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

Fiction:
Swimming Lesson • novelette by Raymond F. Jones –
Open Secret • short story by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett] ∗∗
Escape • novelette by Joseph Gilbert and Fred W. Fischer –
Abdication • short story by A. E. van Vogt and E. Mayne Hull [as by E. Mayne Hull] ∗
The Weapon Makers (Part 3 of 3) • serial by A. E. van Vogt ∗∗∗+
Probability Zero:
Corpus Delicti • short fiction by Henry Kuttner –
Miraculous Fluid • short fiction by Wilson Tucker [as by Bob Tucker] –
Downfall • short fiction by Malcolm Jameson *
Camouflage • short fiction by John Aiken [as by John K. Aiken] –
Ultimate Opposition • short fiction by Roscoe E. Wright –
“A Snitch in Time” • short fiction by D. C. King –
Double, Double, Toil and Trouble • short story by Nelson S. Bond ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by Paul Orban (x5), Elton Fax, Manuel Isip (x4), Frank Kramer (x4)
New Order • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
In Times to Come
Space Fix (Part 2 of 2) • science essay by R. S. Richardson
Tyrannosaurus Was No Killer • science essay by Willy Ley
The Analytical Laboratory: February 1943

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I mentioned last issue that the Simak story therein read like a refugee from an early 1930’s Astounding—well, so does Swimming Lesson by Raymond F. Jones.
You can tell this from the opening conversation: an unrealistic, shouty affair between a military man called Hardin, and a scientist from “Radiation Asteroid” called Pete Wilson. Hardin is trying to convince Wilson about a threat to the Earth and its colonies from the Venusian Korphs, who apparently have a weapon called “Artificial Sky” which can form an impenetrable barrier around a planet or asteroid. A small artificial sun orbits inside the barrier, burning the enclosed body to a crisp (it can also freeze colder than Pluto as well, although this is never explained). The conversation is interspersed with abusive comments from Hardin to Wilson about him being a “stupid ass” and that there “must be something besides purple mush between those ears”, etc.
Wilson maintains that Artificial Sky is impossible, even when Hardin shows him an impenetrable sphere surrounding a suspended apple. When Wilson fires a gun at it, the bullet comes to a halt just before it gets to the sphere and hangs in mid-air.

Wilson then goes back to his science buddies on Radiation Asteroid, adamant that the theories disproving Artificial Sky are correct.
On the spaceship trip home we discover something about the captain of the ship:

“Captain Underhill”—Marla’s voice trembled—”I didn’t know you are part Korph—”
He bowed low as if acknowledging a great compliment. “My great-grandfather was the first of his race to receive the Earth explorers and open the world of Venus to interstellar commerce. I thought everyone knew. It’s an ancestry of which I am very proud.”
“Yes, I should imagine—”
They began walking toward the dining room.
“You see,” Captain Sam Underhill went on, “in those days my father’s people were a very backward race. All Venus was divided into little tribes, each one selfishly clinging to its own traditions and accomplishments like adolescent children. It was not until the Earthmen came that they saw the advantages of the exchange of ideas. It was not until then that they understood the advantages of—shall I say learning?—in contrast to their old ways of conserving the tiny, insignificant accomplishments they had built up through centuries—most of them built on error, as are almost all traditions.”
“Venus is pretty grateful to Earth for changes that have resulted through this new contact, isn’t she?” said Pete. “Indeed—that’s why the day of the landing of the first spaceship from Earth is a national Venusian holiday. The Korphs give tribute to the Earthmen who came and showed them a vision of new worlds. But here we are . . . the dining room is ready.”  p. 14

Needless to say, Underhill is only in the story so he can get thrown out of a burning spaceship by Wilson later on, after the scientist’s asteroid is (surprise!) surrounded by Artificial Sky. At least Underhill does a half decent evil-Korph scene, mwuh, mwuh, mwuh, before he plummets to his death.
Wilson discovers that the barrier is caused by a “time jam”, which is why objects slow down as they approach. This is followed by much running around and then, to keep the pace up during the denouement, his wife is revealed as a traitor who planted a generator powering the Artificial Sky!

