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

Fiction:
The World Is Mine • novelette by Henry Kuttner [as by Lewis Padgett] ∗∗∗
Pelagic Spark • short story by Anthony Boucher ∗∗∗
Competition • novelette by E. Mayne Hull ∗∗
Whom the Gods Love • short story by Lester del Rey ∗∗∗
Calling the Empress • novelette by George O. Smith ∗∗
Sanctuary • short story by Anthony Boucher [as by H. H. Holmes] ∗
Gather, Darkness! (Part 2 of 3) • serial by Fritz Leiber ∗∗∗+

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by A. Williams (x8), William Kolliker (x2), Paul Orban (x2), Elton Fax (x2), Frank Kramer (x3)
Long Arm of Solar Law • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
The Analytical Laboratory: March 1943 & April 1943
Sea of Mystery • science essay by Willy Ley
Brass Tacks • letters

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The World Is Mine by Henry Kuttner is the second of his ‘Gallegher’ stories, and starts with what appears to be three talking rabbits waking the hungover scientist from his sleep. He finds he isn’t imagining them (his visiting grandfather tells him they arrived via a time machine Gallegher built last night while drunk) and soon learns that they are not rabbits but Lybblas. The subsequent exchanges have an enchanting, almost Alice-in-Wonderland feel:¹

“You’re not—human? I mean—we’re not going to evolve into you?”
“No,” said the fattest Lybbla complacently, “it would take thousands of years for you to evolve into the dominant species. We’re from Mars.”
“Mars—the future. Oh. You—talk English.”
“There are Earth people on Mars in our day. Why not? We read English, talk the lingo, know everything.”
Gallegher muttered under his breath. “And you’re the dominant species on Mars?”
“Well, not exactly,” a Lybbla hesitated. “Not all Mars.”
“Not even half of Mars,” said another.
“Just Koordy Valley,” the third announced. “But Koordy Valley is the center of the Universe. Very highly civilized. We have books. About Earth and so on. We’re going to conquer Earth, by the way.”
“Are you?” Gallegher said blankly.
“Yes. We couldn’t in our own time, you know, because Earth people wouldn’t let us, but now it’ll be easy. You’ll all be our slaves,” the Lybbla said happily. He was about eleven inches tall.
“You got any weapons?” Grandpa asked.
“We don’t need ’em. We’re clever. We know everything. Our memories are capacious as anything. We can build disintegrator guns, heat rays, spaceships—”
“No, we can’t,” another Lybbla countered. “We haven’t any fingers.” That was true. They had furry mittens, fairly useless, Gallegher thought.
“Well,” said the first Lybbla, “we’ll get Earth people to build us some weapons.”
Grandpa downed a shot of whiskey and shuddered. “Do these things happen all the time around here?” he wanted to know. “I’d heard you were a big-shot scientist, but I figured scientists made atom-smashers and stuff like that. What good’s a time machine?”
“It brought us,” a Lybbla said. “Oh, happy day for Earth.”
“That,” Gallegher told him, “is a matter of opinion. Before you get around to sending an ultimatum to Washington, would you care for a spot of refreshment? A saucer of milk or something?”
“We’re not animals!“ the fattest Lybbla said. “We drink out of cups, we do.”
Gallegher brought three cups, heated some milk, and poured. After a brief hesitation, he put the cups on the floor. The tables were all far too high for the small creatures. The Lybblas, piping, “Thank you,” politely, seized the cups between their hind feet and began to lap up the milk with long pink tongues.
“Good,” one said.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” cautioned the fattest Lybbla, who seemed to be the leader.  p. 10-11

Gallegher continues to interrogate the Lybblas, and learns about their world and their advanced technology, and how they are familiar with the technical aspects of their society:

