Campbell, who hadn’t been anywhere near the armed forces, wasn’t hard to mislead, but Hubbard was never called out by any of the others, either, and he became respected as the only one of their number who had seen action. Even Heinlein—who seemed to wistfully project his own wartime hopes onto Hubbard—was fooled, writing years later, “Ron had had a busy war—sunk four times and wounded again and again.” When Hubbard told him that he had broken both of his feet in combat, Heinlein felt guilty over making him walk to a neighbor’s apartment to spend the night.
Around this time, Hubbard also slept with Leslyn. Heinlein evidently encouraged the affair, as Hubbard later remarked: “He almost forced me to sleep with his wife.” Leslyn’s thoughts on the relationship have not been recorded—although she later asserted that her husband and Hubbard had been physically intimate, an allegation that has not been otherwise corroborated. Heinlein may have pushed her into it out of pity for Hubbard, although he might have felt differently if he had known that the writer was afraid of a recurrence of his gonorrhea, or that he was sleeping at the same time with one of the couple’s friends.
The group met at Heinlein’s apartment every Saturday, hashing out proposals with an assortment of naval officers throughout the night, with their contact from the Office of Naval Intelligence coming by to hear their recommendations the next morning. Heinlein was pleased by the direct pipeline, which sent the most promising concepts to be tested at the Naval Weapons Station at Hampton Roads, Virginia. No hotel rooms were available, so members slept on the bed, couch, or floor, with the overflow going down the street to stay with Heinlein’s supervisor.
None of the team’s ideas were ever put into practice, but it was a notable success as a social gathering, and on Sunday afternoons, after its official business was over, the fun began. Hubbard and the others performed in comic skits, one of which Sturgeon, who had once wanted to be an acrobat, finished with a backflip that missed the ceiling by inches. As he watched, Hubbard said admiringly, “I can see him now, a skinny kid in a clown suit too big for him, piling out of that little car with the other clowns and bouncing straight into his routine.”
Parties were also hosted by the Campbells, attended by the likes of Heinlein, Stanton, Kuttner, and Moore, at which the editor invited guests to watch the music undulating on a cathode ray screen as they crooned into the microphone. One gathering drew George O. Smith, Sturgeon, and Hubbard, who sang by the fire. Campbell recalled, “He has a low, magnificently mellow baritone voice, and he ‘puts over’ a song so powerfully that when he’s finished . . . you have a marked feeling that the handclapping will start at any second. . . . The fact that Doña has a fairly competent singing voice does nothing to mar such an evening.”
A month later, Jack Williamson, who was serving as a weatherman in New Mexico, paid a visit to Philadelphia. On December 2, the Heinleins served steak and potatoes at a dinner that was attended by Williamson, the Asimovs, the de Camps, and Hubbard. Afterward, they went back to a friend’s house. Gertrude was wearing an unusually revealing dress that night, and both Hubbard and Heinlein, Asimov said proudly, “swarmed all over her.”
But the real life of the party was Hubbard, who was only briefly put out by the fact that de Camp outranked him. He dominated the room, telling stories and singing “Fifteen Men on a Dead Man’s Chest” on Heinlein’s guitar while the rest sat “quietly as pussycats.” Asimov later wrote, “In after years, Hubbard became world famous for reasons far removed from science fiction and guitar plunking, but whatever he does, I remember him only for that evening.” They never met again.
Williamson, the guest of honor, came away with a rather different impression: “I recall [Hubbard’s] eyes, the wary, light-blue eyes that I somehow associate with the gunmen of the old West, watching me sharply as he talked as if to see how much I believed. Not much.”
In January 1945, Hubbard was transferred to the Naval Civil Affairs Staging Area in Monterey. Before his departure, he presented a box of candy bars to Heinlein, who was touched by the gift. Heinlein recommended that he seek out Jack Parsons, a rocket scientist in Pasadena whom he had met through the American Rocket Society, and Hubbard said that he would.
