What the Ellery Queen people did was talk to their contributor Anthony Boucher, then mosdy known as a mystery writer with a few sf stories and fantasies to his credit. Tony proposed what they called The Magazine of Fantasy (the title later broadened to include and Science Fiction, or F&SF for short). They thought it worth trying out. Tentatively. They brought it out as a one-shot, and were pleased enough with the sales to try it again as a quarterly, as a bi-monthly, and ultimately as a monthly.
What the Italian publisher did was to open a New York office and then go looking for magazines to publish. I will not list the magazines because it is too painful; but somehow someone put “science fiction” on the list, and their editor, Vera Cerutti, was appointed to make it happen. Vera didn’t know that much about sf, but she knew that she didn’t, and more than that she knew somehow who did. His name was Horace Gold.
The Golden Age of Gold sounds like either a misfired attempted joke or a Shostakovich ballet, but it was very real. Around 1950, Horace Gold was a prematurely bald man in his mid-30s, somewhat the worse for a World War II disability but well able to cope with the world. Where the coping was difficult it was the world that had to change, not Horace. He had written God’s own quantity of material of all kinds, and among the comic scenarios and the radio scripts and the true detectives there were a few sf stories—not bad, but not great—and a couple of outstanding fantasies: “Trouble with Water,” and above all a fine, tingly novel called None but Lucifer (which, for reasons which cannot possibly be any good, has never appeared in book form, to everyone’s loss).
All this was commendable, but was there anything in that record which qualified Horace Gold to make sf over in a new and better form? If so, it is hard to identify the diagnostic symptom; yet that’s what he did. He wasn’t scientifically trained. His own writing was best where it had least to do with science fiction. But he had two traits that served him well. For one, he had a mind that retained everything; for another, he had persistence that moved mountains. Horace Gold’s chosen weapon was the telephone. There are few writers active in sf in the decade of the ‘50s who do not remember the phone ringing at any hour, at all hours, and Horace’s voice picking up a month-old conversation about writing a story or revising one without missing a beat.
His new magazine was called Galaxy. It began with a burst of bombastic promises about a new kind of science fiction. The funny thing was that it made them good. In its first years it published any number of wise and witty and wonderful stories—by Alfred Bester, Fritz Leiber, William Tenn, Robert Sheckley, Robert A. Heinlein (wooed away from Astounding), Clifford D. Simak (coaxed out of semiretirement), and countless others. Very few of those writers set out to write for 8
Galaxy. Even fewer intended to write the stories they ultimately published. Mountie-like, Horace Gold tracked them down wherever they hid and made them stand and deliver. I mean no denigration of him when I say that he himself suggested relatively few stories to his writers. (There are exceptions, including one of the most successful of my own.) But Horace’s talent was not tutorial. It was obstetrical. When he came at you with those forceps, the story got born. Nearly every one of those early stories has appeared in the best sf anthologies, some of them a dozen times and more; a publisher offered a not-so-small fortune, not long ago, for the privilege of reprinting all those issues verbatim; and that’s what Horace Gold did, all by himself.
And uptown at the offices of The Magazine of Fantasy, Tony Boucher and his sidekick, J. Francis McComas, were doing something rather similar with a quite different list of writers. Their notion was that it was possible to merge the two previously disparate streams of science fiction: the literary-humanist tradition (the novels of Wells, Olaf Staple-don, S. Fowler Wright, and others) and the gimmicky, highflying, innovative, adventurous sf of the pulps. They made it happen. They broadened the universe of discourse for sf writers to include everything there is. Nothing was off limits. No concept could not be explored.
If this seems like a small tiling, consider what the world was like in those days of the early ‘50s. It was the Joe McCarthy era in the United States. Dissent was penalized. Careers were being blasted. In those years, when senators and Presidents headed for the storm cellar, when journalists and statesmen guarded their tongues, science fiction was the home of free speech—almost the only public forum there was, for some people, in some ways. One still meets graying ministers and scientists who remember those 1950s issues of Galaxy and F6-SF with eternal gratitude, for letting them think about the unthinkable when it was costly to speak out loud.
