Astounding

by Alec Nevala-Lee

  Asimov thought it was one of the worst movies ever made. Campbell was more generous: “I think they may be right in feeling that the proposition in ‘Who Goes There?’ is a little strong if presented literally in the screen.” Elsewhere he wrote, “I have an impression that the original version directed and acted with equal restraint would have sent some ten percent of the average movie audience into genuine, no-kidding, semi-permanent hysterical screaming meemies.” When Asimov commiserated over his lack of financial participation, the editor only replied, “It helps spread science fiction among the outsiders. That’s all that counts.”

  Even as The Thing played in theaters nationwide, Campbell was turning inward, with the help of the most loyal partner he would ever have. On June 15, 1951, he married Peg Kearney, who wore pearls, a corsage, and a gray dress. Their wedding took place despite what Campbell called his mother’s “utmost desire to drive Peg away from me before we were married,” which led to such a bitter argument at the house one night that he had to send her home. Peg, his mother realized, couldn’t be pushed around—which was precisely what her son wanted in a wife.

  Peg Campbell on her wedding day, June 15, 1951.

  Courtesy of Leslyn Randazzo

  In the fall, they moved into 1457 Orchard Road in Mountainside, New Jersey, a newly built ranch house with cedar siding and a spacious basement that was big enough for Campbell’s electronics workshop and Peg’s workroom—she later started a business that sold embroidery supplies by mail. They needed the space. Along with Peedee and Leslyn, who were eleven and six, Campbell now had two teenage stepchildren. Joe was seventeen, Jane sixteen, and they were thrown even closer together after Peg’s first husband died in October.

  At first, the blended family seemed off to a promising start. Campbell told Heinlein that the two teenagers had “accepted me completely,” which proved to be overly optimistic. Later that year, Joe left for Williams College, and when he returned, they frequently argued. Joe suffered from asthma that was worsened by stress—Campbell thought that he was using it to dramatize his emotions—and when he majored in political science, his stepfather saw it as an act of revolt, since he openly doubted that there was anything scientific about such fields at all.

  Campbell’s skepticism toward the social sciences was reflected in his work with Peg. At first, they approached it as an extension of their research at the foundation, and they even sent monthly updates to an independent dianetics newsletter in Florida. In the October 1951 issue of Astounding, the editor took pains to distance himself from Hubbard, while also taking partial credit for what had worked. Dianetics, he wrote, was “much less than Hubbard believed it to be—but . . . considerably more than he realized. . . . It needs a tremendous amount of development.”

  Of Hubbard himself, Campbell said privately, “He’s now operating in a not-so-good condition, with a conviction that Joe Winter, I, and the others who originally backed him are his worst enemies.” As far as their personal history was concerned, Campbell wrote to Winter, “Peg’s cordially hated Ron . . . because he experimented on my mind, and on other people’s minds.” When van Vogt paid a visit, he asked if Campbell thought that Hubbard had used hypnosis to convince him to promote dianetics. If anything, Campbell said, he had hypnotized himself into believing it.

  Before long, however, he and Peg had moved off in their own direction. In the magazine, he had written, “But the deep self-understanding that must be achieved for full happiness can be achieved only with the help of someone who is strongly, warmly, personally-emotionally attached to the individual.” It was a statement that arose directly from his private life. After the successive implosions of his marriage and the foundation, he was ready to tear down everything that he knew, and Peg was more than willing to help him rebuild his personality from scratch.

  It was, Campbell said, “a kind of suicide pact.” For fifty hours a week, they confronted their most painful memories, especially from their first marriages, generating ten pages of typewritten notes every other day. Campbell talked about turning it into a book, but apart from some essays that he wrote for his own use, no usable manuscript ever emerged. He preferred to drop hints in conversation, in editorials, and in his increasingly long letters to writers, all of which radiated out from his evenings with Peg, who influenced the second half of his career—and thus science fiction as a whole—as profoundly as Doña had shaped the first.