The plan was for Hubbard to continue to a foreign posting, but his medical issues intervened, and in April, he was diagnosed with a duodenal ulcer. Hubbard—who later described himself as “a supposedly hopeless cripple” at the time—welcomed the excuse to avoid going overseas. He was sent to Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland, and he remained on the sick list for the rest of the war.
ON CHRISTMAS DAY 1944, MARK HUBBARD, LESLYN HEINLEIN’S BROTHER-IN-LAW, WAS KILLED BY the Japanese. Three years earlier, he had been living on Luzon in the Philippines with Keith and their two sons, working as an engineer on a research expedition, when the island was taken. Dynamiting his gold mines to keep them from being taken by the enemy, he disappeared into the bush, listening to the news with makeshift radios that he fueled with alcohol that he distilled himself.
It was an example of the competent man at his best, but Mark Hubbard did not get the ending that he deserved. He caught malaria—his weight fell to below a hundred pounds—and he was handed over to the Japanese occupiers. After a protracted ordeal, he was executed at Bilibid Prison. He was later awarded the Purple Heart, and Heinlein would write one day, “This is how a man gets to Valhalla.” But no one at home knew of his death for months.
In February 1945, Kuttner and Moore arrived on a visit to Philadelphia, with Asimov, the Heinleins, and the de Camps joining them at a restaurant with service so bad that it became a running joke—when one of them asked for a fork, the waiter fished through the dirty utensils at a nearby table. The Kuttners were more concerned by what they saw of the Heinleins: “Both of you seem to be strung on taut wires these days. . . . The hypertension’s sneaked up on you both . . . and we are worried about it and expect you to blow up presently and suddenly.”
On April 12, President Roosevelt passed away. Heinlein and Leslyn wore black armbands to work, and Asimov dropped by Heinlein’s desk to share how depressed he felt at the news: “You see, I’ve never lost a member of my family before.” But the war was entering its concluding phase. Asimov had been keeping track of troop movements on his map in the office, and on V-E Day, Heinlein took it down, replacing it with one of the Pacific Theater.
Shortly afterward, they learned that Mark Hubbard had died. Leslyn was devastated. Worn out by work and worry, she descended further into alcoholism, and Heinlein was in no condition to help. As the war wound to a close, his emotions grew overpowering. After encountering a group of marines, one with a missing leg, another with “just enough of him left to sit down,” he went into the bathroom, locked the door, and cried for fifteen minutes.
When word came that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, one day after he had predicted it, Heinlein said, “That’s the end.” A week and a half later, he wrote out his resignation, citing the conclusion of the war and his health problems—but he also had another project in mind, which he described in a memorandum just before the announcement of the Japanese surrender.
The memo was titled “Tentative Proposal for Projects to Be Carried On at NAMC.” Its actual subject was rockets—the deployment of atomic bombs on missiles like the ones that had rained down on London, in a terrible combination of the two weapons that had embodied the genre’s greatest fears. Heinlein proposed that the Navy organize a mission to the moon, since the technical problems were largely the same, and he strongly implied that he was the one best prepared to lead the charge.
Asimov had a more pragmatic reaction to the bomb. When the news broke, he was reading a book at home while Gertrude did the ironing. Hearing the bulletin on the radio, he wasn’t shocked—he had known that something like it was coming since the day that he had unwisely mentioned uranium to Harold Urey at Columbia. What he thought about instead was the draft.
He had reached a dead end at the Navy Yard. A lieutenant commander t
here liked to make snide remarks about his Russian ancestry, and Asimov knew that he would veto any promotion. Heinlein quietly put the officer in his place: “I sent word to him, indirectly, which let him know that Isaac had been making more money the last couple of months pulp writing than he gets paid to be a crackerjack chemist. This lunk can be impressed only by money and I know it will burn him up.”
In fact, Asimov’s writing had become his greatest source of pride. Campbell was eager for more Foundation stories, and Asimov was equally determined to take advantage of the new higher rates. He would have been content to stick with his proven formula, but Campbell unexpectedly asked him one day to upset the Seldon Plan, the detailed forecast of the future on which the entire series rested.
