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Only five minutes to certain death! Or was it certain death? Was von Blumdorff right? Were the Venusians putting over a daring bluff?
An orderly catapulted into the room and saluted. “The Greenies have just answered, sir.”
“Well,” von Blumdorff leaned forward eagerly.
“They say, ‘Urgently request fleet not to attack. If done, we shall not be responsible for the consequences.’“
“Is that all?” came the outraged shout
“Yes, sir.”
The Admiral burst into a sulphurous stream of profanity. “Why, the infernal gall of them,” he shouted. “They dare bluff to the very end.”
And as he finished, the fifteenth minute clicked off, and the mighty armada burst into motion. In streaking, orderly flight they shot down toward the cloudy shroud of the second planet. Von Blumdorff gri
The Admiral stared and rubbed his eyes. The entire further half of the fleet had suddenly gone crazy. First, the ships wavered; then they veered and shot off at mad angles.
Then calls came in from the sane half of the fleet-reports that the left wing had ceased to respond to radio.
The attack on Aphrodopolis was immediately disrupted as the order went out to capture the ships that had run amok. Von Blumdorff stamped up and down and tore his hair. Karl Frantor cried out dully, “It is their weapon,” and lapsed back into his former silence.
From Aphrodopolis came no word at all.
For two solid hours the remnant of the Terrestrial fleet battled their own ships. Following the aimless courses of the stricken vessels, they approached and grappled. Bound together then by rigid force, rocket blasts were applied until the insane flight of the others had been balanced and stopped,
Fully twenty of the fleet were never caught; some continuing on some orbit about the sun, some shooting off into unknown space, a few crashing down to Venus.
When the remaining ships of the left wing were boarded, the unsuspecting boarding parties stopped short in horror. Seventy-five staring witless shells of humanity in each ship . Not a single human being left.
Some of the first to enter screamed in horror and fled in a panic. Others merely retched and turned away their eyes. One officer took in the situation at a glance, calmly drew his Atomo-pistol and rayed every decerebrate in sight.
Admiral von Blumdorff was a stricken man; a pitiful, limp wreck of his former proud and blustering self, when he heard the worst. One of the decerebrates was brought to him, and he reeled back.
Karl Frantor gazed at him with red-rimmed eyes, “Well, Admiral, are you satisfied?”
But the Admiral made no answer. He drew his gun, and before anyone could stop him, shot himself through the head.
Once again Karl Frantor stood before a meeting of the President and his Cabinet, before a dispirited, frightened group of men. His report was definite and left no doubt as to the course that must now be followed.
President Debuc stared at the decerebrate brought in as an exhibit. “We are finished,” he said. “We must surrender unconditionally, throw ourselves upon their mercy. But someday-,” his eyes kindled in retribution.
“No, Mr. President!” Karl’s voice rang out, “there shall be no someday. We must give the Venusians their simple due- liberty and independence. Bygones must be bygones-our dead have but paid for the half-century of Venusian slavery. After this, there must be a new order in the Solar System- the birth of a new day.”
The President lowered his head in thought and then raised it again. “You are right,” he answered with decision; “there shall be no thought of revenge.”
Two months later the peace treaty was signed and Venus became what it has remained ever since-an independent and sovereign power. And with the signing of the treaty, a whirling speck shot out toward the sun. It was-the weapon too dreadful to use.
Amazing Storieswas, at that time, heavily slanted toward adventure and action and disapproved of too much scientific exposition in the course of the story. I, of course, even then was writing the kind of science fiction that involved scientific extrapolation that was specifically described. What Raymond Palmer did in this case was to omit some of my scientific discussion and to place in footnotes a condensed version of passages that he could not omit without damaging the plot. This was an extraordinarily inept device, at which I chafed at the time. I took the only retaliation available to me. I placed Amazing at the bottom of the list, as far as the order in which to submit stories was concerned.
What I remember most clearly about the story, though, is Fred Pohl’s remark concerning it. The story ends with Earth and Venus at peace, with Earth promising to respect Venus’ independence and Venus destroying its weapon. Fred said, upon reading the published story, “And after the weapon was destroyed, Earth wiped the Venusians off the face of their planet.”