In a final twist (spoiler) Underhill learns that she is one of Hardin’s double agents; the latter wanted Wilson to solve the problem and save Earth from an impending Korph attack.
This is an awful story, and I really struggled to finish it.
Open Secret by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore is about a man called Jerrold who stumbles on robots secretly working in a tower block office when he inadvertently gets off the elevator on the wrong floor. He watches for a short time but, surprisingly, both they and the human receptionist ignore him, so he gets back in the elevator and goes to the twenty-first floor for his appointment with a psychiatrist.
Afterwards Jerrold goes back to the fifteenth floor, and challenges the receptionist there about what he has seen. She freely admits that they are robots, and more ominously adds that the robots don’t care about anyone knowing. He arranges to take her for a drink after she finishes work.

Later, when they are at a restaurant, she freely answers all the questions Jerrold has. In particular she lays out the way the robots manage to control those who learn of them and who become a problem. Every time he shows concern or irritation in response to one of her answers she tells him that he will feel differently after he is “processed”.
The next day Jerrold decides he is not going to accept these robot overlords and will resist. However (spoiler), when he goes to their office and attacks them, he discovers that guns and acid have no effect on them. The end of the story is left hanging in the air, albeit with the suggestion of Jerrold’s ultimate failure, and potential processing.
This is an interesting story of what I suppose you would call ‘Secret Controllers’ paranoia, the kind of thing that would become more prevalent in the commie-scare 1950’s Cold War.
I note in passing that it is written in fairly perfunctory prose (my guess is that it is a Kuttner solo effort) but, that said, it has this striking passage (for both for its sexual frankness and the way it pauses the narrative) from when Jerrold and the receptionist first arrive in the bar:

She set down her glass, ran the tip of a pointed tongue across her lips, and said, “Well, Mr. Mike Jerrold?”
“Well?”
“Question. Are you trying to make me?”
He said, “No,” with a frankness that was disarmingly inoffensive.
“That’s good. You see, Mr. Mike Jerrold, I’m hoping I’ll get a taxi ride home. I live in Brooklyn. If you’ve ever been on the Brighton Express at the rush hour—”
“Taxi it is. Drinks, dinner, and a ride home. Does that suit?”
“Uh-huh.”
It was a cool, dim hideaway place, Jerrold reflected, sipping his sidecar and feeling the tingling warmth move slowly through his body. Seldom was it possible to get out of the world. At times these moments came. Outside was New York; here was nothing but the moment. There was—as yet, anyway—nothing sexual about the situation, nothing to stimulate Jerrold; rather it was the delicious feeling of being able to stop, to rest on his oars and drift. The girl’s presence was subtly effective; she, too, had stopped. For the moment, the driving force that makes up life had ceased. They relaxed in the twilight.  p. 36

Escape by Joseph Gilbert and Fred W. Fischer¹ opens with a broadcast to a future Earth about the fugitive Adam Goodman:

“Adam, it will be remembered, was the son of Richard Goodman, and a mutation as a result of his father’s experiments with short hard radiations on the human embryo. After Goodman’s death, his nearest relative, Stanton Rascoe, took over the guardianship of Adam, and, as you know, subjected him to a rigorous mental and physical course of training from his earliest childhood in hope of producing a ‘Superman,’ as Rascoe expressed it.”

Well, if this is “as you know” or “will be remembered”, why are you telling us again? This is the first of many talking heads sections in a story interwoven with passages of almost cartoon-like action.

