Astounding

by Alec Nevala-Lee

  At the cafeteria, the food was terrible, and Asimov didn’t get along with Leslyn. She struck him as brittle and tense, and her constant smoking—she used her plate as an ashtray—soured him forever on cigarettes. Leslyn didn’t care for him, either. His years at the candy store had left him with the habit of devouring his food in silence, and when he popped half of a boiled egg in his mouth, she couldn’t contain her disgust: “Don’t do that. You turn my stomach.”

  Asimov thought she was speaking to someone else. “Are you talking to me, Leslyn?”

  When she confirmed that she was, he asked what he had done wrong—and swallowed the second half. She shrieked, “You did it again!”

  His comments about the food grated on Heinlein, who decreed that anyone who complained had to contribute a nickel toward a war bond. Asimov knew that this was a message to him. “Well, then, suppose I figure out a way of complaining about the food that isn’t complaining. Will you call it off?”

  After Heinlein said that he would Asimov tried to think of ways to get around it. One day, as he sawed through the haddock on his plate, he asked, in mock innocence, “Is there such a thing as tough fish?”

  It was another battle of wills, and Heinlein wasn’t about to back down. “That will be five cents, Isaac.”

  This time Asimov held his ground. “It’s only a point of information, Bob.”

  “That will be five cents, Isaac,” Heinlein repeated. “The implication is clear.”

  Asimov was saved when another employee, unaware of the rule, took a bite of ham and remarked, “Boy, this food is awful.”

  Rising to his feet, Asimov pronounced, “Gentlemen, I disagree with every word my friend here has said, but I will defend with my life his right to say it.” Heinlein dropped the system of fines. It was a victory, but a small one.

  On September 25, 1943, the Soviets marched back into Smolensk. Two days later, a communiqué said that Petrovichi had been retaken after years under German rule. When Heinlein heard the news, he shook Asimov’s hand and congratulated him gravely. For the moment, at least, they were equals.

  Word finally came of Leslyn’s family in the Philippines. Her sister, Keith, was interned with her two sons in Manila, but her brother-in-law, Mark Hubbard, had vanished. Until then, Leslyn had liked her job, but she began working so hard—“Just doing everything she could to shorten the misery of her sister,” a friend recalled—that it affected her health. She became the personnel manager for a machine shop with six hundred employees, and although she was suited for it—she was the only administrator who made a point of wearing the same uniform as the female workers—it caused her to drink more heavily.

  Heinlein was also feeling the pressure. He sometimes felt like returning to fiction, and when he mentioned this to Campbell, the editor thought that it implied that his work was either going well or “shapfu,” in which the “hap” stood for “hopelessly and permanently.” It was closer to the latter, and in the end, he didn’t do any writing at all. He developed hemorrhoids that his doctor treated with injections, leading to an abscess “in a location where I could not see but was acutely aware of it.” The Navy clearly had no intention of reactivating him, so he decided to try for the Merchant Marine, undergoing an operation to resolve his medical issues that he compared to “having your asshole cut out with an apple corer.”

  He was left with “no rectum to speak of,” and he was recovering in the hospital in January 1944 when Leslyn heard from the Red Cross. Mark Hubbard was missing, but Keith and her sons were aboard the Swedish mercy ship MS Gripsholm—Leslyn had been sending money to pay for their safe passage. It took them seventy days to get from Goa to New York. After their arrival, the two boys were sent to New Jersey to live with the Campbells, where they stayed for months, until their mother had recovered. The stress led Leslyn’s weight to fall below ninety pounds, and she began sleeping for up to twelve hours a day.

  In late January, Heinlein underwent another operation, forcing him to wear a dressing that looked like a diaper. His convalescence would have been a good time to write again, but he could sit for only twenty minutes at a stretch with the aid of an inflatable ring. It was obvious that he would not be serving at the front in any capacity: “I’m simply going to be bored to distraction and worked to a rag doing things I don’t want to do in a town I hate.”

