ISFDB link
Archive.org link

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

_____________________

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ISFDB link
Archive.org link

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

_____________________

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. The Wikipedia article on Panspermia is here.  ●

ISFDB link
Archive.org link

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

_____________________

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are some interesting sections in the article:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An okay issue.  ●

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

ISFDB link
Archive.org link

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

_____________________

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ISFDB link
Archive.org link

_____________________

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charming.

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

5. The Wikipedia page for the V2 rocket.  ●

ISFDB link
Archive.org link

_____________________

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cue Alfred Bester’s The Flowered Thundermug.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

It’s worth reading the whole page.

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

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

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

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

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

ISFDB link
Archive.org link

_____________________

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

4. The Wikipedia page for the Betatron.

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

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

6. The Wikipedia page for 61 Cygni C.

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

ISFDB link
Archive.org link

_____________________

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve been noticing how often science and fantasy fiction writers use for their setting a future world resulting from an Axis victory; and I’d like to put in a word of defense before the Writers’ War Board or some such jumps on us as defeatists.
We are not, thank God, prophets. We don’t write what we feel sure is going to happen, but what, under certain circumstances, might happen. Our futures are so many possible Worlds-of-If evolving out of this present.
Now we aren’t expecting an Axis victory, any more than we are expecting world-wide tidal waves or planetary collisions or the invasion of little green men from Alpha Centauri. These disasters are all, with varying probabilities, present in one or more of the possible Worlds-of-If.
And the more we write about ingenious ruses by which the Axis secures victory—in this story the development of a race-conscious American appeasement party—the less apt those ruses are to succeed, and the more certain we can be that my sons and your daughter will inherit, in deepest truth, the best of all Possible Worlds.  p. 162

This is quite a good issue. Although there is nothing that particularly stands out (apart from Leiber’s serial), there is a lot of good if minor and/or flawed work.  ●

_____________________

1. Kuttner and Moore based their recent story Mimsy Were the Borogoves (Astounding, February 1943, my review here) on Lewis Carroll’s poem Jabberwocky. Along with the beginning of this story (talking rabbits), you rather wonder if they were on a Charles Dodgson kick at the time.

2. ISFDB seems to have conflated A. Williams with English fan Arthur Williams, who did a couple of covers for the fanzine Futurian War Digest. The difference in style is probably enough to indicate they are not the same person (and the idea that an English artist was doing interior illustrations for Astounding from the other side of a U-boat infested Atlantic isn’t likely either).

3. Elton Fax may be Astounding’s first black contributor. He appeared in the magazine from November 1942 to November 1943, and would reappear briefly in Weird Tales during 1944. He has a page at ISFDB, and there are articles about him at Flying Cars and Food Pills, Pulp Artists, and Black Past.

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

I think that the del Rey story should have been where Smith’s is.  ●

ISFDB link
Archive.org link

_____________________

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

Fiction:
Gather, Darkness! (Part 1 of 3) • novel by Fritz Leiber ∗∗∗∗
Ghost • short story by Henry Kuttner ∗∗+
Pacer • short story by Raymond F. Jones ∗∗
Fifth Freedom • short story by Lester del Rey [as by John Alvarez] –
Let’s Disappear • novelette by Cleve Cartmill ∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by Frank Kramer (x7), Paul Orban (x6)
“—Wrap It Up—” • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
In Times to Come
The Old Ones • science essay by Willy Ley
Brass Tacks • letters

_____________________

With this issue Astounding reverts to a smaller size due to wartime rationing and other restrictions. The size of the magazine now appears to be, judging from the images of the scan I read, about 6 inches by 9 inches.

