Astounding

by Alec Nevala-Lee

  On June 6, 1955, Joseph Winter, who was in his forties and overweight, lifted a heavy motorboat engine by himself onto the back of a truck. He felt chest pains, but he failed to seek treatment, and by the time it became clear that he had suffered a heart attack, it was already too late. He passed away two days later in Englewood, New Jersey, leaving behind his wife and children. Years afterward, Hubbard wrote of his death, “There are men dead because they attacked us—for instance Dr. Joe Winter. He simply realized what he did and died.”

  It came as a shock to Campbell and Peg, and it led them to take a course of action that they had long postponed. For more than a decade, the editor had effectively treated Heinlein as a godfather to Peedee and Leslyn, and this informal arrangement had remained in place even after the Heinleins divorced. On the day after Winter passed away, Campbell called the artist Frank Kelly Freas, a close friend, saying that he wanted him to be the guardian for his children if anything happened to him or Peg.

  Joe Kearney in 1955.

  Courtesy of College Archives and Special Collections, Williams College

  A week later, on Friday, June 17, Joe Kearney rose early at his stepfather’s house in Mountainside. Joe had received his bachelor’s degree from Williams College the week before, and he had reason to feel optimistic about his future. He had graduated sixteenth in his class, Phi Beta Kappa, with a Ford Foundation scholarship to study sociology in the fall at Harvard, and he had impressed Asimov two years earlier as “a very charming and intelligent young man.”

  After breakfast, Joe set off in his Plymouth sedan for Chicago, where he would meet up with his fiancée and take summer classes at Northwestern. Peg was grieving for her brother, but she took comfort in her son, whose graduation she had attended. Campbell wrote to a friend, “It was a very good thing for Peg; part of her world might be gone, but another part was doing mighty well.”

  It was a clear, bright morning, and Joe made decent time on the road. Five hours after his departure, around noon, he was on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, passing through the small town of New Baltimore. He was driving at the legal limit of seventy miles per hour. Directly ahead of him, moving slightly more slowly, was a trailer truck loaded with twenty tons of slag, the glassy waste material left over after metal has been smelted from its ore.

  Joe plowed into it at high speed. The truck bed cleared the hood of the Plymouth and smashed into the windshield, leaving him with just enough time to take his left hand from the steering wheel and fling it in front of his face. His skull was crushed, but his only other injuries were a broken arm and some scrapes—if he had thrown himself down onto the passenger seat, he might have lived. No skid marks were left on the pavement, which indicated that he had never even hit the brakes.

  His accident occurred near the Carmelite monastery of St. John the Baptist Church, known informally as the Church of the Turnpike, which stood overlooking the highway. A set of concrete steps led down the hillside to the road, and a few of the monks hurried to help, along with a passing physician. Joe never regained consciousness, but he survived for another ten minutes, until the bleeding spread to the motor areas of his brain to stop his heart and lungs.

  The day before, Joe had received a routine medical checkup—one of his classmates had been diagnosed with leukemia, prompting him to schedule an exam. A prescription for vitamins was found among his belongings, and after his doctor was notified, he called the Campbells.

  When the telephone rang, Peg was out shopping for groceries. On her return, she took one look at her husband’s face, which had gone gray, and knew that something had happened.

  She asked what was wrong. Campbell stared at her for a long moment. “You’ve really had it, kid. Better sit down first.”

  Peg’s mind immediately went to the unimaginable. “What? Not Joe? An accident?”

  Campbell told her as bluntly as he could. “Killed instantly on the turnpike. He hit a truck.”

  “No,” Peg said. Her first, disbelieving instinct was to deny it. “It can’t be—”

  Through his own shock, Campbell had been thinking of how to break the news, and he deliberately delivered it as a flat statement. By giving it to Peg directly, he hoped to push her into denial, which he compared to a slippage mechanism—like the clutch in an automobile—that could prevent greater damage. In a letter recounting the day’s events, he compared its effects to those of science fiction itself: “It lets you consider the problem before the problem hits you.”