Asimov was horrified—“No, no, no”—but he wouldn’t turn down a guaranteed sale. The result, “The Mule,” was his finest work to date. It had one of the best twist endings that the genre had ever seen, and its titular antagonist, a mutant telepath, introduced a welcome element of chance into a series that often seemed constrained by psychohistory itself. Campbell’s two best writers had pulled even.
Yet his fears about the draft persisted. The year before, the Navy Yard had announced that it was reviewing the status of all its employees, and a few days later, Asimov was classified as 1A. His first impulse was to look into becoming an officer, so he headed for the Naval Procurement Office, where he was told to remove his glasses and read the chart on the wall. He responded, “What chart?”
His eyesight was enough to get him exempted for now, but workers with “mild physical defects” were still being considered for the field. Life at the Navy Yard was winding down—employees were destroying war surplus, squashing radios in a compression machine and cutting up flight jackets with knives, and Heinlein and de Camp were preparing to leave. Asimov couldn’t go anywhere yet, but he was optimistic that he would be able to return to Columbia.
On September 7, 1945, the eve of Rosh Hashanah, Gertrude telephoned him with the news that he had been drafted. Asimov knew that it wasn’t as tragic as it seemed—he had been sucked into a war that was already over—but he was still miserable. He couldn’t help thinking that if he had kept quiet about his real age in the third grade, he would have been twenty-six on paper when his number came up, and he wouldn’t have been eligible at all.
Asimov managed to delay his induction by a month, and he and Gertrude moved back to New York. On October 15, he went to see Campbell with an idea for a story, “Evidence,” about a robot that looked like a man, cautioning him that he might not be able to write it until he got out of the Army. The editor took him to lunch with some friends from Bell Telephone, who ordered steaks. Asimov, dismayed by the cost, had the pot roast instead. Campbell seemed much the same as always, and he didn’t tell Asimov what few of their friends knew yet—Doña was gone.
After George O. Smith told him that the bomb had been dropped, Campbell had said, “Oh my God! It’s started.” He had greeted it with a grim sense of vindication. In his November 1945 editorial, he said that civilization as they knew it was dead, but he couldn’t resist sounding a note of satisfaction: “During the weeks immediately following that first atomic bomb, the science-fictioneers were suddenly recognized by their neighbors as not quite such wild-eyed dreamers as they had been thought, and in many soul-satisfying cases became the neighborhood experts.”
He was speaking of himself. As the atomic age dawned, Campbell was acclaimed as a prophet, a role for which he had carefully positioned himself—he had planted “Deadline” in the magazine so that he could point to it later, orchestrating the most famous anecdote of his career to illustrate the genre’s ability to foresee the future. The fact that he hadn’t predicted anything at all was a distinction lost on most readers, who exulted in their newfound relevance. Before long, the writer Chan Davis felt obliged to rebuke fans, “The fact that your life is in danger seems to interest you less than the fact that Anson MacDonald predicted your life would be in danger.”
The calls started coming right away. When a radio station asked Donald Wollheim for comment, he referred them to Campbell, who was “the kind of man who could talk a blue streak about scientific and pseudoscientific possibilities.” Both the Wall Street Journal and the leftist paper PM wanted the editor’s thoughts on “the economics of atomic power,” and he signed a contract with the publisher Henry Holt for a book on the bomb. He was even profiled in The New Yorker, in a Talk of the Town piece titled “1945 Cassandra,” in which he said of the next war:
Every major city will be wiped out in thirty minutes. . . . New York will be a slag heap and any extensive form of government will be impossible. . . . After a big international atomic war, with atomic bombs exploded on the ground, a lot of survivors will be mutated. They’ll give birth to freaks or supermen or telepaths.
A debate about the future was looming, but he was distracted by problems at home. In 1942, his sister, Laura, had left her first husband for another officer in the Foreign Service named William Krieg. They had gotten engaged while Krieg was in Lisbon, and she had braved the Atlantic at the height of the war to join him where he was serving in Lagos, Nigeria.
