished gold. They walked upon their two hinder pairs of limbs, but held the fore part of their bodies upright, in the manner of a praying mantis, and were very dexterous with their third and forward pair of limbs. The first squadron to arrive was armed with little crossbows of silvery metal.
[. . .]
A half-dozen of them trotted over me in an exploratory fashion, seemed to confer, then amputated a bit of my nose. The operation was painless; the venom of their darts must have been an efficient local anesthetic as well. They immediately applied a styptic paste to the wound. Then they retired with the fragment to a point just on the edge of my range of vision, where I could not see exactly what they were doing. But my impression was that they—devoured it! p. 106
The insects spend the rest of the day examining McGrath then, when night comes, they go back to their nest. Gunga Din the gorilla arrives to rescue him. The final paragraphs have McGrath display a number of small hypodermic needles, and a miniature cutlass and crossbow.
The first part of this is quite well written, and it reads like a good Weird Tales story, but the ending is a little unconvincing, and too straightforward.
The third and concluding part of Three Thousand Years! by Thomas Calvert McClary gets off to an entertaining start as Gamble the scientist discovers that his ideals conflict with the realities of human nature:
Gamble delivered his promised feast to the clan—fourteen cases of food. Three thousand people looked at the small pile with astonishment.
Gamble smiled. “Concentrated. I assure you, it is sufficient.”
His four assistants prepared the lavish feast in a special catalytic stove. Twenty-three hors d’oeuvres occupied a space about one inch square!
But—the course was delicious. So was the half gill of soup. At the end came a striped pill about the size of a peanut.
“What’s this ?” Prescott grunted skeptically.
Gamble smiled. “A complete banana split. Twelve trimmings.”
The copper man leaned over to Lucky. “I’m not hungry, but I’ll be damned if I et yet! A dinner just don’t seem right unless you got something to wade into.”
Later Lucky found him nibbling joyously on a piece of dried fish. p. 112-113
After this the novel meanders somewhat. There is a grisly chapter where they start making glass, and one of the glass makers has to sacrifice himself by going under the mould, which is full of molten material, to crack it open. There are also critical problems trying to get into a bank vault:
Gamble did not know how men had first built their weary way through ten thousand years to civilization. Gamble could not find that road again, nor could his experts. If that gold vault defied them—if that slim chain of vast science his laboratory preserved should break—Gamble would be broken. He had no second string. Drega could work with raw rock and brute power, could build again. Gamble could not. He knew it. p. 120
Later there are sections detailing other production problems, and attempts to trade with Drega and steel makers in Pittsburgh. There are cannibals and the outside world to contend with as well. Ultimately, a malaise starts to affect Gamble’s society. People defect to Drega, and Gamble is eventually put on trial for putting the human race into suspended animation. Drega acts as the judge, and he ultimately frees Gamble: the two reconcile.
In conclusion, this is a rather uneven piece, and it overdoes the detail of the various industrial processes required by a modern society (although I did go away with a greater realisation of the problems of restarting civilization after an apocalyptic event). Also, McCleary’s premise about the human need for work isn’t convincing (I suspect many people who are in jobs they don’t like would feel the same). Overall though this is an interesting and, at times, highly entertaining novel.
I’ve already mentioned Wesso’s cover above, but he also contributes Interior artwork for the Wellman piece and, I think, the Walton story on p. 23 (it is uncredited but it looks like his work). There is other credited work by Charles Schneeman, Jack Binder, Eliot Dold, and Olga Ley. This leaves Brown and Coughlin from the list of artists on the title page to claim the illustrations for the McClary and Knight stories. Howard Brown did the cover for the McClary in the April issue, and the interior illustrations for all three issues look like that, therefore Coughlin is presumably the artist for the Knight story on p. 97.
I like a number of the illustrations in this issue, the Wesso, Schneeman, Coughlin, Ley, and the first of the Dold pieces for Gallun’s story.
Fantastic Fiction by John W. Campbell is an interesting editorial about how technological changes creep up slowly on society as they are perfected. The last couple paragraphs are prescient in their observation that spaceships and atomic power will “come together” and that their discoverers are “here today”.