“We read everything. Technical books on science as well as novels. How disintegrators are made and so on. We’ll tell you how to make weapons for us.”
“Thanks. That sort of literature is open to the public?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“I should think it would be dangerous.”
“So should I,” the fat Lybbla said thoughtfully, “but it isn’t, somehow.”
Gallegher pondered. “Could you tell me how to make a heat ray, for example?”
“Yes,” was the excited reply, “and then we’d destroy the big cities and capture—”
“I know. Pretty girls and hold them for ransom. Why?”
“We know what’s what,” a Lybbla said shrewdly. “We read books, we do.” He spilled his cup, looked at the puddle of milk, and let his ears droop disconsolately.
The other two Lybblas hastily patted him on the back. “Don’t cry,” the biggest one urged.
“I gotta,” the Lybbla said. “It’s in the books.”
“You have it backward. You don’t cry over spilt milk.”
“Do. Will,” said the recalcitrant Lybbla, and began to weep.
Gallegher brought him more milk. “About this heat ray,” he said. “Just how—”
“Simple,” the fat Lybbla said, and explained.  p. 12-13

Gallegher promptly builds the device which, when tested, burns a hole in the door. The rabbits note that it can also be used to kill people, like what happened to the corpse in the back garden. Gallegher inwardly digests this information, and then he and the Lybblas go outside and look at the corpse of an elderly bearded man with a heat ray hole in his chest. The police turn up at almost the same time (the neighbours in the surrounding high-rises have noticed the body), and arrest Gallegher. Before this, his attempt to toss the heat ray gun into the bushes is seen by a corrupt cop called Cantrell, who pockets the device, and uses it to blackmail Gallegher into keeping silent about the invention.
Most of the rest of the story details Gallegher’s legal troubles. We eventually find that the body is an older version of Gallegher himself—or rather the bodies are older versions of Gallegher’s, as every time there is a key event in the story one body disappears and a different one appears in the garden (there is a multiple time-lines explanation).
After the first body vanishes, the police release Gallegher but, when a second body turns up, he has to get a lawyer. To get the money to pay for him, Gallegher builds another invention, a device that can transfer knowledge or skills from one person to another.

Cantrell the cop finds out about this invention and, to further his megalomaniacal plans, demands that Gallegher use the device to transfer multiple abilities to him. This last section provides the story’s amusing but logically inconsistent dénouement (and one which conflates skills or knowledge with compulsion—as part of the transfer (spoiler) Cantrell unwittingly learns the skills of a high-dive circus act and subsequently jumps out of a plane to his death).
This story has an excellent start with its back and forth between Gallegher and the Lybblas, but it turns into a more routine albeit inventive story for its remainder. It is a pity about the weak ending but the talking bunnies are a delight (they pop up throughout to demand milk and cookies, and to proclaim “The World is Ours”). Enjoyable but flawed.
Pelagic Spark by Anthony Boucher starts with a clever if contrived scene where fellow SF writer L. Sprague de Camp is talking to his wife Catherine about Nostradamus’s prophecies, and also about McCann (Campbell’s alter-ego) and Boucher’s opinions on that subject. He then writes his own nonsense prophecy to finish off one of his articles:

“Every man his own Nostradamus, that’s my motto,” he went on. “I am, personally, every bit as much a prophet as Mike ever was. And I’m going to prove it. I’ve just thought of the perfect tag for my debunking article.” His wife looked expectant.
“I’m going to close with an original de Camp prophecy, which will make just as much sense as any of Mike’s, with a damned sight better meter and grammar. Listen:
.
“Pelagic young spark of the East
Shall plot to subvert the Blue Beast,
But he’ll dangle on high
When the Ram’s in the sky,
And the Cat shall throw dice at the feast!”  p. 32

He adds, sarcastically, that several hundred years in the future it will no doubt be claimed that it has come true.
The story then skips forward in time to an army sergeant in the jungle tearing the article out of a magazine. When he is later captured Japanese soldiers question him about the prophecy, and it eventually ends up with Hirohito’s astrologer. Next stop for the prophecy is a victorious Hitler in 1951 (who has by this time crushed Japan), before we end up at the main part of the story which takes place in 2045. A plot to assassinate the Hitler XVI during a visit to Java then plays out, and satisfies the predictions.