Anyway, back to the story: Adam steals a spaceship and makes his way to Jane, a female friend who lives in a city on the inside of the asteroid Gravite. As Adam’s escape plays out there is lots of derring-do, and I thought that the story seemed a bit Buck Rogers (although I’m not that familiar with the latter). Sure enough, Jane hints at this after Adam surprises her later in her room:

“—[Adam], you aren’t at all like what I’d imagined you to be. I’d read all the ancient fictional books about supermen preserved on microfilm at the Gravite library, and the result was a rather weird combination of Odd John, Victor Scott and Buck Rogers. Horrible thought, isn’t it?”  p. 48

After they talk each other to death (and Adam tells her to call him “Stinky”—God only knows why) she agrees to help him kidnap the uncle that has exploited his genius while keeping him captive. They then set of for Earth and chat/datadump a bit more. We learn that her dead parents owned a hollowed out cave on Ganymede, where they can keep his uncle Rascoe after Adam has captured him.

The rest of the story involves Adam making his way to Rascoe’s compound, and energetically beating up nearly all of his security men before arriving in the uncle’s office. We learn that the latter is a “midget”. He is initially pleasant and avuncular towards Adam—until, that is, his inner megalomaniac eventually bursts out:

The whisper from behind [Adam] was almost machinelike in its monotonous repetition; but no machine could ever express that black hate that crawled in that voice.
“She laughed at me, damn her soul. Laughed. Laughed at me, damn her. I’ll get her; I’ll get them all. Laughed at me—”
Without looking behind him, Adam asked with grim intensity, “What are you up to, Rascoe? What are you up to?”
Rascoe said, “I’m going to be God.”
“You’re mad,” said Adam. His voice wasn’t steady.
Rascoe laughed horribly.
“I’ll play God. With you, Adam, with you. With all mankind. Your germ plasm. I’ll impregnate all the women with it artificially, and create a race of supermen, and be king of them all. Me! The undersized, pitiful little runt she laughed at. Me, Adam. And my scientists will take the embryo of the new supermen and work with them if they are not perfect, and the supermen will have giants and other monstrous things to be amused by and to work for them. They’ll all grow up under my training and I shall make them obedient and they shall know me as their god and their only god forever and ever and—”
“You’re mad, Rascoe,” repeated Adam. “You’re mad.” There was sweat glistening on his forehead, and a harsh uncertain edge to his breath. “You can’t interfere with natural selection that way, it can’t be done. The horrors you would produce by forced breeding would be—”  p. 59

As Adam tries to take Rascoe away, the security men eventually overpower him and he is rescued by Jane. During the kerfuffle, Rascoe goes over the balcony and plummets to the ground floor.
Rascoe’s death is soon forgotten as the pair escape in a fast patrol spaceship for the hollow asteroid, and they talk about other issues—Adam tells Jane that he can’t marry her because:

“My gene pattern is so absolutely different, that marriage with another person, genetically average, might produce horrors beyond conceiving—”  p. 63

Jane then reveals that she has the same genetic pattern as Adam, and that her middle name is Eve!
As they leave Earth, Adam transmits a farewell message to its citizens:

“To a world lost in effeminacy and forgotten glory, farewell. Some day, centuries hence, when our new strain has been tempered and found keen in the fire of hardship and struggle, our children’s children’s children will return, bringing with the will to conquer, the old careless courage, the indomitable initiative that now lies dormant. For then the degeneracy that is upon you will have run its course, and man will again look to the stars, and in his restlessness throw off the decadence of his ancestors. When that happens, when the human race again seeks the things without which it is nothing—beauty, achievement, adventure, and the true Utopia founded upon the quest for truth, upon the privation and sudden death of research and exploration—when it learns once more that man must fight or stagnate in complacent boredom, then the new man will return to lead the race to the limitless potentialities that are its very justification for existence—the realization of which is the only omega that the spirit of man can ever truly know.”  p. 64-65