The Great Eye by R. DeWitt Miller (who contributed March’s novelette The Master Shall Not Die!) is an interesting science article about the intended uses of the new Mount Palomar 200” telescope, and the problems that will need to be overcome in operating it.
Monstrous Twin is a short filler about the similarities between the “twin elelments” sulphur and selenium. It grimly outlines the problem in certain agricultural situations:
In certain regions of the West, the ground is poor in sulphur. Plants growing there, unable to get the “badly-needed sulphur, take the near-twin element, selenium, instead.
Then the deadliness of the element begins. Cattle and horses, chickens and similar animals eat those plants. Their growing cells require sulphur, and the selenium slips in instead. Hair-cells, trying to manufacture that sulphur-containing protein, first find that the substitute won’t work. The hair-cells are poisoned, die, and ulcerous sores appear. The hair drops out in ugly patches. Sores, cuts, bruises fail to heal, as the growth-stimulating functions of the tissues fail for lack of sulphur. The wounds spread and fester. The animal’s brain is affected.
But selenium-fed hens laying eggs somehow manage to get the selenium into the proteins that should contain sulphur. And it works—somewhat. The things that hatch out live, for a while at least. But they aren’t chickens. They are monstrous things. Growth of young, new cells—where sulphur is most vitally needed—goes on somehow—but it goes wrong. Calves and colts born to cattle and horses fed on that poisoned fodder are monstrous, the degree of wrongness increasing with the proportion of selenium the mother animal ate. p. 96
In Times to Come plugs next issue’s new novelette by Ray Cummings and the associated cover, as well as heralding the return of Clifford D. Simak.
The Analytical Laboratory: April 1938 presents the story-ratings for the April issue, which I commented on in that review.4
Witnesses of the Past by Willy Ley is a fascinating article about “living fossils”, biological oddities such as the duck-billed platypus and the lungfish, etc., and the consternation these animals caused scientists at the time of their discovery.
The accomplished illustrations for this article are, according to the issue’s ISFDB page, “by Olga Ley, per editor response to Isaac Asimov, Astounding, Aug. 1938.”
I’d be interested to know what corrections or additions, if any, a modern biologist would make to this article.
Science Discussions has the usual half-baked and semi-incoherent contributions punctuated by a couple of letters of interest. D. R. Cummins, of Sacramento, CA, comments on favourably on the astronomical covers that the magazine has started using, and has suggestions about others he would like to see:
[How] about some lunar scenery in its probable real colors? The Moon is one of the most-pictured extra-terrestrial objects, but after all, it is the closest and the easiest to examine and will be the first landing place for space travelers. My impression is that the apparent uniformity of color on the Moon is due to the conditions under which we see it. Yesterday it was cloudy here but we could see the snow-covered Sierra Nevada Range sixty miles away illuminated with bright sunlight. It had a silvery brightness curiously like a lunar landscape as seen through a telescope. There was the same lack of variety in coloring, yet in the mountains there is great contrast between the snow and light-gray granite and the green of the trees (pine, fir, cedar, etc.) and the dark, volcanic rock. p. 149
There are a couple of letters that should probably be in Brass Tacks, including one by A. S. McEckron, Galvaston, KA, who provides an amusing description of that column:
It was with considerable surprise and some apprehension that I noted the rather uproarious emergence of Brass Tacks from its well merited banishment to the limbo of obsolescence. Such a department could and should be of inestimable value as a symposium of the opinions and preferences of your readers—if all readers could be persuaded to present their mental reactions as opinions rather than pearls of wisdom from the treasure house of omniscience. Brass Tacks, for some time previous to its banishment contained more stridence than science, more concussion than discussion. It was about as interesting and instructive as a cacophonous wrangle between a covey of quail and a flock of crows; the quail perpetually interrogating “But why? But why? But why?”: and the crows raucously “Because! Because! Because!” And its short sojourn in the editorial hoosegow appears to have improved neither its temperament nor its technique. p. 151
Brass Tacks starts with a couple of correspondents expressing a preference for Dold’s artwork over Wesso’s, which I find rather baffling (Dold has another admirer towards the end of the column). Elsewhere, there are positive comments about the beginning of McClary’s serial Three Thousand Years!
