Astounding

by Alec Nevala-Lee

  Even more significant was the fact that Kuttner and Moore, on the advice of the editor, had begun to collaborate, working in shifts under the name Lewis Padgett. Their run culminated in “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” and “When the Bough Breaks,” two extraordinary stories with an unusual interest in marriage and the inner lives of children. It was an enormously promising line of development, but Campbell never followed up on it, in part because it seemed unrelated to the war. Yet no one else did so much to carry Astounding after Pearl Harbor.

  Another writer from the Heinlein circle who was eager to write for Campbell was Ray Bradbury, whose eyesight made him ineligible for the draft. He had been mentored by Heinlein and Leigh Brackett, but he received his most rigorous apprenticeship from Kuttner, who jokingly threatened to kill him if he didn’t stop writing so much purple prose. After selling two pieces to the Probability Zero department, which won first place in the Analytical Laboratory poll, he seemed on the verge of breaking into Astounding, and his timing should have been perfect.

  Yet he never quite made it. In the fall of 1942, his agent submitted “Chrysalis,” a superman story pitched squarely at the editor’s tastes. Campbell thought that Bradbury had “mastered the mechanics of writing pretty thoroughly already,” but he asked for a number of revisions. After Bradbury rewrote it with input from Moore and Kuttner, Campbell passed anyway. A year later, Bradbury sold him a minor van Vogt parody, “Doodad,” but he never placed another story in the magazine, despite giving the editor first look at such future landmarks as “The Million-Year Picnic” and “Mars Is Heaven!” Campbell turned them all down.

  Even after raising rates twice, Campbell was still having trouble finding stories, and he was distracted by other problems. In a spectacular case of bad timing, Astounding had expanded in size shortly before Pearl Harbor, but it didn’t attract new advertisers, and its placement alongside the slicks failed to increase sales. After sixteen issues, it returned to its old dimensions, and in late 1943 it shrank further. The problem was wartime rationing—the electrotyping process, which was needed for the larger pages, ate up metal, and the firm’s paper allotment was repeatedly cut.

  Of his two magazines, Unknown was the more vulnerable. Campbell had once hoped that it would exceed the sales of Astounding, but its circulation had turned out to be lower, making it an inefficient user of paper—it had to print the same number of display issues to fill space on newsstands, which left it with a higher percentage of returns. Playing for time, Campbell announced that its print run would be reduced, ads would be eliminated, and the next issue would be pocketbook size.

  It never came. Unknown ceased publication after its October 1943 issue, and its paper was allocated to Astounding. From a business perspective, the decision was straightforward, but emotionally it was devastating. When Asimov visited the editor shortly afterward, Campbell didn’t even mention it. A few weeks later, Heinlein informed Asimov that Unknown was gone “for the duration.” Asimov wrote correctly in his diary, “I interpret that as forever.”

  Campbell had killed his favorite child so that the more valuable title could survive, in part because he believed that science fiction still had a role to play in the war. It was a laboratory in which his writers could work out scenarios for the future, as Anthony Boucher wrote in response to readers who were tiring of pessimistic war stories: “The more we write about ingenious ruses by which the Axis secures victory . . . the less apt those ruses are to succeed.”

  The editor certainly believed it. And the death of the magazine on which he had lavished so much energy precipitated his next move, in which he was determined to prove the genre’s worth once and for all.

  IN THE APRIL 1942 ISSUE OF ASTOUNDING, IN AN EDITORIAL TITLED “TOO GOOD AT GUESSING,” Campbell had quoted an unidentified contributor: “I’m doing research work of a restricted, confidential nature; other men in my lab are doing other secret work. If I write a story and, on the basis of my technical background, guess reasonably accurately, I may describe something one of those other men is actually developing. There would naturally be a feeling that it was a leakage of secret material. I’d like to write—but I’m afraid I might guess right. I’d better not.”

