The Worlds of George O

by George O. Smith

  So the bureau that wanted the maintenance and repair manuals went through the Naval Development Research Council, who, in conjunction with the Office of Scientific Research and Development, contracted with the University of Southern California, Los Angeles campus, to start a crash program to produce these manuals.

  UCLA promptly ran into an interesting difficulty. Seems yes, 'twas true, there are a lot of writers in Hollywood and environs, and what they knew about rescuing the heroine from a fate worse than death and getting her into the sack with the hero was one thing, but none of them had ever gone to bed with an electron. Well, that was that; return to GO and start over

  again. So the selected group of professors of rhetoric, lexicography, and electronic physics left California to come east, where the best-known and highly recommended publishers of technical books could be found. They picked McGraw-Hill, and hired Keith Henney, the editor of

  Handbook for the Radio Engineer. Keith Henney, a long-time science fiction reader, promptly hired John W. Campbell, who promptly got in touch with those that he knew had technical background and experience, and invited them in.

  In July 1944, I moved east. Housing, in 1944, wasn't merely impossible; it didn't exist.

  John suggested that if I didn't mind sleeping on a pull-out bed-sofa, I could stay there until I could find a suitable place to live.

  Once more I went into a change of living. Where I'd been hauled into John's cellar once each month, it became every night and the entire weekend. But even that pattern began to change, for very good reasons. The first was that John didn't want to become an engineer, all he wanted was the technical knowledge that would enable him to build stuff in his workshop for his own amusement and a possible profit if he could sell an article. It has been said that the best engineer, in any field, is the one who knows more things that won't work, and why, than his fellows. John had a good beginning with his earlier misguided attempts. Now, with help, he wasn't just trying everything in mind, only those things that sounded reasonable, and most of my time was explaining just why this or that either wouldn't work or was not too good an idea. The other reason is that it had been nine years since I'd swapped my collection of radio parts for my camera and had given up home electronics, and I wasn't about to dive back in.

  In that summer, John developed a habit that made me hoarse. As the train loaded up in Westfield, John would ask, "But why can't... work?" and the train would take off with a roar, and I'd spend to the next station at the top of my voice explaining. As things quieted down, he'd pose another question.

  But mostly, during the latter part of that summer of 1944, John tinkered until he ran into trouble, and that's how I spent my time in his cellar, getting him out of trouble. As he grew more experienced--that is, discovered more things that wouldn't work--his need became less, and I began to use his typewriter instead of his soldering iron.

  Here it becomes necessary to take a look at the distaff side of the family. What did Dona Campbell think of all this?

  As I said, John's operations were his way of life, and he'd been at it since before he graduated. Dona put up with it, or possibly had become used to it. Let's put it in a series of sentences. For example, John did not drink, but he didn't object if his wife had some of her neighbor friends over for Saturday-afternoon cocktails, so long as he wasn't involved. Or she went to one of the neighbors' houses--and one of John's projects when I arrived was a wired-radio pickup system with the transmitter in the kid's room and the receiver with Dona up or down the block.

  Then, one weekend afternoon, with the living room full of neighbors, I had to go to the--well, Campbell used to get fluffy over the misuse of his name, so I won't say it--and on my way back, I was asked if I'd stay and have a drink. I didn't reply, "I thought you'd never ask me," but about three hours later, John came up to ask about something and found me in the kitchen, where I'd taken over the task of refilling the glasses.

  In that early autumn of 1944, things took another change. The Heinleins (Robert A. and wife) and the Campbells had for long celebrated a birthday coincidence in September. Bob Heinlein had been Navy Reserve, and at the outbreak of the war (and possibly earlier, although I'm not quite sure) he'd asked for a reinstatement of his commission, been refused for medical reasons, but had been accepted as a civilian employee at the Philadelphia Naval Yard. With them came L. Sprague de Camp and wife, and it became a very merry weekend. It closed with an invitation that I visit Philadelphia the following week to attend a house-warming party, which was another merry weekend.