I thought, up to this point, that this was just a bad, if occasionally fast-paced, pulp story, but the last part made me wonder if Adolf Hitler was writing SF in his spare time (vide Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream) and submitting his stories under a pseudonym.
Abdication by A. E. van Vogt and E. Mayne Hull is the first of the Artur Blord series (which would be continued by Hull alone).²
The story starts with the narrator meeting a wealthy self-made man called Rand on a spaceship to Earth. While the narrator is talking to Rand, another man called Tansy comes up and addresses the former as “Artur Blord”.
There then follows some rather confusing intrigue involving, in no particular order, (a) Rand’s retirement to Earth and details of an arranged marriage, (b) a dead body in Tansy’s room, (c) the arrival of Tansy while the narrator and Rand are standing over the body in their invisibility suits. When Tansy enters the Room and finds them there, he mentions a planet called Zand II. There may be other moving parts which I have forgotten in my bewilderment.

This resolves (spoiler) with Rand disembarking on Zand II, his retirement abandoned as he resolves to et to the bottom of this intrigue. Meantime, the narrator, who has aided Rand throughout, gets a part share in anything that Rand manages to set up On Zand II (given for his help on the ship).
The coda to the story occurs three years later, and has the narrator—who we find out is the real Artur Blord—married to Rand’s one-time fiancée, and the owner of a twenty-five percent share in Rand’s uranium mine on Zand II. Blord had manipulated events to get Rand to do what he wanted, i.e. set up a business there.
This is an unlikely and contrived story, and has one of those plots that barely makes sense.
The last part of The Weapon Makers by A. E. van Vogt continues with both the Hedrock and Neelan threads told in alternating chapters. In the first of these, the Weapons Shop’s no-man Edward Gonish meets an incognito Empress Innelda in a gambling and entertainment area of town (you wonder if van Vogt was just back from Vegas) to discuss the giant man’s attacks. At the end of the meeting Gonish realises that Hedrock is hiding in the Empress’s apartments.
The story then jumps forward to after the Weapon Shops have attacked the palace, and Hedrock—who has married Innelda in the meantime—has been taken prisoner. The Empress quizzes her officers and discovers that Hedrock previously went through a six feet by two sheet of metal in the cellars, and then returned before the attack.
Gonish later tells Innelda that Hedrock is an immortal, and has been part of the family line several times over the years, and may have been one of the early Emperors! The Empress orders Prince de Curtin to negotiate with the Weapons Makers to get him back.

Meanwhile, the story’s other protagonist, Neelan, becomes consciousness after twenty-two days on the lifeboat (there is no explanation of why he hasn’t died of dehydration). He eventually slows the boat down when a fleet of mile long spaceships appear around him.
Things get strange when he tries to flee from the ships, and the lifeboat ends up floating inside one of them. When he opens the airlock he looks out on a staggering sight:

He was staring down at a city from a height of about two miles. The city glittered and shone from a very blaze of hidden light, and it was set in a garden of trees and things in bloom; and beyond was green countryside, alive with a profusion of brush and meadows, and sparkling streams.
The whole curved gently upward into a haze, of distance on the three sides that he could see.
Except for the obviously limited horizon, it could have been Earth.
The second tremendous shock struck Neelan at that point. A city, he thought, an Earthlike city in a ship so big that— His mind couldn’t grasp it. His brain throbbed like a tuning fork. The spaceship, which had seemed a mile long, was actually at least fifty, and it was cruising through space with several hundred of its kind, each machine the size of a planetoid, and manned by super-beings.  p. 102

He takes the boat down to the surface and goes into the city, where a number of strange things happen. First he sees a vision of himself in bed after having been interrogated by the Empress, then he sees himself operating the ship just before the alien contact.
It becomes apparent that the aliens are sifting through his memories.

