Astounding

by Alec Nevala-Lee

  Campbell had pushed hard for the change, and he landed the editorship of Air Trails in the summer of 1946. John Michel, a founding member of the Futurians, was working there at the time, but he disliked Campbell so much that he quit immediately. In his first editorial, the new editor informed his readers, “It is up to each of us, personally, to learn and progress with the world—or be overwhelmed and left behind.” It was familiar language for Astounding, but a drastic shift for a model airplane magazine, which Campbell filled with psychology and the bomb: “We can already control atomic weapons—it’s men who need control.”

  He was feeling overstretched, and at the end of 1946, he brought on L. Jerome Stanton, who had worked on the sonar and kamikaze projects, as an associate editor. Stanton later joined Astounding, reading the slush pile and forwarding the best stories to Campbell, while Tarrant continued to wield her blue pencil. The two men once passed along a vaguely dirty joke about “the original ball-bearing mousetrap”—the tomcat—in a story by George O. Smith, assuming that she would take it out. She didn’t, and the gag famously made it into print. But it also indicated how divided Campbell’s attention was becoming.

  Campbell loved editing Air Trails, but the magazine failed to interest advertisers, and after the science angle was dropped, he bowed out in November 1947. There were rumors that Unknown would be revived, and Hubbard told Heinlein that he hoped that it would give him a fantasy market again: “Between you and me, I hate the hell out of gadgets.” It never reappeared, and its absence only increased the pressure on Astounding to reflect all sides of Campbell’s personality.

  Yet his one surviving magazine was doing well, printing tens of thousands more copies than it had during the war. Campbell took advantage of the situation to alter the logo, with Astounding written in a barely visible script and Science Fiction in huge block letters—allowing him to achieve, in effect, the title change that he had wanted since the late thirties. A year and a half later, he arranged for advertising to be sold specifically for the magazine, rather than for all the firm’s titles, enabling book publishers to reach fans directly, as well as identifying the science fiction community for the first time as a distinct demographic.

  Campbell was among the first to benefit from the market for science fiction in hardcover, with collections of his work issued by several publishers, which partially made up for his one great failure. He had spent his career thinking about the atom, and his definitive statement was The Atomic Story, which he had written in a white heat at a low point in his marriage. He had hoped that the book would be released quickly, but it was delayed by paper and press shortages. It finally appeared in 1947, after its moment of maximum relevance had passed, and he complained that Henry Holt had “rooked” him out of thousands of dollars by postponing it.

  The result was a readable work of popular science, but it ignored the personalities of the men behind the bomb, turning the story into a kind of superscience epic in which particles, not people, were the heroes. Campbell burnished his credentials with yet another account of the “Deadline” incident, and in its closing chapter, he revisited familiar territory:

  These two incomplete sciences—psychology and nuclear physics—are now abruptly confronted with the atomic bomb. . . . Psychology has not yet advanced far enough to permit all men to live sane, balanced, and tolerant lives. That has not hitherto been essential to survival; in the not too distant future it may be.

  What was required, he wrote, was “a total reorganization of the pattern of civilization,” and his final lines amounted to a prelude to dianetics: “We must learn more about atomic forces. But we’d be wise if, first, we learned more about man—the one greater force that can twist atomic energies to its will.”

  On April 9, 1949, Street & Smith discontinued most of its pulps to focus on slick publications like Mademoiselle. When Asimov was told the news, which his father had heard over the radio, he thought that his career was over. The next day, he learned that Astounding was the only one that had been spared. Campbell had saved it, in part because of his readers—most had college degrees, with salaries averaging four hundred dollars a month, and virtually all were male. He had their attention, and he felt that he had preserved it for a reason, even if it came at a personal cost.

  And just as Sturgeon’s “Microcosmic God” had served as an emblem of the magazine at the beginning of the decade, another story symbolized this moment of transition. “E for Effort” by T. L. Sherred, which appeared in May 1947, revolved around two men who develop a technique for filming the past. At first, they use it to make period epics for Hollywood, but they soon realize that the device also makes it impossible for nations to keep secrets, which is a crucial development “if atomic war is not to sear the face and fate of the world.”