There is one particularly negative letter from James S. Avery, Skowhegan, MA:
In the few short months that you have been editor, you have destroyed practically all of the marvelous work that Tremaine had done for several years before you. You have broken up and disfigured every point that he strove to uphold. The magazine has now absolutely no tradition to look up to. From the first of your issues, the magazine has had a rushed, slapped-together air about it. Even the printers seem to sense it.
My last few issues have been loosely bound, raggedy cut, covers set up unevenly— all in all a general slovenly appearance.
Truthfully, I can say the mag is not one quarter as good as in 1934, and not a fifth as good as in 1937—certainly not very complimentary to you. Its stories have declined in quality—each issue is just a bit poorer than the preceeding. Its art work has gone down frightfully. Brass Tacks has been neglected, heavy science articles have increased. All these signs point to a slow but sure break-down of the old policy. Worst of all— or perhaps it seems the worst to me—is the disgracing placement of Brass Tacks. In the March issue its position was excellent. Why couldn’t it have been left there, instead of being shoved among columns of advertising? Science Discussions is good and should be kept, but in moderation. Why is it today we rarely see any more of the highly enjoyable letters of the type once printed in the old Wonder Stories? That was a department to be proud of! p. 156
I suspect this may be a solitary outlier—but Campbell liked an argument.
With two good serials and a novelette, and a couple of okay short stories (not to mention an unprecedented three science articles I liked!), this issue is probably the best of the early Campbell Astoundings I’ve read so far. ●
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1. In Campbell’s letter of 28th February 1938 to his friend and correspondent Robert Swisher (in Fantasy Commentator #59/60—recommended, and available at Lulu.com), he talks about Wellman’s and Gallun’s stories, and the changing publication date of the magazine:
“In June we’ll have another astronomical cover—Mars. I’ll have to show it as seen from Diemos, the outer moon, because Phobos is so close you can’t see the whole planet from there. It illustrates ‘Men Against the Stars’ by Manly Wade Wellman, who, incidentally, is coming along damn well. ‘Pithecanthropus Rejectus’ and ‘Wings of the Storm’ both received a way-above-average reception. ‘Men Against The Stars’ had a fine idea, but needed some rewriting. Wellman took a crack at it, and still unsatisfied, I took a hand. See if you can tell, when it appears, where the joinery was done. I rewrote about one third of the story.” p. 82
“Gallun’s a funny one. Once in a while he hits a high-spot like ‘Old Faithful’ and deserves a lot. Most of the time he rides along. He’s gotten three accepts in the last three weeks. One weak, hut not too weak. One medium good. One that almost reaches ‘Old Faithful’ ‘Seeds of Dusk’ is the latter. p. 83
“They’re playing hide-and-seek with Astounding’s publication date,” Campbell complained. “You noticed the nice banner line about ‘second-Wednesday-of-the-month’? But the June issue actually comes out the third Friday. The July issue will come out the fourth Friday. And the fourth Friday thereafter. Don’t ask me why—they, not I, conceived the shift.” p. 83
2. Prince Rupert’s Drop at Wikipedia.
3. It’s not only me (and Campbell) who thought that Gallun’s story was a good one—it was anthologised in (among others) Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Raymond J. Healy & J. Francis McComas, 1946, and in The Astounding-Analog Reader Volume 1, edited by Harry Harrison, Brian W. Aldiss, 1972.
The story has a sequel, When Earth Is Old, written in the same period but rejected by Campbell according to a note for the story on ISFDB (it quotes p. 86 of Gallun’s Starclimber: The Literary Adventures and Autobiography of Raymond Z. Gallun). It eventually appeared in Super Science Stories, August 1951.
4. The Analytical Laboratory for this issue appeared in the August one:
The success of the Wellman novelette and the poor showing for the two serials, especially Williamson’s, perplexes me. At least the Gallun novelette was appreciated. For the record: the Walton, James and Knight stories were never reprinted. ●
Edited 15th November 2019: Archive.org link added.
