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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

Dyke subsequently establishes that there is a woman involved:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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