But that Camelot ended, too, with a whimper. All golden ages come to an end. Pericles met the Peloponnesian War; the Caesars lost out to Alaric and the barbarians. What defeated that golden age of science fiction was a stock manipulation.
It was one of those front-office things we have seen before, but on a heroic and catastrophic scale. Magazine publishers do not deliver their publications to your local newsstand themselves. They employ intricate chains of distributors and wholesalers to do the job. Until the mid-1950s there were two major channels for national distribution: the collective resources of a dozen independents and their wholesalers on the one hand, and on the other the massive, ancient American News Company with its countless subsidiaries.
In the mid-1950s a stock investor looked upon the American News balance sheet and found it good. Over the decades it had acquired vast equities in restaurants and warehouses and real estate, and all of those assets had been bought when the world was young and prices were low. You could buy up the stock, he mused, and sell off all the assets, and close up the company, and come out with a ruddy fortune. And so he did. ANC was liquidated, and dealt the magazine business in general a blow from which it has never recovered —as anyone can see who has tried to buy a copy of Look or Collier’s lately.
So science-fiction magazines were done in, most of them. There were 37 titles at the peak of the boom in the 1950s; at last count, there were perhaps half a dozen struggling to stay alive. There’s still plenty of science fiction—in books. But the magazines are only a shadow…
It could be different. A new publisher to take a chance. Another Campbell, or a latter-day Gold. Some bright new ideas, and some bright new writers to make them real . , . But that’s another story, and a different Golden Age!
Rafferty’s Reasons
I wrote this story twice—once when I was in my early 20s, when it went the rounds of the magazines without connecting, and again 10 or 15 years later, when 1 came across the yellowed sheets and decided I knew what I had done wrong the first time, and could do it right the second. When I finished it I was quite pleased with it. It happened that that same day I finished another story with which 1 was not very pleased at all. I sent both of them to my favorite editor, with a note saying, “You’ll like one of these, I’m sure, but the other I have doubts about and I won’t be disappointed if you reject it.” By return mail came a manuscript, a check and a letter saying, “Boy, were you right!” Only he bought the wrong one.
It was the year of the projects, and nearly Election time. Vote for Mudgins! screamed the posters. He put us back to work!
Even Rafferty was back at work, taken off the technological dole, and he sat there in his boss’s office, looking at him and hating him. Fat old John Girty, his boss. A Mudgins man from the old Fifth Precinct days, a man with the lowest phase number in the state.
“Riffraff!” Girty stormed. “A good job is wasted on a bum like you. You wish you were back on relief!”
Rafferty only nodded, his face full of misery, his heart black murder.
“Mark my words, you'll wreck the whole project!” Girty said ominously. “And when the Projects go, the Machine will come back.”
Rafferty nodded again. He wasn’t listening, although he appeared to be. He was watching his hand on the desk. The hand was moving, crawling slowly over the chipped plastic top like a thick-legged spider. It was crawling toward a letter opener.
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�Take warning, Rafferty,” said Girty. “You’re a troublemaker. Thank heaven I’ve got a few loyal workers in the Project, to tell me about skunks like you! Don’t let me hear about any complaints from you again. If you don’t like your job, you can quit.” Of course, he couldn’t, and Girty knew it. But it was a way to end the conversation, and he turned and stalked out of the room.
Rafferty sat there, watching his hand, but it was only a hand again. His hand, weak and helpless like himself; and the letter opener was only a letter opener. He got up after a while and leaned absently against the hooded computer that could have unemployed them all—if it weren’t for Mudgins and his New Way. You couldn’t say he was thinking, exactly, although there was a lot to think about in the silent computer under its sealed plastic cover. But he couldn’t be doing that.
Not under the New Way.