  Later that afternoon, a doctor gave Peg a sedative. Campbell recalled, “It didn’t make Peg sleepy, but sort of slightly euphoric. . . . It made everything seem much less important.” In the days after the accident, Peg spent much of her time with Jane, who had been a student at Wellesley with Joe’s fiancée. The worst moment was when her son’s personal effects arrived from Bedford, Pennsylvania, including his steel watchband, which had been twisted and crushed. Campbell wrote, “It threw Peg; she hadn’t worked her way through as yet. It did not throw me; it fitted into a completed visualization I already had worked out.”

  But Campbell had been through an ordeal of his own. For three days, he obsessively relived the crash, as if he had been the one who had died: “The experience ran through from driving along the highway, through the truck coming in the windshield, the emotional shock of realization, the physical shock of the impact—and back to the driving along the highway.” He became nervous in his own car: “I was afraid to make the familiar drive down to the railroad station, because I now knew that some hitherto unsuspected danger was lurking.”

  And the more he thought about the accident, the harder it seemed to understand. The official explanation was that Joe had dozed off, but Campbell refused to believe it. While packing the night before, Joe had mentioned the risk of becoming tired on a long drive, and he had slept for eight hours. The Plymouth had been checked prior to the trip, and after the crash, Joe’s heart had kept beating, which implied that he hadn’t been incapacitated at the wheel.

  The unavoidable conclusion was that the crash had been caused by some external factor, and within a day of the accident, Campbell became convinced of what it was. Joe had been killed by highway hypnosis—a waking trance produced by the act of driving itself. The sound of the wheels, the drone of the engine, and the monotony of the landscape had all created the conditions for disaster.

  As soon as Campbell arrived at this explanation, his fear of driving disappeared—but it led to a deeper crisis of conscience. In figuring out the problem of highway hypnosis, he had drawn on information that had been available to him before the accident, which pointed to a terrible conclusion: “I could have warned Joe. I could have saved his life. The fact that I did work out the problem proved that I could have weeks before.” And he decided that he would never be at peace until he was able to say calmly to himself, “I am guilty of Joe’s death.”

  It wasn’t a rational statement, but it also pointed the way forward. Campbell would take his revenge on the unseen danger that had killed his stepson, personifying it like the villain in a story: “I am, as you see, seeking vengeance against the killer that got Joe.” He later wrote to Asimov, “Joe Kearney was sacrificed; we’re exploring the relationship between the present human mental mechanism and the operation of high-energy, high-performance, extreme-endurance machines. Joe summoned a demon too powerful to handle; it destroyed him.”

  Campbell had been preparing for this fight his entire career, and he immediately began seeking allies: “I’m trying to rally the tribe to go on the warpath to avenge Joe’s death.” He reached out for help from all sides, including the county legislature, the highway department, the big three auto companies, and his own authors, including Will Jenkins—although he pointedly failed to involve Heinlein. He worked hard on an article, “Design Flaw,” to mobilize his writers and readers, and when it appeared in the October issue, Asimov thought that it was the most powerful piece that Campbell had ever written.

  In a twist worthy of one of his ow
n stories, Campbell argued that highway hypnosis disproportionately affected people of high intelligence—the greater one’s ability to focus, the higher the risk of falling into a trance, which meant that it killed “the Good Joes.” To overcome it, psychology had to submit to the discipline of engineering: “No real solution to the problem can be achieved until the basic mechanisms of the mind involved are elucidated. . . . We do not care in the slightest who solves it—whether it’s a psychologist, an information theory expert, or an African witch doctor; the sole consideration is that it must be solved.”

  He had rarely allowed himself to appear so vulnerable in the magazine, and after the article was published, letters poured in with possible fixes. Campbell welcomed the discussion, but he cautioned readers against missing the big picture: “The pragmatic, trial-and-error approach to a solution is necessary—but must not be allowed to make a fundamental attack on ‘What is hypnosis?’ unnecessary.” He had known that the project would require the synthesis of numerous subjects, from automotive design to highway planning, and now he suspected that a concentrated assault on the nature of thought itself would be needed before work could even begin.

