Astounding

by Alec Nevala-Lee

  The article, which was riddled with errors, noted that they had failed to come up with anything practical. It concluded, “Heinlein, de Camp, and Azimov, however, have been separated from the service now and have gone back to their typewriters, where it is so much easier to invent things.” And the only quoted source in the entire piece was Campbell.

  De Camp was furious. He called Campbell to complain, raging to Heinlein that the editor must have been “drunk, hostile, or very, very careless.” Heinlein, in whom the article caused an “explosion,” asked Campbell to tell the paper that he had been misquoted, and there was talk of the three authors joining in a lawsuit. De Camp contented himself with sending an angry letter, and no further action was taken after the newspaper printed his response.

  Klein, the credited writer, later said that he had obtained his information from Campbell, and that his notes had been written up by a cub reporter. Campbell, in turn, blamed Klein, saying that he had only talked to him for ten minutes, distractedly, during a meeting in another editor’s office. In reality, his quotes were almost certainly authentic—the article included an account of the “Deadline” affair that repeated his assertion, which only he could have made, that he had been allowed to continue printing stories about the bomb.

  If he gave the rest of the story to Klein, as it seems likely that he did, it was his fantasy of what the Navy Yard might have been. Campbell still clung to the belief that science fiction could have played a greater part in the war, and he wasn’t above inventing one for it out of thin air. He claimed elsewhere that the operations rooms on warships had been inspired by E. E. Smith’s Lensman stories and that the magazine had “helped the Navy with more than a dozen vital little systems and gadgets.” At best, these were embellishments, and at worst, they were outright lies.

  It all felt a little like Hubbard, and it reflected how the war had failed to live up to either of their expectations. Hubbard had craved glory for its own sake, while Campbell—while not averse to taking credit—had wanted science fiction to rise to the occasion for which he thought it had been destined. In practice, it had turned out to be less useful than he had hoped, but after the war, he saw another chance. Before Hiroshima, he had written in Astounding:

  Our present culture is finished. Either it will learn something about how men live and think and react, so it can be discarded in favor of a cultural system that can prevent warfare, or the next gross failure on its part will produce a war in which the ancient cry of “Wolf! Wolf!” will not be a false alarm—they really will have the weapon that can’t be stopped.

  The atomic bomb had been a triumph of technology, but it also pointed to the fact—which Heinlein’s “Solution Unsatisfactory” had foreseen—that existing social and political systems weren’t up to the task of controlling it. Campbell had already moved to make sociology a province of science fiction, and the next frontier, as he had long understood, would be in the brain.

  He had failed to make a direct impact on the war, but his life’s work had been clarified. In the world of tomorrow, power would be based on the mind, rather than on industrial might. Campbell couldn’t run a research operation on the scale necessary to produce an atomic weapon, but for a psychological breakthrough, he needed nothing but the resources that were at his disposal.

  In fact, it required nothing more than two men in a quiet room. Science fiction, he decided, would save mankind from the bomb—and this time, the project would be one that he could control. As he wrote to Hubbard on November 11, 1945, “Science fiction better get stepping if it wants to lead the world!”

  IV.

  The Double Minds

  1945–1951

  The art [of science fiction] consists in concealing from the reader, for novelistic purposes, the distinctions between established scientific facts, almost-established scientific hypotheses, scientific conjectures, and imaginative extrapolations far beyond what has even been conjectured. The danger of this technique lies in the fact that, if the writer of science fiction writes too much of it too fast and too glibly . . . he may eventually succeed in concealing the distinction between his facts and his imaginings from himself.

  —S. I. HAYAKAWA, ETC., SUMMER 1951

  10.

  Black Magic and the Bomb

  1945–1949

  In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.

  —ALEISTER CROWLEY, LIBER O

  At the end of 1945, the three writers who had been displaced by the war entered a world that had changed forever. Before Pearl Harbor, their careers had followed distinct trajectories—shaped in no small part by their reactions to Campbell—that had been interrupted just as they seemed on the verge of reaching the next stage. Instead, they had been diverted along other lines, and in the aftermath, they were unable to resume the lives that they had been leading before the convulsions began.

  It would have been hard enough to navigate this homecoming in itself, and there were other complications. Campbell, who had brought them all together, was evolving as well. One of his authors soon found that the forces that the war had set in motion weren’t quite done with him yet. Another became distracted by upheavals in the wider world and in his own life. And one had been altered in ways that neither he nor anyone else would fully understand for a long time.

  ON NOVEMBER 1, 1945, ASIMOV RECEIVED A PSYCHOLOGICAL EXAMINATION AT THE ARMY INDUCTION center in Philadelphia. He was told that he suffered from “situational tension,” which struck him as the least surprising news in the world. Later that afternoon, he was sworn in by a sergeant, who asked the assembled recruits if they had any questions. Asimov felt obliged to make the traditional crack: “Yes, Sarge—how do we get out of this chicken outfit?”

  The sergeant just rolled his eyes. Asimov was put on a train to Fort Meade, Maryland, and proceeded from there to Camp Lee in Virginia. When he called Gertrude, he began to cry. He learned to make a bed to military specifications and showed an unexpected talent for marksmanship, although his high score on the Army General Classification Test—an intelligence exam given to soldiers—meant that he would end up behind a desk no matter what he did.