  They conducted sessions in the den every night, working after Campbell’s daughters, who adored their new stepmother, had gone to bed. As Peg stitched at her embroidery, Campbell sat on bolsters with his legs crossed, and they talked until two in the morning. Later, he started off with twenty milligrams of Benzedrine, which had been used by the dianetics group to aid the auditing process. Their discussions left him feeling as if he had been worked over with a baseball bat, and afterward he slept like a log. On several occasions he was left so “mentally twanging” that he feared that he might be psychologically crippled, or even die.

  Peg was uniquely capable of standing up to Campbell—Asimov called her “the velvet glove around the iron fist”—and their work centered on a question that she had asked him after their marriage: “How do you think?” Campbell spent the next decade convinced that he was on the verge of a breakthrough, with a messianic belief in his abilities that was not unlike Hubbard’s, and their ideas came to sound oddly alike. One night, Campbell sat up in bed “with bright and gladdened face,” transfixed by the revelation that he was the repository of two billion years of genetic memory, and proclaimed, “Peg—I am an Immortal Essence!”

  It soon led him into strange places. Since logic had failed to prevent his old life from falling apart, Campbell began to focus on intuition, which he felt was only the surface manifestation of a vast subterranean continent of unexplored powers. The term “psionics” had first appeared in a story by Jack Williamson in 1950, but the editor’s interest in telepathy and clairvoyance went back years. The dianetics group had taken them seriously, and in Hubbard’s absence, Campbell started to study them more closely. He wrote to Eric Frank Russell, “I know the general concept of teleportation, levitation, and a few other spontaneous psi phenomena—also telekinesis, etc. In addition, I know the general basic laws which can permit precognition.”

  Campbell also thought that he had the power to impose his will on others. At the office one day, he told Asimov that he wouldn’t be able to raise his hands from his chair. A look of panic crossed the writer’s face: “He could not move his arms. He tried, and unlike a hypnotized subject, he was consciously trying to break the spell. He was fully aware of his condition. He was not hypnotized; he was enchanted—in the old, fear-tingling magical sense.” Finally, the editor gave him permission to lift his arms again, and Asimov—who never spoke of the incident—managed to free himself. Campbell was equally shaken: “It scared the hell out of me.”

  In 1952, Campbell began to drop hints about his interest in psionics to “various authors and key fans” at the Worldcon in Chicago. Soon afterward, he mentioned the term for the first time in his editorials, arguing that science fiction possessed an advantage in the study of paranormal powers, which would only introduce noise into conventional experiments. Just as he had with dianetics, however, he wanted to present it in a form that his readers would accept: “Until I can demonstrate the phenomena myself, and communicate the exact nature of the mechanisms involved, with demonstrations of each step, I’m not ready to talk.”

  He confided his plans to an unlikely correspondent. In May 1953, his father, who had retired to Sarasota, Florida, had suffered a stroke, partially paralyzing him on his left side. At the urging of his stepmother, the two men began to correspond on a regular basis for the first time in years. Campbell’s letters were often emotional—he still resented how he had been treated as a child—but he also made an effort to impress his father with his new interests : “I’m in this for blood; it’s not a game, or a hobby. Somebody’s going to be a new Newton, or a new
Edison; the field is untapped. I’ve got the neatest little research organization for high-power thinking anybody ever dreamed up: the science fiction readers and authors.”

  His primary project, which he planned to call Serendipity Inc., had arisen from an unexpected source. Gerald Smith, the head of Street & Smith, had left the firm after a long battle with cancer, and Arthur Z. Gray, his successor, was surprisingly open to unconventional ideas. Not only did he encourage Campbell’s interest in psionics, but he introduced him to a group of businessmen who wanted to invest in it, and in 1954, he told him about a man named Welsford Parker.

  Parker was an inventor in Belleville, Ontario, who had spent two decades working on what he described as a gold-finding machine. Its most significant test had occurred a few years earlier, when the treasure hunter Mel Chappell hired Parker to use his equipment on Oak Island, the speck of land off Nova Scotia rumored since the nineteenth century to be the site of a pirate hoard. The expedition failed, and Chappell lost more than thirty thousand dollars.

