On March 8, 1944, a month after “Deadline” appeared, Agent Arthur E. Riley went to interview Campbell at the Chanin Building at 122 East Forty-Second Street, where the magazine had recently relocated. It was exactly the sort of reaction that the editor had hoped to provoke. The story wouldn’t have received nearly the same degree of interest if he had simply submitted it to the censorship office, and he seemed flattered by the inquiry, answering the agent’s questions as cheerfully as if he were auditioning for a role on the Manhattan Project itself.
Campbell took full responsibility, saying that he had written to Cartmill—who had “no technical knowledge whatever”—with the idea. Riley wrote in his report, “The subject of atomic disintegration was not novel to [Campbell], since he had pursued a course in atomic physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1933.” As an editor with a scientifically literate audience, Campbell added, he often drew on published sources and the work of his “technically minded intimates and associates.” He showed Riley a copy of a journal that talked about nuclear fission, and he even described the story line of “Solution Unsatisfactory.”
If he was hoping to make a favorable impression, he wasn’t entirely successful. Riley reported that Campbell was “somewhat of an egotist,” a judgment confirmed when the editor stated grandly, but not inaccurately, “I am Astounding Science Fiction.” Campbell also provided Cartmill’s address and offered to suppress the magazine’s Swedish edition, which seemed the one most likely to fall into German hands—and in fact, Wernher von Braun, the head of the Nazi rocket program, was allegedly obtaining it using a false name and a mail drop in Sweden, although there was no way that either man could have known this at the time.
The agent also grew interested in Will Jenkins, who had been seen having lunch with Campbell and an engineer at Bell Labs. After he was denied a security clearance, Jenkins had resigned from the Office of War Information, and he had run into trouble before. One of his efforts, “Four Little Ships,” had been reworked at the request of the Navy, apparently because its plot overlapped with classified minesweeping techniques. Campbell had submitted it to the censor, as he hadn’t bothered to do with “Deadline,” and he may well have printed it just to see what the reaction would be.
Riley made an appointment with Jenkins, and when he arrived at the author’s house, they went up to the roof to speak in private. “Tell me, have you ever read the Cleve Cartmill story ‘Deadline’?”
Jenkins said that he had. When asked for his thoughts, he replied, “A pretty good story, and the science is authentic. Quite accurate.”
There was a charged pause. “Well, what we want to know is, could it be a leak?”
Jenkins, unlike Campbell, was less than gratified by the attention. He later wrote, “At this point my hair stood up on end and its separate strands tended to crack like whiplashes.”
On further questioning, Jenkins acknowledged that he and his daughter had “conducted experiments designed to acquire quantities of atomic copper.” He had gone to Campbell’s office in 1942 with ten grams of what he believed was a pure copper isotope, which he had separated using a home setup. It had clear commercial potential—Campbell had joked that he should try it on uranium—but Jenkins still had to prove that it worked. He gave the sample to Asimov for testing using the mass spectrograph at Columbia, but nothing ever came of it.
It was the first time that Riley had heard of the man whose name and rank he recorded as “Lt. Azimoff.” Additional investigation alerted him to de Camp and Heinlein, the latter of whom was flagged as a person of interest because of his friendship with Cartmill. An actual leak seemed remote, but there were other reasons for concern: “In the opinion of informed persons, the story contains more than just an academic course in atomic physics, revealing as it does certain things developed since 1940.” Riley concluded by advising that Campbell be reminded of the Voluntary Censorship Code, which restricted the discussion of secret weapons in print.
In California, Special Agent R. S. Killough was looking into Cartmill, who resided in Manhattan Beach, where a number of scientists on the atomic project also lived. His mail was placed under surveillance, with all of the return addresses noted down, and his mailman revealed that the author had received a letter from the editor shortly after the visit from Riley. Cartmill, the mailman added, seemed reluctant to talk about the pulps—he was more eager to discuss a story that he had placed in Collier’s—and when asked about “Deadline,” he had only said, “It stinks.”
At first, Cartmill said that he had come up with the plot of “Deadline” on his own, but after being interviewed on two separate occasions by Killough and Special Agent D. L. Johnson, he revised his account. Johnson wrote, “He took the major portion of it directly from letters sent to him by John Campbell . . . and a very minor portion from his own general knowledge.” At their next meeting, Cartmill showed Johnson their correspondence. The technical information in the story, Johnson noted, had been taken almost verbatim from the editor’s letters.
On May 6, W. B. Parsons, the district intelligence officer at Oak Ridge, sent a memo to Lieutenant Colonel John Lansdale, the security chief in Washington, D.C. Parsons expressed concerns that the story would “provoke public speculation,” and he advised that Street & Smith be told that that “such highly particularized stories on secret weapons are detrimental to national security because of the flood of rumors they begin.” He also proposed that the firm’s special mailing privileges be revoked, which would have been tantamount to killing the magazine.
Campbell had placed Astounding in a dangerous position—more dangerous, perhaps, than he ever suspected. Lansdale forwarded the memo to Jack Lockhart, an assistant director at the Office of Censorship, who was reluctant to take drastic action. He hadn’t cared for “Deadline,” but he felt that punishing the magazine for it would be undemocratic: “I tremble over venturing into this field. . . . I think it would be found that any such action would be more likely to lose a war than to win it.”