The vision of the city fades away, and he finds himself looking at what the inside of the ship really look like: there are webs everywhere, and he realises the aliens inhabitants are spider-like beings.
Things get even weirder after this: he connects mentally with Gil, and learns that he and his stranded crew are dying as the planet they are on gets closer to the sun. The aliens then question Neelan about his memories (and show a noticeable lack of emotion as they do so) before telling Neelan that Gil is dead. Neelan shoots himself in the head, and finds himself back on his lifeboat.
At this point in the story I was beginning to wonder where all this was going: the spider-aliens seem a completely unnecessary kitchen sink subplot—and a slightly confusing one—that takes the novel away from my preferred ground of the Empire/Weapon Shops conflict. However, in the next Hedrock chapter the story moves back on to this territory and provides most of the book’s finale (although there are another couple of chapters that follow).
In this climactic chapter Hedrock is once again interrogated by the Weapon Shop Council but quickly gains the upper hand: when he went through the metal door before the attack, he went into no-space and, time-shifted, now watches himself in front of the council. His no-space self quickly disarms the councillors while the real-space Hedrock tells them they are, and have always been, under permanent observation by the “Watchers” (just Hedrock really) since their foundation. As the Council has broken its own laws, Hedrock orders them all to resign, but only after they have negotiated with the Empress for his release.
When Cadron, the Council leader, later tells him they have negotiated a better deal than expected, Hedrock’s response is not what they expect:

“We have received from the empress a most remarkable offer. Recognition for the Shops, a share in the government. It’s a surrender of the first order—and all we’ve got to do is deliver you up alive, as you yourself have stipulated.”
Hedrock said grimly. “You are refusing, of course.”
“Eh?” Cadron’s image stared.
Hedrock went on in a steely voice, “Cadron, you don’t really tell me that your council is excited about such a thing. Don’t you realize that there can never be a common meeting ground between two such diametrically opposed forces?”
[. . .]
“Cadron, the Weapon Shops constitute a permanent opposition. The trouble with the opposition of the old days was that they were always scheming for power; all too frequently their criticism was dishonest, their intentions evil; they lusted for control.
“Never must the Weapon Shops allow such emotions to be aroused in their followers. Let the empress rebuild her own chaos. I do not say she is responsible for the corrupt state of the empire, but the time has come for her to attempt a vigorous housecleaning.
“Throughout, the Weapon Makers will remain aloof, interested but maintaining their great standards for the relief throughout the galaxy of those who must defend themselves from oppression.
“The gunmakers will continue to sell their guns and stay out of politics.”  p. 116-117

At the end of this cracking chapter, Hedrock returns to the palace and talks to Gonish. The latter predicts that Innelda will die in childbirth: she overhears the conversation and tells them to leave and never return.

The last two chapters tidy up the Hedrock thread and tie in the spider-aliens to the rest of the story. Neelan negotiates with the aliens to resurrect his brother and colleagues, and later spreads information about the aliens existence that ensures the small group’s freedom (there is now no point in killing them again). Finally, Hedrock goes to see Innelda on the day of her child’s birth. She dies, but the aliens (who have turned up to observe Earth) witness her death and decide to resurrect her to record her emotional reactions. The story concludes with this classic line from the spider-aliens, and one that must have appealed to Campbell’s ideas about human exceptionalism:

“This much we have learned; here is the race that shall rule the sevagram.”  p. 130

To be honest this work is, structurally, a bit of a mess. Whereas the Hedrock/Weapon Makers thread is largely well done you rather wonder what the Neelan/spider-aliens part of the book is doing here—it feels like another story wandered in by mistake. That said, the novel is compulsively readable and entertaining tale for much of its length and, at points, it is very good. If you are one of those people who can turn off the analytical part of your mind and go with the flow you’ll find it a lot of fun.

