The essence of the thing is that, naturally, the Russians get plans of the machine, and they, too, start asking questions. Nature had to be taught to answer questions in English, of course; somebody suddenly discovers that nature talks Russian, now, too.
The repercussions of Security are wonderful at that point naturally.
But then Nature responds with a neat detail of how-to-do-it with some remark that “as tried out at Borschtograd” and given freely without stint of Russia’s most secret work. Nature’s most useful as a computing machine, outstrip-ping the best electronic devices by six orders of magnitude, everybody’s feeding their secret weapons figures into the teletypers for answers.
I think it would be rather wonderful the way Security tempers would rise.
The howls of anguish when it was discovered that Nature couldn’t keep a secret.
Tsk, Tsk. Ain’t it awful.
I think we could have fun and hilarity with this item. The teletyper is, of course, the poor physical scientist. But in this guise the problem of what to do about science would suddenly loom somewhat different.
Regards, John
Will, with his fascination with gadgets and extensive scientific reading, wrote fictional descriptions of a number of other inventions, which became desirable or achievable only much later. Will describes a power-generating space station in a very early story, “Power Planet,” which appeared in the January 1931 edition of Amazing Stories.
Robert Silverberg points out that the idea of beaming electricity down to Earth from satellites is getting major attention today. He quotes a report made by the Pentagon in October 2007 in his column “Reflections” in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, published in August 2010. It said that it would provide “affordable, clean, safe, reliable, sustainable, and expandable energy for man kind.” Silverberg adds, “the history of the power-satellite theme in science fiction goes back much farther than that — to 1931, astonishingly, and Murray Leinster’s novelette ‘Power Planet.’” Silverberg continues:
“Power Planet” appeared in the January 1931 issue of the pioneering SF magazine Amazing Stories. The magazine science fiction of that era was mostly pretty creaky work, but “Power Planet,” despite some crude pulp touches, remains surprisingly readable today. It presents us with fiction’s first power-generating space station:
“The Power Planet, of course,” Leinster writes, “is that vast man-made disk of metal set spinning about the sun to supply the Earth with power. Everybody learns in his grammar-school textbooks of its construction just beyond the Moon and of its maneuvering to its present orbit by a vast expenditure of rocket fuel.
Only forty million miles from the sun’s surface, its sunward side is raised nearly to red heat by the blazing radiation. And the shadow side, naturally, is down to the utter cold of space. There is a temperature drop of nearly seven hundred degrees between the two sides, and Williamson cells turn that heat-difference 104
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into electric current, with an efficiency of 99 percent. Then the big Dugald tubes — they are twenty feet long on the Power Planet — transform it into the beam which is focused always on the Earth and delivers something over a billion horsepower to the various receivers that have been erected. The space station itself is ten miles across, and it rotates at a carefully calculated speed so that the centrifugal force at its outer edge is very nearly equal to the normal gravity of Earth. So that the nearer its center one goes, of course, the less is that force, and also the less impression of weight one has.”
This is astonishing stuff for 1931. Where did Leinster/Jenkins get the idea?
In “The Wabbler,” Will’s first story for John Campbell, ( Astounding Science-Fiction, October 1942), Will described an autonomous underwater robot, which is now in development by a research center for artificial intelligence.
The concept has been explored for everything from NASA–funded research on techniques to explore the ice covered liquid water oceans on Europa, the fifth moon of Jupiter, to develop self-propelled gliders that could be used for long-distance scientific missions, and to expand the realm of possibilities for studies of the oceans.
In The Murder of the U.S.A. , mentioned earlier, Will describes a nuclear attack on the U.S., the Cold War, missiles in their silos, the belts of radar warning and the anti-missile-to-missile problems.
Later, in Space Tug, published by Shasta, 1953, he dreamed up gravity-simulator harnesses, inflatable air locks, magnetic-soled shoes (required for space walks), spaceship ejector seats, and spaceflight simulators in a story about the problems of running a space station.
In describing a gravity-simulator harness, Will wrote:
“When we got back,” Joe told Brown, “we were practically invalids. No exercise up here. This time we’ve brought some harness to wear. We’ve some for you, too...” Joe got out the gravity-simulator harnesses. He showed Brent how they worked. Brown hadn’t official instructions to order their use, but Joe put one on himself, set for full Earth-gravity simulation.
He couldn’t imitate actual gravity, of course. Only the effect of gravity on one’s muscles. There were springs and elastic webbing pulling one’s shoulders and feet together, so that it was as much effort to stand extended — with one’s legs straight out — as to stand upright on Earth. Joe felt better with a pull on his body.
NASA has now developed an orbital exercise machine designed to keep astronauts in shape. It is called the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill, or COLBERT, and was named after comedian Stephen Colbert. When NASA organized an online poll soliciting names for Node 3 of the International Space Station, Colbert’s many fans won the privilege for him but, after much discussion, it was decided to name the treadmill after him instead. The node is called Tranquility after the Sea of Tranquility, Seven • The New York Years: The 1940s
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where Apollo 11 landed on the moon, more in keeping with names of other nodes, Unity and Harmony. In spite of the original concern over the appropriateness of the name, NASA felt the campaign was successful in that it generated welcome attention for the oft-forgotten International Space Station.