  He tried to reconcile himself to his situation, but he remained envious of those who had seen action. This included L. Ron Hubbard, who was rumored to be in command of a ship. Alone of them all, it seemed, he had been given the chance to prove that he was the hero he had always claimed to be. In the magazine, Campbell wrote fondly, “Hubbard has been an adventurer all his life; he had special training of an even more directly applicable nature—he’s been a fighting man and a skipper of his own ship before.” And he told Heinlein:

  I imagine that the thing that would really satisfy [Hubbard’s] nature . . . would be a chance to command a sub sent out to raid Tokyo harbor. I wouldn’t permit him to, if I were running the Navy. He’d probably try to up ship and bombard Hirohito’s hovel with his deck gun, just for the hell of it.

  8.

  The War of Invention

  1942–1944

  The position of America has been violently changed in twenty-four hours. The makeup of our lesser community of science fiction is of interest, if not importance. . . . L. Ron Hubbard is Lieutenant L. Ron Hubbard, U.S.N. We have a few of his stories on hand; whether he will, now, have time for more I cannot know.

  —JOHN W. CAMPBELL, ASTOUNDING, FEBRUARY 1942

  Hubbard had occupied a desk at the Office of the Cable Censor in New York since May 1, 1942. At first he did well, drawing measured praise from his superior: “Since reporting to this activity, this officer has shown a full realization of the seriousness of an assignment to duty. He has shown an increasing sense of responsibility and displayed a marked improvement in his work.” But almost from the moment he arrived, he was anxious to get just about anywhere else.

  Shortly after his return, Hubbard saw Campbell, who floated the notion to Heinlein of finding a place for him at the Navy Yard: “[Hubbard’s] own feeling is that his direct experience with Jap weapons, methods and tactics might be his prime asset.” His limp was mostly gone, but his indignation remained: “They’ve kidnapped him into a desk job, and he got a licking out in Java, and he wants almighty bad to get back out that way and give his red hair a chance.”

  What Hubbard really wanted was to go to sea. He requested an assignment to the Caribbean or Alaska, particularly the latter, “the peoples, language, and customs of which I know and of which I possess piloting knowledge.” Ultimately, he was granted half of his wish. In the first of several second chances that he would receive—largely because of a shortage of personnel—he landed a post in Neponset, Massachusetts, to take charge of a trawler after it was converted to a patrol vessel. It would stick close to shore, but Hubbard seized on it as an opportunity to return to the fleet.

  He was promoted to the rank of full lieutenant. Before heading to Massachusetts he found time for trips to Los Angeles and New York, and he dropped by the office to see Campbell, who noted that he seemed tickled by his new position: “He’s back on sea duty, and evidently going to get somewhere near what would really suit his mentality—a chance to be a privateer.” Doña agreed: “Hubbard has gone to collect a subchaser somewhere and a happier male John has never seen. That would be about as close to the old buccaneer status as he could get, wouldn’t it?”

  Hubbard welcomed the association with his old stories. Arriving in Neponset on June 25, he was greeted by a crew of what he later described as former convicts, “their braid dirty and their hammocks black with grime.” Like one of his own heroes, he claimed to have transformed this band of outcasts into capable sailors—an achievement that existed entirely in his imagination. In reality, work proceeded smoothly, and Hubbard found time to accompany Campbell on a visit to a science fiction club in Cambridge. A month after his arrival
he took the ship for a test cruise.

  He would never serve at its helm again. In a remarkable repetition of his experience in Brisbane, he was relieved of his authority. There was bad blood between the men at the shipyard and those assigned to the ships, and Hubbard had an altercation with an officer whom he criticized by name to Washington. The only result was that he lost his berth, with the commandant of the Boston Navy Yard writing that he was “not temperamentally suited for independent command.”

  Hubbard protested in vain. He had learned nothing from his earlier mistakes, and the fact that he stumbled into a similar situation so quickly hinted at a fundamental flaw in his personality—but he was given another chance. After reporting to the Naval Receiving Station on Long Island, he successfully asked to be nominated to the Submarine Chaser Training Center in Miami. A garbled rumor of this assignment reached Campbell: “I have a feeling Ron traded his ship for a sub—a Nazi one in a mutual destruction deal. Only Ron and crew came home; the Nazis didn’t.”

