Astounding Science-Fiction v33n02, April 1944

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

Brass Tacks • letters

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The article also explains how a jet engine works.

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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