Although most of the prophecy can ultimately be mapped against various events, the last line has such a convoluted explanation that this can’t be easily done. The conclusion by the story’s narrator, therefore, is that his great-grandfather de Camp must have been a prophet!
This is a clever if somewhat contrived piece, and amusingly in-jokey too.
Competition by E. Mayne Hull is the second of her ‘Artur Blord’ series. In this one a wealthy and powerful businessman blackmails a kidnapped secretary and plants her into Blord’s organisation. She is to help organise Blord’s kidnap, or will die from a seven-day poison whose only antidote belongs to her abductor.
These events all takes place on the planet of Delfi II, in the Ridge Stars system. One other exotic element hinted at early in the story is an alien being that lives on Delfi I:

The dark Castle of Pleasure stood on the Mountain of Eternal Night on the dead moon that was the companion planet of Delfi II. Remnant of a forgotten civilization, its scores of towers pierced the heavens like gigantic swords. No man had ever delved into all its labyrinthian depths, for men entered that antique place only by permission of the one living relict of its long-dead builders, by the permission of the Skal thing.  p. 55

Most of the story concerns the shenanigans involving the planted secretary and Blord’s kidnap (Blord is entirely aware of the intrigue and plotting, and the reason for it—which is a competitive tender for a space drive that his company looks like winning). In the final section he decides he will allow himself to be kidnapped after getting his doctor to do some mental preconditioning that will help him withstand any hostile questioning.

After Blord is drugged by his secretary he is taken to the Castle of Pleasure. There he is briefly mind-probed by the alien Skal but finds, during a discussion with the beast, that he cannot buy its loyalty. He then deals with the men who have abducted him and ultimately agrees to joint ownership of his drive—providing they give him all their inferior spaceship drive patents and designs in return. Needless to say (spoiler) his drive, which doesn’t actually exist, is then developed from all of theirs.
This is the second story in which Blord has shown himself to be too clever by half, and it all feels somewhat contrived. That said, I thought it okay story: it was only a day or two later that I realised that the Ridge Stars, alien planets, the Skal, and all the rest of it is only van Vogtian stage-dressing for a rather slight tale.
Whom the Gods Love by Lester del Rey reads like a mainstream story but starts off with a tantalising hook:

At first glance the plane appeared normal enough, though there was no reason for its presence on the little rocky beach of the islet. But a second inspection would have shown the wreckage that had been an undercarriage and the rows of holes that crisscrossed its sides. Forward, the engine seemed unharmed, but the propeller had shredded itself against a rock in landing, and one wing flopped slowly up and down in the brisk breeze that was blowing, threatening to break completely away with each movement. Except for the creak and groan of the wing, the island was as silent as the dead man inside the plane.
Then the sun crept up a little higher over the horizon, throwing back the shadows that had concealed the figure of a second man who lay sprawled out limply on the sand, still in the position his body had taken when he made the last-second leap. In a few places, ripped sections of his uniform showed the mark of passing bullets, and blood had spilled out of a half-inch crease in his shoulder. But somehow he had escaped all serious injuries except one; centered in his forehead, a small neat hole showed, its edges a mottle of blue and reddish brown, with a trickle of dried blood spilling down over his nose and winding itself into a half mustache over his lip. There was no mark to show that bullet had gone on through the back of his head.
Now, as some warmth crept down to the islet from the rising sun, the seemingly dead figure stirred and groaned softly, one hand groping up toward the hole in his forehead. Uncertainly, he thrust a finger into the hole, then withdrew it at the flood of pain that followed the motion. For minutes he lay there, feeling the ebb and flow of the great forces that were all around him, sensing their ceaseless beat with the shadow of curiosity.  p. 61

These “great forces” that have brought the man to life also give him other powers: later, he partially repairs the skin damage to the plane, removes the engine, and alters the undamaged wing so it too can flap. He then gets into the aircraft and flies away. A striking image.
The rest of story is, on one level, a routine war adventure, but one that involves a powerful alien entity. When he engages a group of enemy aircraft after being attacked (he is, at the time of the attack, floating inside the stationary aircraft asleep), he finds he is out of ammunition, so summons blue light to gather at the tips of his guns. These beads of energy then fly off, acting like particularly destructive bullets. He then finds a Japanese fleet and wreaks havoc with much larger droplets of the blue light.

