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

Fiction:
Clash by Night • novella by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lawrence O’Donnell] ∗∗∗∗
Shock • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett] ∗∗
Shadow of Life • novelette by Clifford D. Simak ∗
Q. U. R. • short story by Anthony Boucher [as by H. H. Holmes] ∗∗
The Weapon Makers (Part 2 of 3) • serial by A. E. van Vogt ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by Paul Orban (x3), Manuel Isip (x2), Frank Kramer (x9), Elton Fax
Mutually Exclusive • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Photographic Plate Finds Kepler’s Nova • science essay by R. S. Richardson
The Analytical Laboratory: January 1943
Evolution Designs Instinct Patterns, Too • science essay
Space Fix (Part 1 of 2) • science essay by R. S. Richardson
In Times to Come
Brass Tacks • letters

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Clash by Night by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore is the first of their stories under the ‘Lawrence O’Donnell’ pseudonym and it is the highlight of the issue.
The introduction to the story sets it in Montana Keep, a domed city under the depths of Venus’s seas, during a carnival to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Earthmen landing on the planet. Earth has been destroyed in a nuclear conflagration, and the survivors inhabit this and other similar keeps. The reason humanity has settled under the sea is because of the inimical Venusian wildlife on the land.

We are also introduced to the Free Companions, small military groups or clans of a few thousand, who are based in land forts on the surface and who work as mercenaries for the various keeps. These latter do not fight each other directly but outsource their conflicts to the Companions, who wage war against each other on the surface in semi-ritualistic but nonetheless lethal battles.
The story proper starts with one of these Free Companions, Captain Scott, in a tavern where he is dealing with a problem between one of his officers and the locals. They are interrupted by a mobilization message that comes over the “hot-box”: his company, the Doonemen, are required. He leaves his “free-wife” Jeana, and makes his way through the city to the administration station. During his journey we learn more about what happened to Earth:

Glancing up, Scott was reminded of the catastrophe that had unified science into something like a freemasonry. Above him, hanging without gravity over a central plaza, was the globe of the Earth, half shrouded by the folds of a black plastic pall. In every Keep on Venus there was a similar ever-present reminder of the lost mother planet.
Scott’s gaze went up farther, to the Dome, as though he could penetrate the impervium and the mile-deep layer of water and the clouded atmosphere to the white star that hung in space, one quarter as brilliant as the Sun. A star—all that remained of Earth, since atomic power had been unleashed there two centuries ago. The scourge had spread like flame, melting continents and leveling mountains. In the libraries there were wire-tape pictorial records of the Holocaust. A religious cult—Men of the New Judgment—had sprung up, and advocated the complete destruction of science; followers of that dogma still existed here and there. But the cult’s teeth had been drawn when technicians unified, outlawing experiments with atomic power forever, making use of that force punishable by death, and permitting no one to join their society without taking the Minervan Oath.  p. 11

Scott arrives at the President of Montana Keep’s office and meets his commander, Cinc Rhys. After the President excuses himself, Scott discovers that Virginia Keep has hired another company called the Helldivers to attack, and that Rhys is trying to negotiate with a smaller unit called the Mob to help the Doonemen defend Montana Keep.
At the meeting Scott also meets the President’s nephew Norman Kane, who wants to join the Doonemen, and his sister Ilene. Scott isn’t required until dawn so he ends up going for a drink with Ilene, even though his free-wife Jeana is waiting at home. At this point the story switches deftly from world building to character examination as it explores Scott’s dissatisfaction with life, and the social mores of the Companions:

His relationship with [Jeana] was the peculiar one rendered advisable by his career. Free-marriage was the word for it; Jeana was neither his wife nor his mistress, but something midway between. The Free Companions had no firmly grounded foundation for social life; in the Keeps they were visitors, and in their coastal forts they were—well, soldiers. One would no more bring a woman to a fort than aboard a ship of the line. So the women of the Free Companions lived in the Keeps, moving from one to another as their men did; and because of the ever-present shadow of death, ties were purposely left loose. Jeana and Scott had been free-married for five years now. Neither made demands on the other. No one expected fidelity of a Free Companion. Soldiers lived under such iron disciplines that when they were released, during the brief peacetimes, the pendulum often swung far in the opposite direction.
To Scott, Ilene Kane was a key that might unlock the doors of the Keep—doors that opened to a world of which he was not a part, and which he could not quite understand.  p. 14-15

