Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  “Good. Fats, this is the business. You’ll get about 99.99 percent efficiency now, instead of the 20 percent maximum before. You’re all right, Lhin.”

  Fats knew nothing of electronics, but it had sounded right as Lhin explained, and he made no comment. Instead, he headed for the control room. “Okay, we’ll leave here, then. So long, monkey.”

  Slim gathered up the wire and handed it to Lhin, accompanying him to the air lock. On the ground, as the locks closed, the Moon man looked up and managed an Earth smile. “I shall open the doors above for you to go through. And you are paid, and all is fair, not so? Then—so long, Slim. The Great Ones love you, that you have given my people back to me.”

  “Adios,” Slim answered, and waved, just before the doors came shut. “Maybe we’ll be back sometime and see how you make out.”

  * * * *

  Back in the cave, Lhin fondled the copper and waited for the sounds the rockets would make, filled with mixed emotions and uncertainties. The copper was pure ecstasy to him, but there were thoughts in Fats’ mind which were not all clear. Well, he had the copper for generations to come; what happened to his people now rested on the laps of the Great Ones.

  He stood outside the entrance, watching the now-steady rocket blast upward and away, carrying with it the fate of his race. If they told of the radioactives, slavery and extinction. If they remained silent, perhaps a return to former greatness, and passage might be resumed to other planets, long deserted even at the height of their progress; but now planets bearing life and intelligence instead of mere jungles. Perhaps, in time, and with materials bought from other worlds with ancient knowledge, even a solution that would let them restore their world to its ancient glory, as they had dreamed before hopelessness and the dark wings of a race’s night had settled over them.

  As he watched, the rocket spiraled directly above him, cutting the light off and on with a shadow like the beat of wings from the mists of antiquity, when winged life had filled the air of the moon. An omen, perhaps, those sable wings that reached up and passed through the roof as he released the slides, then went skimming out, leaving all clear behind. But whether a good omen or ill, he had not decided.

  He carried the copper wire back to the nursery.

  And on the ship, Slim watched Fats wiggle and try to think, and there was amusement on his face. “Well, was he good? As good as any human, perhaps?”

  “Yeah. All right, better. I’ll admit anything you want He’s as good as I am—maybe he’s better. That satisfy you?”

  “No.” Slim was beating the iron while it was hot “What about those radioactives?”

  Fats threw more power into the tubes, and gasped as the new force behind the rockets pushed him back into his seat. He eased up gently, staring straight ahead. Finally he shrugged and turned back to Slim.

  “Okay, you win. The monkey keeps his freedom and I keep my lip buttoned. Satisfied now?”

  “Yeah.” Slim was more than satisfied. To him, also, things seemed an omen of the future, and proof that idealism was not altogether folly. Some day the wings of dark prejudice and contempt for others might lift from all Earth’s Empire, as they were lifting from Fats’ mind. Perhaps not in his time, but eventually; and intelligence, not race, would rule.

  “Well satisfied, Fats,” he said. “And you don’t need to worry about losing too much. We’ll make all the money we can ever spend from the new principles of Lhin’s hookup; I’ve thought of a dozen applications already. What do you figure on doing with your share?”

  Fats grinned. “Be a damned fool. Help you start your propaganda again and go around kissing Marshies and monkeys. Wonder what our little monkey’s thinking?” Lhin wasn’t thinking, then; he’d solved the riddle of the factors in Fats’ mind, and he knew what the decision would be. Now he was making copper sulphate, and seeing dawn come up where night had been too long. There’s something beautiful about any dawn, and this was very lovely to him.

  * * * *

  Copyright © 1942 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.

  LESTER AND JUDY-LYNN DEL REY, by Frederik Pohl

  Quite a few years ago— well, about seventy of them, to be exact—I was the teenage editor of two professional science-fiction magazines for the giant pulp firm of Popular Publications. I didn’t pay much for the stories that went into my magazines but I did pay something, and so most of the science-fiction writers of that era dropped by from time to time to see if I would care to relieve them of some of their stack of Astounding rejects.

  People like hoary old Ray Cummings and bright-minted new stars like L. Sprague de Camp came by my little office at the end of 42d Street, just where it stops dead at the East River, and one day our switchboard girl, Ethel Klock, informed me that I had a new visitor named Lester del Rey.

  Though I’d never met the man, I knew the name; I had seen it, enviously, any number of times on the Astounding contents page. “Shoot him right in!” I commanded, hoping that he would come bearing manuscripts, and a couple of minutes later there he was, short, angel-faced, no more than a couple of years older than myself—and, yes, with two short-story manuscripts in his hands!

  There is an established procedure for such events. It doesn’t allow the editor to snatch the typescripts from the author’s hands, or the author to throw them in from the doorway without a word. There has to be a little chatting back and forth first, so I had to wait until Lester was back in the elevator to start reading. The stories were short. I finished them both in a quarter of an hour.

  Then I rejected them both.

  What was wrong with them? I don’t remember. What were they about? I don’t remember that, either. And not only did I bounce them, so did every other editor Lester showed them to. Years later I asked him what had become of them. He said he had no idea, didn’t remember anything about them, and hoped I would never ask him such an embarrassing question again.