  In the meantime, Henry Kuttner and C. L Moore were living in a house in Hastings-on-Hudson. One of the writers of the Campbell Troupe in the UCLA installation in the Empire State Building was one L. Jerome Stanton, a former radio telegrapher who'd taken the pitcher to the well once too often on the Murmansk run--the ship took a stick of bombs across the foredeck and, happily, the one that landed next to the radio shack was a dud. L. Jerome got out; the next one might go off. He was, and is, an excellent guitar and banjo player, so he was always welcome. In October I found a house in Scarsdale, warmed it up properly, and started to live socially. Somewhere, I don't recall exactly where. Theodore Sturgeon, who had been running a D-7 'Dozer down in the Virgin Islands for a Seabee battalion, wrote the novelette "Daisy Etta," which is a sort of pun since it's the way the Islanders say D-7. John changed it to Killdozer, since puns in Latin-American Spanish aren't likely to be understood in the United States unless one pauses to explain why they're funny.

  Among-them-present now-and-then was A. Bertram Chandler, who was first officer in the British Merchant Marine--the "Wavy-Navy." He used to turn up with a couple of rations of H. M. naval stores when his ship hit New York. On one such occasion, with L. Jerome on the banjo and Ted Sturgeon on the guitar, I was giving my bathroom baritone a go on "Abdul Abulbul Ameer," and at the end Chandler said, in his BBC accent, "I say!

  I've never heard that version!" The musicians started over again, and Jack Chandler came out with about the rawest, dirtiest version of anything I'd ever heard--and that's the only way he'd ever heard the epic sung.

  And so autumn went into winter with the social life going on fine, here and there and back and forth in a cheerful, closed, merry group that included Will Jenkins (Murray Leinster) now and then, and Isaac Asimov, infrequently.

  By that same late autumn, the war in the Pacific had become a matter of time. The war effort hadn't slowed down, indeed, it was going ahead as fast as it could, because slowing down when you're ahead is what the hare did. But there were plans to take care of things when the shooting stopped, and one of these plans was to prepare for the occupation of Japan by setting up a school to train interim military governors. They set it up at Princeton.

  Now, Lafayette Ronald Hubbard had been an adventurer and a soldier of fortune, and he was a skilled seaman, and one of the areas he knew very well was the Aleutian Islands. During the war, L. Ron Hubbard skippered a number of small warcraft, destroyer escorts and landing craft, personnel or tank or what-have-you, through the Aleuts, and had gone through some shooting scrapes, since the Aleuts lie uncomfortably close to the enemy's home territory and the enemy had, at one time, invested the outland island Attu.

  And Ron, like L. Jerome, had one too close. Unlike L. Jerome, the one too close put L. Ron in the hospital, where, the cheerful fellows they were, they suggested that he might be wise to study Braille.

  Since L. Ron had signed up for the duration, he was sent to the military government school at Princeton, instead of giving him another ship.

  In the background, but seldom part of the bunch, was Fletcher Pratt, far too busy writing about naval warfare, building as his hobby the scale models of whatever warships he could get pictures of plans of. (This collection was purchased and donated to the U. S. Navy by Lt. Commander Marsden Perry after Fletcher died.) Unhappily missing by now was Willy Ley, whom I'd met when John and Willy (during my Cincinnati, Washington, New York trips) had been interviewing Dr. Felix Ehre
nhaft, whose theories on magnetics might have caught John's hobby-riding habit if they had a chance for success. Willy was missing because Willy, wife, and family had gone to Washington because the helicopter had become popular, and one of the finest ways to save horsepower and give the chopper a whopping take-off without that counter-rotation prop in back would be to put a small liquid-fuel rocket on the end of each blade and let the chopper rotate itself.

  So in the summer, autumn, and winter of 1944, my whole attitude changed. I'd been reading the stuff written by the names I met in that period, but now here I was, both socially and professionally accepted by them.