Colbert’s fans are known for their activity in trying to get his name in prominent places. He came in first in a 2006 bridge-naming contest in Hun-gary. The country’s government later said it “cannot name the bridge after the comedian because he does not speak Hungarian and is not dead.” This is the kind of story that would hugely amuse Will, and he would have repeated it endlessly.
Thrilling Wonder Stories became another regular market for Murray Leinster stories after they printed “The Eternal Now” in the fall 1944 issue. It was the new name for Wonder Stories after Hugo Gernsback sold it to Standard Magazines in 1936. Will developed a long relationship with Leo Margulies, when he was editor, and later with Oscar Friend and Sam Merwin, Jr., when Startling Stories came on board in 1939. Oscar Friend was Will’s agent for a while.
The June 1947 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories included three stories by Will, each under a different name. The Boomerang Circuit, listed as a novel by Murray Leinster, and “The Nameless Something” under the name William Fitzgerald were featured on the cover. A short story by Will F. Jenkins, “From Beyond the Stars,” was inside.
Will was popular with the magazine’s fans. The same issue’s letters to the editor section had several comments on the previously published story
“The Manless Worlds”: “Some of your readers enjoy fantasy — as for me give me SF (and Murray Leinster). “‘Manless Worlds,’ good SF story with many twists.” “‘Manless Worlds’— Wonderful.” “I was delighted to see ‘The Manless Worlds.’ I have been gnawing my fingernails waiting for a sequel to ‘The Disciplinary Circuit.’”
On the other hand, one reader wrote, “Give Murray a sharp rap across the knuckles and let him try again.”
Will discusses two of the stories in the magazine’s The Story Behind the Story section in Thrilli
ng Wonder Stories.
As Murray Leinster, he writes about The Boomerang Circuit, last in the Kim Rendell trilogy.
In this novelette like the other two (“The Disciplinary Circuit” and “The Manless Worlds”), I was trying to work out the consequences of a mechanical means of Government. It would, uncontrolled, lead to war. But the whole progress of civilization has been a succession of tamings of previously dangerous things. Wild animals and fire were the first two conquests. We have in the 106
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immediate future the need to tame the fissionable nuclei of various explodable elements. But there is a bigger job still. To tame machines.
In the three novelettes I’ve been talking about a machine which takes over most of the functions of government and practically all of its coercive or executive functions. Such a machine, without controls, would be just as dangerous as a chain reaction. That, I tried to make clear.
In this story, to me the most important event is the dropping of those little cases of apparatus on the worlds that tried to wipe out Ades — and, of course, the arrangement that they shall become articles of commerce. They will leave the governments of their worlds with full power to deal with individual criminals, but no power to oppress groups. Full authority for government, but none for oppression.
That limitation not only will be needed in the future, but it’s badly needed right now in some parts of the world. Maybe these three novelettes will start somebody thinking.
The trilogy was published in book form as The Last Spaceship (Frederick Fell, NY, 1949). He writes about The Nameless Something under the name
“William Fitzgerald.”
Bud Gregory fascinates me. Somewhere there’s somebody like him in some fashion or another. I’ve seen what you might call embryo Bud Gregorys more than once.
I’ve seen people who could make much better mousetraps than average, and nobody paid attention, much less beat a path to their door. Somewhere, the answer to an awful lot of problems either rest or lie latent in some human skull, and it will be only luck if they’re pried out.
The fact is the ability to think and the desire to think and accomplish things are only rarely joined together. Most of us know many people who want very desperately to do great things and simply haven’t got the equipment. But some of us, too, know people who have got the equipment and simply don’t bother.
Their superior equipment simply enables them to loaf more and have a better time generally. There’s Bud Gregory, drat him.
I suppose what I have to say about the whole thing is simply, “Do you have a little Bud Gregory in your home?” Somebody has.
Avalon reprinted the story as Out of This World in 1957, and Will tells more on the flyleaf. He says he was inspired by an incident he was told about that supposedly happened at the Harvard Mathematics Department. A young farm boy who had no previous training in math, not even high school, rushed in, excited, and said he had discovered something interesting. The professors, not impressed, took a look, and then another. What he had figured out on his own was one of the greatest discoveries in mathematics — logarithms. He was only a hundred years late.
Thrilling Wonder Stories published several more of Will’s stories in the 1940s including “The Lonely Planet” and “The Lost Race” (published in book Seven • The New York Years: The 1940s
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form as The Duplicators). Will offered “The Lost Race” for an anthology, My Best Science Fiction Story, published by Pocket books in 1954.
In its introduction, “Why I Selected the Lost Race,” he said: It is merely my favorite story at the moment ... I like it because it gives me a chance to talk about so many of my pet theories, of which one or two may even have some sense to them. A moon-rocket is impractical though not impossible at the moment because the fuel is too cheap, by the pound. The best rocket-fuel we’ve got hasn’t too many times the energy-content of coal, and its value per pound is proportionate. Produce a fuel that is really practical and safe for a space ship, and you’ll have a fuel that steamship companies will bid up to almost any price you can name, because with it they can carry cargo in the space now occupied by coal-bunkers and oil-tanks. In terms of light-years of travel, of course, a ship’s fuel will be worth more than the ship itself ! Which is one of the notions I wanted to play with.
