Campbell had also requested a contribution from Asimov, who wrote two stories that were promptly rejected. Asimov was annoyed by this, and he decided to try just one more time. The resulting story, “Time Pussy,” didn’t take him long to finish, and he was done by early afternoon. Asimov turned on the radio in the apartment, keeping the volume low so that he wouldn’t disturb his father, who was taking a nap in the next room. Just before three o’clock, the music cut out and was replaced by a news bulletin. It was December 7, 1941.
III.
The Invaders
1941–1945
In a short war, invention has no time to apply its full weight; in a long-term conflict, the role of inventive ingenuity will be powerful, if not ultimately decisive. In as thoroughly unpleasant a world as we now inhabit, there’s a definite element of comfort in that. A people with the record of inventive ability that Americans have proven can, if forced to it, make of itself a most terrible enemy.
—JOHN W. CAMPBELL, ASTOUNDING, JANUARY 1941
7.
A Cold Fury
1941–1944
You’ve told me that I was your best writer—but I’m also a slightly antiquated crack gunnery officer; I ought to just fit on some slightly antiquated guns. We can afford to take a chance that guns will do a little more toward winning the war than my stories would.
—ROBERT A. HEINLEIN, IN A LETTER TO JOHN W. CAMPBELL
Campbell heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor in a phone call from Heinlein. When the telephone rang at his house that evening, he could tell from the sound of the ring that it was long distance, which told him what to expect before he even answered. As a result, he seemed so unemotional at the news that Heinlein felt obliged to say, “I’m not kidding, you know.”
After Heinlein told him that he and Leslyn wouldn’t be able to visit for the holidays, Campbell passed the phone to Doña, who said that it was hard to decide what affected her the most—her sadness at their canceled trip or her feelings as an American. John echoed this the next day, writing that he was “gloomy as hell” that the Heinleins weren’t coming. And Doña wrote, “But do, both of you, take very good care of my daughter’s only godparents. They are very precious, to all three of us.”
Heinlein’s call to Campbell was the second one that he had placed. The first had been to the naval personnel office in San Diego, asking to be assigned back to active duty. One of the ships struck in the attack had been the USS Oklahoma, on which Hubbard’s father had served as an assistant gunnery officer, and where Heinlein had sailed on a practice cruise in 1927. At Pearl Harbor, the battleship, which had been believed to be unsinkable, took five torpedoes, with more than four hundred men killed or missing. As Heinlein wrote to Campbell:
Pearl Harbor isn’t a point on a floor game to me—I’ve been there. The old Okie isn’t a little wooden model six inches long; she’s a person to me. . . . And the casualty lists at Oahu are not names in a newspaper to me; they are my friends, my classmates. The thing hit me with such utter sickening grief as I have not experienced before in my life and has left me with a feeling of loss of personal honor such as I never expected to experience.
He was fiercely patriotic, and when the war began, he was racked with guilt at the knowledge that it had caught him as a civilian. His feelings were swiftly transformed into “a cold fury” toward the Japanese: “I not only want them to be defeated, I want them to be smashed. I want them to be punished at least a hundredfold, their cities burned, their industries smashed, their fleet destroyed, and finally their sovereignty taken away from them.” He was under no illusions that he would be allowed at sea—there was scarring on his lungs from tuberculosis—but he badly wanted shore duty. In the magazine, Campbell wrote that Anson MacDonald, Heinlein’s alter ego, was “somewhere in the Pacific,” but this was wishful thinking. And when Ray Bradbury joked that if he were at risk of being drafted he would pretend to be gay, Heinlein was so offended that he refused to speak to him for years.
One member of the team was ready for action. Hubbard, who had been actively preparing for war, heard about the bombing from a “bum” at a cigar store on Eighth Avenue, and he was assigned to the Philippines in December. He made much of his family’s naval tradition, claiming that his father had been the commander of the USS Astoria—in fact, he had been a supply officer—when it returned the ashes of the ambassador Hiroshi Saito to Japan in 1939. Doña wrote admiringly to the Heinleins, “He’ll probably turn up in Greenland, in a typical Ron-like way.”