He was quite right. I was naive enough then to suppose that words and good intentions are sufficient. (Fred also remarked that the weapon that was too dreadful to be used was , in fact, used. He was right in that case, too, and that helped sour me on titles that were too long and elaborate. I have tended toward shorter titles since, even one-word titles, something Campbell consistently encouraged, perhaps because short titles fit better on the cover and on the title page of a magazine.)
If I thought that my sale to Campbell had made me an expert in knowing what he wanted and in being able to supply that want, I was quite wrong. In February 1939 I wrote a story called “The Decline and Fall.” I submitted it to Campbell on February 21 and it was back in my lap, quite promptly, on the twenty-fifth. It made the rounds thereafter without results and was never published. It no longer exists and I remember nothing at all about it.
On March 4, 1939, I began my most ambitious writing project to that date. It was a novelette (in which I named an important character after Russell Winterbotham) that was intended to be at least twice as long as any of my previous stories. I called the story “Pilgrimage.” It was my first attempt to write “future history”; that is, a tale about a far future time written as though it were a historical novel. I was also my first attempt to write a story on a galactic scale.
I was very excited while working at it and felt somehow that it was an “epic.” (I remember, though, that Winterbotham was rather dubious about it when I described the plot to him in a letter.) I brought it in to Campbell on March 21, 1939, with high hopes, but it was back on the twenty-fourth with a letter that said, “You have a basic idea which might be made into an interesting yarn, but as it is, it is not strong enough.”
This time I would not let go. I was in to see Campbell again on the twenty-seventh and talked him into letting me revise it in order to strengthen the weaknesses he found in it. I brought in the second version on April 25, and it, too, was found wanting, but this time it was Campbell who asked for a revision. I tried again and the third version was submitted on May 9 and rejected on the seventeenth. Campbell admitted there was still the possibility of saving it, but, after three tries, he said, I should put it to one side for some months and then look at it from a fresh viewpoint.
I did as he said and waited two months (the minimum time I could interpret as “some months”) and brought in the fourth version on August 8.
This time, Campbell hesitated over it till September 6, and then rejected it permanently on the ground that Robert A. Heinlein had just submitted an important short novel (later published as “If This Goes On-”) that had a religious theme. Since “Pilgrimage” also had a religious theme, John couldn’t use it. Two stories on so sensitive a subject in rapid succession were one too many.
I had written the story four times, but I saw Campbell’s point. Campbell said Heinlein’s story was the better of the two and I could see that an editor could scarcely be expected to take the worse and reject the better simply because writing the worse had been such hard work.
There was nothing, however, to prevent me from trying to sell it elsewhere. I kept trying for two years, during which time I rewrote it twice more and retitled it “Galactic Crusade.”
Eventually I sold it to another of the magazines that were springing up in the wake of Campbell’s success with Astounding . This was Planet Stories , which during the 1940s was to make its mark as a home for the “space opera,” the blood-and-thunder tale of interplanetary war. My story was of this type, and the editor of Planet , Malcolm Reiss, was attracted.
The religious angle worried him, too, however. Would I go through the story, he asked during luncheon on August 18, 1941, and remove any direct reference to religion. Would I, in particular, refrain from referring to any of my characters as “priests.” Sighing, I agreed, and the story was revised for a sixth time. On October 7, 1941, he accepted it and, after two and a half years that included ten rejections, the story was finally placed.
But, having put me to the trouble of that particular remove-the-religion revision, what did Reiss do? Why, he retitled it (without consulting me, of course) and called the story “Black Friar of the Flame.”
I might mention two points about this story before presenting it.
First, it was the only story I ever sold to Planet .
Second, it was illustrated by Frank R. Paul. Paul was the most prominent of all the science fiction illustrators of the pre-Campbell era, and, to the best of my knowledge, this is the only time our paths crossed professionally.
I did see him once from a distance, though. On July 2, 1939, I attended the First World Science Fiction Convention, which was held in Manhattan. Frank Paul was guest of honor. It was the first occasion on which I was publicly recognized as a professional, rather than as merely a fan. With three published stories under my belt (“Trends” had just appeared) I was pushed up to the platform to take a bow. Campbell was sitting in an aisle seat and he waved me toward the platform delightedly, I remember.
I said a few words, referring to myself as the “worst science fiction writer unlynched.” I didn’t mean it, of course, and I doubt that anyone thought for a moment that I did.