There were nuances, Scott found, which he had never known existed. A hedonist like Ilene devoted her life to such nuances; they were her career. Such minor matters as making the powerful, insipid Moonflower Cocktails more palatable by filtering them through lime-soaked sugar held between the teeth. Scott was a uisqueplus man, having the average soldier’s contempt for what he termed hydroponic drinks, but the cocktails Ilene suggested were quite as effective as acrid, burning amber uisqueplus. She taught him, that night, such tricks as pausing between glasses to sniff lightly at happy-gas, to mingle sensual excitement with mental by trying the amusement rides designed to give one the violent physical intoxication of breathless speed.
Nuances all, which only a girl with Ilene’s background could know. She was not representative of Keep life. As she had said, she was an offshoot, a casual and useless flower on the great vine that struck up inexorably to the skies, its strength in its tough, reaching tendrils—scientists and technicians and sociopoliticians. She was doomed in her own way, as Scott was in his. The undersea folk served Minerva; Scott served Mars; and Ilene served Aphrodite—not purely the sexual goddess, but the patron of arts and pleasure. Between Scott and Ilene was the difference between Wagner and Strauss; the difference between crashing chords and tinkling arpeggios. In both was a muted bittersweet sadness, seldom realized by either. But that undertone was brought out by their contact. The sense of dim hopelessness in each responded to the other.  p. 15-16

At the end of their night together, Ilene asks Scott to join her permanently in Montana Keep. He agrees, but will only do so once the current battle is over. Scott then goes home, and Jeana guesses that he has met someone else. She tells him that it won’t work out, and why:

He was wondering how to broach the subject of Ilene to Jeana.
She saved him the trouble.
“If it’s a girl, Brian, just take it easy. No use doing anything till this war’s over. How long will it take?”
“Oh, not long. A week at most. One battle may settle it, you know. The girl—”
“She’s not a Keep girl.”
“Yes.”
Jeana looked up, startled. “You’re crazy.”
“I started to tell you,” Scott said impatiently. “It isn’t just—her. I’m sick of the Doones. I’m going to quit.”
“Hm-m-m. Like that?”
“Like that.”
Jeana shook her head. “Keep women aren’t tough.”
“They don’t need to be. Their men aren’t soldiers.”
“Have it your own way. I’ll wait till you get back. Maybe I’ve got a hunch. You see, Brian, we’ve been together for five years. We fit. Not because of anything like philosophy or psychology—it’s a lot more personal. It’s just us. As man and woman, we get along comfortably. There’s love, too. Those close emotional feelings are more important, really, than the long view. You can get excited about futures, but you can’t live them.”
Scott shrugged. “Could be I’m starting to forget about futures. Concentrating on Brian Scott.”  p. 18

He later leaves for the battle and she is left praying that he returns safely.
This section of the story seemed rather atypical/adult/risqué for the Astounding of 1943!
Scott is then sent by Rhys to see Cinc Mendez of the Mob to negotiate a deal for their help. He goes to the surface and gets on a flitterboat driven by Ilene’s brother Norman. En route to the meeting they only narrowly escape a volcanic eruption at sea. After they arrive, and Scott negotiates a deal with Mendez, we learn more about this strange surface world when the boat disintegrates on the way back and the two end up in the sea near the shoreline. They manage to get to the beach and then have to walk overland to their fort, a perilous task:

Clearings were unusual in the forest. There was one here, twenty feet wide, slightly saucershaped. Scott gingerly extended the pole and probed. A faint ripple shook the white mud, and almost before it had appeared the captain had unholstered his pistol and was blasting shot after shot at the movement.
“Shoot, Kane!” he snapped. “Quick! Shoot at it!”
Kane obeyed, though he had to guess at his target. Mud geysered up, suddenly crimson-stained. Scott, still firing, gripped the boy’s arm and ran him back at a breakneck pace.
The echoes died. Once more the distant elfin drums whispered through the green gloom.
“We got it,” Scott said, after a pause.
“We did?” the other asked blankly. “ What—”
“Mud-wolf, I think. The only way to kill those things is to get ’em before they get out of the mud. They’re fast and they die hard. However—” He warily went forward. There was nothing to see. The mud had collapsed into a deeper saucer, but the holes blasted by the high-x bullets had filled in. Here and there were traces of thready crimson.
“Never a dull moment,” Scott remarked. His crooked grin eased the tension. Kane chuckled and followed the captain’s example in replacing his half-used clip with a full one.  p. 27