  In short, what began as a form of escapist entertainment is transformed, with a small shift of emphasis, into a way to save mankind—which is exactly what Campbell believed science fiction could be. But the tone had changed. “Microcosmic God” had closed with its race of tiny beings surpassing all human technology. “E for Effort” ended with its heroes arrested and murdered by a government terrified of what they might accomplish—and then the war begins anyway.

  IN 1949, GEORGE O. SMITH WAS DIVORCED AND WORKING AS A RADIO ENGINEER IN INDIAN QUEEN, a suburban neighborhood of Philadelphia. One afternoon, he was cleaning up at the house when his doorbell rang. When he answered it, Smith was stunned to see Doña Campbell. She had driven eighty miles from Scotch Plains, and she didn’t waste time on small talk. “George, build me a good, stiff drink!”

  As he listened, Doña poured out her story. Campbell, she said, had become obsessed with Hubbard’s new mental therapy, of which she deeply disapproved: “She took a dim view of anyone without academic schooling in medicine or the mind playing with what she called an ‘offshoot’ of psychiatry.” And while this wasn’t the first point of disagreement between Doña and her husband, it was the one that finally drove her into another man’s arms.

  Over the next year, they carried on an affair in plain sight. Every Friday, Smith took the train to Westfield, picked up Doña, and went back to Indian Queen. On Sunday, they reversed the process. Smith recalled, “John was satisfied so long as the house was clean and there was food . . . and especially happy when Doña left the place, so he could have his dianetic sessions without someone waving an admonitory forefinger from left to right while her head moved right to left in opposition.”

  Campbell would later say that their marriage had been in trouble for a long time, with Doña “having no interest in the future with me these past couple of years.” He blamed his persistent skin problems not on overwork, but on “underwife,” and said that they had agreed to end it as early as May 1949. Doña, in turn, described dianetics as “only the last straw in a very ungood situation.”

  But while Hubbard may not have caused the break with Doña, he certainly benefited from her absence—as well as from Campbell’s other vulnerabilities. In 1948, the magazine’s offices had relocated to Elizabeth, New Jersey, removing him from writers in New York. His father was in Germany, rebuilding its telecommunications system, while Laura was stationed with her husband in Venezuela. Campbell was more alone than ever—and Hubbard was ready to take advantage of it.

  At the end of May, Hubbard and Sara had arrived in Elizabeth, moving into a house that the editor found for them on Aberdeen Road, just three miles from the office. Soon afterward, Campbell read Excalibur. He wasn’t impressed, calling it “more fiction than anything else,” but he was struck by Hubbard’s appearance: “The sparkle was back, and it was genuine. His conversation was lucid and thoroughly organized. He was thinking again. He told me he had found the secret of the problem of the mind—but more important he had found himself.”

  In its latest incarnation, Hubbard’s theory hinged on the idea that the brain was divided into two halves—the analytic and reactive minds. The former was perfectly rational, but it could be affected by memories, or �
�impediments,” implanted while a person was unconscious. Such experiences were stored in the reactive mind, which took over in times of stress—a patient who heard a doctor say “He’s better off dead” while under anesthesia would take it as a literal command. Hubbard’s treatment, which didn’t have a name yet, was designed to access these recollections, some of which dated from before birth, and erase any damaging behavior patterns.

  Campbell, who had heard the doctors talking over his body during his appendix operation, was supportive, but he proved unresponsive to both hypnosis and narcosynthesis. He later gave a possible reason: “I had known [Hubbard] as a professional, accomplished liar since 1938; nothing he said could be believed without personal conscious cross-checking. That sort of barrier makes hypnosis damn near impossible!” Yet he also wanted to believe that this was the positive element that had been lacking in all his negative pronouncements about the bomb. He had been describing the problem for years, and this felt like the solution—even if his impression that Hubbard had healed himself was all that they had to go on.