  This had its backlash, and I must recount another event that I shall spend as little time upon as I can. I'd been raised in my own home on the South Side of Chicago that my mother held together by hook and by crook until she died in 1930 after a long illness. From 1930 to 1935 I lived in rooming houses, and I hated them but that was what I had. One of the pleasures of life was to sit on the front steps in the evening. When things began to turn toward the better in 1935, I mentioned the fact that my job was way the hell up on the far West Side and that it was silly of me A) to live on the South Side with an hour elevated ride, that B) I was sick and tired of living in a four-by-six room with one window looking out on an air shaft, and C) I was tired of living alone and if I found someone who agreed with A, felt the same way as I did about B, I'd suggest C and we'd cancel all three of them. No, I wasn't introduced to her. We'd met all along, before. But, there being a distinction, I now met my first wife.

  Skipping the middle, it was not until the social fraternization began, with weekend party after weekend party, that it came unglued. For there are two reasons for wanting a home and a place. One is a home with the latchstring out, the windows open, and coffee, tea, or 100 proof to the visitor who enters. The other is a castle with the drawbridge raised, the portcullis closed, and boiling transformer oil to pour down upon he who has the temerity to rap upon the closed and barred door.

  Selah!

  * * * *

  To clear the air, let me tell you a tale. It was in the rolling-around period toward the last of the war, and Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore were beginning to think about going back to Los Angeles (Their home had been rented, which is why they stayed in Hastings-on-Hudson for the duration). L.

  Jerome, Theodore the Sturgeon, and some of the rest had been invited to a sort of pre-call house-cooling party for Saturday. Hank suggested that if I weren't busy, why not come out Friday, because he wanted to talk about something that would be better off without a noisy gang.

  The subject wasn't much. He'd heard about fire lanes cut in the woods to fight forest fires, and he knew that I'd been raised in the Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota areas, and--although no one will believe me today--I was once a Boy Scout. Hank wanted to know how-come they sometimes used dynamite, and I explained that fire lanes take a long time to cut.

  Okay, Friday night passed quietly.

  I now admit that I am one of those wholly unbearable people who waken at the first sign of sunshine and, as Fred Pohl once said, "At six o'clock in the morning, he's making home-fried potatoes and cooking four pounds of bacon..." and so I awoke and couldn't find the Kuttners' four pounds of bacon, nor the potatoes, and while I was wondering where the coffee, tea, et cetera was, two things took place. Hank came feeling his way downstairs, and, as he located the coffee, the typewriter upstairs began to make noises. One half hour, maybe three-quarters, we'd had our morning coffee, and Hank said something about going upstairs and getting dressed.

  He disappeared.

  They didn't pass each other on the stairs, but Catherine turned up very shortly afterward, reconstructed the coffee, which Hank and I had finished, and I had my second wake-up with her--with the typewriter going on at the same rate upstairs. Once more, say three-quarters of an hour passed, and Catherine said something about getting into day clothes, and disappeared. Hank came down, dressed, and said something cheerful about breakfast--with the typewriter going on as usual. This went on. They worked at it in shifts, in relays, continuously, until about two o'clock that Saturday afternoon, when the one downstairs did not go upstairs when the one upstairs came down. This time the typing stopped.

  They had been writing the novelette "Vintage Season" which was about time travelers who came back to witness some awful epidemic of some sort of plague that was so contagious that the city authorities dynamited plague lanes.

  I learned later, from John, that they always worked that way, and worked so well at it that the only way he could tell who had written what was if the word "gray" came in the story. One of them habitually spelled it "grey."

  L. Jerome and Ted Sturgeon turned up late in the afternoon, and once more we had a merry weekend.

  It was Sunday afternoon when I was asked why I didn't write more, and I told them that the job of preparing technical manuals took some of the steam out of me, and besides, the day was too damned short. That started a discussion with Hank Kuttner, Ted Sturgeon, and me re-doing Life. We were to have a thirty-hour day, nine days a week, and so on and on until we'd run out of alterations. At which point, L. Jerome put the guitar down with the remark that "If we were to wake up tomorrow morning with eight fingers on each hand, by noontime some guy would have invented a twelve-string guitar."