  And then, slowly but inevitably, he started to back away. Six weeks after the accident, Campbell wrote to a friend, “I’ve sort of slowed down on the anti-hypnosis campaign, for a reason. There is no point in trying to get Somebody To Do Something, until you have some idea of what to do that will be effective. As of now, so little is known about hypnosis that efforts to Do Something would be purely trial and error.” The questions involved seemed almost unfathomable: “Define ‘reality’ so that we can distinguish between ‘reality,’ ‘hallucination,’ ‘delusion,’ and ‘illusion.’ That involves a fundamental attack on the problem of the nature of the process ‘to think.’ ”

  It was typical that he became distracted from his campaign almost at once—he lacked the patience to be a true scientist, and he tended to drop projects abruptly in favor of the next tempting possibility—but Joe’s death was too painful for him to abandon it entirely. The answer, he decided, was psionics, which could serve as a source of objective data on the brain. From there, it was a short step to “the basic mechanisms of the mind,” which would illuminate the causes of his stepson’s death. It was a turning point in the history of the genre, and although Joe was never mentioned again, he provided its unspoken motivation, haunting it to the end like a ghost.

  The Parker Machine had turned out to be a bust—Parker had refused to provide crucial details about his work, and after a second trip to Belleville, the scheme petered out to nothing. Shortly after his stepson’s accident, Campbell received a more promising lead from Colonel Henry Gross, a member of a group in Pennsylvania that hoped to sell psionic machines. Gross alerted him to the work of Galen Hieronymus, a Florida inventor who had developed what sounded at first like another mineral detector—but unlike Parker, he had actually patented the design.

  Without contacting Hieronymus, Campbell assembled the device for himself. It took the form of a flat box with a pickup coil on one end, a knob in the middle, and a touchplate sandwiched over a spiral of copper wire. According to the instructions in the patent, you placed a mineral sample—Campbell used a chunk of lead—near the coil. You then turned the knob, which rotated a prism, while stroking the touchplate with your free hand. When the prism lined up with the radiation that the sample was allegedly emitting, the touchplate was supposed to feel sticky.

  After Campbell was finished, he called in his youngest daughter, Leslyn, who was ten years old. The girls were used to helping him out with his home experiments, and this one seemed like more of the same. “You stroke this plastic gimmick here. Tune it till the plastic feels different.”

  “Feels different?” Leslyn asked her father. “What do you mean? Different how?”

  “Well, that’s for you to tell me,” Campbell replied. “Maybe it’ll feel furry, like a kitten, all of a sudden, or maybe it will feel as though it turned into a bowl, instead of being flat. But you tune it and tell me.”

  Leslyn did as instructed. After a minute, she said, “It feels like—sort of like tar. If I pushed on it, my fingers would get stuck.”

  Campbell grew excited. He called Hieronymus in Florida, and the two men cooked up another test. Like Parker, Hieronymus claimed that the machine worked on photographs, and that it could be used to kill pests from a distance. Campbell sent him a snapshot of a cherry tree, along with a twig with a few leaves, and was amazed by the result: “All the tent caterpillars dropped out of it, dead, within three days, precisely as he predicted.” Years later, he described it to the author Poul Anderson as the moment that he began to take psionics seriously: “I got shown.”

  He prepared for publication, even as he privately ventured into weirder territory. Hieronymus revealed that the machine ceased to work during nuclear tests, which intrigued Campbell, but the strangest discovery of all was one that the editor made on his own—the machine functioned even when unplugged. This led to a series of experiments, of which he obscurely wrote, “I have a Campbell Machine, derived from the Hieronymus Machine, that works, too. Only it’s based on something so insane that it makes the Hieronymus Machine look as conventional as a shovel.”