  They decided to involve someone from the medical side, which would allow them to present their case more convincingly. The year before, Astounding had published an article about endocrinology by a doctor in Michigan named Joseph Winter. Campbell had long been fascinated by the subject, which Winter extolled as the interface between the body and the mind: “It’ll be a great world when endocrinology reaches its peak—no dwarfs, no sterile women, no impotent men, no homosexuals, no insanity and no unhappiness. No fooling!”

  In July, Campbell wrote to invite Winter to join their new project: “L. Ron Hubbard, who happens to be an author, has been doing some psychological research. . . . He’s basically an engineer. He approached the problem of psychiatry from the heuristic viewpoint—to get results.” Winter was receptive. He had studied Korzybski for similar reasons, and he was intrigued by the claim that Hubbard had treated both mental illness and conditions such as asthma and ulcers.

  Campbell’s letter was followed by one from Hubbard: “My vanity hopes that you will secure credit to me for eleven years of unpaid research, but my humanity hopes . . . that this science will be used as intelligently and extensively as possible.” Hubbard described himself as “a trained mathematician,” but in a moment of uncharacteristic modesty, he also said, “The articles you suggest would be more acceptable coming from another pen than mine.”

  In the meantime, toward the end of July, Campbell experienced a breakthrough—the traumatic memory of his birth, with the aid of the flashing lights produced by the pyramid of mirrors on a record player. According to Hubbard, they even verified the account with the editor’s mother: “The recording of her sequence compared word for word with his sequence, detail for detail, name for name.” Campbell came to believe that his mother, who had passed out during the delivery, had received an impediment of her own when the doctor said, “You’ll forget all about this in a little while.” It had always been one of her favorite phrases.

  Their work together grew more intense, with sessions often conducted by telephone. Hubbard allegedly discovered a sentence that could work as an “automatic restimulator” for anyone’s impediments, and when he used it in a call to Campbell, the editor left his house at once: “[I] was barely able to hold myself under control for the seven minutes necessary to reach his place. . . . I arrived with arms and legs quivering uncontrollably, my stomach knotted up in cold fear, palpitations of the heart, heavy cold sweat, and just generally a state of acute nervous collapse.”

  He felt that he was benefiting from the treatment—he had lost twenty pounds, and his sinusitis seemed to be gone—and he even used it on his children. Leslyn, who had turned four, suffered from itchiness, which Campbell supposedly took away in three minutes. When Peedee, who was nine, fell off her bike and skinned both knees, he saw it as an opportunity for an experiment: “I used the technique on one knee—the worst. It healed completely about three days before the other, and all pain was gone from it within five minutes.” But Doña still refused to be treated.

  Campbell hoped to expand the circle, in his own version of the kamikaze team, and he began to reach out to others. He had told Heinlein about their work in July, and on September 15, 1949, he wrote excitedly:

  I firmly believe this technique can cure cancer. . . . This is, I am certain, the greatest story in the world—far bigger than the atomic bomb, because this is the story of controlling human thought, freeing it for use—and it is human thought that controls atomic energy. It is a story that must be spread, though, and spread fast. . . . But dammit, Bob, right now the key to world sanity is in Ron Hubbard’s head, and there isn’t even an adequate written record!

  Heinlein responded cautiously, “You will appreciate that I must approach this with scientific skepticism, albeit an open mind. If he is right, he has a discovery that makes the atom bomb look like peanuts.”

  In the meantime, Campbell recruited a man named Don Rogers, an engineer at Western Electric with “a purple-plated doozy” of a case, and in October—the week after President Harry Truman announced that the Soviets had tested a nuclear device—Winter arrived in New Jersey. At the first session that he observed, he watched as Hubbard took Campbell back to a period before his birth. Listening to Campbell’s chest with a stethoscope, Winter became concerned for his health, and he was amazed when the editor seemed to recover as soon as the memory had been discharged.

