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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

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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.  ●

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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.  ●