Eventually they are spotted and a flitter picks them up. Back at the fort Scott talks to his elderly orderly about leaving the Company, and later leaves for the battle with the Helldivers. The next section of the story is more formulaic than most of what precedes it, but contains more soul-searching on the part of Scott.
The Doonemen (spoiler) win the battle after a deception plan of theirs succeeds. Rhys is killed however, and Scott becomes the new Cinc.

At the end of the story Scott decides that, although the Free Companions’ purpose in life is futile, and that one day the companies will cease to exist, he is first and foremost a soldier.
I found this piece particularly interesting for a number of reasons. To start with it is the first of the Kuttner/Moore collaborations where I’ve felt that there is definitely another writer involved in the process. This comes over here particularly at the start of the piece, with prose that is  more complex and fluent then anything I’ve noticed so far in previous ‘Kuttner/Moore’ stories. Further, the world-building and characterisation in the first three-quarters or so is much more complex and realistic than normal. Both of these aspects make me wonder if the story is mostly Moore’s work (apart from, maybe, the battle scenes at the end, which are flatter, more routine fare, and seem similar to the work I’ve read hitherto—I’m now wondering if these have been mostly or all Kuttner’s work).¹ In future I’ll be examining more closely the stories that have the Kuttner/Moore byline.²
This is a rather uneven piece, and it also has too straightforward a finish—but there is a lot here that is quite impressive, which is why I finally decided to give it four stars rather than three and a half.

Shock by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore is another story that has a Twonky-ish time-portal start—on this occasion a strange-looking man crawls from Gregg’s apartment wall:

“Who are you?” Gregg demanded, recovering the use of his tongue.
The man spoke an odd sort of English, slurred and with an extraordinary tonal range, but recognizable. “I’m a mugwump,” he announced, balancing on his middle. “My mug’s in . . . eh? . . . in 1943 and my wump’s in . . . uh!” He gave a convulsive wriggle and burst through, sprawling on the carpet and breathing hard. “That was a nardly squeeze. The valve isn’t quite big enough yet. Forthever.”
It made sense, but not much. Manning Gregg’s heavy, leonine features darkened. He reached out, seized a heavy book end, and rose.
“I am Halison,” the newcomer announced, adjusting his toga. “This should be 1943. Norvunder soverless.”
“What?”
“Semantic difficulty,” Halison told him. “I am from about . . . well, several thousand years in the future. Your future.”
Gregg’s gaze went to the hole in the wall.
“You’re talking English.”
“Learned it in 1970. This isn’t my first trip into past. Many of them. Looking for something. Important—skandarly important. I use mental power to warp space-time pharron, so valve opens. Lend me clothes, if you please?  p. 40

You get the impression the writer (or writers) have just read Anthony Boucher’s The Barrier (Astounding, September 1942).³
The time traveller is then off-stage for most of the story and, in the meantime, Gregg goes through the portal to the traveller’s apartment. He can see an intriguing world outside its windows but can’t find a door. He does, however, find a number of strange toys and devices in the room.
After a number of visits to this future world, both with and without his ex-playboy neighbour, and as the portal periodically opens and closes (spoiler), Gregg ends up permanently trapped on the other side.
The traveller has previously mentioned that he is expecting a visitor at his ‘apartment’ around the time that Gregg is trapped—and the twist ending is that this turns out to be a medical robot coming to treat the traveller’s mental illness with shock therapy.