The Cover is William Timmins’ best effort for the magazine so far, and illustrates Fritz Leiber’s second novel Gather, Darkness! (this appeared a month after his first, Conjure Wife, in Unknown Worlds, April 1943). The scene depicts the Hierarchy’s archpriests watching Brother Jarles preaching revolution to a crowd in the square while holding up his priests’ robe with the repulsor field activated.
You can probably gather from the aforementioned that this is one of those ‘Science as Religion’ stories, where scientists are fake priests, and their “miracles” are achieved by using advanced science and technology. We soon learn that this “religion” is a result of scientists of a previous Golden Age acting to avoid humanity’s descent into barbarism. Unfortunately, the ruling Hierarchy has turned into a tyranny (the priests not only have robes which have repulsor fields but also have “wrath-rays,” etc.) and they preside over a population reduced to medieval serfdom. A resistance movement called the Witchcraft is growing and the novel is about the struggle between these two sides.
This all gets off to a cracking start (just like Conjure Wife), and begins in the Great Square of Megatheopolis where Brother Chulian and Brother Jarles are handing out work assignments to the masses. We quickly learn a lot about the future world when Mother Jujy passes by to calls of “Witch” from a small boy in the crowd, and Jarles raises his eyes to the buildings of Sanctuary in the middle of the city:

Megatheopolis was magically different. For there rose the gleaming buildings of the Sanctuary, topped by the incredible structure of the Cathedral, which fronted the Great Square.
Jarles looked up at the Great God, and for a moment felt fingering through his anger a touch of the same awe and reverence and pious fear that vast idol had used to awaken in him when he was only a Commoner’s child— long before he had passed the tests and begun to learn the Secrets of the Priests.
Could the Great God see his blasphemous rage, with those huge, searching, slightly frowning eyes? But such a superstitious fancy was unworthy even of a novice in the Hierarchy.
Without the Great God, the Cathedral was still a mighty structure of soaring columns and peaked windows tall as pine trees. But where one might expect a steeple or a pair of towers, began the figure of the Great God—the upper half of a gigantic human form, terrible in its dignity and serenity. It did not clash with the structure below, but was an integral and indisseverable part of it. The heavy folds of its drapery became the columns of the Cathedral, and it was built of the same smooth plastic.
From where it stood, it dominated all Megatheopolis, like some vast sphinx or unbelievable centaur. There was hardly an alley from which one could not glimpse the stern yet benignant face with the glowing nimbus of blue light. And as for the Great Square immediately below, one felt that the Great God was minutely studying every pygmy creature that crossed it, as if he could at any moment reach down and pick one up for a closer scrutiny.
As if? Every Commoner knew there was no “as if” about it!
But that massive figure did not rouse in Jarles one atom of pride at the glory and grandeur of the Hierarchy and his great good fortune in having been chosen to become part of it. Instead, his anger thickened and tightened, becoming an intolerable shell about his emotions—as red and oppressive as the scarlet robe he wore.  p. 12

Jarles’ colleague, Brother Chulian, is in the process of telling a woman called Sharlson Naurya that she will serve in the Sanctuary, but Naurya refuses and, after some back and forth, Chulian loses his temper:

Chulian bounced up from the bench he shared with Jarles. “No Commoner may question the judgments of the Hierarchy, for they are right! I sense more here than simple stubbornness, more even than sinful obstinacy. There is only one sort of Commoner who would fear to enter the Sanctuary when bidden. I sense—Witchcraft,” he announced dramatically, and struck his chest with the flat of his hand. Instantly his scarlet robe ballooned out tautly, until it stood a hand’s breath away from his body at every point. The effect was frighteningly grotesque, like some incredible scarlet pouter pigeon. And above his shaven head a violet halo glowed.
There was a sibilant hiss of terror, and the faces of the Commoners grew more pale. But Naurya only smiled very faintly, and her green eyes seemed to bore into Chulian.
“And that, once sensed, is easily discovered!” the swollen little priest continued triumphantly. He stepped quickly forward. His puffy scarlet glove clutched at her shoulder without seeming quite to touch it, yet Jarles saw her bite her lips against sudden hurt. Then the scarlet glove flirted downward, ripping the heavy smock, so that the shoulder was uncovered.
There were three circular marks on the white skin. Two burned angry red. The other was rapidly becoming so. Jarles thought that Chulian hesitated a moment and stared puzzlingly at them, before gathering himself and shrilling out, “Witchmarks! Witchmarks! Proof!”  p. 12

At this point Jarles activates his own robe and attacks Chulian, knocking him unconscious. After depowering his robe he climbs on a table and proceeds to harangue the crowd, and reveals the Golden Age origin of their world, and that their religion is fake. He tells them there is no God, and that he does not have divine powers as a priest, taking off his robe and holding it up with the repulsor field and halo activated. When he throws it towards the crowd it comes to rest two feet off the ground.