Asimov was in less of a hurry. While Heinlein, Hubbard, and Campbell saw the war as a chance to fulfill their destinies—a rite of passage that would demonstrate that they were the equals of the competent men of their fiction—Asimov viewed it as a distraction from his chosen path. Unlike the others, he was young enough to be eligible for the draft, so he didn’t need to invent a role for himself. When the war was ready, it would come for him.
But he was still emotionally affected. On the day after the attack, he took “Time Pussy” to Campbell, who accepted it “none too enthusiastically.” At their meeting, Asimov told the editor that he was so furious with the Japanese that he wasn’t really mad at Hitler anymore—a sentiment that struck Campbell as faintly amusing when uttered by a Russian Jew. For the next two months Asimov wrote nothing at all, and he spent much of his time riveted to the radio.
As air raid drills were conducted in New York, Campbell prepared a bomb shelter in his basement, and his family geared up for the war effort. Several years earlier, his father had been promoted to outside plant engineer in the Operation and Engineering Department of AT&T, placing him in charge of emergency stocks of materials and preparations against sabotage. His sister Laura, who had returned from Paris, was preparing to join her new husband at a diplomatic posting in Nigeria, while Doña organized a Red Cross class for women in their neighborhood.
The only one who seemed unsure of his place was Campbell himself. He wrote to Heinlein, “My own status is somewhat confusing to me now. The optimum application of my efforts would seem to be somewhere in the propaganda line—which is notoriously overcrowded. The present work is, it seems to me, a form of indirect propaganda, and probably about as useful a station as I could find anywhere.” Unlike Heinlein, who had a position for himself in mind, Campbell had never come to any conclusion, although he had long mulled over his potential role in the war.
At first Heinlein sympathized with his uncertainty. He agreed that Campbell, given his age and medical history, wouldn’t make good “cannon fodder,” but he was ready with a counterproposal: “I suppose it has already occurred to you that there might be a spot for you in the national research program. In spite of the fact that you have been out of lab work for a number of years, it ought to be your field of greatest usefulness, and I hear they are shorthanded.”
Campbell agreed that his best contribution might be as a head of research—a kind of encyclopedic synthesist. He was realistic enough about his qualifications, however, to know that his chances of landing such a position were nonexistent. Aside from his stint at Pioneer Instruments, he had minimal lab experience, and the skills that he used to generate ideas at Astounding were modest compared to what it would take to run projects within the military.
He was also worried that his magazines would die without him. In response, Heinlein made an extraordinary suggestion: “Of course, it would be kinda rough on Street & Smith for you to go into research or such, but, as has been pointed out a long time ago, Doña could do just as good a job of editing, if she had to, as you do. With a maid-cook at home she would keep those two books going, quality high and making money, for the duration.”
Heinlein went on to propose that Leslyn and Doña run the magazines together—a remarkable acknowledgment of their uncredited roles in their husbands’ careers. Campbell was less bullish, writing to Heinlein, “I doubt [Doña would] get the job, which would be stupidity on the part of S&S. She hasn’t written anything, hasn’t edited, has no reputation or p
roof of ability in that line that’s official. We know—but they may not.” In the margin, Doña wrote, “Ha! Such is the power of love.” But she also pointed out that finding someone to watch the baby was easier said than done.
A new source of tension soon arose. After the outbreak of hostilities, Campbell had appointed himself the resident expert at the office, where he pulled out maps to explain the situation to his coworkers. In the process, he heard criticisms of the military’s lack of preparedness, including some from Fletcher Pratt, who remarked that “the British once shot an admiral for a lesser dereliction of duty” than Pearl Harbor. Campbell passed his comments along to Heinlein, who became livid, saying that it came “perilously close to giving aid and comfort to the enemy.”
The editor missed the hint, writing back to repeat the same points, while adding a few of his own. It prompted a pair of savage replies from the Heinleins, which Doña had the misfortune of opening first. Heinlein informed Campbell that he had written—but not mailed—a long response “to stir you up off your fat fanny,” and in the letter that he did send he didn’t pull his punches: “When it comes to matters outside your specialties, you are consistently and brilliantly stupid.” He warned Campbell to avoid speaking in those terms to anyone in the service: “Don’t write to Ron in such a vein. He has not my indoctrination and he is in the battlefield.”
