The Worlds of George O Read online

  The Worlds of George O.

  Ed By Frederick Pohl

  Contents

  Blind Time

  The Planet Mender

  The Catspaw

  Rat Race

  Meddler's Moon

  Meddler's Moon (Radio Script)

  In the Cards

  History Repeats

  The Big Fix

  Fire, 2016

  Understanding

  Introduction

  It is a widely known fact that Arthur C. Clarke inspired the modern communications satellite, but how many people know what inspired Arthur Clarke? I think I do. I think it was George O. Smith. Of course, George Smith's comsats were on a vaster scale. They were not in any measly low-Earth orbits, they were out in deep space--in the Trojan position of Venus's orbit, to be exact, wherefore the best known of them was entitled Venus Equilateral. And they were manned, too. Manned, in fact, by as wisecracking a bunch of slipstick-slinging and busbar-welding engineers as ever space saw.

  And what inspired George O. Smith?

  Well, that's where I come in. As a (very young) boy editor around 1940 I published, in my magazine Astonishing Stories, a couple of novelettes about a wisecracking bunch of slipstick-slinging, variety-hybridizing biotechnicians in a hydroponics plant. The author was a young man named John E. Harry. I thought him really promising, but he wrote only a few stories--as far as I remember, I published all there were--and then he disappeared from view. (He may have been discouraged by the kind of money science fiction writers were being paid around 1940, although I gave him my top rate--half a cent a word.) Although Harry's career was brief, it was not without consequence.

  Out in Chicago, a young radio engineer named George O. Smith read the stories. He liked them, and he realized that such wisecracking technicians were all around him in the laboratories where he worked. So inspiration struck. He transferred the lot of them to outer space in a story, and readers liked that, too, and a whole career was born.

  So you see how it worked out? If I hadn't published John E. Harry, Smith might not have written "Venus Equilateral," Clarke might not have published his 1945 paper on communications satellites--and all the rest of us might still be carrying on our long-distance communications by semaphore.

  * * * *

  Of course, George O. Smith was (and is) too fine a writer to stay with one setting, a single set of characters, and an unvarying style. He became one of the most prolific and best-liked writers in John W. Campbell's stable of wonderkids during the Golden Age of Astounding. Then he went on to broaden his appeal with such fine and various novels as Hellflower (derring-do on Venus) and The Fourth R (an impressive and thoughtful look at what learning is all about)--not to mention the stories collected in this volume.

  I wasn't lucky enough to publish a great deal of George's work, especially in his most productive years--John Campbell competed most unfairly; he paid more than I did. But we were good friends anyway, and we still are. For the best part of two decades I had a standing date every New Year's Eve at George's house. What great parties! What marvelous company--Fletcher Pratt and Willy Ley, Sprague de Camp and Lester del Rey, plus wives and friends and occasional drop-ins, and especially plus George and his really fine wife Dona to see that everyone's champagne glass was always full. These were not mere drunken brawls, you know.

  They provided much culture. At least once on every New Year's, George and I would sing all the verses of The Road to Mandalay. It was our most popular party turn. Sometimes the rest of the guests wouldn't start throwing things until the fourth or fifth stanza.

  One of the great charms of this collection is that George has supplied his own headnotes for his stories, and, in between episodes of roaming the starlanes and investigating the future in the stories themselves, we have the chance to wander through the worlds of science fiction writers, fans and technologists, and to relive some of science fiction's past. They are great fun; but George has not told us everything. He has left out some details which I, as an eye-witness to part of them, feel I must supply, since there is a great moral lesson to be drawn from them.

  In 1948 George Smith and I drove to the World Science Fiction Convention in Toronto, stopping on the way back to pay our respects to Niagara Falls. A decade or so later he settled down in a house near the seashore in New Jersey, a few miles from my own.

  Great bodies of water exercise a strong hold on human minds.

  George feels that pull more than most. At Niagara, George was impelled to give something of himself to the immense cataract and so, since we had been driving without stop for several hours, he seized the opportunity to lean past the guard rail and offer some of his own bodily fluids to the falls.

  A Harmless gesture, perhaps; but the waters do not forget, and over the twenty-odd years he has lived on the seashore they have returned to remind him, two or three feet of waters in his living room at a time. The Smith house is charming. But at certain seasons it is better adapted for eels and turtles than for human beings, and the moral is: "Never relieve yourself on anything bigger than you are."

  Because George O. Smith is technically trained, his stories have that insider's view of scientists at work that science fiction is so very good at giving us laymen; because he is the sharp, observing human being he is, they tell us much about ourselves; because he is gifted, they inspire our imagination with his own. C. P. Snow used to complain that the two cultures, the humanists and the scientists, could not understand each other because there was no point at which their interests met. Probably Snow didn't know much about science fiction when he said that. Certainly he did not know George O. Smith.

  --Frederik Pohl

  * * * *

  The publishing of a book is a slow process. While this one was moving through the stages from manuscript to bookstore I received a phone call from Lester del Rey, to say that George O. Smith had been found dead in his home in Rumson, New Jersey. Apparently he suffered a heart attack.