Eventually, his long tirade is interrupted when the huge plastic statue of the Great God leans forward and extends a huge finger towards him. Jarles is saved from the discharge of the crackling blue energy by what appears to be two black hands that materialise out of nowhere and whisk him away. Gales of satanic laughter accompany the rescue.
This huge (albeit cleverly done) data dump is followed by just as much information in the next chapter, where we see inside the Sanctuary, and witness a meeting of the Apex Council’s archpriests. Their leader is Brother Goniface, and we learn about the politics and factions of the Council, and that Goniface himself has fomented the crisis in the town square to flush out a growing unrest in the population, and to seize power for himself.
During this meeting several country priests appear before the council with reports of huge wolves prowling outside their towns and villages (these prove to be solidographs—holograms essentially—projected by the Witchcraft to destabilise the regime). After dealing with this issue the archbishops then view a holographic recording of Brother Jarles in the town square. Goniface recognises the woman accused of witchcraft—Naurya is really Knowes Geryl, a woman from his past. Goniface orders his cousin and chief scientist Deacon Deth to take her prisoner but keep it a secret.

The rest of the novel keeps up this pace of information and invention, and falls into two main threads. The first is from the viewpoint of Goniface and the Apex Council, and their attempts to stamp out Witchcraft; the other involves Brother Jarles (it turns out that the Witchcraft have rescued him, but he refuses to join them, and is hunted by the Heriarchy on his release until Mother Jujy gives him shelter). This latter thread also deals with the activities of the Black Man (so-called because of his radiation absorbent clothing) who, when he is not being a prankster in church upsetting collection trays, runs the Witchcraft’s resistance activities for an unseen leader called Asmodeus; the last main character is Sharlson Naurya.
There are many parts of this I would like to talk about at length but I’ll restrict myself to the section that describes the arrest of Naurya by Brother Chulian. When he and another priest go to her house to apprehend her she seems she seems unconcerned but, before they leave, there is an extraordinary event:

“Run, Puss!” she cried with an almost mischievous urgency. “Tell the Black Man!”
A glittering talon ripped at the waist the gray homespun of her dress—from within. There was a rapid disturbance of the cloth. Then through the slit something wriggled and sprang.
Something furry, big as a cat, but more like a monkey, and incredibly lean.
Like a swift-scuttling spider it was up the wall and across the ceiling, clinging effortlessly.
Chulian’s muscles froze. With a throaty gasp his companion lunged out an arm. From the pointing finger crackled a needle of violet light, scorching a shaky, zigzag track in the crude plaster of wall and ceiling.
The thing paused for a moment in the air hole, looking back. Then it was gone, and the violet beam spat futilely through the air hole toward the black heavens, where one star glittered.
But Chulian continued to stare upward, his slack jaw trembling. He had gotten one look at the tiny face. Not when the thing moved, for then it had been only a rippling blur, but when it paused to glance back.
Not all the features of a face had been there. Some were missing and others seemed somehow telescoped into each other. And the fine fur encroached on them.
Nevertheless, where the features showed through the fur, they were white, and, in spite of all distortions, they were a peering, chinless, hellish, but terribly convincing caricature of the features of Sharlson Naurya.  p. 32