Nearly all the Probability Zero stories are as bad as usual. Corpus Delicti by Henry Kuttner (multiple spoilers follow) has a scientist take a greedy man into the fourth dimension where he ends up eating his 3D body; Miraculous Fluid by Wilson Tucker is a nonsense story about light that is so strong it leaves an image on the wall (normal not laser light); Downfall by Malcolm Jameson tells of an implosion bomb dropped on Germany, and the freak weather that follows; Camouflage by John Aiken has a country that is about to be invaded paint the sky to look like the ground (and the ground the sky) to confuse the enemy; Ultimate Opposition by Roscoe E. Wright has an irresistible force which meets reverse entropy (I didn’t understand this one); “A Snitch in Time” by D. C. King has a man use the fourth dimension get to a bank vault to rob it, but he collides with himself on the way back and is destroyed.
The last effort, Double, Double, Toil and Trouble by Nelson S. Bond would have made a good Unknown story at greater length and with a plot. Written in letter format, it has missives from the writer to Campbell that appear to arriving in duplicate, before we eventually find out that Bond has a doppelgänger. None of this stands up to close examination, but some of it is quite fun:

Dear John:
Here’s that story I promised you. Hope you like it.
Yours,
Nels Bond.
Willow Road,
Roanoke, Virginia,
July 26,1942
.
Dear Mr. Campbell:
Inclosed is the new short story, “Test Case,” which I sincerely hope will meet with your approval.
Very truly yours,
Nelson S. Bond.
.
STREET & SMITH PUBLICATIONS, INC.
Astounding Science-Fiction
July 26, 1942
Mr. Nelson S. Bond,
Willow Road,
Grove Park,
Roanoke, Virginia.
Dear Nelson:
What on earth’s the matter with you? Have you been writing too many fantasies? I’ve just read “ Test Case,” and it’s a buy, but whatever possessed you to send me two copies?
And what is the meaning of your recent letters?
Yours,
J. W. C.
.
Willow Road,
Grove Park,
Roanoke, Virginia,
July 28, 1942
Dear John:
Glad “Test Case” is O. K. Thanks for the check. The letters? And the other manuscript? Why, I suppose they must be what I tried to warn you about. You see, there’s a wingding living down the road from me a way—somehow or other he’s got the idea he can knock off an easy living copying my stories and submitting them under my name. Just pay no attention to him; I’ll straighten matters out somehow or other.
Ever thine,
Nels Bond.
.
Willow Road,
Roanoke, Virginia,
July 30, 1942
Dear Mr. Campbell:
Did you receive my story, “Test Case”?
The one marked with an “X”? Have heard no word from you.
Nelson S. Bond.
.
Willow Road,
Roanoke, Virginia,
August 3, 1942
Dear Mr. Campbell:
Did you receive my manuscript, “Test Case”? This is vitally important. Please answer immediately!
Nelson S. Bond.
.
RKEVA: 815P842
MR. JOHN W. CAMPBELL, JR.,
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION,
79 SEVENTH AVENUE,
NEW YORK, NEW YORK.
DID YOU RECEIVE MANUSCRIPT “TEST CASE”? TERRIBLY IMPORTANT. PLEASE WIRE REPLY MY EXPENSE.
NELSON S. BOND.
NYCNY: 932A842
.
MR. NELSON S. BOND,
WILLOW ROAD,
ROANOKE, VIRGINIA.
OF COURSE RECEIVED MANUSCRIPT AND FORWARDED CHECK AS PER LETTER JULY 26TH. WHAT’S GOING ON? YOU’RE DRIVING ME NUTS. . . !
JOHN W. CAMPBELL.  p. 91-92

The Cover by William Timmins illustrates the burning spaceship scene from Jones’ story and is Timmins’ best work yet.
The Interior artwork, like the fiction, is rather lacklustre, and this is not helped by the fact that there are no title illustrations: for some reason they all appear as individual spots in this issue.
The illustrations by Paul Orban, and Kramer’s (for the van Vogt, anyway) are okay; Manuel Isip’s are more cartoonish than usual, but then that is appropriate for the story he is illustrating.

