Astounding | SF MAGAZINES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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