This is the first explicit appearance of a “familiar” in the novel—these are Witchcraft creatures bioengineered from their owners flesh, which feed on the their progenitor’s blood, and stay in telepathic contact with them. They are an inventive and entertaining part of the novel, as indeed are all the other witchy bits and pieces that Leiber introduces as part of the Witchcraft, such as old Mother Jujy, the Covens, etc.
After taking Naurya into custody, Chulian and his brother priest wend their way back through the city streets with their prisoner. They then find their way blocked by an inky blackness (another solidograph projection) that not even their halos can illuminate, and are forced to change their route,  having to pass a “haunted house,” an unsettling building left over from the Golden Age. When the group arrive in front of the house the blackness surrounds them completely and prevents further progress. Naurya escapes through the door but the priests are locked out. The blackness dissipates and Cousin Deth (Brother Goniface’s henchman) arrives—he is not impressed.

The siege of the house that follows is a set-piece that nods towards a similar one in A. E. van Vogt’s story The Weapon Shop. We have, of course, the usual problems with doors:

Then one of the young priests strode with great dignity toward the house, bearing his rod of wrath above his head like a gleaming sword. Heads turned as, breathlessly, every Commoner watched his approach.
“This place is evil!” he cried suddenly in a great voice, “it is offensive to the nostrils of the Great God. Tremble, Sathanas! Cower, ye fiends! For, lo, I inscribe above the door the brand of the Hierarchy.”
He stopped directly in front of the oddly wrinkled doorway or entry-sphincter. A violet brilliance gushed from the extended rod, of the same hue as his halo, which was almost invisible in the sunlight. Slowly he traced a burning circle.
What happened next was not part of the program. He leaned forward suddenly to peer through the irregular orifice in the doorway, leaving the fiery circle unclosed. He must have seen something of exceptional interest, for he thrust in his head. Instantly the doorway puckered and snapped tight around his neck, leaving him frantically kicking and plunging, while his rod, still gushing violet light, set the green weeds smoking.
There were gasps and scattered screams and a few shrieks of hysterical laughter from the crowd. The three other young priests dashed forward to help their companion, one of them snatching up the fallen rod, which instantly ceased to flame. They tugged and pushed at him violently, and pried at the doorway. The wall gave a little, as if semielastic. That was all.
Then the door opened wide of its own accord and they all sprawled backward in the smoking weeds. The young priest who had been trapped sprang up and darted into the house before the others could stop him, even if they had tried to. The door clenched shut behind him. The house began to shake.
Its slack walls tightened, bulged, were crossed by ripples and waves of movement. Its windows all squeezed shut. One wall stretched perceptibly, another contracted. There were other distortions.
An upper window dilated and through it the young priest was ejected, as if the house had tasted him and then spat him out. Halfway down he exerted his Inviolability. so that his fall was slowed and cushioned. He bounced gently.
This time the laughter of the crowd did not sound entirely hysterical.
The house became quiescent.  p. 41-42

Cousin Deth brings forward more advanced weapons (“Unlimber the zero-entropy spray, Brother Sawl!”) to “exorcise” the house, but is initially matched by its Golden Age technology.
All of this gets Leiber’s novel gets off to a hugely entertaining start, and it is probably the most fun I’ve had since reading Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Time.
Ghost by Henry Kuttner is another story that has supernatural references but, unlike the Leiber, all these do is serve to confuse matters. After a talking-heads start about a modern-day ghost in a computing facility in the Antarctic we find that the machine isn’t haunted but has absorbed a case of manic depression from a previous operator who committed suicide. It is now inducing the same madness in its current operator Crockett.

To “cure” the machine a psychologist called Dr Ford goes to the station with a patient who has a similar manic-depressive condition. The plan is to cure the patient, and induce a similar cure in the machine.
While this therapy takes place we get a feel for the oppressive and claustrophobic nature of the station:

There were shadows in the station. After a few days Dr. Ford noticed those intangible, weary shadows that, vampiric, drew the life and the energy from everything. The sphere of influence extended beyond the station itself. Occasionally Crockett went topside and, muffled in his heat-unit parka, went off on dangerous hikes. He drove himself to the limits of exhaustion as though hoping to outpace the monstrous depression that crouched under the ice.
But the shadows darkened invisibly. The gray, leaden sky of the Antarctic had never depressed Crockett before; the distant mountains, gigantic ranges towering like Ymir’s mythical brood, had not seemed sentient till now. They were half alive, too old, too tired to move, dully satisfied to remain stagnantly crouching on the everlasting horizon of the ice fields. As the glaciers ground down, leaden, powerful, infinitely weary, the tide of the downbeat thrust against Crockett. His healthy animal mind shrank back, failed, and was engulfed.  p. 65

At the end of the story the psychologist effects a cure in both patient and machine but, unknown to the former, another problem remains. . . .