  He was seventy years old.

  A few weeks earlier I showed George the manuscript of this introduction. He was pleased by it. Still, the fact of his sudden death put a new light on the subject. Did it now sound too flippant? Should I rewrite it in more reverential tones?

  It wouldn't have been hard to touch on some of the more dignified aspects of George's career--his forty years as an engineer, his wartime work for the OSR on guided missiles and radar, his National Defense Council awards--but I decided not to. The George O. Smith I remember saw the world as a pretty comic spectacle. There are those who might look askance at comedy under these circumstances... but George was not one of them.

  --Frederik Pohl

  * * * *

  THE WORLDS OF GEORGE O.

  I am going to violate that old rule about beginning at the beginning, because if I begin at the beginning, we'll all be back in the Venus Equilateral days--and until someone twists my arm for another Channing & Franks tablecloth engineering session, The Complete Venus Equilateral tells it all.

  But I don't mind telling you how it all began:

  I'd been reading science fiction since Hugo Gernsback used to fill the center section of Science & Invention with a story or the episode of a serial every month. I graduated to Amazing when it arrived, and took up the old Clayton Astounding with equal pleasure.

  Professionally, I'd worked my way upward from the day we all wound wire on oatmeal boxes and used a chunk of galena crystal as a detector to the point where I was designing what we'd call "entertainment" electronics; meaning radio receiving sets for home and household and the family automobile. And somewhere along about 1935, designing radio sets all day and then playing with radio as a hobby in the evening got to be just too damned much radio. I swapped a co
uple of bushel baskets of radio gear for a camera, which came in handy because I'd acquired, in the following order, one wife, one typewriter, and a daughter named Diane. When I wasn't taking my weekly pictures of my daughter and sloshing up the house with developer, hypo, and the rest, I'd try my hand on the old Woodstock.

  Because, you see, Doc Smith didn't write as much as I'd have liked, and John W. Campbell had become editor of Astounding with a firm clause in his contract NOT to write science fiction. For anybody, including himself.

  Ergo, someone had to write the science fiction I preferred, and it had to be me.

  Meanwhile, back at the ranch, John W. Campbell was going through his way of living. I learned the process later, but I'm told with the highest authority that as far back as his college days, John took up concentrated hobbies and rode one until it fell to the ground, whereupon he abandoned it, climbed onto another hobby, and took off in another direction. He'd been trying to develop the fuel cell, and the house had been sloshed up with beakers of acid and alkali, and various salty messes. He swapped the fuel cell for photography, and the house became sloshed up with developer, hypo, and the rest. Then he'd met Harry Walton, one of the home workshop editors of Popular Science who occasionally tossed off a story for Astounding, and Harry got John interested in building things, taking pictures of them, writing the article on how to build the------, and John took up home electronics, somewhere about 1939 or 1940.

  John's way of living was to get up in the morning, breakfast, catch the train to New York for work, come home, eat dinner, and then disappear into the workshop until it was time for bed. On the weekends, the only thing that changed was that John did not catch the train to New York.

  Now, I said that I'd been toying with science fiction, but not very hard at the time. I was designing automobile radios for the Automobile Radio Laboratory of The Philco Corporation in their special design center in Detroit. It was a fairly good job, and all went well until the spring of 1941, when the special studies group designed a brand new automatic tuner.

  Everything had to be new, at least on the visual point, and the standard push-button radio had been around a long time. The interest was on floor control, with six pre-set stations on call in a sequence; one whiffled through the sequence by pushing a button on the floor and stopped when the station one wanted came on.

  Unfortunately, this model didn't work; instead of staying put, each station-setting moved, with slow but alarming regularity toward the total high-end of the broadcast band where it stopped because it couldn't wander any further. We filled lab books with data, trying everything. I built a switch run from an old phonograph to click off the push-button routine: fifty times around the sequence in one minute, pause and measure how much each station-setting had drifted.

  Studebaker and Chrysler had been sold and others were interested, and the Oak Manufacturing Co. had the basic tools built and were turning out tuners (that didn't work, but hardly their fault!) that were to go into production as soon as we got the bugs out. As a consequence, with a few million automobile sets awaiting a successful tuner, you cart rather quickly gather just how much time I had free to take a hard stab at writing science fiction. Very little, if you're not sure; and guess where we all were on that Sunday afternoon, 7 December 1941? Following the wandering turret tuner toward the high end of the broadcast band!

  But things changed as soon as it was known that this war was not going to be a six-week pushover. The turret tuner died and left no address, and we began to get strange-looking equipment, designed as a functional prototype by government laboratories, to be reduced to mass production design.