Later that month, Parsons spoke with H. T. Wensel, a technical advisor at the United States Engineer District Office in Oak Ridge, who was of the opinion that “such articles coming to the attention of personnel connected with the Project are apt to lead to an undue amount of speculation.” Like Campbell, the Counterintelligence Corps was evidently less concerned with the average reader than with the scientists of the Manhattan Project, who were so focused on the technical side that they rarely paused to consider the ethical questions.
They decided in the end to rely on the magazine’s voluntary cooperation, and Lockhart asked Campbell to provide assurances that he would not “publish additional material relating to subjects involved in our special request of June 28, 1943,” which restricted the discussion by publishers of “atom smashing, atomic energy, atomic fission, [and] atomic splitting.” Campbell later claimed to have received an exemption from the directive, saying airily:
We got the notice of censorship on atomic energy, along with a lot of other magazines, but I wrote back that atomic bombs had been our stock in trade for years and that it would look terribly suspicious if we suddenly dropped them—from the magazine, I mean. The Army said they guessed so, too. They probably figured nobody would believe us anyhow.
In reality, he immediately began to censor stories. At times, he took it as a badge of honor, writing proudly to Swisher, “One of the boys guessed too good, and the resultant investigation brought a general censorship attention to [Astounding]. We are now censored as thoughtfully as the straight fact magazines—only more so, because we go in for ‘wild’ guesses.” Campbell had usually been the source of this material in the first place, so it wasn’t hard to remove it—he was essentially censoring himself. He even dropped a hint to readers: “The really good ideas—the ones we want to talk about and write about—have, quite literally, gone to war.”
On some level, Campbell was unable to decide which narrative was more flattering to Astounding—that it had been granted a
special release from the restrictions, or that it had guessed so accurately that it had drawn even stricter censorship. Neither version was true. No such exemption was given, while “Deadline” had only compelled him to abide by the existing rules, and in practice, he decided to have it both ways, varying the account based on who was listening.
A legend later developed that Campbell was relieved that Riley had failed to notice a map on his office wall, on which he used pins to keep track of the addresses of subscribers—including a suspicious clustering around a post office box in Santa Fe. The story is probably apocryphal, but he may well have had his suspicions. After the war, he wrote, “Every major trade journal publishing company . . . knew Oak Ridge was being built, and knew fairly well what its intended purpose was.” He certainly kept an eye on the geographic distribution of sales, and a large number of copies were sold at the drugstore near Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
In any case, the gamble with “Deadline” had succeeded. Campbell had a hunch about what the government was doing, and he had successfully cast out a lure to test it. He took satisfaction in the result, and he never knew how close he had come to ruining the magazine. But after all was said and done, he was still on the outside—although he was about to get the chance to make his first real contribution.
IN LATE 1943, THE INSTALLATION AND MAINTENANCE BRANCH OF THE RADIO DIVISION OF THE Bureau of Ships realized that it had a problem. Manuals for sonar equipment—including the kind that led to Hubbard’s encounter with two imaginary subs—were dangerously out of date, and some were nonexistent. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Sonar was a crucial weapon in the war, with equipment being installed across the fleet, and there were no workable manuals for the men who had to use it.
A request for assistance to the National Defense Research Committee was passed along in February 1944 to the University of California Division of War Research in San Diego. For ease of access to writers, it was decided to base the project in New York, where Keith Henney, an editor at McGraw-Hill, would oversee operations. Henney, who had a background in radio, was also a science fiction fan, and when the time came to find someone to run the writing side, he contacted Campbell.
The “Deadline” inquiry was just wrapping up, and Campbell may have hoped that it would lead to just such an offer—although it was probably made in spite of the investigation, not because of it. For once, his experience was useful, and he was pleased by the fact that he had finally been approached by the NDRC, which had declined his services when the war began.
He promptly began to recruit his authors. Heinlein badly wanted to join, but the editor said that it was no use: “[We] are, as usual, unable to stick the proper pins in the proper people to get the proper reactions in anything approximating the proper reaction time.” Campbell told Heinlein that he hoped to “eventually see your shining face in the slave barracks,” but the transfer never came through.
Other writers were more fortunate. Heinlein came to think that Sturgeon had worked on the project—in fact, he was still overseas at the time—but Campbell did hire L. Jerome Stanton, a member of Heinlein’s circle, and George O. Smith, a recent discovery from the magazine. Smith, who was born in 1911, was a radio engineer who wrote the kind of highly technical stories that Campbell liked, and the editor had invited him to spend a weekend every month in New Jersey. On these visits, Campbell—who was writing freelance articles on electronics for Popular Science—put Smith to work on projects in the basement, while Doña joked that he treated her “like a delicate flower instead of a husky wench.”