When he finally comes upon an Allied air base memories and pain overwhelm him—he still has the bullet in his brain, so repairs the cleft it has made and forces the slug out of his head. At this point he becomes his old self again, and bales out of the (by now useless) aircraft.
This isn’t an entirely successful piece—the story pretty much just stops at the end—but it is an interesting one for its mature, mainstream voice and lack of dated dialogue and SF hardware. It is also quite unlike the other stories in the magazine. Taken together with his début piece, it makes me think that if del Rey had wanted to he could have become a crossover writer like John Wyndham or John Christopher.
Calling the Empress by George O. Smith is the second in the ‘Venus Equilateral’ series about the space station/communications centre. In this one Channing, the director of the station, gets an urgent request to try to contact a spaceship that has just launched from Mars to Venus but will be quarantined if it arrives there, which will ruin its perishable cargo. Contacting a spaceship in transit has never been attempted before, and the story tells of their efforts to point the station’s communication beams at it while it is millions of miles away, even though it isn’t equipped to pick up the signals!

They chip away at the problem, which involves building a machine to swing their beam to match the path of the spaceship, etc. Eventually, (spoiler) they send Morse code on the ship’s meteor detection wavelength, causing some very odd changes to its flight path. When the spaceship crew realise it is a signal they find that the only person on board who can understand Morse is one of the passengers, a thirteen year old boy!

This is a very dryly written and sometimes rather dull piece, an archetypal Science Discussions story (i.e. one with rivets). It has too many passages like this:

Jim, the beam-control man, sat down and lighted a cigarette. Freddy let his flitter coast free. And the generators that fed the powerful transmitter came whining to a stop. But there was no sleep for Don and Walt. They kept awake to supervise the work, and to help in hooking up the phase-splitting circuit that would throw out-of-phase radio frequency into the director-elements to swing the beam.
Then once again the circuits were set up. Freddy found the position again and began to hold it. The concentric beam hurled out again, and as the phaseshift passed from element to element, the beam swept through an infinitesimal arc that covered thousands of miles of space by the time the beam reached the position occupied by the Empress of Kolain.
Like a painter, the beam painted in a swipe a few hundred miles wide and swept back and forth, each sweep progressing ahead of the stripe before by less than its width. It reached the end of its arbitrary wall and swept back to the beginning again, covering space as before. Here was no slow, irregular swing of mechanical reflector, this was the electronically controlled wavering of a stable antenna.  p. 81

I found this a bit of a struggle to get through, but if you can persist it’s an okay story I guess.
Sanctuary by Anthony Boucher has an American man in Paris at the start of WWII deciding to make his way out of the country. On his way an undersecretary in the Foreign department asks him to talk to a Dr Palgrave about his time theories.
At the doctor’s villa, surprisingly, he finds himself not only having dinner with Palgrave but with the head of the local Gestapo.

During their meal, the three talk about various things, including a story about a black-faced ghost who appeared at the house in 1937 and stayed for six weeks. The colonel leaves, and the narrator speaks to Palgrave about his time theory work—until, that is, he gets annoyed by Palgrave’s lack of patriotism. The scientist is not interested “in the affairs of men.”
When the pair retire to have coffee they are interrupted by German soldiers looking for an British commando from a group that have landed nearby. Then, after the soldiers have left, they are then interrupted by the commando himself. When the Germans come back Palgrave hides the commando by sending back in time.
There is another wrinkle or two to the story but this is an unlikely and contrived piece (spoiler: the commando is the black-faced ghost but, after six weeks in the past he returns looking completely different, so they tell the Germans he is another American guest).
Boucher’s other story in this issue also mentions the war: did people really want to read about this stuff in their fiction magazines as well as hearing about it everywhere else?
Gather, Darkness! by Fritz Leiber continues the its tale of a future Earth ruled by a fake religion set up by scientists many years before. It starts with Goniface, the leader of the ruling Hierarchy Council, revealing some of his back story in a dream (he is the child of a priest and a fallen sister, and entered the priesthood illegitimately, attempting to kill his half-sister, Sharlson Naurya to keep his secret). When he wakes he thinks he sees a familiar, and later notices a spot of blood on his sheets.