The talky start, computer jargon, and outdated psychology theory do not help the story get going but it improves later, there is some effective description, and it also has a neat twist ending.
I think there is a better story in here where the ghost stuff is dumped—this is really about sanity or insanity, and the latter would have been a better title.
Pacer by Raymond F. Jones is an okay piece of space opera that starts with Commodore Ed Ingraham tearing strips off the men in his fleet. Further vexing him are the orders he has to intercept a slow-moving freighter and escort it to Earth.

Before that rendezvous there is some back story about Ingraham’s past with his father on a commercial ship, and how the latter has supposedly retired to Earth. Surprise!—when they meet the freighter it is Ingraham’s old ship, and his father is piloting it. Cue much embarrassment for Ingraham when, in front of his men, his father calls his martinet son “Kid”, etc. Relations further deteriorate when Commodore Ingraham tries to force his father to transfer his valuable cargo of crystallium so the convoy won’t be slowed down by his ship, which would become the “pacer,” or slowest vessel. Needless to say his father refuses and threatens to blow up his ship (as you do when dealing with rebellious children: stop fighting in the back seat or I’ll blow up the car).

The last act is a space battle with the alien Correne, who are currently wiping out humanity as they progress through the solar system. Ingraham’s Dad has a plan to defeat them that involves his mysterious crystallium cargo, and (spoiler) the speed that it can safely be transported.
Fifth Freedom by Lester del Rey starts off with Tommy Dorn in a future American labour camp during a war with “Centralia,” whose forces have pushed forward to the English Channel. He is a conscientious objector, and therefore despised by his bunk mates and estranged from his family.
Part of the beginning is interestingly meta-fictional:

He tried again to cut the blaring radio out, with its news and propaganda that neither interested nor impressed him, hut dinned remorselessly into his ears, and turned back to the latest Astounding; it had arrived for him only today, and as yet he’d only glanced at the cover and readers’ corner. Hopefully, he began on the cover story:
.
Major Elliot glanced up from the papers as the captain entered, nodded, and went on reading through the reports. “Centralia’s moving up; big offensive at midnight tomorrow, Captain Blake. I want you to take six volunteers—”
Damn! The boy’s lips tightened and he threw the magazine under his bunk, his raw nerves whipped by the fresh insult; even there, war! All day, he’d been counting the hours and minutes until his shift went off and he could find release from the horrible reality, only to find science-fiction as filled with it as all else. He jerked the lumpy pillow up, threw his head against it, and tried to drown out the mutter of voices behind him and rest.  p. 109-110

After a promising beginning Dorn’s story turns into a manipulative, by-the-numbers soap opera that involves a bunk mate called Jimmy, who is crippled by polio, and Alice, a girlfriend from the woman’s camp (sensitive Tommy meets her when he is playing his violin up on the hill). When New York is later radiation bombed by Centralia, Jimmy saves Tommy from a beating at the hands of a group of the camp thugs.

Later, an Air Force recruiter tries to get Tommy (a qualified pilot) to fly the new rocket ships, but he refuses. Shortly afterwards the camp is attacked by enemy bombers and Alice is seriously injured. The Air Force man returns with a rescue team and once again tries to convince Tommy to join the military. When he fails he gives Tommy a respectful homily about how the country is a democracy and that people aren’t forced to do things against their conscience. The Air Force man adds that he’ll have him shipped out to a better place in the Mid-West.
The bombers return later, and Tommy watches as three of the new American rocket ships intercept them: two intentionally blow up their ships, destroying the enemy fleet.