Another is the matter of tedium in space-travel. Human beings being what they are, I think that sheer boredom is going to be the second biggest problem awaiting us in space travel, fuel being the first.
“Dead City” (also known as “The Malignant Marauder”) and “De Profundis” were also printed in Thrilling Wonder Stories. “De Profundis,” printed in 1945, was a special favorite of Will’s.
In an article called “Reverie” in Science Fiction Review, April 27, 1964, Will said: “I like it because everybody’s heard of men seeing sea serpents and telling other men, who don’t believe them. “De Profundis” is a story about a sea serpent seeing a man. And he tells the other sea serpents. And they didn’t believe him.”
Will continued to be published in Thrilling Wonder Stories until it shut down in 1954.
Startling Stories, companion magazine to Thrilling Wonder Stories, published a number of Leinster stories including the novel The Man in the Iron Cap in November 1947 later published in book form as The Brain Stealers.
Triple Western, another of the Thrilling group, reprinted Black Sheep in April 1948.
Jack McDevitt, 2006 Nebula winner, remembers all those magazines.
He says:
Somewhere in the mid-forties, at about the age of nine, I fell in love with Thrilling Wonder, Astounding, and Startling, with their dazzling covers, their robots clanking off with half-dressed women, and their rocket ships. Most of all, the rocket ships. Will Jenkins rode one all his life. And those of us who were lucky — or smart — enough to tag along, owe him more than we can ever repay.
If Flash Gordon — my introduction to science fiction — used his magnificent ships to go after crazed dictators and interplanetary pirates, Will showed us what far traveling was really about.
His work was unlike anything I’d seen before. I’m not sure that “First Contact” 108
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was my earliest science fiction story, but it’s the first one that stayed with me.
That kept me up at night. I read it, and wondered why they couldn’t find stories like that to assign in school. And I was never the same. In “A Logic Named Joe,” I had my first encounter with a machine that seemed able to think. Was such a thing possible? He introduced me to time travel, and managed it like nobody else. He made me realize, e.g., that a person who travels into the past need never die, because he can always go back and rescue himself.
He scared the devil out of me with his jungle ants. He took me on my first visit to alternate worlds. He demonstrated that life was much more complicated than I’d been led to believe. He opened doors that I hadn’t realized were shut.
I grew up in South Philadelphia. And I suspect that without him, and his colleagues, I might never have seen what lay beyond the rooftops.
Thank you, Will.
Will knew and respected many of the then current science fiction writers and editors, although few found their way out to his apartment in Beechhurst, Queens. (Rogers Terrill and his wife told of a particularly harrowing trip home from a dinner party at Will and Mary’s involving subway accidents, unspeakable coffee stops and a 3 A.M. arrival home.) One who did make it several times was Ted Sturgeon. His first story in Astounding was published in 1939, and he was a fan of Will’s. Will talked to him about writing, giving his usual tips and suggestions from his own experience. The girls were never banished from adult conversations, and Billee was fascinated by Sturgeon’s accounts of his life in the Merchant Marine. She was particularly interested in the conversations when he discussed his ideas for
“The Chromium Helmet,” published in Astounding in June 1946. In it, engineer Go
dfrey’s daughter has the answer to the reason she and his wife and sister all believe so strongly in wishes that couldn’t be true, but he keeps ignoring her. When Billee had her own children, she remembered what she had learned from that story and tried to listen very carefully to what her children told her.
Once Sturgeon brought over a handful of dough-like material and explained that General Electric had developed it as a possible synthetic rubber, and now no one knew what to use it for. You could squeeze it and make shapes, pull it out, and bounce it on a hard surface. Will reeled off a bunch of possible uses, but it was so much fun no one singled out a practical one.
In 1960, someone thought to name it Silly Putty, put it in a plastic egg, sold it as a toy, and made millions.
For Will, one of the milestones that gave him the most pleasure was bringing science fiction to the slick magazines under his own name. “Symbiosis,” printed in Collier’s, June 14, 1947, was a story of a particularly devious and sophisticated form of biological warfare. In “Doomsday Deferred,” which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, September 24, 1949, we meet the Soldado Ant and wish we hadn’t.
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Later, Robert A. Heinlein, writing in Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy (page 6, St. Martin’s Press, 1991) quoted Will as saying, “Bob, I’ll let you in on a secret. Any story — science fiction or otherwise — if well written, can be sold to the slicks.” Whether this was an influence or not, when Heinlein turned his concentration to the slicks, his career took off.
With his sense of fun, Will came up with an idea specifically addressed to fans and their magazines. It was printed in The Fanscient, issue number 7, Spring 1949, under the section “Author, Author.”
[I am going] to spend the rest of what space is allotted to me urging a stunt I think fans and fan magazines could do for fun and the greater good of science-fiction [ sic]....
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