Shadow of Life by Clifford D. Simak reads like a refugee from a 1933 Astounding—and so it sticks out like a sore thumb in this 1943 issue.
Initially, it gets off to a reasonable start, with Lathrop, the narrator, on a spaceship with an alien who is warning him about an existential threat to Earth:

“You can’t fight them,” said the thing. “There is no way to fight universal evil. The best you can do is hide from it.”
The Earthman shrugged. “None of them will reach us for a long time. Now that we know about them, we’ll be ready.”
The thing at the controls concentrated on the setting of more studs, then said: “You’ll never be ready. You’re like a candle in the wind, waiting for a gust that will put you out.”  p. 50

We then learn that the alien has spent the last two decades showing Lathrop the malevolence spread through the universe by the Bad Aliens, and the way it infects all the races it encounters. The alien hopes that Lathrop will go back to Earth and tell his people to prepare for their demise. Lathrop, however, has had enough of being forced to watch things he never wanted to see, and having twenty years of his life wasted, so when he learns that the spaceship is on an automatic course back to Mars, he kills the alien by “squeezing the life out of it”. You avoid giving trigger-warnings to millennials at your peril.
The story then cuts to Mars where we meet Carter, Latham’s old research partner. Carter has finished twenty years of research of Mars and his written a book about the strange disappearance of the Martians and any information about them. We are also introduced to Buster, a robot who works for Elmer, a Martian “ghost”—really the residual personality of the missing Martian race. We also learn about the Preachers, a group that has a strange cautionary message for humanity, and Alf, Carter’s assistant, who is in jail for searching a forbidden Martian reservation for a mythical purple jug. There is also a visiting artist called Harper. As you can imagine, this section is quite busy setting up its multiple moving parts.

Lathrop then arrives back in the Martian city—after his arrival the spaceship shrinks in size and disappears. Buster has meantime stolen Carter’s manuscript and taken it to Elmer, who wants to suppress Carter’s discoveries and protect the hiding Martians. Lathrop also knows too much, so Elmer sends Buster to bring Lathrop to him, but the latter is suspicious. After talking to Buster about the Martians hiding from the Evil Ones, Latham finally agrees to see Elmer. Buster then rushes him, and Latham uses a weapon he took from the dead alien. Buster shrinks in size.

This story has an ending where all the bits click together (deep breath for spoiler summary): Alf returns with the purple jug which Harper (really one of the Bad Aliens) tries to steal. Harper/Bad Alien does this as he knows that the Martians have shrunk their civilization and have hidden it in the jug (all that extra mass is put into the fourth dimension). Latham uses his weapon on Harper but it melts him to a puddle rather than shrinking him (you can see why the Bad Aliens wanted the jug and the 4D tech).

After this a tiny spaceship comes out of the jug and grows in size. A Martian comes out of the ship and is rather patronising about humanity’s chances against the Evil Ones, before it steals the jug and rushes back into the spaceship which promptly re-miniaturises itself—this means the Martian civilisation is now doubly miniaturised!
Lathrop and the others shrug their shoulders and decide to mass produce the weapon so they can kill all the Bad Aliens.
This has a ridiculous plot and uses the already outdated trope of miniature worlds but, that said, it is well enough told, and some nice touches. It’s still pretty bad though.⁴
After reading three of Boucher’s recent stories (The Compleat Werewolf, The Barrier, and Elsewhen) I was looking forward to Q. U. R. It’s rather disappointing though, having little of the style and wit of previous work.
It starts off with an account of how the robot repairman narrator meets Quincy as they intervene to stop a group of factory workers mistreating a Venusian. After some fighting, the narrator offers Quincy a job fixing robots, and on his first assignment the latter radically modifies an android (all robots have human form), getting rid of several of its unused human functions and limbs, etc. The narrator realises that this is the solution to the many robot malfunctions that are currently occurring, and quits his job to form a new company with Quinn—Q.U.R. (Quinn’s Usuform Robots—a play on Rossum’s Universal Robots, R.U.R., I guess.).
Their company and the idea of building non-human form robots is initially stalled by a law that gives patents on all robots to Robinc., the narrator’s former company, so they go to see the Head of the Council to see if they can convince him to change the law. He says he’ll help if they can mix a very specific type of drink to impress a visiting Martian politician.