New Order by John W. Campbell, Jr. is his promised editorial about the changes coming to the magazine. He explains that wartime rationing of metal requires a change from electrotype to stereotype process and, as they can’t get a large-page-size machine for the latter, they will have to produce a smaller size publication. They will also use glue and not staples to bind the magazine.
For those who want to read Campbell’s detailed explanation, click the image above.
In Times to Come has further comment about the change in size, which will bring a crowded look with its smaller typeface and margins. Campbell ends with a note about the writing plans of Astounding’s military authors after the war:

But from what I hear in letters from the men who are in the war now, there’s going to be a sudden flood of more than top-notch yarns as soon as the nasty business of squashing Hitler, Tojo & Co. is done. The yarns they want to write now—and haven’t the time. Will Stewart’s got an idea about those Aliens of the seetee ship, and their inscriptions that talk—Heinlein wants to tell the story of the Blind Singer of the Spaceways; you may remember mention of some of his poems in Heinlein stories—E. E. Smith is working out the tremendous and intricate plot of the last of the Lensman series, a true explanation that Kinnison was never able to grasp—³  p. 65

Space Fix, R. S. Richardson’s space navigation essay, concludes with a short second half that examines effective or energy distances to the other planets in the solar system. It starts by demolishing a common SFnal trope:

One of the favorite devices for introducing the solar system to the uninitiated is by means of a broad plain on which divers fruit and vegetables are placed at the proper intervals to represent the Sun and planets.
On the scale generally adopted, the Sun is a large pumpkin or squash. Mercury thirty-six feet away is by tradition a small pea.
Venus and the Earth are larger peas. The Moon nine inches from the Earth is a radish seed, although some authors favor mustard seed for the Moon. Jupiter a quarter of a mile away is an orange. Saturn a smaller orange, and Uranus and Neptune are plums at distances of a mile and a mile and one half. Pluto at two miles from the central pumpkin is still an uncertain quantity, but probably in the pea class with the Earth and Venus.
The writer first became aware of this model at about the age of twelve in one of Sir Robert Ball’s numerous monographs on astronomy. Since then it has been turning up regularly in the popular star books about once or twice a year until now a pronounced allergy has been developed to these fruit-and-vegetable solar systems. There is something irritating about the smug assurance with which each author goes around depositing oranges and radish seeds over that two-thousand-acre field. (A ritual that would certainly cause anyone to be regarded with suspicion of lurking insanity if observed in the act). You wish somehow there wasn’t such a finality about the whole performance. That just as the author was laying down the final pea for Pluto you could grab his arm and cry, “Your neat little solar system is all wrong! Uranus is closer to the Earth than Mercury and Pluto is not the farthest planet. Distance is more than merely a matter of miles!”  p. 66

Unlike last issue’s confusing illustrations, there is a particularly good diagram which illuminates this idea (N.B. the vertical energy scale is logarithmic):

Tyrannosaurus Was No Killer by Willy Ley is an article about T. Rex which is a mixture of outdated and partially correct material (he gets the fact that it was a scavenger wrong but gets close to its T-shaped posture while moving, for instance).

The Analytical Laboratory: February 1943 was discussed in that issue.⁴
Unusually, there is no Brass Tacks letters column this issue.

A fairly dreadful issue, probably due to the number of writers in military service who are not contributing.  ●

_____________________

1. Joseph Gilbert’s ISFDB page is here (it shows a couple of Probability Zero pieces, and a handful of stories in secondary magazines), and Fred W. Fischer’s ISFDB page is here (only this story is listed apart from a couple of letters, making him a half-shot wonder).

2. The ISFDB page for the ‘Artur Blord’ stories is here.

3. The three stories referred to are probably Jack Williamson’s Seetee Shock (Astounding February-April 1949), Robert A. Heinlein’s The Green Hills of Earth (The Saturday Evening Post, February 8, 1947), and ‘Doc’ Smith’s Children of the Lens (Astounding, November 1947-February 1948).
Strange how they all took until well after the end of the war to appear.

4. The Analytical Laboratory for this issue appeared in Astounding, June 1943:

I’m surprised the Jones was so far ahead of the Padgett (Kuttner/Moore).  ●