  In the spring of 1954, Campbell and Gray traveled to Belleville to conduct an investigation of their own. Campbell examined Parker’s machine, which was a box with dials on the outside, various “condensers, vacuum tubes, electrical wiring, batteries,” and a pair of rods that were held by the operator. When a mineral sample—or even a photograph of where a deposit might be found—was brought nearby, the rods were allegedly drawn in that direction.

  Campbell was convinced: “Parker is not a fool; he’s a brilliant pragmatic experimenter. He has stumbled onto a new, basic principle of the universe.” The editor theorized that it tapped into an “urge field” present in all human beings, which meant that the operator, not the machine, was the real detector. Its best commercial application, he thought, would be as a substitute for radio. They just had to build one device that could detect another, which he estimated could be done within two years.

  He was willing to put his own money on the line. Gray’s investment group had sunk $150,000 into various avenues of research, and Campbell invested as well, buying ten thousand shares of stock in the Parker Universal Contact Co., Ltd. He wanted to become rich, not just for the obvious reasons, but as proof of his legitimacy. Campbell had spent most of his career as an editor earning just sixteen thousand dollars a year, and he told his sister, “[A] larger-scale crackpot has to be a millionaire to be a genius, and I’ll be a millionaire.”

  Parker’s device seemed like the great discovery he had been seeking, but an even more important test was just around the corner. Campbell was about to see Heinlein for the first time in six years, and it would be no ordinary reunion. Heinlein was still the best writer he had ever known, and Campbell wanted to recruit him as badly now as he once had for dianetics—not for the Parker Machine, which he was reserving for his fellow investors, but for the research program that he had undertaken with Peg. And this meeting would be the best chance that he would ever have.

  Heinlein and Ginny had recently returned from a trip around the world. After dinner with Asimov in New York, Ginny, who was feeling ill, caught a flight back to Colorado Springs, and Heinlein headed to Mountainside the following day “for the express purpose of giving John a chance to tell me what he was doing.” Campbell had described his research in letters, but Heinlein found it hard to understand: “I don’t know your methods, I don’t know how you work, I don’t know what you are driving at—you are going to force me to come east just to find out!”

  On May 26, 1954, when Heinlein arrived at the house, it was empty—Campbell had arranged for Peg and the girls to be away. This was striking in itself. Heinlein had never met Peg, and he hadn’t seen his goddaughters in years, but Campbell didn’t want any interruptions. He ushered the writer into the basement, and instead of asking about the trip, he launched into the lecture that he had prepared, subjecting Heinlein to the full weight of his obsessions at once.

  Heinlein couldn’t make head or tail of it. When the editor said that he was working on a new definition of distance, Heinlein challenged him, only to be told that he didn’t know enough mathematics to understand it—although Campbell later claimed that Heinlein had made the same accusation to him: “He said I had no right to say I was a nuclear physicist, because I hadn’t had enough higher math.” Campbell vaguely alluded to the Parker Machine, but when Heinlein asked to hear more, he was informed that the details were confidential.

  They also rekindled their disputes over General Semantics, which Campbell later said he dismissed “in about five minutes.” The discussion became heated, and Heinlein—who felt that the editor hadn’t seriously studied the subject—responded at one point by objecting, “I didn’t say that, Korzybski did.” Campbell shot back, “A magnetic tape recorder would show that your voice said it, not Korzybski’s. Aren’t you responsible for any authority you quote?”

  Back in the kitchen, Campbell tapped Heinlein on the chest, telling him that this work was as important as the race for the bomb, and that he lacked serious social purpose because he didn’t have children. This was a low blow. Heinlein wanted kids, but Ginny had learned from their doctor that her husband was sterile. She never told him, but it left a gap in their lives to which Heinlein, who returned to issues of fatherhood compulsively in his fiction, never reconciled himself.