After joining the sonar group, Smith moved into the house at Scotch Plains, where he slept on the pullout couch. Leslyn’s nephews were still living there, so it was crowded, but the editor was pleased to have an electrical engineer at his disposal—and Smith also came to know Doña well. Campbell rarely drank at home, but he didn’t mind when his wife had friends over for cocktails. One evening, as Smith was coming upstairs to use the bathroom, Doña asked him to join the party, and after three hours, Campbell found him still mixing drinks in the kitchen. Smith later observed, “The trouble with John Campbell is that he has no redeeming vices.”
The sonar manual team eventually expanded to take up an entire floor of the Empire State Building, with a staff of four editors, ten physicists, ten engineers, thirteen rewrite personnel, four draftsmen, thirty-one clerical assistants, and a naval lieutenant to review the results. They sorted themselves into “two big and several dozen small rooms,” and Campbell soon found himself up to his ears in work, shuttling between his two jobs “like a ping-pong ball with a hotfoot.”
His group produced thirteen manuals, covering equipment used in antisubmarine warfare ships, destroyers, and subs throughout the Navy. Campbell was left without any vacation time, but his new job may have allowed him to print the article on military problems that he had been trying to publish for years. Titled “Inventions Wanted,” it provided a technical wish list prepared by the Office of Scientific Research and the National Inventors Council. It came out too late to have any meaningful impact, but the fact that it appeared at all amounted to a minor victory.
He may have hoped that his work would lead to a more extensive research role, but it never did. Campbell resigned after half a year, before the effort was complete: “I couldn’t keep up both NDRC and S&S, and the project I was on was due to fold in about five more months.” Running a writing factory wasn’t quite the position that he had envisioned for himself, and he was already looking ahead to the end of the war. Doña was pregnant with their second child, and he had become involved with a far more intriguing undertaking, which he owed entirely to Heinlein.
Heinlein had spent the early part of the year recuperating from his surgeries. After he returned to work, an important figure entered his life in September 1944, when Lieutenant Virginia Gerstenfeld was transferred from the Bureau of Aeronautics in Washington, D.C. Gerstenfeld, who was born in 1916, had a background in chemistry, a fiancé in the Pacific, and a fierce streak of patriotism—her only regret about serving her country was that she couldn’t go into combat herself. On her first day, Heinlein gave her an amused look: “Lieutenant, your slip is showing.” Gerstenfeld, mortified, ran into the bathroom to repair the broken strap.
They became good friends, despite their differences. Gerstenfeld, who went by Ginny, was smart and attractive, but she wasn’t impressed by science fiction—and she was a Republican. When President Roosevelt toured the Navy Yard on October 27, she didn’t even want to see him, leading Heinlein to protest, “But he’s your commander in chief!” Heinlein headed over on his own, and he came away worried about Roosevelt’s health. Asimov joined the crowd as well, and when he saw the president leaning out of his limousine, he found himself cheering at the top of his lungs.
Heinlein was soon pulled into another project. As the war shifted to the Pacific, the Navy became concerned by the threat of kamikaze attacks, and in the fall, he was asked by the Office of Naval Intelligence to assemble a group to brainstorm unconventional responses. Heinlein, who had trained as a gunnery officer and was familiar with the technical background of aviation, was the ideal man to organize talent and evaluate ideas. It was close to Campbell’s dream, and Heinlein asked the editor to join—although he also left no doubt about who was in charge.
The core of the team consisted of Campbell, Stanton, de Camp, Pratt, and George O. Smith. Jenkins had been overruled as a full member because he had never graduated from high school, but as the most resourceful inventor of them all, he was informally consulted. Heinlein also asked Campbell to invite Sturgeon, who had returned from St. Croix in October and was suffering from depression.
Asimov was conspicuously absent. Unlike Heinlein or Campbell, he was content to keep his head down, making incremental progress on the research that he was conducting, and he lacked the technical or military background of most of the others. If he had been a regular part of Heinlein’s social circle, he might have been included, but he was se
t apart from the others by his youth, habits, and personality, much as he had been with the Futurians.
Hubbard was also there. He had spent the first half of the year in Portland, waiting on the conversion of the USS Algol. As its navigational officer, he had endured an uneventful two months at sea, but his role had little in common with his fantasies of being a pirate, and his superior noted that he was “very temperamental and often has his feelings hurt.” On October 4, when the cargo ship left for the Marshall Islands, Hubbard was already gone.
He made his way to Princeton, where he took part in a four-month training program at the School of Military Government, along with Heinlein’s younger brother Clare. Campbell wrote proudly of Hubbard, whom he had invited to join the kamikaze group, “He’ll go in with the first wave of landing craft, unarmed, but in navy officer’s uniform, to take charge of civilians trapped in the newly formed beachhead.” Hubbard, in turn, was spinning stories as furiously as ever. If he had failed to become a hero, it was easy enough to pretend to be one.
Hubbard wasted no time in embellishing his experiences, claiming that he had nearly been blinded in a close call with a deck gun and had taken ships up through the Aleutian Islands. He used his imaginary war wounds to explain his fragile mental state, as well as to make himself attractive to women, and his friends were happy to believe him. Campbell wrote wonderingly, “He was in command of an attack cargo carrier that helped at Saipan just before he was assigned to his present job. He’s been sunk five times, wounded four. He was the naval officer in charge of sending ships through to MacArthur on Bataan.”
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