The Black Man meantime tails Brother Jarles, watching him from the roofs as the latter walks towards a rendezvous point: Jarles has decided to join the Witchcraft (who oppose to the ruling Hierarchy). Both are caught, the Black Man ambushed by an “Angel”, a drone like vehicle that is piloted by a priest. Jarles later goes to Brother Dhomas for brain-washing.
While Dhomas works on Jarles, the Black Man is telepathically contacted by his familiar Dickon, who has been searching the Hierarchy building for him. The familiar is almost exhausted, and needs to feed. The Black Man tells it what to do to scare away the two superstitious priests guarding him. After doing so, Dickon joins him:

The Black Man heard Dickon pattering toward the bed. Over the edge appeared a red-furred paw, whose suctorial palm was edged by five sharpclawed fingers. Slowly and laboriously now, for the familiar had suddenly come to the end of its strength—the Black Man could sense dazed exhaustion in the quality of the vague telepathic impulses—the little creature pulled itself up into view.
Like a spider monkey it was, but with a much smaller torso and even skinnier. Downy, reddish fur covered what seemed the merest outline or sketch of an animal—a tracery of pipestem bones and ribbonlike muscles. The incarnation of fragile nimbleness, though at the moment sluggish with exhaustion. The head was more like a lemur’s with large, peering eyes, now filmed and groggy.
A wraithlike, elfish thing.
But for the Black Man, the sight of it woke a pang of deep affection and kinship. He knew why its reddish fur was the same shade as his own hair, why its high-foreheaded, noseless face looked like a caricature or odd simplification of his own. He knew it, loved it, as his brother. More than his brother. Flesh of his flesh.
He welcomed it as it crept feebly to his side and applied its strange mouth to his skin. And as he felt the suction and faint pricking, and knew it was drawing fresh blood from him and simultaneously discharging vitiated blood into his venous capillaries, he experienced a dreamy gratification and relief.
“Drink deep, little brother,” he thought.  p. 128

Dickon then leaves carrying a message from the Black Man to the Witchcraft.
The rest of the story tells of Jarles betrayal of the Witchcraft at a coven meeting, where many witches are arrested; Asomodeus, their leader, only just escapes using an angel-like device next to him.
Goniface then stages a coup at the Apex Council meeting, and a rival priest called Frejeris is excommunicated for his resistance (this involves having all his senses shut off). The captured witches are brought in and questioned, and Goniface experiences the same terrible pain as them. News of rioting reaches the Council, and Goniface suggests a Grand Revival, a religious festival cum proproganda event to appease the masses.

The latter section drags somewhat and so does the next one, which involves a psychobabble discussion between the newly promoted Jarles and his prisoner Naurya, during which her familiar attacks him and is killed.
This instalment ends with the Dickon’s return to the Black Man. The familiar tells him of the raid on the coven and the arrest of the witches, and that he has taken the dispossessed familiars to the Breeding Place to feed. Dickon finishes by mentioning the birth of Jarles’ and Goniface’s familiars. The Black Man tells Dickon to bring them to him.
This instalment isn’t as good as the first, but it still has its moments.