  When his furlough came, he hitchhiked to the train station in Washington and made his way to New York. On December 30, at his father’s candy store, he ran into Pohl, who had just been discharged. Pohl said proudly that he had scored 156 on the intelligence test. “What was yours?”

  Asimov couldn’t lie. His score had been the highest anyone had ever seen. “I got 160, Fred.”

  “Shit!” Pohl said. It never even occurred to him that Asimov wouldn’t tell the truth.

  Asimov still wanted to get out of the Army. Before his departure, he had seen an article about the release of chemists engaged in research, but it would take six weeks to see any results on the application, and until then, he would be stuck wherever he happened to be. He didn’t want to get stranded in basic training, so he decided to wait. In the meantime, he befriended the base librarian, who offered him a typewriter to begin a new robot story.

  On February 9, 1946, he attended a USO event in Richmond, where he danced with a “very pretty girl.” They arranged to meet again the next day, and he stayed in the city overnight. “I know exactly what I had in mind and I might have carried it through,” Asimov recalled. “I think she was willing.” When they went to her apartment, however, after making a few hesitant moves, he heard himself saying that he had to leave. The girl was startled, but she let him go. At a time when he was anxious to return to Gertrude, an affair would have been a betrayal, and as soon as he made it back to base, he submitted his request for discharge.

  Rumors were circulating that he was being saved for Operation Crossroads, the atomic bomb
test scheduled for Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The show would be run by the Navy, but the Army wanted to study food and equipment for the effects of exposure to radiation, and one of its “specialists” would be Asimov. He felt sick at the news, reflecting that if he had made his application in basic training, he wouldn’t have been considered at all.

  On March 15, Asimov arrived in Hawaii on a troopship—his first voyage at sea since his departure from Russia. Two months later, thanks to a misunderstanding over his discharge status, he escaped from Bikini with one day to spare. At a moment when Heinlein and Campbell were defining themselves through their reactions to the bomb, he was the only one who came close to being involved in nuclear testing—and he hadn’t wanted anything to do with it. Campbell wrote to Heinlein, “Isaac doesn’t like the atomic bomb worth a damn. Isaac, I fear, is approaching the status of one who has been successfully scared by the understanding of what the thing means.”

  It would be even more accurate to say that Asimov saw the bomb as a disruptive force that was keeping him away from the life that he wanted to resume. Campbell himself was an important part of that world, and on June 11, a few days into another furlough in New York, Asimov paid him a visit, bringing along his father for the first time. Afterward, he and the editor had lunch, where Asimov pitched the short story “Little Lost Robot.” He couldn’t write it until after his situation in the military was clarified, but he didn’t like to come by without a new idea.

  In July, Asimov’s discharge was finally approved, and he moved back to Brooklyn, where he did his best to break the habit, which he had picked up in the service, of casually using the word “fuck.” Later that summer, he received an offer to buy the rights to his story “Evidence” for $250, which Campbell said seemed fair. When Asimov learned that the interested party was Orson Welles, he agreed, delighted, but nothing ever came of it. Welles owned it in perpetuity, making it impossible to sell it again—a point that the editor, whose casual attitude toward rights outside the magazine would soon cause other problems, had neglected to mention.

  On September 23, Asimov registered as a graduate student at Columbia. He continued to think of the war years as an “extraneous intrusion” on his life, lamenting to Pohl that his friends were “lost in a maze of successful agencies, editorships, and whatnots,” while he was back in school as if nothing had changed. Yet he continued to flourish as a writer. Campbell paid him five hundred dollars for “Now You See It—,” a new Foundation story, and at the World Science Fiction Convention the following summer in Philadelphia, Asimov was treated as a celebrity.

  Another attendee was Sam Merwin, Jr., the editor of Thrilling Wonder Stories. Several months earlier, he had asked for a novel from Asimov, who promptly started work on Grow Old with Me, about a future society in which all citizens are euthanized at the age of sixty. In September, however, Merwin told him that it had to be rewritten from scratch. Asimov—who was anxious about his dissertation and his efforts to have a child with Gertrude—was furious. Picking up the manuscript, he snarled, “Go to hell!” He never submitted to Merwin again.

  Campbell rejected it as well, saying that it lacked a natural breaking point for serialization—which may have been a diplomatic way of saying that it was a step down from his best work. Asimov’s professional future was also up in the air. Earlier that year, he had attended a convention of the American Chemical Society, writing on his registration, “Not interested in any work having any connection to the atomic bomb.” He left without any interviews. By January, he was starting to worry, but he managed to land a postdoctoral position at the last minute.

  As part of his research, Asimov often had to prepare solutions of a white fluffy compound called catechol. One day, he had thought idly, “What if it dissolved just before it hit the water?” It occurred to him to frame the story as an academic parody, complete with references and diagrams, and when he pitched the premise—with its sidelong look at determinism, which appealed to Campbell’s interest in psychology—the editor laughed: “Go try it.”