So off they go to their local Martian bartender Guzub to see if they can learn how he mixes the drink. It isn’t as simple as they think—there is a lot of experimental drinking done—but they prevail, and build a robot to do the job.
This is a rather unlikely story, and it has the feel of middling pulp:

Now,” I said to Quinby, “tell me how you got this unbelievable idea of repair?”
“Why, isn’t it obvious?” he asked simply.
“When Zwergenhaus invented the first robot, he wasn’t thinking functionally. He was trying to make a mechanical man. He did, and he made a good job of it. But that’s silly. Man isn’t a functionally useful animal. There’s very little he can do himself. What’s made him top dog is that he can invent and use tools to do what needs doing. But why make his mechanical servants as helplessly constructed as he is?
“Almost every robot, except perhaps a few like farmhands, does only one or two things and does those things constantly. All right. Shape them so that they can best do just those things, with no parts left over. Give them a brain, eyes and ears to receive commands, and whatever organs they need for their work.
“There’s the source of your whole robot epidemic. They were all burdened down with things they didn’t need—legs when their job was a sedentary one, two arms when they used only one—or else, like my house servant, their organs were designed to imitate man’s rather than to be ideally functional. Result: the unused waste parts atrophied, and the robots became physically sick, sometimes mentally as well because they were tortured by unrealized potentialities. It was simple enough, once you looked at it straight.”  p. 83-84

Clunk, clunk, clunk.
At a push, I’d describe this story as okay. I’d note in passing that this otherwise light piece has a couple of unnecessarily sour notes: the maltreatment of the Venusian is one, and the other is that the punishment for breaking robot patent law is “sterilisation”. Harsh.⁵
The Weapon Makers by A. E. van Vogt ended last issue with Empress Innelda re-ordering the arrest of the immortal Captain Hedrock. On the roof security staff intercept him before he can get to a flyer, but they turn out to be Weapon Shop operatives, and he is taken to the Hotel Royal Ganeel (a Weapon Shops front) where he meets the no-man Edward Gonish. Hedrock learns that he is under arrest and is to go on trial before the full Weapon Shop council.
When Hedrock appears in front of the latter they question him and eventually show that his decision to stay for lunch with the Empress reveals he is not who he claims: this action would have required a considerably braver man. Cadron, the leader of the council explains:

“Here is what happened: When the psychologists discovered the variation, two cerebro-geometic figures were set up on the Pp machine. One used as a base the old record of your mind; the other took into account a seventy-five percent increase in every function of your mind, EVERY FUNCTION, I repeat, not only courage.
“Among other things, this brought your I. Q. to the astounding figure of two hundred seventy-eight—”
Hedrock said: “You say, every function. Including idealism and altruism, I presume?”
He saw that the men were looking at him uneasily; Cadron said: “Mr. Hedrock, a man with that much altruism would regard the Weapon Shops as merely one factor in a greater game. The Weapon Shops cannot be so broadminded. But let me go on:
“In both the cerebro-geometric figures I have mentioned, the complicated figurate of the empress was mechanically woven into the matrix; and because speed was an absolute essential, the possible influence on the situation of other minds was reduced to a high level Constant, modified by a simple, oscillating Variable—”
In spite of himself, Hedrock found himself becoming absorbed.  p. 103

I found my reaction to the above passage rather ambivalent: part of me thought “Oh dear, what dreadful super-science gobbledygook”; another part of me thought “Yeah! An immortal superman with an IQ of 278!” I think what you have here is the same kind of reaction that summer movie blockbusters produce, and this probably tells you what van Vogt, E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith, etc., were to Astounding.
As the council’s inquisition draws to an end, and it looks as if Hedrock is going to be executed, he goes to a pre-planted ring hidden in one of the walls, activates it, and uses it to travel through a vibratory transmitter to a hidden lab. Once there he destroys the portal and all the devices he has left behind in the hotel—he realises that he will only escape once from the Weapon Shops. Then a twenty-foot high monster attacks him.
Meanwhile, in the other story thread, Neelan is eventually sent to the ship by the Empress Innelda to distract Greer (he is given an invisibility cloak, and a telestat device that will let the Empress observe his actions. This latter device is also lethal and she will use it to kill him if he betrays her.) Meanwhile a giant man attacks one of the cities.