The Cover for this issue is a bit of a comedown from Timmins’ effort last month, and it is also rather uninspired compared with début artist A. Williams’ Interior artwork for Kuttner’s story.² Williams also provides better than average work for a couple of the other stories: they aren’t great art, but they are interesting and/or dynamic pieces. My favourites among the others are Paul Orban’s first illustration for the Hull story and Elton Fax’s³ second for the del Rey. Kramer’s pieces for the Leiber are okay too, bar the one with the badly drawn wolf.
Long Arm of Solar Law by John W. Campbell, Jr. is not so much an editorial as a short science essay about the extent of the Sun’s gravitational influence, how it spreads out beyond our nearest stellar neighbours, and its effect on comets.
The Analytical Laboratory: March 1943 & April 1943 covers two months, and I discussed these results in the reviews of those issues.⁴
Sea of Mystery by Willy Ley is an interesting article on the Sargasso Sea, how it features in history and literature, its ecology, and so on. It concludes with an account of the life-cycle of eels, which lay their eggs on the ocean floor in that region.
Brass Tacks only has a few letters this issue. New reader Art Rapp, from Saginaw, MI, notes that, judging by the way copies of Astounding disappear from his newsstand, he doesn’t expect his comments to have any influence. He has this to say about Kramer’s artwork:

Although I don’t usually care for serials, anything of Van Vogt’s is bound to be good—and this promises to be no exception. Alas, however—it is losing much of its effect through poor illustration. Kramer has talent for depicting machinery, but why does the poor guy in the Page 30 cut wear the same costume as his remote ancestors?  p. 160

I think I may have made a similar observation. Rapp later raves about Mimsy Were the Borogroves.
Bill Buhmiller of Eureka, MO, however, doesn’t:

Maybe in my undeveloped stage of adolescence I have not yet developed the necessary imagination that is required for the consumption of some of the stories that are printed in your “sometimes” excellent magazine. I am referring to the stories like “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” and “The Twonky,” neither one which made very much sense. But what’s the idea? I don’t get the drift.  p. 162

Campbell replies (or pre-replies) that he thinks they are “interesting, off-trail ideas, rather neat little horrors.”
The last letter is from Anthony Boucher and comments on his story Pelagic Spark:

I’ve been noticing how often science and fantasy fiction writers use for their setting a future world resulting from an Axis victory; and I’d like to put in a word of defense before the Writers’ War Board or some such jumps on us as defeatists.
We are not, thank God, prophets. We don’t write what we feel sure is going to happen, but what, under certain circumstances, might happen. Our futures are so many possible Worlds-of-If evolving out of this present.
Now we aren’t expecting an Axis victory, any more than we are expecting world-wide tidal waves or planetary collisions or the invasion of little green men from Alpha Centauri. These disasters are all, with varying probabilities, present in one or more of the possible Worlds-of-If.
And the more we write about ingenious ruses by which the Axis secures victory—in this story the development of a race-conscious American appeasement party—the less apt those ruses are to succeed, and the more certain we can be that my sons and your daughter will inherit, in deepest truth, the best of all Possible Worlds.  p. 162

This is quite a good issue. Although there is nothing that particularly stands out (apart from Leiber’s serial), there is a lot of good if minor and/or flawed work.  ●

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1. Kuttner and Moore based their recent story Mimsy Were the Borogoves (Astounding, February 1943, my review here) on Lewis Carroll’s poem Jabberwocky. Along with the beginning of this story (talking rabbits), you rather wonder if they were on a Charles Dodgson kick at the time.

2. ISFDB seems to have conflated A. Williams with English fan Arthur Williams, who did a couple of covers for the fanzine Futurian War Digest. The difference in style is probably enough to indicate they are not the same person (and the idea that an English artist was doing interior illustrations for Astounding from the other side of a U-boat infested Atlantic isn’t likely either).

3. Elton Fax may be Astounding’s first black contributor. He appeared in the magazine from November 1942 to November 1943, and would reappear briefly in Weird Tales during 1944. He has a page at ISFDB, and there are articles about him at Flying Cars and Food Pills, Pulp Artists, and Black Past.

4. The Analytical Laboratory results for this issue appeared in the September one:

I think that the del Rey story should have been where Smith’s is.  ●