  Campbell may have been flattering himself with the notion that the magazine could stumble across an important secret by accident, but it wasn’t entirely out of the question. He concluded the editorial by saying that they would restrict themselves for now to stories that were more removed from reality: “The consequence is that we will, in the future, try to be wilder guessers, place our stories further in the future, or base them on themes that can’t lead to those too-good guesses. . . . For once, we’re in the position of finding it wiser to guess wrong!”

  It was a statement of caution, but it also reflected his faith in the genre as a proving ground for ideas, as well as the contribution that he still hoped it would make to the war effort. In the January 1941 issue, Campbell had said that America would be a terrible enemy in a conflict decided by inventive ingenuity, and he had repeated himself after Pearl Harbor: “We have the highest potential of scientific research of any nation on Earth, by far. . . . If you must attack America, do it with horse cavalry and war clubs—not mechanized warfare!”

  At first, the Navy Yard had seemed like the chance that he had been awaiting. Campbell wrote excitedly to Swisher, “The whole setup down there is engaged in making the gadgets we’ve been talking about for a dozen years—plus the couple hundred more that we hadn’t thought of yet.” This wasn’t what most of its engineers were doing—and it certainly didn’t resemble the work of Asimov, Heinlein, or de Camp—but it remained his dream of what it might become.

  After he failed to “crash the gate,” Campbell began to think seriously about setting up something like it for himself. He felt that he would make a good head of research, and he had an existing venue for it in Astounding. As long as his circulation levels were acceptable, Street & Smith gave him comparative freedom, so he didn’t have to report to anyone. The problem remained of pushing his ideas through the military bureaucracy, but Campbell reasoned that he could outsource this to Heinlein—who was overworked enough as it was.

  One possible approach was to run technical problems in the magazine and ask readers for suggestions. This had been a key part of Scoles’s pitch to Heinlein in January 1942, in which the job offer had been an aside:

  Among the writers and readers of Astounding and Amazing Stories there must be a lot of men formerly known as crackpots who are beginning to come into their own as the “men with ideas” and possibly in the future “saviors of their country”. . . . Might it not be a good idea if you wrote an article to be published in all the science fiction magazines bringing out the need for all of these ideas?

  Campbell couldn’t have put it better himself, and he remained enthusiastic about the prospect long after any chance of a position at the Navy Yard had evaporated. In July, he wrote to Heinlein, “I’ll have to try helping by indirection. . . . Perhaps if I knew more of the general problems, could even discuss general problems in the magazine with suggestions that the readers use imagination and see what solutions they could propose, something useful could be done.”

  As an example, he offered an idea of his own—filling a lab with an atmosphere of argon gas for certain kinds of industrial work, which was already being done with helium—and asked for more: “Can you suggest a list of problems, or a few, that I could at least try to mull over?” Campbell put Fletcher Pratt to work on an article on “problems of the Navy that technically minded imagination might be able to solve,” and he informed Leslyn that the author had “gotten Navy authorization to write it, and is getting Navy assistance in selecting material to use.”

  It never appeared. Neither did “The Battle of Design,” in which Campbell hoped to start a discussion of wartime engineering problems. The issue was censorship—the Navy had been receptive, but the Army rejected it as a security risk. It left the editor without a public forum, but he st
ill wanted to play a role. At his first meeting with the fan Damon Knight, he said that he was thinking about leaving the magazine to go into research: “I’m a nuclear physicist, you know.”

  Campbell identified two plans of attack. In the November 1942 issue, after stating that his attempt to enlist had been “stymied,” he said:

  But I’m running an unofficial recruiting office. I know a place where some young engineers, with engineering degrees and a little experience, a degree at least, are very badly needed. . . . It’s a chance to really serve the country in a way that will make your training, and particularly your trained imagination—something even rarer than engineering training—count for a maximum result.

  As an example of the kind of problem on the table, he mentioned the “practical, workable development” of a space suit for high altitudes. A pressure suit project really did exist—even if none of the writers at the Navy Yard worked on it, despite rumors to the contrary—and the editor forwarded the responses that he received to Heinlein, although no evidence exists that it led to anyone being hired.