  So that was my unpromising start to knowing Lester del Rey. Fortunately, later on things got better.

  Later on things did, but it took a few years. John Campbell got over his nasty habit of rejecting any of Lester’s stories, so Lester had nothing to sell me; and then the Air Force invited me to join them for World War II so I had no magazine to buy them for, anyway. Then, postwar, Lester and I ran into each other now and then at various gatherings, and then in 1947 we ran into a big one. That was the ’47 World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia.

  We were both there. When it was over we were having a cup of coffee together somewhere when we got to thinking. We had had such a great time mingling again with our nearest and dearest (as well as some of our farthest and dislikedest) from the world of science fiction that we decided we really ought to organize some sort of local sf group so we could do more of it. So Lester commandeered a couple of his friends and brought them to my Greenwich Village apartment, where I had collected a few of mine, and we sat down and created the Hydra Club. (Why Hydra? Because there were nine of us there, and the mythological Hydra had had nine heads.)

  This was a definite public service, because for years thereafter the Hydra Club had become the place where sf writers from out of town visited when they came to New York in order to find people they could talk to. (Out of town sometimes meant very out of town—in the case of Arthur Clarke or W. Olaf Stapledon, the United Kingdom; in the case of A. Bertram Chandler, from about as far away as you could get without leaving our planet entirely, namely Australia.)

  Nor was Hydra merely a place where you could exchange trade gossip with colleagues. Lester and I both found wives there, and we two couples made a habit of going to cons together. What made that easy was that after a while Lester and Evelyn del Rey came out to visit with Carol and me and our growing number of children in our big old house in Red Bank, New Jersey. The del Reys’ intention was to spend a weekend. They wound up staying seventeen years—well, seventeen years in the neighborhood, anyway, since after a while they bought a house of their own down the street. It might have been lon
ger, but one day, driving to a small vacation in Florida, their car got entangled in the wake of an eighteen-wheeler and was sent spinning off the road. Evelyn was thrown clear, but then the car rolled over on her and she was killed.

  After that Lester could not stay in their house. He sold it for a pitiful amount—furniture, books, wine cellar and all—to the first person who thought to make him an offer, and moved back to the city.

  For all those years we had been keeping busy, Lester writing, me doing some of that but also fooling around with editing and other diversions. After putting together a string of anthologies for Ian Ballantine, I wound up as editor of a couple of science-fiction magazines, Galaxy and If. It was not a well-paying job but I loved it. It gave some welcome perks, including a full-time assistant.

  When I needed to hire a new one I interviewed a recent Barnard graduate named Judy-Lynn Benjamin, who seemed to be bright and energetic enough for the job, but presented two worrisome problems. One was that her specialty was the works of James Joyce and she knew nothing at all about science fiction. That, I figured, could be handled; I would not ask her to make any buy-or-bounce decisions, and everything else I could easily teach her.

  The other struck me as tougher. Judy-Lynn was an achondroplastic dwarf, not much over three feet tall, and I didn’t know how she would manage to reach the top drawers of the filing cabinets. But I took a chance, and actually she worked out rather well, turning out to be capable of managing anything at all. After I left the magazines, Judy-Lynn went to work for Ballantine Books, winding up running the enterprise, which is why its current avatar, Del Rey Books, was named after her.

  Lester entered the picture when my publisher, Bob Guinn, urged me to add a fantasy magazine to my group. I had nothing against fantasy, but I didn’t have a great deal of interest in it, and anyway I didn’t want to add to my work load. So I persuaded Lester, now a widower for some years, to come aboard as its editor. He did well, and the three of us got along well, too, in fact better than I realized until I got a phone call from Lester to say that he and Judy-Lynn were getting married, and would I care to be his best man?

  I would. They did it. And after a while, he joined Judy-Lynn at Ballantine, and—no surprise to anyone who knew them—with Lester handling the fantasy side of the operation while Judy-Lynn continued with the SF, they were fabulously successful, leading the field in the number of their books that wound up on the New York Times bestseller list.

  What made Judy-Lynn successful? The answer to that is simply that she worked with (and/or married) three of the best editors around, studied what they did attentively and learned from all of them. (I know that makes me sound immodest, but I learned from the best there was, namely J. W. Campbell.)

  Lester had a whole other style. Lester took as his model some of the historically great editors of the past and, like them, questioned every phrase and comma in every manuscript he accepted and made the authors rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. It paid off—once when I was having lunch with Lester’s boss he told me that he believed Lester was the most profitable editor in the publishing industry—but it was arduous. Some authors dumped the man who had made them bestsellers in favor of some other editor who might give them a less stressful life.

  So the del Reys were riding high, but it came to an end. One of the penalties of being an achondroplastic dwarf is the likelihood of a short life span. After some very good years, Judy-Lynn had a massive stroke and then died of it, and a few years later Lester followed her.

  Other husband-wife editorial teams in science fiction and fantasy—Ian and Betty Ballantine, Donald and Elsie Wollheim—have done wonderfully well, but in making that Times list, no one has done better than the del Reys, and I don’t really think anyone ever will.

