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With reverent awe, Sills approached the spoon, grasped it with forceps, and withdrew it from the surrounding liquid.
What followed immediately after that can never be fully described. Later on, when excited newspaper reporters pressed them unmercifully, neither Taylor nor Sills had the least recollection of the happenings of the next few minutes.
What happened was that the moment the ammoniumplated spoon was exposed to open air, the most horrible odor ever conceived assailed their nostrils!-an odor that ca
With one strangled gasp. Sills dropped the spoon. Both were coughing and retching, tearing wildly at their throats and mouths, yelling, weeping, sneezing!
Taylor pounced upon the spoon and looked about wildly. The odor grew steadily more powerful and their wild exertions to escape it had already succeeded in wrecking the laboratory and had upset the vat of Ammonaline. There was only one thing to do, and Sills did it. The spoon went flying out the open window in the middle of Twelfth Avenue. It hit the sidewalk right at the feet of one of the policemen, but Taylor didn’t care.
“Take off your clothes. We’ll have to burn them,” Sills was gasping. “Then spray something over the laboratory-anything with a strong smell. Burn sulphur. Get some liquid Bromine.”
Both were tearing at their clothes in distraction when they realized that someone had walked in through the unlocked door. The bell had rung, but neither had heard it. It was Staples, six-foot, lion-maned Steel King.
One step into the hall ruined his dignity utterly. He collapsed in one tearing sob and Twelfth Avenue was treated to the spectacle of an elderly, richly-dressed gentleman tearing uptown as fast as his feet would carry him, shedding as much of his clothes as he dared while doing so.
The spoon continued its deadly work. The three policemen had long since retired in abject rout, and now to the numbed and tortured senses of the two i
Men and women were pouring out of the neighboring houses, horses were bolting. Fire engines clanged down the street, only to be abandoned by their riders. Squadrons of police came-and left.
Sills and Taylor finally gave up, and clad only in trousers, ran pell-mell for the Hudson. They did not stop until they found themselves neck-deep in water, with blessed, pure air above them.
Taylor turned bewildered eyes to Sills. “But how could it emit that horrible odor? You said it was stable and stable solids have no odors. It takes vapor for that, doesn’t it?”
“Have you ever smelled musk?” groaned Sills. “It will give off an aroma for an indefinite period without losing any appreciable weight. We’ve come up against something like that.”
The two ruminated in silence for a while, wincing whenever the wind brought a vagrant waft of Ammonium vapor to them, and then Taylor said in a low voice, “When they finally trace the trouble to the spoon, and find out who made it, I’m afraid we’ll be sued-or maybe thrown in jail.”
Sills’ face lengthened. “I wish I’d never seen the damned stuff! It’s brought nothing but trouble.” His tortured spirit gave way and he sobbed loudly.
Taylor patted him on the back mournfully. “It’s not as bad as all that, of course. The discovery will make you famous and you’ll be able to demand your own price, working at any industrial lab in the country. Then, too, you’re a cinch to win the Nobel Prize.”
“That’s right,” Sills smiled again, “and I may find a way to counteract the odor, too. I hope so.”
“I hope so, too,” said Taylor feelingly. “Let’s go back. I think they’ve managed to remove the spoon by now.”
It should be quite obvious to anyone reading “The Magnificent Possession” that I was majoring in chemistry in college at the time. As supposed humor, it is much more embarrassing on rereading than “Ring Around the Sun” is. Imagine having a Congressman named “Hornswoggle” and having gangsters speak in a ridiculous, misspelled version of Brooklyn slang.
“The Magnificent Possession” was the only one of the first nine stories I wrote that Campbell never saw, and I’m glad of that.
In early December I wrote a story I called “Ad Astra,” and on December 21, 1938 (my father’s forty-second birthday, though I don’t recall thinking of it as an omen one way or the other), I went in to submit it to Campbell. It was my seventh visit to his office, for I had not yet missed a month, and it was the ninth story I submitted to him.
“Ad Astra” is the first story I wrote for which I remember, even after all this time, the exact circumstances of the initiating inspiration. That fall, I applied for and received a National Youth Administration (NYA) job designed to help me through college. I received fifteen dollars a month, if memory serves me, in return for a few hours of typing. The typing I did was for a sociologist who was writing a book on the subject of social resistance to technological i
Naturally it occurred to me that a story might be written in which social resistance to space flight might play a small part. It was because of that that I used “Ad Astra” as the title. This was from the Latin proverb “Per aspera ad astra” (“Through difficulties to the stars”).
For the first time, Campbell did more than simply send a rejection. On December 29, I received a letter from him asking me to come in for a conference to discuss the story in detail.
On January 5, 1939, I went to see Campbell for the eighth time-and for the first time at his specific request. It turned out that what he liked in the story was the social resistance to space flight-the space flight itself was, of course, run of the mill.
Rather daunted, for I had never before had to revise a story to meet editorial specification, I went to work. I brought in the revised story on January 24, and on January 31 I discovered the system used by Campbell in accepting stories. Though his rejections were usually accompanied by long and useful letters, his acceptances consisted of a check only, without a single accompanying word. It was his feeling that the check was eloquent enough. In this case it was for sixty-nine dollars, since the story was 6,900 words long and Campbell paid one cent a word in those days.
It was my first sale to Campbell, after seven months of trying and after eight consecutive rejections. The story appeared half a year later, and I then found that Campbell had changed the title (on the whole justifiably, I think) to “Trends.”