  Campbell’s other strategy was to solicit ideas from writers in private correspondence. Heinlein encouraged this, and he also approached Will Jenkins, a brilliant inventor who wrote science fiction under the name Murray Leinster. Jenkins responded with “a very careful, long, and elaborate letter in which I listed all the imaginative gimmicks that I thought could help win the war,” and the three men formed an unofficial triumvirate for brainstorming, with Heinlein at the Navy Yard, Campbell at the magazine, and Jenkins at the Office of War Information.

  Jenkins, who was in contact with underground resistance movements, was especially interested in dirty chemical tricks that could be used by factory workers to sabotage the Nazis. Campbell saw that this was the perfect place to get credit for something that might be used in the field, and he pitched ways to weaken wing struts and disable boilers, while Willy Ley contributed the “diabolic” notion of using airplanes to drop poison ivy or Japanese beetles over Germany. The editor also bombarded Heinlein with his own proposals, including using flares to destroy an attacking pilot’s night vision and marking submarines with magnetic bombs. None were deemed practical.

  Campbell—who had made his name with stories in which huge engineering problems were solved overnight—was growing impatient. He was unable to point to a single clear case of influence, and sending his ideas to Heinlein put him in a position of vulnerability that he had hoped to leave behind. Like Hubbard, he was burdened by an obsolete idea of heroism. While Heinlein had learned to maneuver within the bureaucracy to the best of his abilities, Campbell had gambled on finding a shortcut, but he had failed. And so had Unknown.

  It was in this mood that he received a letter from the writer Cleve Cartmill in August 1943, pitching a story about the ghost ship Mary Celeste. Campbell didn’t care for it, but he had another premise in mind. Ever since hearing about the cubic foot of uranium at Columbia, he had been keeping a close eye on experiments in atomic power, and he wrote to Cartmill:

  There might be a story in this thought. . . . U-235 has—I’m stating fact, not theory—been separated in quantity easily sufficient for preliminary atomic power research, and the like. They got it out of regular uranium ores by new atomic isotope separation methods; they have quantities measured in pounds. They have not brought the whole amount together, or any major portion of it. . . . They’re afraid that that explosion of energy would be so incomparably violent . . . that surrounding matter would be set off. . . . And that would be serious.

  The letter, which ran for three pages, outlined a story that paralleled the situation of the Allies and the Axis, with the latter threatening to set off an atomic bomb before it was defeated. Campbell finished, “Now it might be that you found the story worked better in allegory—the war being placed on another planet, where similar conditions prevailed. I think the story would be the adventure of the secret agent who was assigned to save the day—to destroy that bomb.”

  Cartmill was guarded in his response, saying that the idea was “prophecy so close to home that it may be ridiculous. And there is the possible danger of actually suggesting a means of action which might be employed.” On a practical level, he wasn’t sure whether he could come up with a believable alien background, and he asked a series of questions about the science, “keeping an eye, of course, on what should or should not be told for social, military, or political reasons.”

  Campbell’s reply was two and a half pages long. He seemed confident that the alien setting would sidestep any problems with the censors: “Censorship won’t give any trouble about what happens on [another planet], where they might kick somewhat about local happenings. . . . The situation will simply go along as though it were earth.” Campbell advised him to study the earthlike world in “Nightfall” and to read “Blowups Happen” for approaches to the technical side, and he proposed that the hero have a prehensile tail to make it clear that he wasn’t human.

  Cartmill remained doubtful, but he wasn’t going to turn down a sure sale. He wrote it quickly, submitting it in the first week of September, and the result, “Deadline,” appeared in the March 1944 issue, which was out by February 11. Most readers didn’t think highly of it—one called it “mediocre fantasy”—and it ranked last in the Analytical Laboratory poll. But Campbell had a particular audience in mind.