  It was also about the period when it was considered possible that we could exist on Venus and Mars, although it was generally accepted that native extraterrestrial life did not exist in this solar system, and one began to wonder what, if any, good are the other planets.

  I got to pondering, and tried the following under the title "The Plumber's Helper," but it didn't go at the time. Later, in the period after the war, I tried it again, under a new title and with new characters. This time it worked, but it goes here now because it was in this period that the idea came to me that, if one tries, one can find a use for anything.

  As Don Channing said, "The navel is a good place to hold the salt when eating celery in bed."

  The Planet Mender

  I

  She looked at Phil Watson thoughtfully. "You're the most restless man I've ever met," she told him.

  Phil smiled sourly. "Sorry," he said. "I'm--just always looking, I guess." He tried to straighten up his smile because he wanted this date to run off happily. The attempt only pointed out his unease.

  "What are you looking for?" asked Louise.

  "Damned if I know," he said. He contemplated her thoughtfully. She was a good looking woman of about twenty-three or thereabouts, brunette, slender, high-breasted, and long-legged. Pretty, but no startling beauty, he decided. Brains she must have, and Phil's interest lifted for a moment as he wondered how she used them. She was a schoolteacher. It had been a long time since Phil Watson had been in a position to observe how a schoolteacher used her brains, and then he had not been intellectually equipped to study the process. He smiled wistfully, then, and started to say,

  "Everything seems so staid and uneventful. I--"

  The music from the radio came to a dreamy halt, and the voice of the announcer said, "This is the Mars-Week program, brought to you by the Mars Chamber of Commerce. Remember to stay tuned to this station; be sure that you don't miss the announcement of the century! Some time this week--within the next few days--the one billionth space traveler will set foot on Mars! So be ready for the Mars-wide celebration. Be ready to greet the one billionth person! Who will it be? Who will be the--"

  * * * *

  Phil walked over and turned the radio off. "That's partly what I mean, I think,"

  he said, and then joined Louise Hannon's rueful laugh. He added. "That's no less addled than I am."

  "I know," she said.

  "I wonder if you do," he murmured. "Look, Louise. Here we sit in a city on Mars waiting for the one billionth visitor. It should be wonderful. It ought to be a breathless moment--something soul-stirring. So what do we have?

  A radio program doing its best to whip up some enthus
iasm for something that would have made people bug-eyed a hundred years ago."

  Louise nodded solemnly. "A hundred years ago it was the first man on Mars. That was exciting. But you can't go on and on in a breathless state forever. What do you want?"

  "A little excitement. Everything's so smooth and well-controlled. Mars was an adventurous place back then. Now? Now we have a planet full of bank clerks and farmers and machinists and hot water and gin mills and apartments and--"

  "You'd prefer it if we had to hack our lives out of the planet's crust, fighting the cold nights and the thin air and the arid red desert?"

  Phil shook his head. "That's where my seeking falls flat on its face. I like my comforts, too... but there ought to be something left to chance."

  Louise laughed. "In other words you want to hang your cake on the wall after your dessert?"

  "Maybe. Maybe."

  Louise went to the French doors and looked out on the Martian landscape. It was dark. Hazy-dark, with just enough luminosity at the horizon to show the flatness of the land. She took a deep breath and lifted her arms to the night air. Her gesture was unconsciously alluring, and Phil went over to stand beside her. He put an arm around the slenderness of her waist and turned her to face him. Her arms came down, her hands squeezed his shoulders gently; but she held herself at arms' length from him, leaning back and looking solemnly into his eyes.

  "You're seeking romance and adventure," she told him. "And I represent--which?"

  Phil felt some of the wind go out of his sails. Lamely, he said, "Which will you have?"

  She leaned forward suddenly and pecked him chastely on the lips. "A little romance first--and then the adventure of motherhood," she told him.

  "Is that enough?"

  These were not exactly the plans that Phil had in mind, but he could not tell her so. Besides, she knew darned well already.