Once Neelan gets to the ship he plays for time, and tries to get down to the control room to start the engines and get away. Once he gets rid of the telestat, the Empress realises he has betrayed her and orders her big guns to open fire on the ship. Before Neelan can get to the control room the Empress’s men enter the ship.
The next chapter is exciting and fast-paced one that has Neelan doing a lot of running about both in and around the ship before stealing a lifeboat. Once airborne he is surrounded by Imperial cruisers, so he points the boat at Centaurus and engages the infinity drive.
The Empress later watches the giant man destroy parts of several of the Empire’s cities (we later learn that the buildings that are destroyed are empty ones owned by Hedrock’s shell companies) before finally getting one of her princes to contact the Weapon Shops for help and co-operation. She also tells them to find Hedrock and bring him to the palace.
The instalment finishes with Hedrock scaring off the giant creature in his lab—it is an enlarged rat which he returns to its normal size. We learn that the machine which causes this effect is linked to Hedrock’s immortality and his research to rediscover the process.
Although I more or less enjoyed this part, I was rather disappointed that the story has drifted away from the Empire/Weapon Shop dichotomy set up in both the first part of the serial and in the previous story The Weapon Shop. The novel appears to be degenerating into a fast-paced and entertaining, but ultimately trivial super-science tale.

The Cover, once again, is an average effort by William Timmins, and illustrates the spheres in Clash by Night that take people from the undersea Keeps to the surface.⁶
I like most of the Interior artwork in this issue: the first of the Orban and Isip illustrations are good, as are Kramer’s illustrations for the Simak (particularly the robot ones: personally, I’d like to see more robots with boxy heads and rivets). I note that Kramer is usually criticised along with Kolliker in Brass Tacks’ letters, but I think this is a little unfair as some of his work isn’t bad. Or not as bad as Kolliker’s, anyway. That said, his second set of illustrations for the van Vogt are as dreary as last issue’s. Fax’s robot drawing is a bit retro, but I liked it nevertheless.
Mutually Exclusive by John W. Campbell, Jr. is an interesting editorial that begins with a discussion of mutually exclusive conditions:

The classic example [. . .] is, of course, “You can’t eat your cake and have it, too.” There’s another set of mutual exclusives that science fiction has not recognized as such—has, in fact, joyously stirred together in an incompatible mixture time and again. The two are tied together in a favorite descriptive phrase about an immense city of the future, with skytowering buildings laced through with planes and airships floating through the sky without visible support.
The two are mutually exclusive, as thoroughly so as the above.  p. 6

He quickly outlines the problems with sky traffic (flow control for one) and quickly disposes of airships and planes. He has this about helicopters:

Sikorsky has invented a fully practical, genuinely workable type of helicopter. It can hang still in the air, rise vertically, move in any direction whatever, or any combination of directions. It can rise and lower itself at speeds as low as one foot a minute. The helicopter could settle easily onto a city building’s roof, park between two—or in the midst of four or eight already parked—machines. It has the ability to wait that an automobile has. It certainly appears to be capable of creating the vast urban air traffic of fiction.
It can’t. The propeller—and the helicopter hangs on a giant vertical-lift propeller—is a mechanical device for creating a jet of air; it derives its pull from the reaction of that jet. The propeller wash of a plane is a familiar thing today; the prop-wash of a helicopter’s lifting blades will be, soon after the war. Remember that that helicopter’s prop-wash is going to represent the reaction of the whole weight of the machine. It will be a huge jet of air on which more than a ton of steel and aluminum alloys is floating. That prop-wash is going to be an item to reckon with—and the prop-wash from ten or a dozen such ships waiting at an air-traffic light would be enough to make the air lanes for five or six hundred feet below a cyclonic jumble of twisting winds in which no pilot could maintain control of his machine.  p. 6

I am impressed that Campbell had a better understanding of these issues in 1943 than the media do today—a media that doesn’t let any critical thought interfere with their endless “Any day now!” coverage of Amazon’s drones flying their deliveries straight to our doorsteps. They won’t.⁷
Campbell goes on to look at anti-gravity devices before making the point that this would lead to massive decentralisation: so still no future cities with vehicles flying above them.
Photographic Plate Finds Kepler’s Nova by R. S. Richardson is a half-page science filler about a new type of photographic plate (which is red rather than blue sensitive) detecting Kepler’s nova of 1604.
The Analytical Laboratory: January 1943 was discussed in the review of that issue.⁸
Evolution Designs Instinct Patterns, Too is another half-page science filler, uncredited but presumably by Campbell, and is about why horses didn’t evolve to cope with broken legs like wolves/dogs did.