As he typed the letter, Heinlein began to weep. After regaining his composure, he resumed in a gentler tone. Campbell had said that he was looking into a reserve commission as a factory inspector, and Heinlein was glad to hear it, although he also revealed his earlier misgivings:
To be frank . . . I have been slightly perturbed that you might be all out for the war effort—except of course for Astounding, Unknown, and their editor. But apparently you realize as I do that it doesn’t matter if you lose your job or I my market for fiction as long as we can preserve our own way of life and make it safe from bastards like the Sons of Heaven and the Nazis.
Heinlein added that if science fiction was necessary for morale, the public could make do with what the inferior pulps were publishing, and he concluded, “By the way, talk to that young idiot Asimov—he wants to go fight. M.S.’s in physical chemistry aren’t cannon fodder.”
Leslyn was less accommodating. In a letter that displayed her intelligence at its most forceful, she rebuked Campbell for speaking of Pratt and his circle as if they were something other than the general public, using a devastating analogy to drive her point home: “Don’t you realize what that bunch are, John? They’re an ‘organized fan’ club.” She pointed out that Campbell would never permit a fan to tell him how to run his magazine, and she noted that Hubbard was one of the few in that crowd who had actually become a professional.
It was an unanswerable argument—with its unstated implication that Campbell was little more than “an organized fan” of science—and the editor wrote back to apologize, calling himself “a clumsy oaf” who was only good at shoving his foot in his mouth. He also assured them that he wouldn’t dream of speaking in such terms to Hubbard. Heinlein accepted the apology, saying that the exchange of letters had provided him with the emotional catharsis that he had needed.
He also had more important news to share. A lieutenant commander named Albert “Buddy” Scoles, whom Heinlein had known at Annapolis, was the assistant chief engineer for materials at the Naval Aircraft Factory in Philadelphia, informally known as the Navy Yard. Scoles, a science fiction fan, had written to ask Heinlein if Astounding would be interested in publishing an article on technical problems that the military was trying to solve. In a postscript, he added, “Incidentally, how would you like to go back to active duty and go to work here in the Factory?”
It was framed as an afterthought, but it was exactly the call that Heinlein had been awaiting. He shot back a postcard to confirm his interest, and after discussing the offer by phone, he reached out to Campbell. It was only because of his stories, Heinlein wrote, that Scoles had contacted him at all, and there might be a role for Campbell as well: “You are likely to have quite a lot to do with my job—from a minimum of helping by talking with me to a maximum of possibly serving as a commissioned officer, coordinate with or superior to me.”
Campbell replied that he hoped “most ardently” that it would come through. He was even more relieved that they were still speaking: “The greatest disturbance caused by your two letters last time was a very genuine fear that I might have busted up a friendship that meant a deal more to us than any single friendship should, perhaps, for our own emotional safety.” Doña seconded this: “My concern lay solely in the fear that . . . a friendship very precious to us would go completely on the rocks, and all through mishandling of ideas and words on poor, unknowing John’s part.”
Heinlein flew out to visit Scoles in Philadelphia, where he was told that the job, if it materialized, would involve recruiting engineers. He recommended de Camp, who had applied for the Naval Reserve, and he apparently also thought of Asimov. In February, the Heinleins moved in with the Campbells for two months. Leslyn wanted to land a factory position, but she was suffering from gallstones, and she was worried for her sister, Keith, who had been on the Philippine island of Luzon with her family when the Japanese invaded.
At his friend John Arwine’s apartment, Heinlein set up a meeting with Scoles, Campbell, and de Camp, who was anxious to join. Campbell’s situation was less clear. He was having second thoughts about his ability to pass a physical exam, so he decided to apply to the National Defense Research Committee through a friend of his father’s. He didn’t want to commit himself to the Navy Yard—he still hoped to find what he saw as a more meaningful role—and there was also the problem of relocating. With a wife who had just given birth under difficult circumstances, a baby, and two vulnerable magazines, he was reluctant to leave for Philadelphia.