  He arrived in Miami in November. An acquaintance saw him urinating blood, which he attributed to his injury in Java, although its true cause was less heroic. He later wrote, “While training in Miami, Florida, I met a girl named Ginger who excited me. She was a very loose person but pretended a great love for me. From her I received an infection of [gonorrhea]. . . . I went to a private doctor who treated me with sulfathiazole”—which can cause bloody urine—“and so forth.”

  Elsewhere, he recalled his experience there more fondly: “Boy was I able to catch up on some sleep.” He did passably well, telling the Campbells that he had graduated at the top of his class—he was really twentieth out of twenty-five—and landing an assignment to command a submarine chaser, the USS PC-815, being built in Portland, Oregon. It was close to Polly, but his marriage was effectively over, and he still feared that he had gonorrhea: “I took to dosing myself with sulfa in such quantities that I was afraid I had affected my brain.”

  On May 18, 1943, the PC-815 departed for San Diego, with Hubbard left to his own devices for the first time as a commander. The calm lasted for five hours. At three in the morning, off Cape Meares in Oregon, a soundman reported something in the water about five hundred yards ahead. Hubbard slowed the engines. Over the earphones, they thought that they heard screw noises, which indicated the presence of a submarine. It was unlikely but not impossible—a Japanese sub had shelled an oil refinery in Santa Barbara the year before—and they assumed an intercept course.

  When they were close enough, Hubbard ordered the crew to drop three depth charges. In his report, he wrote hyperbolically, “The ship, sleepy and skeptical, had come to their guns swiftly and without error. No one, including the Commanding Officer, could readily credit the existence of an enemy submarine here on the steamer track and all soundmen, now on the bridge, were attempting to argue the echo-ranging equipment and chemical recorder out of such a fantastic idea.”

  They continued to sweep the area, going on a second attack run and firing on an object that Hubbard later conceded was probably just a floating log. At nine in the morning, two blimps joined in the search, followed shortly afterward by four more ships. Hubbard began to think that they were dealing with two different subs, and the following day, he claimed, a periscope was seen by “every man on the bridge and flying bridge.” When they opened fire, it vanished, and Hubbard conducted another attack before receiving the order to return.

  The entire incident had lasted for sixty-eight hours. A subsequent investigation concluded that there had been no submarines there at all. The only evidence to the contrary came from the magnetic anomaly detectors in the blimps, which had probably been triggered by a natural deposit. After the war, no record was found of Japanese submarine activity in the area, and no wreckage was ever recovered. Hubbard thought that the Navy hadn’t wanted to alarm the locals, and he never ceased to believe that he had sunk “two Jap subs without credit.”

  He avoided discipline—he had been hasty, but not reckless—and in June, the PC-815 headed for a group of islands southwest of San Diego, where Hubbard, who was suffering from a throat infection, ordered four training rounds to be fired and anchored there overnight. It had been “a very arduous day,” he explained, and he didn’t trust anyone to pilot the subchaser without him. While they were holding station, he also allowed his men to shoot at a target that was tossed from the ship.

  What Hubbard didn’t know was that the islands were really part of Mexico. The Mexican government complained, and a board of investigation was convened at the end of the month. Hubbard said lamely, “At no time was I aware of invading Mexican territorial waters.” His men lied to protect him, but he had run out of second chances. After being admonished for conducting gunnery practice and anchoring without authorization, he was transferred in early July.

  Hubbard had been commander of his own vessel for a total of eighty days. A fitness report rated him below average, stating that he was “lacking in the essential qualities of judgment, leadership, and cooperation.” It was his last mistake, and he was posted to the Issuing Office in San Diego until the Navy could figure out what to do with him. While there he complained of various pains—although he later admitted that he had invented them to avoid punishment—and he went to the hospital for three months. After being released in October, he was assigned to the Algol, an amphibious attack cargo ship, as its navigational officer.