Space Fix by R. S. Richardson is the first part of a science essay about navigating in the solar system, and is fairly heavy going. It starts with a naval example that I didn’t entirely understand (I must buy a sextant and practise). I was then stumped by the solar system example:

I finally figured out that the method is (a) measure that angle between the sun and Rigel—this gives you your radial (or “longitude”) from the sun—and then measure the angle between Mars (or any other visible planet) and the sun—this will give, from pre-calculated tables, your distance along the previously calculated radial.
The rest of the article is about the different ways you can get to Mars (low to high energy) and is almost as impenetrable. These diagrams aren’t as helpful as they could be:

In Times to Come is mostly about next month’s Raymond Jones story, Swimming Lesson, but the passage ends on an ominous note:

The editorial next month needs mention here, too. Astounding undergoes another change, one I haven’t space to describe here. You won’t like it. We don’t like it. Three guesses as to what three megalomaniacs are responsible for it. Full explanation in the April issue will be followed by the change-over beginning with the May number.  p. 78

Fans of the time may have thought the magazine was changing to bimonthly or quarterly publication but it was going to change from bedsheet size back to its old, smaller pulp format.
Brass Tacks is another short column like last issue’s. It has more negative comments about the artwork (aimed at Kramer and Kolliker) and has another ‘Best of the Year’ list from Bill Stoy, Jamaica, New York. Elsewhere, E. Everett Evans of Battle Creek, Michigan, hopes no more of his fan friends go into the military: he has to buy four issues of Astounding a month, “and that’s money.”

The Moore/Kuttner and van Vogt stories make this a worthwhile issue.  ●

_____________________

1. As already noted in the January review, Moore was ill around this time. Campbell wrote to his friend Robert D. Swisher about Kuttner and Moore in a May 1943 letter (Fantasy Commentator #59/60, edited by Sam Moskowitz & A. Langley Searles, Lulu.com):

“They’ve been having troubles; they’re in Hollywood you know—were in the Heinlein’s house as renters while Bob and Leslyn were here. They moved out, with the intention of coming East, because Kat was expecting, (first anyone ever heard of C.L. Moore being pregnant) was homesick, and didn’t think an air-raid shelter at a critical moment was satisfactory. Kat evidently had a mild hysteria attack—wouldn’t let anyone but Hank in the house, took to her bed, more or less, and demanded constant attention. Hank, being the breadwinner, had his hands fullish. Also, just as they were about to get started East, after selling their car. Kat had to be hospitalized for a period vaguely diagnosed as a month or so. They’d leased the house—it’s miles from town, and carless.
Hank couldn’t stay anyway. Hank had to have a minor neck operation. He supervised moving day, resettled an apartment and wrote stories. With Kat, from what I can piece together in letters to me, explaining and apologizing for delay on promised scripts. And the Heinleins were complaining that he wasn’t visiting her at the hospital.” p. 142

2. After reading Clash By Night I started rooting around looking for interviews, etc., by C. L. Moore (it looks like, according to ISFDB, no-one ever interviewed Kuttner). I didn’t have much luck as they are all (except one) in hard to find fanzines like Chacal (#1), Etchings & Odysseys (#4), and The Diversifier (#22, #28/29). If anyone has these, I’d appreciate a scan (or even a readable mobile phone photo).
However, I did find this comment by Moore in the introduction to Fury (the 1947 sequel of sorts to Clash By Night):

Yesterday I reread Fury for the first time in many years, and I’m not surprised, but interested, to see in it the two recurring themes which emerge quite explicitly in nearly everything we wrote. Hank’s basic statement was something like, “Authority is dangerous and I will never submit to it.” Mine was, “The most treacherous thing in life is love.” In Fury these two ideas underlie everything that happens. I can identify which parts I contributed and which he did by this alone.
Fury was written by about one and an eighth persons. We collaborated on almost everything we wrote, but in varying degrees. It worked like this. After we’d established through long discussion the basic ideas, the background and the characters, whichever of us felt like it sat down and started. When that one ran down, the other, being fresh to the story, could usually see what ought to come next, and took over. The action developed as we went along. We kept changing off like this until we finished. A story goes very fast that way.
Each of us edited the other’s copy a little when we took over, often going back a line or two and rephrasing to make the styles blend. We never disagreed seriously over the work. The worst clashes of opinion I can remember ended with one of us saying, “Well, I don’t agree, but since you feel more strongly than I do about it, go ahead.” (When the rent is due tomorrow, one tends toward quick, peaceful settlements.)
In Fury, which is a good example of this process, I wrote comparatively little of the copy. The idea was basically Hank’s and I didn’t identify very strongly with it. I didn’t identify with Sam Reed, the lead character. But what I did contribute I can recognize instantly, after all these years, by the passages in which color-images predominate, and in which my dramatically gloomy theme appears.