The men set their sights on another likely recruit. Earlier that month, Campbell had told Asimov that Heinlein was in town, and he had added enigmatically that the author should come to him first if he were at any risk of being drafted. On March 2, 1942, Asimov visited the office to see Hubert Rogers, who had painted the cover for “Nightfall,” and he was surprised to find Heinlein there as well. It was the first time that they had ever met.
A week later Campbell invited Asimov to his house. On March 11, Asimov took the subway to the ferry, proceeding by train to Scotch Plains, which was a considerable journey by his standards. On his arrival, he asked a station agent how far it was to the editor’s neighborhood. The agent said, “Very far.”
Asimov walked as fast as he could for half an hour. When he got there, he apologized for being late, explaining that he didn’t know how long the walk would be. Campbell was amazed: “Why didn’t you call? I would have come and got you by car.” Asimov was embarrassed to admit that he hadn’t even thought of it.
Along with the Campbells and the Heinleins, the guests that evening included Willy Ley, Hubert Rogers, and their wives. At one point Heinlein offered Asimov what looked like a cola. When Asimov asked what it was, Heinlein replied, “It’s a Coke. Go ahead, drink it down.”
Asimov obliged. It was a Cuba Libre, Heinlein’s cocktail of choice, and his face grew red. Asimov wasn’t a drinker—after accepting “one ounce of blended rye” at de Camp’s apartment, he had taken the train three times around Manhattan before trusting himself to walk home—and he sank into the corner, trying to collect himself. Until then, he had been talking loudly, and Heinlein laughed. “No wonder Isaac doesn’t drink. It sobers him up.”
Heinlein later dimmed the lights to show slides of some nude photos that he had taken, which Asimov studied with interest. He sensed that his maturity was being tested—he was a decade younger than either Heinlein or Campbell—but he evidently passed. At the end of the month, he received a job offer from Scoles.
The Heinleins and the Campbells spent their time together as pleasantly as they could. Campbell wrote of his daughter, “[Philinda] started making
eyes at Bob the day he arrived, and has been working on him ever since. She’s been flirting with Leslyn very effectively, too.” The couples went out on the town, and Campbell felt the pinch: “They took us to shows, but damn it, taxi fares, meals, train fare, hiring someone to stay with Peeds, six or eight times begins to mean real money. Damn these freelances; they can afford it.”
But not all was well. Heinlein’s application had stalled, and Leslyn’s health problems made it unlikely that she would get the factory role that she wanted. Both were tense—Leslyn told Heinlein much later that she was irrationally convinced that he was trying to poison her—and Heinlein took refuge in fiction. At Scotch Plains, with Campbell’s input, he wrote “Waldo” and “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag,” framing the latter around an affectionate portrait of a married couple not unlike the Heinleins themselves. They would be his last stories until after the war.
In April, Arwine entered the Coast Guard, and the Heinleins moved into his apartment. Heinlein figured out that an issue in his disciplinary file—stemming from the angry letter to the Citizen-News that he had written years earlier—meant that he couldn’t be assigned to active duty, so he joined up as a civilian. On May 2, he received his appointment as an assistant mechanical engineer, and he and Leslyn rented a place near the Navy Yard.
Another naval officer had unexpectedly returned. Campbell told Heinlein, “L. Ron Hubbard’s in town—temporarily confined to the Sick Officer’s Quarters. He’s angry, bitter, and very much afraid—afraid he’ll get assigned to some shore job.” Hubbard, who was sporting a limp, claimed to have survived the sinking of the USS Edsall: “He collected a piece of Jap bomb in his thigh during the battle of the Java Sea. . . . Allied air power was not giving adequate coverage.”
The truth was much less glamorous. Hubbard had disembarked in Brisbane, Australia, in January to await transport to Manila. After his arrival he ran into trouble with the naval attaché, who blamed him for rerouting a supply ship, the Don Isidro, without sufficient authorization. Hubbard had sent the steamship, which was running food and ammunition to General Douglas MacArthur’s besieged troops in the Philippines, on a roundabout route along the coast of Australia. On the way, it was attacked by the Japanese, resulting in the deaths of twelve men.
Astounding Page 15