  But he wasn’t ready to reveal this yet. Instead, he continued to invite writers to try the Hieronymus Machine, including the one author who was the least likely to be receptive to it. On March 28, 1956, Asimov delivered his novel The Naked Sun to the editor’s house, where he was asked to test the machine. He would have refused, but he felt obliged to humor Campbell, although he later admitted, “I no longer trusted the rigidity and integrity of his judgment.”

  Asimov twisted the knob, but he failed to feel any sticky sensation. After a while, however, his fingertips became sweaty. He said hesitantly, “Mr. Campbell, the plate feels slippery.”

  “Aha!” Campbell made a note of the reading on the dial. “Negative stickiness!”

  In the June 1956 issue, Campbell described the Hieronymus Machine in detail, saying that he hoped to publish similar pieces in the future: “The articles we run are going to be exceedingly unauthoritative, untrustworthy, incoherent, and misinterpreted.” He drew the line, however, at studies of extrasensory perception, which was too unreliable to be tested. A device, by contrast, could be built by anyone, with the magazine serving as a clearinghouse of experimental data.

  The following year, in the February issue, he unveiled the Campbell Machine, which he had been secretly developing since before the first article appeared. It was a “symbolic” Hieronymus Machine that used no electronic parts whatsoever, aside from a meaningless switch and a pilot light on the outside of the box. In place of the remaining components, Campbell drew a circuit diagram with ink, made a “touchplate” out of a piece of paper, and linked all the pieces together with nylon thread from Peg’s sewing basket. And it still worked.

  Campbell concluded that it was the relationship between the parts that mattered, not the mechanism itself, and he was pleased by how insane this sounded. Yet he never conducted obvious tests on either version, and he resisted calls to do so, insisting that he was just an amateur: “I am not compelled to defend my hunches, or perform any experiments you think I should perform.” It was exactly the attitude that had infuriated him in Parker, and his refusal to be pinned down undermined any attempts to investigate the subject seriously.

  Many were skeptical, and when a fan asked Campbell whether the Hieronymus Machine was a hoax, like Asimov’s articles about thiotimoline, the editor seemed horrified by the implication. There were inquiries from Bell Aircraft and the RAND Corporation, and Claude Shannon offered to test it, although the timing never worked out. Campbell soon moved on to other causes, and Hieronymus himself felt that the editor had set back acceptance of his work by a century. The symbolic machine, he said, functioned because the ink conducted lines of force, but when it came to serious research, it wasn’t worth “a tinker’s damn.”

  AS ASTOUND
ING BECAME DOMINATED BY ARTICLES AND STORIES ABOUT PSIONICS, THE QUALITY OF the magazine suffered. At times, Campbell seemed detached from fiction—he was more interested in his contacts at Bell Labs, the Harvard Computer Lab, and MIT—but he continued to give ideas to writers. He pitched a premise to Asimov about a man who can levitate, which appeared as “Belief,” and they reunited again with “The Micropsychiatric Applications of Thiotimoline,” which presented a method of turning psychology into “an exact science.” It was a conscious parody of dianetics, and Campbell may have published it as a subtle act of revenge.

  The early fifties saw the appearance of several classics, including Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity, but the decade’s most famous story was Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations,” in which a pilot was forced to jettison a stowaway, a teenage girl, to prevent his rescue spacecraft from crashing. Godwin’s first draft ended with her surviving, and the editor responded harshly, “You gypped me. I accepted that your ship could not land with the stowaway—you stated that as the condition—and then you hornswoggled me and did what you said couldn’t be done.” He had Godwin rewrite the conclusion repeatedly until the girl died.

  Campbell occasionally thought about returning to fiction—The Moon Is Hell had finally seen print, and he wrote his first new story in years, “The Idealists,” for an original anthology—but he preferred to hand out ideas to others. In his search for reliable writers, he came to know an unlikely pair. Robert Silverberg was now a student at Columbia University, and in 1955, the author Harlan Ellison introduced him to a neighbor named Randall Garrett, who proposed that they write a serial together. They tailored the outline to Campbell’s prejudices about humans and aliens, and when they were done, Garrett said that they would pitch it in person.