It as half an hour before Rafferty opened his books again, before he dipped his pens in the red ink and the black ink and wrote down the figures. If Rafferty was capable of pride he was proud of the way he kept the Project’s books. Machines had taught him how to keep books, and even Mudgins granted that machines were useful for that sort of thing. The dark fever inside him slowly receded, and the artist that lived in Rafferty, the creator inside of every man, admired the cool, neat numbers that he made.
He lived with the cool numbers all the long afternoon. (Vote for Mudgins and the Ten-Hour Day! the slogans said.) And they calmed him. But when the end of the day came and fat John Girty came out of his office and took down his black hat and walked out, without a smile, without a word—
Then it was that the black heat inside Rafferty surged up again, and the smoke of it bit his nostrils. Not for ten minutes did he get up to leave himself, not until all the others had gone and no one was there to see him tremble as he walked out with a look of utter desperation in his eyes.
Rafferty walked past the lines of tables, walked up the slideway, and to the far corner of the balcony before he put down his tray. All by himself he sat there, as far as he could get from the other people who were eating their Evening Issue meal. He sat down and ate what was before him, not caring what it was or how it tasted, for everything tasted alike to Rafferty. All bitter with the bitterness that is the taste of hatred.
“I hate him,” Rafferty said woodenly. “I would like very much to kill him. I think it would be nice to kill him. Fat Girty, some day I will kill you.”
Rafferty talked to himself, hardly making a sound, never moving his lips. It wasn’t thinking out loud, because it wasn’t thinking, only talking, and it was not out loud. Wherever he was, Rafferty talked to himself. No one heard him, no one was meant to hear him.
“I hate your lousy guts,” Rafferty would say, and the man beside him would smile and bob his head and never know that Rafferty had said anything at all.
He would talk to people who weren’t there. When he first went on the Projects, Rafferty thought that some day he would say those things to people. Now he knew that he would never say them to anyone but himself.
“You are a cow,” Rafferty said. He was talking to Girty, who wasn’t anywhere near the New Way cafeteria where the Projects personnel ate. “You say I’m a troublemaker, when I only want tiiem to leave me alone. You think I make mistakes with the numbers in the books. I don’t. I never make mistakes when I write down numbers and add them. But you think I do.”
If Girty had been there, he would have denied it—because how could Rafferty make mistakes after the machines had taught him? But Girty wasn’t there, and the rest of the people around Rafferty in the cafeteria went on eating and talking and reading, except for a few as silent and solitary as Rafferty himself. None of them heard him.
Rafferty picked up the big dish and put it away from him, picked up a smaller dish and put it down in front of him, touched a fork to the soggy but vitamin-rich and expertly synthesized pie.
“Your secretary,” said Rafferty in his silent voice, “she makes mistakes, though. Perhaps I should kill her too, cow.”
Rafferty finished the pie and went down the stairs.
“You blame me for everything,” Rafferty said, pushing silently through the crowd at the coffee-beverage um. He put a Project-slug in the slot and held the lever down while his cup filled with three streams of fluid, one black, one white, one colorless. “You don’t treat me right, cow,” he said, and turned away.
A man jostled him and scalding pain ran up Rafferty’s wrist as the hot drink slopped over.
Rafferty turned to him slowly. “You are a filthy pig,” he said voicelessly, smiling. “Your mother walked the streets.”
The man muttered, “Sorry,” over his shoulder.
Rafferty sat down at another table with a party of three young Project girls who never looked at him, but talked loudly among themselves.
“I’ll kill you, Girty,” Rafferty said, as he stirred the coffee-beverage and drank it.
“Ill kill you, Girty,” he said, and went home to his dormitory bed.
John Girty said peevishly: “I want you all to try to act like human beings this morning. We have an important visitor from Phase Four.”
The Project nodded respectfully and buckled down to work and when the important visitor arrived and stood with Girty, looking over the busy room, not even Rafferty looked up.