The last scene has Tommy at Alice’s deathbed. After she passes away he decides to volunteer. I hope he turned out a better combat pilot than he was a conscientious objector.
I realise that this was written in the middle of a World War but it is a manipulative piece, and irritatingly sanctimonious—as well as an obvious early example of “pushing Campbell’s buttons” (i.e. pandering to that Editor’s beliefs or hobby horses). Avoid like the plague.
Let’s Disappear by Cleve Cartmill has an overly padded beginning that has an investigator called Thorne Raglan (who owns and runs a company called Hunt Inc.) pick up a contract to find a man called Colin Fane. Fane is one of the beneficiaries of a dead man’s estate, but there are parties who do not want him found.

Apart from Raglan having to deal with being followed by persons unknown, he also has to deal with Hubert Davenport (a relative of Fane’s, and not very helpful), his niece Emily, and a rabble-rousing politician called Coffman, who espouses anarchist ideals and, unknown to Raglan, wants to get hold of a force field weapon that he believes Fane possesses.

None of this really matters as it is a typical Cleve Cartmill piece—an excuse for a lot of running around punctuated with the odd fist fight or, on this occasion, a wildly acrobatic flight/chase in an air taxi.

In the last fight of the story (spoiler) a sword belonging to Hitler is used to slash Coffman’s throat, presumably to give the story some contemporary colour. It ends with one of those “this knowledge is too dangerous to survive” endings where they decide to destroy the weapon and burn the plans.
I’m beginning to dread seeing Cartmill’s byline in the magazine.

The Interior artwork continues to be rather lacklustre: I thought that Paul Orban’s work was much better than Frank Kramer’s—some of the latter’s work has a very perfunctory feel to it (look at the first illustration for the Lester del Rey story, “Man sits beside filing cabinet in office”).
“—Wrap It Up—” by John W. Campbell, Jr. is an editorial about the results of war science, focussing particularly on rubber substitutes, elastomers, etc., and their uses.
In Times to Come refers to production problems and the lack of an Analytical Laboratory feature:

This being the first issue in which the new type face and new format are used, our calculations slipped a bit; this space was supposed to be some three times as great. The lack of Analytical Laboratory is not due to lack of space, however—it’s due to lack of letters.
The March issue had been on the stands only a few days when this issue went to press. Trying to offset the inevitable delays of transportation, we are pushing our press dates ahead; this lack of Lab, or a held-over Lab, is apt to be more frequent in the future.  p. 59

I don’t know why Campbell just doesn’t just do the obvious and slip the results by a month.
The last sentence mentions a new ‘Gallagher’ story from Henry Kuttner, “a nice, if slightly cockeyed, yarn—”

The Old Ones by Willy Ley is an article about zoological geography, the distribution of animals around the globe due to historical land mass change. This has some interesting parts but is overlong, and too often descends into endless lists of animals by continent or area—I started skimming before the end. There should also have been an illustration rather than a page of text describing the original three continents (p. 93, etc.)

Brass Tacks has a long and considered letter (see above) from J. V. Lewis which is rather (shallowly) dismissed by Campbell. The letter before this, from Edmond M. Clinton Jr., San Francisco, CA, is about how SF is extrapolation not prophecy. A later letter from Chandler (Chan) Davis,¹ Cambridge, MA, has a top ten for 1942 that omits Nerves and The Twonky. I note that there has been little enthusiasm in either the Analytical Laboratory or Brass Tacks for that latter story. One wonders how it became a “classic.”

It is definitely worth getting this issue for the Leiber serial, and Kuttner’s story is worth a look, too.  ●

_____________________

1. Chan Davis would start publishing in Astounding in 1946. He would go on to publish thirteen stories, half a dozen of which Campbell published. He seems to have drifted away from that editor when he returned to writing after a five-year gap (1953 to 1958). See Davis’s page at ISFDB.  ●