I counted the colour adjectives in the next story of theirs I read, Open Secret (Astounding, April 1943). It has (these are all quick counts and are complicated by “green eyes” “red hair” type repetitions) nine in nine and a half pages. The first chapter of Clash by Night has thirteen in six pages; chapter five is interesting in that the first three pages or so have seven, and the last five pages have three. I also noticed this in the first half of that last chapter (this is when the fleet are sailing out to meet the opposition, but before the battle has started):

One had to believe in an ideal before devoting one’s life to it. One had to feel he was helping the ideal to survive—watering the plant with his blood so eventually it would come to flower. The red flower of Mars had long since blown. How did that old poem go?
.
One thing is certain, and the rest is lies;
The flower that once has blown forever dies.
.
It was true. But the Free Companions blindly pretended that the flower was still in blazing scarlet bloom, refusing to admit that even the roots were withered and useless, scarcely able now to suck up the blood sacrificed to its hopeless thirst. New flowers bloomed; new buds opened. But in the Keeps, not in the great doomed forts. It was the winter cycle, and, as the last season’s blossoms faded, the buds of the next stirred into life. Life questing and intolerant. Life that fed on the rotting petals of the rose of war.  p. 33

Does this image-rich passage, and the colour adjective word-count above, suggest that Moore wrote the first part of this chapter and Kuttner the rest? Or am I chasing shadows?

3. Anthony Boucher’s Barrier is reviewed here.

4. According to this ISFDB page Simak’s story has—unsurprisingly—never been reprinted.

5. This story by Boucher made it—why I do not know—into The Great SF Stories #5, edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg (DAW, 1980) along with the Moore/Kuttner piece:

7 • Introduction (The Great SF Stories 5 (1943)) • (1981) • essay by Martin H. Greenberg
11 • The Cave • (1943) • novelette by P. Schuyler Miller
30 • The Halfling • [Earth (Brackett)] • (1943) • novelette by Leigh Brackett
57 • Mimsy Were the Borogoves • (1943) • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett]
91 • Q. U. R. • (1943) • short story by Anthony Boucher
113 • Clash by Night • [Keeps • 1] • (1943) • novella by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lawrence O’Donnell]
172 • Exile • (1943) • short story by Edmond Hamilton
178 • Daymare • (1943) • novelette by Fredric Brown
219 • Doorway Into Time • (1943) • short story by C. L. Moore
238 • The Storm • [Mixed Men] • (1943) • novelette by A. E. van Vogt
271 • The Proud Robot • [Gallegher (Henry Kuttner)] • (1943) • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett]
306 • Symbiotica • [Jay Score / Marathon • 3] • (1943) • novelette by Eric Frank Russell
352 • The Iron Standard • (1943) • short story by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett]

6. This cover is a bit of a Frankenstein job cobbled together from a number of images. There is not a decent hi-resolution image on the web.

7. Campbell barely scratches the surface of the problems with city air traffic. To New Yorkers you would just have to say “9-11”. Will people elsewhere put up with the constant noise of drones flying around and over their houses? And don’t get me started on critical failures and performance planning. (Commercial aeroplane passengers are probably are unware that, in the event of an engine failure, their plane has to be able to continue its take-off run (after V1*) and climb away, stay level (or have a planned drift down) above safety altitude, and land without damage to the aircraft or passengers. Given that those Amazon boxes can potentially land on you, your kids, your car, or your house,** it is difficult to imagine more relaxed regulations.)
* V1 is the speed beyond which you are committed to take-off even if an engine fails (there isn’t enough runway to stop safely).
** Millennials will just have to worry about themselves as they won’t be able to afford kids, a car, or a house.

8. An abbreviated Analytical Laboratory for this month appeared in the June issue:

I expected Kuttner and Moore’s story to have taken first place.  ●