  Asimov wrote it up as “The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline,” but he worried that it would look bad if it came out before his orals, so he asked that it be published under a pseudonym. After it appeared in the March 1948 issue, he was in the lab with two other students when one said, “Hey, that was a funny satire on chemistry by you in the new Astounding, Isaac.”

  “Thanks,” Asimov said. He paused. “What made you think the article was by me?”

  The student pretended to consider the question. “Well, when I noticed your name on it, I thought, ‘Gee, I bet he wrote it.’ ”

  The other graduate student stared at him. “Don’t tell me you put your own name on a satire on chemistry when your dissertation is coming up?”

  Asimov was horrified. He called Campbell to ask why he hadn’t published the article under a pseudonym, as they had previously agreed. The editor’s explanation was a simple one: “I forgot.”

  He later wondered whether Campbell had forgotten on purpose. The article became the most popular story he had ever written, at least among the general public. Campbell claimed that readers had gone to the library to look up the fictitious sources that it mentioned, and chemists were especially tickled by it. Asimov didn’t enjoy the attention—it just made him more worried about his orals.

  On May 20, the day of his presentation arrived. After he was done, a professor asked, “What can you tell us, Mr. Asimov, about the thermodynamic properties of the compound known as thiotimoline?”

  Asimov broke down laughing. He went outside, and after five minutes the professors emerged one by one to shake his hand. According to Gertrude, he lay awake for most of the night, giggling to himself in bed and repeating, “Doctor Asimov.” He finally had his Ph.D.

  In June, he began his postdoctoral research, on the same day that he started one of his best stories, “The Red Queen’s Race,” about a scientist suffering from guilt over his work on the bomb. Later that year, he visited Astounding’s cramped new offices in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Campbell wanted another Foundation story, but Asimov was tiring of the series. Since this would be the last installment, the editor requested that it be a long one, and he eventually took “—And Now You Don’t” for a thousand dollars, which was the largest check that Asimov had ever seen.

  But a new chapter of his life was about to begin. Early in 1949, he got a call from Bill Boyd of the Boston University School of Medicine, who had recommended him for a position. Asimov, who had never considered entering academia, paid a visit to the medical school, and when he was asked if he could teach freshman biochemistry, he replied, “Certainly.” He didn’t tell them that he didn’t know anything about it, but he figured that he could catch up later.

  With help from Pohl, Grow Old with Me was bought by Walter I. Bradbury of Doubleday, where it was retitled Pebble in the Sky. Asimov had met Bradbury at the Hydra Club, a successor to the Futurians that included del Rey, Sturgeon, and Judith Merril, whom Asimov described as “the kind of girl who, when her rear end was patted by a man, patted the rear end of the patter.” He was speaking from experience, but he softened the facts—Merril had actually grabbed at his crotch.

  At the end of May, Asimov and Gertrude moved to Boston. For the first time ever, he was willingly leaving one life and entering another. He still didn’t think that he would be able to write for a living, and he had doubts about his dependence on one editor: “There was a question in my mind as to how much of the success of my stories was mine and how much Campbell’s. . . . What would happen to me, then, if something happened to Campbell? If he quit or were fired or died? Might it not be possible that I would then find suddenly that I was no writer at all?”

  AFTER THE WAR, ASIMOV HAD BEEN DEPOSITED STRAIGHT INTO THE ARMY, PLUNGING HIM INTO A system that he desperately wanted to escape. Heinlein had the opposite problem. In August 1945, he had packed up his life at the Navy Yard, leaving some furniture with the Campbells, and prepared to
make sense of his place in the postwar world. Before leaving, he said goodbye to Virginia Gerstenfeld. Ginny recalled, “He left me on a street corner in Philadelphia with a kiss. Our first.”

  Loading up their Chevy, Heinlein and Leslyn headed west. In Santa Fe, they saw his friend Robert Cornog, a physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project. Cornog introduced them to scientists, and Heinlein was surprised to be treated as a political authority: “The men who built the atom bomb [were] asking us quite seriously what they should do next to achieve their social aims.” As a gesture of thanks, Cornog presented them with a hunk of the translucent green glass produced by the detonation of the bomb at Alamogordo. Leslyn was afraid to touch it.

  On September 11, they arrived in Los Angeles, where Heinlein busied himself with letters about his rocket project. He also reconnected with Jack Parsons, an engineer who had been one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Parsons was a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis, a group associated with the occultist Aleister Crowley, to whom he sent money. He was also a science fiction fan, and Heinlein, Williamson, and Cartmill all attended meetings of the temple, which de Camp called “a conspiracy to seize control from the extroverts.”

  Leslyn’s health was still poor—at one point she weighed less than eighty pounds—and they went on vacation to Murrieta Hot Springs. They were joined in October by Hubbard, who was on convalescent leave from the naval hospital. Rather than go back to Polly, he had headed down to Los Angeles, and he was staying at the Eleanor Hotel when he heard that he was going to be mustered out. When they returned to Laurel Canyon, he moved in with them. Heinlein established a shared workspace, with a desk for Hubbard made out of a door and a pair of old packing crates, and charged a quarter to anyone who broke the rule of silence.