  He would never hold an independent naval command again. On some level, his life had failed to live up to his stories, but it would be even more precise to say that his fiction had been easier to manipulate than reality. Hubbard grew resigned to returning to the only career in which he had received any degree of approval: “My salvation is to let this roll over me. . . . To pile up copy, stack up stories, roll the wordage and generally conduct my life along the one line of success I have ever had.”

  IF HUBBARD BELIEVED THAT HIS STINT IN THE MILITARY REPRESENTED A LOSS TO THE MAGAZINE world, he was perfectly right, at least in the eyes of his closest collaborator. After Pearl Harbor, in the February 1942 issue of Astounding, Campbell provided a rundown of the impact of the war on his writers. The first one he mentioned was Hubbard, followed by Heinlein, of whom he wrote, “I do not know whether he will be able to do any further writing; I greatly doubt that he will.”

  From the moment that war was declared, Campbell knew that the availability of his authors would present a problem. In a letter to Jack Williamson after the attack, Campbell listed the writers who he expected to lose and concluded, “That leaves de Camp, you, and van Vogt as the primary steady writers available.” He was premature in naming de Camp, and after writing a few stories based on an idea from the editor about antimatter, Williamson reported for duty in New Mexico.

  Many authors would be excused for health reasons—if they had been better physical specimens, they might not have been writers at all—but it didn’t take long for Campbell to find that even those who escaped the draft would be hard to keep. Del Rey was classified as 4-F, but he moved to St. Louis to be close to his girlfriend, contributing just a handful of pieces while working as a metalworker at McDonnell Aircraft. Sturgeon, who was also medically exempt, left to run a hotel in Jamaica, and he wouldn’t write on a regular basis for years.

  Only one reliable author remained. In Astounding, Campbell had written, “A. E. van Vogt is a Canadian; probably his status will not be changed; if anything, his work will increase in volume.” Before the war, when Heinlein was threatening to retire, Campbell had made van Vogt an unprecedented offer: “I would like to contract you to write for Astounding. I’m willing to buy two or three hundred dollars worth of stories a month from you. In other words, it’s wide open.”

  Van Vogt—whose bad eyesight disqualified him from the military—had accepted the proposal. Campbell wanted stories that reflected on the global crisis, but he also had more expansive developments in mind: “I’m genuinely trying to divert the stream of science fiction a bit, and you, del Rey, and one or p
ossibly two others are the best bets as to authors capable of making the change felt. . . . What I’m trying to do in science fiction is to turn it away from the hard, rather brittle practicality of some of the best of the stories of the last year or two.”

  Campbell was pleased by the results, but he continued to search for new talent. In the August 1942 issue, he told readers, “For the past several months, I’ve been somewhat busy. In addition to the usual job of getting the magazines together, there’s been a problem of getting some new authors together, and helping some almost-but-not-quite writers into the pretty-good division.” Occasionally he would make a lucky find, but he preferred to tackle the problem more systematically—by targeting writers a degree or two away from those he had already discovered.

  One obvious source was the Futurians, but even if he had wanted their services, most were unavailable. Donald Wollheim, whose heart murmur had kept him out of active duty, was working for Ace Magazines, and in 1942, Cyril Kornbluth was called up. When he went to say goodbye to Pohl, they drunkenly swore an oath—slashing their hands with a razor—to kill the editor Robert Lowndes for no particular reason. The following morning, they woke up in the same bed, hungover and covered in blood. They stared at each other, pale, and Kornbluth said, “Well, I think I’d better go, Fred. So long. Have a nice war.”

  Campbell was more interested in the Mañana Literary Society, which had just been memorialized in the mystery novel Rocket to the Morgue, by Anthony Boucher. His most valued contributors from that circle were Cleve Cartmill, who was handicapped by polio, and the married writers Henry Kuttner and Catherine L. Moore, who had met through their mutual friend H. P. Lovecraft. Moore was already a respected author, while Heinlein saw Kuttner as his best replacement. Campbell eventually came to agree: “He’s a homely little squirt, and looks pretty weak. I didn’t see, myself, what Catherine Moore saw in him. I herewith take it back. He evidently has real character and real worth.”