  * * * *

  Longtime editor, agent, and author Frederik Pohl is a SFWA Grand Master and seven-time Hugo Award-winner. This essay first appeared on Pohl’s The Way the Future Blogs (www.thewaythefutureblogs.com), an online sequel to his 1979 autobiography, The Way the Future Was.

  RAYMOND Z. GALLUN

  (1911–1994)

  Well-known in the 1930s and ’40s and almost forgotten today, Raymond Zinke Gallun (pronounced like balloon) was a fixture in the early years of Astounding, first with editor F. Orlin Tremaine and then with John W. Campbell. Unlike many early science fiction writers, there really was science in Gallun’s stories: He felt that alien worlds and creatures needed to be credible and scientifically plausible, rather than just convenient plot devices. His writing may not be widely remembered today, but it was enormously influential on many future hard SF writers who absorbed his stories while growing up.

  Gallun was a wanderer in his youth, and did almost all of his wrting during that time. He left the University of Wisconsin after a year to travel abroad, working at odd jobs to support himself while traveling through Europe (where he briefly married) and around the world. He sold his first science fiction story as a teenager in 1929 and continued to write prolifically in the years leading up to World War II, selling most of his 120 stories in that time. He had another burst of writing in the early 1950s, then wrote only a handful of works (including four of his five novels) in the last forty years of his life. “Old Faithful,” first published in 1934, is probably his best-known story and led to sequels “The Son of Old Faithful” (1935) and “Child of the Stars” (1936).

  Nowadays a story about a sympathetic alien hardly seems shocking, and there’s still a certain sweetness to the story. When “Old Faithful” was published, however, aliens were generally voracious bug-eyed monsters—sometimes just to be villainous and sometimes as an expression of racial or colonial views by other means. In Before the Golden Age, Isaac Asimov wrote about how the trend away from aliens as analogues for Eurocentrism may have been inevitable given the reaction against the Nazi attitudes that were just beginning the process of tearing Europe apart. “But if the trend was inevitable,” said Asimov, “Gallun nevertheless was the first to take advantage of it in a really effective manner.”

  OLD FAITHFUL, by Raymond Z. Gallun

  First published in Astounding Science Fiction, December 1934

  If Number 774 had been a human being, he might have cursed bitterly or he might have wept. Certainly he had reason to do so. But Number 774 was not a human being. His fragile form bore not the slightest resemblance to that of a man; he knew nothing of smiles or frowns or tears, and whatever emotions passed within his cool, keen mind were hidden even to members of his own race.

  The two messengers who had come to his workshop that afternoon had not seen into his heart, and he received their message with the absolute outward calm that was characteristic of his kind—at the end of forty days Number 774 must die. He had lived the allotted span fixed by the Rulers.

  With food and water as scarce as they were, no one had the right to live longer unless he had proved through the usefulness of his achievements that it was for the good of all that he be granted an extension. Otherwise the young and strong must always replace the old and weak.

  In the opinion of the Rulers the work of Number 774 was not useful; it was without value and was even wasteful. An extension of life-span could not be considered; Number 774 must die.

  Having imparted this information the messengers had crept into the streamlined hull of their ornithopter. Silvery wings had flapped, and the weird craft had lifted lightly, circled the great isolated workshop once in parting salute, and then had sped off into the west toward a distant city.

  In obedience to some impulse Number 774 had ascended to a high-placed window in the towering wall of his domicile, to watch the ornithopter go. But long after the glinting metallic speck of its form had vanished into the sunset, Number 774 continued to stare out toward the west. Pools of purple shade swelled and broadened in the hollows between the dunes of the Martian desert that stretched in undulating flatness to the far horizon.

  The sun sank out of sight, leaving only a faint reddish glow that quickly faded out at the rim of th
e world. The Martian sky, deep purple and shot with stars even during the day, became almost black, and the stars, veiled by an atmosphere only one-sixth as dense as that of Earth, gleamed with a steady and eerie brilliance that is never seen by terrestrial observers.

  It was a strange, beautiful sight, and perhaps in other circumstances something fine and paradoxically human in Number 774’s being might have appreciated its wild and lonely grandeur. But natural splendors could scarcely have interested him now, for his mind was too full of other things.

  In the sky was a tiny gray-green streak which he knew marked the position of an approaching comet. For a long moment he stared at it; and then his gaze wandered up among the welter of stars and sought out a greenish silver speck far brighter than any of its fellows.

  For many minutes his attention clung unwavering to that brilliant point of light. He knew more about that planet than any other inhabitant of Mars. He had never heard its name, nor in fact did he have a vocal name of his own for it. To him it was just the world which held the third orbital position in order from the sun. And yet, for him, there was concentrated in it all the hopes and all the fascination of a lifetime of painstaking work and effort.

  Gradually, by patient, methodical observation, he had wrested a few of its secrets from it. He had learned the composition of its atmosphere; he could describe its climates accurately; he even knew something about its soil. But beyond such superficial information for a long time it seemed that he could never go.