But the visitor looked at Rafferty, and said something in an undertone to Girty. “Oh, well, of course,” said Girty. “We get all kinds here. That one has a bad record. He was some kind of an artist, or picture painter, or something like that under the Old Way. They take a lot of work, those marginal ones, and, as you see, they’re likely to turn out sullen.”
The visitor said something again and Girty laughed. “He might not like it,” he said with heavy, angry humor. “Heaven help us all if we ran this Project the way he likes. But come on into my private office. You’ll be interested in our overtime schedule—”
They were gone, and Girty was right, Rafferty did not resent the way they talked about him, no more than St. Lawrence, roasting on his grid, would have resented a sneering word from his torturers. Rafferty hadn’t the scope left to resent small injuries.
The electronic call-me-up whispered on old Miss Sandburg’s desk, and she limped into Girty’s office, clutching her stenographer’s pad as though it might bite. She was a sour one too, for all she was second in command of the Project office. She had been a wife and a mother once, and they said that she didn’t really want to work. But she worked, of course.
Rafferty sat hunched over his books, looking at John Girty’s door without turning his head. He saw old Ellen Sandburg go in, and saw her come out again ten minutes later, with the spiderweb lines sharper around her eyes, and the white lips pressed hard together. “You are a slave,” Rafferty said without a sound. “You let him bully you because you like to be a slave. But I don’t.”
But he was working with the cool numbers then, and he lost himself. The zeroes and fives and decimals moved in orderly progression, and there was no hate in them, nothing but chill straightness that never changed.
Only at three o’clock in the afternoon when he had to take the Saturday payroll into fat John Girty’s office to be checked and verified, did the coolness fall away and leave him burning. “I won’t kiss your foot,” said Rafferty, and opened the door without knocking. “I’m as good as you are, cow,” said Rafferty, and dumped the carton of pay envelopes silently on Girty’s desk.
But Girty hardly looked at him, only grunted with his fat, angry cow’s grunt and thumbed irritably dirough the envelopes. But when Rafferty went back to his desk the numbers would not go right. They were hot red and smoldering black, and they swirled and bloated before his stinging eyes. He sat there and watched them swirl and swell as fat as fat John Girty. He just sat there, Rafferty did, holding his pen over the ledger, moving his fingers as though he were writing, but never touching pen to paper until five o’clock, early Saturday quitting time.
Then fat John Girty came out of his offi
ce and dumped the pay envelopes on Rafferty’s desk again, and took his hat and left. The clerks and the girls put away their papers, and took their coats from where they had hidden them behind the sheeted bookkeeping machines and lined up before Rafferty’s desk to get their pay.
“The Project pays you to work, not to collect money.” That was what Girty said. “On the Project’s time you work. You get paid on your own time. You get off early on Saturdays anyhow.”
It wasn’t fair. But all Rafferty could do when Girty went out of the office was to stare after him for a second, with his own hot, black heart showing in his eyes, and try to rush through handing out the payroll.
‘You’re a coward, Girty,” he said without a sound, and handed a fat yellow envelope of Project-vouchers and Project-slugs to Ellen Sandburg.
“You know that I hate your guts, so you run away,” he said. “But it won’t help you, cow. You can run away. But I can catch you.”
Fifteen minutes start John Girty had. No more. But it took Rafferty over an hour to make it up. An hour of looking in all the expensive, free-market restaurants where Girty might be, pressing his forehead against the glass like an urchin on Christmas day, only with the blackness coming out of no urchin’s eyes.
The streets were packed, and crowds bumped against Rafferty, some careless and impolite, some doddering and apologetic, and once or twice a man as bleak and frozen as Rafferty himself.
It was weekend going-out night, and every street comer had its Mudgins Demonstrator on his flag-draped platform, frightening the passersby with prophecies of the return of Unemployment and the Machine. Rafferty noticed that he was hungry, but he didn’t have time to eat, not while he was looking for fat John Girty and while the letter opener was secretly fondled in his pocket.
In the Problem Pit Page 13