  It was the last straw. Four hours was the equivalent of a single session with Peg, but it was more than Heinlein could handle. He wrote to their friend G. Harry Stine, who was working on rockets in New Mexico, “I got preached at, had verbal paradoxes hung under my nose and then snatched away, was told repeatedly that I did not understand, and that I lacked the patience for the sort of difficult work he was doing, and was told again and again how important and revolutionary it was.”

  They parted on bad terms. Heinlein told Stine, “After four hours of bullyragging I felt insulted—not only my intelligence insulted by prime damfoolishness, but personally and emotionally insulted by being told repeatedly that I did not understand simple statements—and then told I was a slacker because I did not drop everything and follow him!” Campbell, in turn, informed Stine, “In the course of the evening, I learned a lot; he, on the other hand, successfully resisted learning.”

  As Stine saw it, Campbell was “mashing Bob’s face in,” and in the process, he left no doubt that it had to be all or nothing. Revealingly, he never delivered the pitch with the same intensity to Asimov, who lacked a comparable sense of mission. Heinlein disliked the pressure: “I wish John would just let it be an ordinary friendship without insisting that his friends be his disciples.” And in another letter to Stine, he vented his frustration: “As for space flight, who is actually sweating to achieve it? You and the boys with you, eating sand and wind . . . ? Or John Campbell sitting on his fat buttocks back in Jersey and laying down the law from his easy chair?”

  EARLIER THAT YEAR, CAMPBELL HAD READ THE LIVING BRAIN BY THE NEUROPHYSIOLOGIST W. GREY Walter, who described how strobe lights could cause epileptic seizures. It reminded him of his experience with the mirrors, and he built a “panic generator” in his basement with a flickering fluorescent tube. When he tried it on his family, Peg’s throat tightened, Joe felt asthmatic, and Peedee got a headache—but it bothered Campbell for only ten seconds. He was, he proudly noted, “immune.”

  Campbell was less impervious to his own mother, who remained as hard to handle as ever. After one of her visits left him seething, he decided to take action. His sessions with Peg encouraged him to cultivate a brutal honesty, as he had with Heinlein, and he wrote a startlingly savage letter to his mother and stepfather that ran for nine pages: “I will judge Mother as one adult judging another. I judge her unreliable.” He informed her that she had made him miserable as a boy, told her that she had no friends, and called her a “a vicious harridan.”

  It was October 1954. The following week, just before his mother’s sixty-sixth birthday—her twin had passed away six years earlier—Hurricane Hazel tore through New Jersey. At her house, the lights
and telephone went out, and she felt sick. Her husband drove her to the hospital, where she died of what was later diagnosed as coronary thrombosis and arteriosclerosis. In a letter to Theodore Sturgeon, however, Campbell offered another theory:

  The trigger that caused her death by heart attack was, I believe, my interdicting her efforts [against Peg]. . . . I clipped her wings three successive times, each time cutting her down harder. . . . The fourth time I went a step further; I showed mother why she was driven to act the way she did, in a particular instance. She died a week later.

  Campbell seemed to genuinely believe that he had caused his mother’s death, as if he had finally discovered her one weakness, as his heroes had done with the monster that she had inspired in The Thing.

  His sister was passing out of his life as well. In 1952, while stationed in Guatemala, Laura had converted to Christianity. She became highly devout, and Campbell, a lifelong agnostic who had only recently taken to describing himself as “a deist,” needled her newfound faith: “You have found The Light, and know I speak from the Outer Darkness, so what I say must have but little value.” Elsewhere in the same letter, he wrote more bluntly, “Christianity has failed.”

  After her conversion, Laura read the novel The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to her son Laurence, who was troubled by the thought that he loved Aslan, the lion, more than Jesus. Laura reached out to C. S. Lewis himself, who wrote back to reassure her: “He must be a corker of a boy.” Laurence later corresponded with Lewis, whom he saw as a mentor for the rest of his life. He was less close to his uncle, although both Campbell and Lewis were writers of speculative fiction who used their position to advise their readers on how to live—and both would have their convictions tested in middle age by unexpected tragedy.