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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is no Analytical Laboratory this time around.⁴

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

Dyke subsequently establishes that there is a woman involved:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well-enough, if predictably, done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The article also explains how a jet engine works.

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

ISFDB
Archive.org

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

_____________________

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Campbell replies:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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