  Winter concluded that the treatment was basically just a form of hypnosis, but he was willing to try it for himself. Moving in with Hubbard and the pregnant Sara, who were living in a rented cottage in the nearby town of Bay Head, he commenced treatment, lying on the couch for up to three hours a day. Like Campbell, he was a junior case—his father, Joseph Winter, Sr., had been a prominent figure in his town in Michigan—and the process was sometimes agonizing: “I had nightmares of being choked, of having my genitalia cut off.”

  Their work in the early days was characterized by wild experimentation. At one point, Campbell attempted to hypnotize subjects using a spiral painted on a record turntable—which was reminiscent of a device that Hubbard had mentioned in one of his Ole Doc Methuselah stories—and they tried combining scopolamine with heavy doses of phenobarbital or sodium amytal. Neither worked on Campbell. The drugs either put him to sleep, snoring, or, when the others roused him enough to conduct a session, left him awake and unhypnotizable.

  They frequently argued over terminology. Years earlier, to avoid the risk of misleading associations, Campbell had proposed coining new words like “nam” and “env” to discuss mental health. Now “impediment” was replaced with “norn,” after the fates of Norse mythology—in which the editor had been interested for much of his life—and then with the more clinical “engram.” A “clear” was a person whose engrams had been successfully removed, leaving him with total recall and freedom from psychosomatic disease, while a patient became known as a “preclear.”

  Gradually, they refined Hubbard’s methods, which Campbell called “rules of thumb,” into a process known as auditing. A typical encounter began with the patient seated in an armchair in a quiet room. Smoking wasn’t allowed, which must have annoyed Campbell. The auditor ran through the patient’s memories, advancing along a “time track” of incidents, which would be relived as many times as necessary to discharge them of emotion. A special emphasis was placed on prenatal trauma, including attempted abortions, and the ultimate objective was to erase the very first engram, which had been installed shortly after conception.

  It was a reasonably effective system of talk therapy, and it had as much in common with Campbell’s conversational style—in which he hammered away at his listeners, asking them to question their assumptions—as with Hubbard’s hypnotic techniques. Campbell compared it to figuring out a story idea, and it sometimes felt like an attempt to institutionalize his method of raising the intelligence of his readers. Hubbard himself was less good at it, and observers later noted that he rare
ly followed his own procedures: “Although he did a lot of talking, he couldn’t audit. . . . He had to resort to a sort of black magic hypnosis.”

  As Campbell’s confidence in the technique increased, he brought in science fiction fans to be treated in his basement, and there were even a few lighter moments. Hubbard owned a calico cat, Countess Motorboat, which the editor would always kick: “So I just simply processed the cat up to the point where the cat, every time John W. Campbell, Jr. would sit down, would go over and tear his shoelaces open.” On another occasion, Campbell’s daughter Leslyn rose from where she had been playing with her toys, walked across the room, and kicked Hubbard in the shins. She remembered, “I guess I didn’t like being ignored.”

  Hubbard evidently believed in his own theories, which amounted to a formalization of his intuitive methods of emotional manipulation. But he was also keeping his options open, and he spent the second half of the year working on the screenplay for the film Rocketship X-M. He said that the producers hoped to benefit from the publicity for Destination Moon, the movie that Heinlein was making with George Pal, and that if it did well enough, there might even be a film based on Ole Doc Methuselah. Hubbard also produced several short stories and a serial, To the Stars, writing to Heinlein in July, “Nothing of real interest. Campbell happy. Field calm. Track muddy.”

  Throughout this period, the assumption within the group was that they were preparing a paper for a professional journal, with Campbell hoping to run a piece in Astounding as well. The first hint of an article appeared in the December 1949 issue, in which Campbell wrote:

  It is an article on the science of the mind, of human thought. It is not an article on psychology—that isn’t a science. It’s not General Semantics. It is a totally new science, called dianetics, and it does precisely what a science of thought should do. . . . The articles are in preparation.

  It was the first attested use of the word “dianetics,” which was allegedly derived from the Greek for “through the mind.” Campbell, notably, failed to mention Hubbard by name—although the announcement ran across from the author’s story “A Can of Vacuum”—and he didn’t state specifically that the articles would run in Astounding, which indicated that authorship and placement were still under discussion.