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Scanlon stared his surprise, “What do you mean?”
“Come with me, please, father. I shall explain.” His grave expression was almost frightening. Madeline joined the two at the door, and at a sign from Max, seemed to comprehend the situation. She said nothing but her eyes grew sad and the lines in her forehead seemed to deepen.
In utter silence, the three entered the waiting Rocko-car and were sped across the town in the direction of the Hill o’ the Woods. High over Lake Clare they shot to come down once more in the wooded patch at the foot of the hill.
A tall, burly Tweenie sprang to attention as the car landed, and started at the sight of Scanlon.
“Good afternoon, father,” he whispered respectfully, and cast a questioning glance at Max as he did so.
“Same to you, Emmanuel,” replied Scanlon absently. He suddenly became aware that before him was a cleverly-camouflaged opening that led into the very hill itself.
Max beckoned him to follow and led the way into the opening which after a hundred feet opened into an enormous manmade cavern. Scanlon halted in utter amazement, for before him were three giant space-ships, gleaming silvery-white and equipped, as he could plainly see, with the latest atomic power.
“I’m sorry, father,” said Max, “that all this was done without your knowledge. It is the only case of the sort in the history of Tweenietown.” Scanlon scarcely seemed to hear, standing as if in a daze, and Max continued, “The center one is the flagship-the Jefferson Scanlon . The one to the right is the Beulah Goodkin and the one to the left the Madeline .”
Scanlon snapped out of his bemusement, “But what does this all mean and why the secrecy?”
“These ships have been lying ready for five years now, fully fuelled and provisioned, ready for instant take-off. Tonight. we blast away the side of the hill and shoot for Venus -tonight. We have not told you till now, for we did not wish to disturb your peace of mind with a misfortune we knew long ago to be inevitable. We had thought that perhaps,” his voice sank lower, “its fulfillment might have been postponed until after you were no longer with us.”
“Speak out,” cried Scanlon suddenly. “I want the full details. Why do you leave just as I feel sure I can obtain full equality for you?”
“Exactly,” answered Max, mournfully. “Your words to Johanson swung the scale. As long as Earthmen and Martians merely thought us different and inferior, they despised us and tolerated us. You have told Johanson we were superior and would ultimately supplant Mankind. They have no alternative now but to hate us. There shall be no further toleration; of that I can assure you. We leave before the storm breaks.”
The old man’s eyes widened as the truth of the other’s statements became apparent to him, “I see. I must get in touch with Johanson. Perhaps, we can together correct that terrible mistake.” He clapped a hand to his forehead.
“Oh, Max,” interposed Madeline, tearfully, “why don’t you come to the point? We want you to come with us, father. In Venus, which is so sparsely settled, we can find a spot where we can develop unharmed for an unlimited time. We can establish our nation, free and untrammeled, powerful in our own right, no longer dependent on-”
Her voice died away and she gazed anxiously at Scanlon’s face, now grown drawn and haggard. “No,” he whispered, “no! My place is here with my own kind. Go, my children, and establish your nation. In the end, your descendants shall rule the System. But I-I shall stay here.”
“Then I shall stay, too,” insisted Max. “You are old and someone must care for you. I owe you my life a dozen times over.”
Scanlon shook his head firmly, “I shall need no one. Dayton is not far. I shall be well taken care of there or anywhere else I go. You, Max, are needed by your race. You are their leader. Go!”
Scanlon wandered through the deserted streets of Tweenietown and tried to take a grip upon himself. It was hard. Yesterday, he had celebrated the fortieth a
Yet, oddly enough, there was a spirit of exultation about him. His dream had shattered-but only to give way to a brighter dream. He had nourished foundlings and brought up a race in its youth and for that he was someday to be recognized as the founder of the superrace .
It was his creation that would someday rule the system. Atomic power-gravity nullifiers-all faded into insignificance. This was his real gift to the Universe.
This, he decided, was how a God must feel.
As in “The Weapon Too Dreadful to Use,” the story dealt with racial prejudice on an interplanetary scale. I kept coming back to this theme very frequently-something not surprising in a Jew growing up during the Hitler era.
Once again my naivete shows, since I assume not only an intelligent race on Mars, where such a thing is most unlikely even by 1939 evidence, but assume the Martians to be sufficiently like Earthmen to make interbreeding possible. (I can only shake my head wearily. I knew better in 1939;
I really did. I just accepted science fictional cliches, that’s all. Eventually, I stopped doing that.)
My treatment of atomic power was also primitive in the extreme, and I knew better than that, too, even though at the time I wrote the story, uranium fission had not been discovered. The Tweenie’s mysterious reference to “a function of x2plus y2plus z2” merely means that I had taken analytic geometry at Columbia not long before and was flaunting my knowledge of the equation for the sphere.
This was the first story in which I tried to introduce the romantic motif, however light. It had to be a failure. At the time of the writing of this story, I had still never had a date with a girl.
And yet the greatest embarrassment in a story simply littered with embarrassments was the following line in the seventh paragraph: “… For it, he had become a middle-aged man at thirty-the first flush of youth long gone-”
Well, I wrote it at nineteen. To me, the first flush of youth was long gone by the time one reached thirty. I know better now, of course, since more than thirty years later, I find that I am still in the first flush of youth.
There was some reason for self-congratulation in co
My name also appeared on the cover of the magazine. It was the first time that had ever happened.
Almost immediately after finishing “Half-Breed,” I began “The Secret Sense,” submitting it to John Campbell on June 21, 1939, and receiving it back on the twenty-eighth. Pohl could not place it either.
Toward the end of 1940, however, a pair of sister magazines, Cosmic Stories and Stirring Science Stories , were being pla
I, too, was asked, and since by that time I was convinced I could sell “The Secret Sense” nowhere, I donated it to Wollheim, who promptly accepted it.
That was that, except that, at the time, yet another magazine, Comet Stories , was coming into existence, under the editorship of F. Orlin Tremaine, who had been Campbell’s predecessor at Astounding .
I went to see Tremaine several times, since I thought I might sell him a story or two. On the second visit, on December 5, 1940, Tremaine spoke with some heat concerning the forthcoming birth of Wollheim’s magazines. While he himself was paying top rates, he said, Wollheim was getting stories for nothing and with these could put out magazines that would siphon readership from those magazines that paid. Any author who donated stories to Wollheim, and thus contributed to the destruction of competing magazines who paid, should be blacklisted in the field.
I listened with horror, knowing that I had donated a story for nothing. It was a story, to be sure, that I had felt to be worth nothing, but it had not occurred to me that I was undercutting other authors by setting up unfair competition.
I did not quite have the nerve to tell Tremaine I was one of the guilty ones, but as soon as I got home I wrote to Wollheim asking him to accept one of two alternatives: either he could run the story under a pseudonym so that my guilt would be hidden, or if he insisted on using my name he could pay me five dollars so that if the question ever arose I could honestly deny having given him the story for nothing.
Wollheim chose to use my name and sent me a check for five dollars, but did so with remarkably poor grace (and, to be sure, he was not, in those days, noted for any suavity of character). He accompanied the check with an angry letter that said, in part, that I was being paid an enormous word rate because it was only my name that had value and for that I was receiving $2.50 a word. Perhaps he was correct. If so, the word rate was indeed a record, one that I have not surpassed to this very day. On the other hand, the total payment also set a record. No other story I have written commanded so low a payment.
Years later, the well-known science fiction historian Sam Moskowitz wrote a short biography of me, which appeared in the April 1962 Amazing . In the course of the biography, he describes a version of the above events and mistakenly states that it was John Campbell who was angry at the donation of stories without pay and that it was he who threatened me with blacklisting.