What happened next, Campbell wrote, was that “she was invalided home with complete breakdown into psychotic melancholia”—or what would be known today as bipolar disorder. Laura was hospitalized, and she appears to have received electroshock therapy. Campbell wrote favorably about the treatment in the magazine, saying that it allowed patients to get the equivalent of half a year’s distance on emotional trauma, but it weighed on his mind.
Doña was dealing with troubles of her own. Their second daughter, Leslyn, had been born without complications on March 22, 1945. They named her after Leslyn Heinlein, and there was no question that the Heinleins were her godparents. Between the war, her two children, and her husband’s workload, however, Doña began to suffer. She had been drinking more, although only socially—she got tipsy in the afternoons with other young mothers, and she sometimes went out with George O. Smith and Stanton while Campbell watched the girls. She said of him wryly, “It must be the life I lead that has ruined his health.”
But there were darker factors involved, some of which remain obscure. Sturgeon had lived with the Campbells for several weeks while Doña was pregnant, and he later hinted that it was because of a difficult personal situation—Doña was “in very real danger at the time from an outside source,” and he was there to serve as her bodyguard while Campbell was at the office. Doña was also skeptical of her husband’s evolving ideas, writing to the Heinleins that he was undergoing “a renovation, regeneration, or something, of personality. I await the results.” She added:
Seems like I have spent a goodly portion of these thirty-one years waiting for someone, or something, so don’t be surprised if I decide to take off like one of Willy [Ley]’s rockets one day, scattering burning particles in all directions, of course, and falling to earth again with a good, solid thump.
She underwent therapy, writing to Heinlein, “I also have been the victim of a sort of postpartum psychosis. I’ll let you know whether I’m working to conquer it or encouraging it.” After the war, her psychiatrist told her to take a vacation, and on September 27, Doña left for Boston, leaving the girls behind, in a separation that was planned to last between four and six weeks. Campbell told Heinlein:
She’s in violent revolt against responsibility of any kind, and determined to do what she wants to do. . . . I am in somewhat of a delicate situation in trying to get some data out of her as to her plans. The thing she resents is responsibility and “being pushed”; if I try to get her to tell me what makes [sic], she automatically resents it as an effort to control her decisions—and she’s supposed to be getting a rest from pressures.
While in Boston, Doña met up with George O. Smith, who had landed a job working at the Submarine Signal Company. Two weeks after her departure, Campbell received a letter from her that was “rather impersonal, but otherwise normal.�
� Leaving the children with Margaret, their maid, he tinkered with his record player and lost himself in work—the year before, he had been named the science editor for all of Street & Smith. Sturgeon, who was suffering from writer’s block, came to stay for ten days. He finally cranked out “The Chromium Helmet,” about an attempt to make the brain into an efficient machine, in Campbell’s basement, with the editor reviewing the pages as they came out of the typewriter.
In November, Doña returned. Campbell wrote to Heinlein, “Doña’s mood is not improved greatly, and could stand immense improvement. At present, you can’t scare her with atomic bombs or any other threats. It is her deep-seated opinion that the world will be much improved by their liberal use, and [she] would like to be handy by when the first one lands.” He was positioning himself for the postwar era, writing in the December 1945 issue, “May we call to your attention that the essential principles employed in the bomb were described as the arming mechanism of the atomic bomb in the story ‘Deadline’ in the March 1944 Astounding.”
Doña was back, but her mood was grim. As she wrote to Heinlein, “What do you expect to do with this horrid little world and its unimportant very little people if you finally manage to save it? . . . I not only don’t care if the world explodes its little self tomorrow, I hope to God it does. I prefer to be part of the splatter rather than the splattered.” With her luck, she would survive the blast: “I’ll die of overwork, preserving the edible portions of the animals you and John have talked to death.”
TWO MONTHS LATER, THERE CAME A CURIOUS CODA. ON JANUARY 20, 1946, THE PHILADELPHIA Record published a story titled “Stranger Than Fiction,” by the reporter Alfred M. Klein. It described a secret research laboratory at the Philadelphia Navy Yard that had been staffed by three science fiction writers, Heinlein, de Camp, and “Azimov,” who had been asked to build “some of these superweapons and atom-powered spaceships you’ve been creating on paper.”
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