  He had long suspected that the government was working on an atomic bomb. His earliest stories in college had revolved around the discovery of nuclear power, but when the moment finally came, it found him on the outside looking in. If he had graduated from MIT a few years later, he might conceivably have been part of the effort, but instead, he was just an “organized fan.”

  It led him to break his one rule. He had said that Astounding would refrain from publishing anything that might reveal secrets of national defense, and now he was deliberately printing a story with blatant parallels to the most important military project of all time. Campbell made no effort to clear it with the censors, as he had for similar works. It was an act of recklessness that exceeded anything that Hubbard ever did—but it was also the only bomb that he could detonate.

  And its impact was felt at once. The Manhattan Project counted many science fiction fans among its workers, and word of the story rapidly spread, until employees were talking about it openly in the cafeteria of the atomic weapons lab in New Mexico. Cartmill’s device bore minimal resemblance to the designs under development, but it didn’t matter. Edward Teller, who would later be known as the father of the hydrogen bomb, recalled that the reaction at Los Alamos was “astonishment.”

  But it made its most significant impression on a man who wasn’t a scientist at all. He was a security officer. As the others discussed the story over lunch, he listened quietly—and he took notes. If Campbell had wanted attention, he was about to succeed beyond his wildest expectations.

  9.

  From “Deadline” to Hiroshima

  1944–1945

  Atomic physics . . . could end the war in a day, in a fraction of a second, beyond doubt—but there’s considerable doubt as to whether there would then be a postwar world to worry about.

  —JOHN W. CAMPBELL, ASTOUNDING, AUGUST 1943

  Cleve Cartmill’s “Deadline” was set on Cathor, a planet consumed by a global war between two factions known as the Sixa and the Seilla. Its hero was a spy whose mission is to penetrate an enemy stronghold, track down the scientist who is developing the ultimate weapon, and destroy it before it can be detonated. He succeeds, defusing the bomb and scattering the uranium inside: “It would fall, spread, and never be noticed by those who would now go on living.”

  The story was undeniably bad, and even the least critical readers might have found the reversals of the names “Sixa” and “Seilla” too juvenile to pass muster in Amazing, let alone in Astounding. Yet its shallowness amounted to a narrative strategy in itself. The hero’s tail, the childishly coded belligerents, and even the planet without human char
acters—a convention that the magazine rarely used—were all clues to view it as something else. It obviously hadn’t been published on its merits as entertainment, so there had to be some hidden message.

  And it didn’t take any scientific background to realize that the entire story was an excuse to talk about the atomic bomb, which Cartmill described using language transcribed straight from Campbell’s letters, down to the line “I’m stating fact, not theory.” The story noted that there were sixteen pounds of uranium in the bomb, with each pound providing an explosive yield of fifty thousand tons of dynamite, and it delved into its design at length:

  Two cast-iron hemispheres, clamped over the orange segments of cadmium alloy. And the fuse—I see it is in—a tiny can of cadmium alloy containing a speck of radium in a beryllium holder and a small explosive powerful enough to shatter the cadmium walls. Then—correct me if I’m wrong, will you?—the powdered uranium oxide runs together in the central cavity. The radium shoots neutrons into this mass—and the U-235 takes over from there.

  Decades afterward, Campbell would claim that this was the most detailed description of a nuclear device published anywhere before the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In reality, sixteen pounds of uranium wasn’t enough to set off a chain reaction—the bomb called Little Boy used one hundred and forty pounds—and the method of assembly was too slow. A real atomic bomb had to fire one mass at another using an explosive charge, while in Campbell’s design, the powder in the central cavity would melt through the iron shell long before it exploded.

  It wasn’t the first time that U-235 had appeared in fiction, either. Just as Campbell had added superfluous touches of psychology to Asimov’s “Homo Sol,” he had inserted references to the fission reaction, often gratuitously, into numerous stories. But the sheer specificity of “Deadline” was enough to set off alarms in the Counterintelligence Corps—the agency responsible for security at Los Alamos—as soon as the cafeteria conversations that it inspired had been brought to its attention.