  Our lives changed, too. From the day of my first steady job in the first lab, we'd worked regular overtime, with additional overtime when something came up with problems. When (I think it was the Labor Relations Board or its equivalent at the time, say 1939 or so) ruled that overtime work must be paid for unless the worker was a supervisor, we engineers were appointed to supervise mechanical draftsmen, each of whom supervised one model shop machinist, who didn't have to supervise anything because model shop mechanics belonged to a union that got paid overtime no matter what. But with government contracts coming in, there were government auditors who supervised the supervisors, and overtime work without pay other than

  "supper money" stopped. Further, they could hire more engineers and draftsmen, but at no greater pay than we regulars were getting, so it was economically sound to hire help instead of paying time and a half for overtime.

  With time on my hands, I took my first real thrust at writing science fiction. I took off on one, double spaced and all, and finished it; a job that might go off today with science fiction's trend toward strange cultures on distant planets, but in 1941 it didn't work.

  It came back--but not with a rejection slip. It came back with what I found to be the case: if John W. Campbell were interested (in anything!), one got a six-page letter, single spaced. This one said that he couldn't use the story I'd written, but he liked my style, and he had the firm notion that I had a technical background, and couldn't I write something that used my education and experience as a foundation.

  The result was "QRM--Interplanetary." They paid me money for it.

  I've never been the same since.

  And that is how the beginning began.

  "QRM--Interplanetary" was purchased in the early spring of 1942, and appeared in the October, 1942 issue. Through that time, Philco closed the laboratory in Detroit, and we were given the offer of moving to Philadelphia or going elsewhere, and I had received an offer to operate as project engineer on one of the programs to develop the so-called "radar"

  proximity fuse, at the Crosley Corporation in Cincinnati.

  Moving and getting settled into a new job kept me busy once more, especially since the program was a flat six-day week, eight hours each, on a job that took everything out of us, both physically and mentally, because by then it was known that this "six-weeks war" might go on for six years, and we'd been hurt so bad that the United States might come out second.

  My writing lagged until Campbell wrote me another of his six-page letters, generally asking about his electronic home workshop, and suggesting that he was waiting for another story of the same kind I'd turned out before. Hoping, then, not to be hauled off before a firing squad, I took some liberties with what little was known about radar, and wrote "Calling the Empress." I got the check in Cincinnati in February 1943, on a cold, cold morning after an icy rain-hail storm. I opened the envelope as I hit the front steps--and the ice--and landed with two feet forward, both arms waving, on the bottom step--no, I mean with my ass on the bottom step. I don't know whether it was worth the check; I was once five feet eleven, since then I've been five feet nine.

  Here, once more, came a change in my way of living. Since August or September of 1942, when the proximity fuse program began to shape up, there had been some haphazard scurrying back and forth between Cincinnati and Washington. Now, oh, about the spring of 1943, the haphazard scurrying was replaced by a schedule in which I was sent to Washington for a few days once each month.

  Meanwhile, John's response to my reply to his letter was another letter, asking more about electronics, and from there the correspondence went absolutely wild. John found that he had a writer, and a tame electronic engineer, and late in 1943 it became expedient for me to arrange my monthly trip to Washington so that the conference closed on Friday night, and I made arrangements to return to Cincinnati on Monday morning in time for work.

  It was on that first trip that I discovered John's way of life. I was promptly escorted into the cellar, where I played supervisor until I damned near missed my reservations to get me back to Cincinnati because they'd played that "double daylight saving time" process on the clocks for the war effort, but the railroads adamantly stayed on standard time.

  That was my first sight of John W. Campbell. The stunt of making weekend reservations went on, neither the government nor the company cared very much how
I spent my weekends, so long as two important points were kept. First, there were no expenses vouchered for whatever I did from Washington on Friday evening through Washington on Sunday night, when I picked up my reservation to arrive in Cincinnati on Monday.

  And second, both the government and the company knew where to find me all the time.

  And so, once each month, I traveled to Washington, and on Saturday morning I was hauled into John's home workshop electronics laboratory until it was time to be raced to transportation on Sunday night.

  Once I hit Washington without a confirmed railroad reservation home.

  The Baltimore & Ohio railroad didn't have a place for me, so instead of leaving for New Jersey on Sunday evening I had to stay in John's basement until Wednesday. On Monday morning, I was hauled into John's basement workshop after confirming my position, and my lack of reservation, and the Campbell telephone number, while something called the War Reservation Board (or something like that) tried to pull strings to get me a bunk on a train.

  At about 10:30 that Monday morning, I asked whether John was going in to Street & Smith. His reply:

  "No. You see, I'm entertaining an author."

  That baffled me. You see, I'm an engineer by profession, and I've always thought that way. My writing science fiction was an avocation, and even now when I'm retired, I'm a retired engineer who happens to have a talent for the typewriter, and can happily make a buck out of it.

  "Author?"

  John nods at me. "You, George."

  Well, now, the word "author" is like the word "esquire." That is, bestowed by others but never used himself, like the word "mister." I'm George O. Smith, and I sign my name that way and answer the telephone that way, and one never calls himself "Mister Smith" unless one is being haughty. So the word "author" is reserved for fellows like Bill Shakespeare or Charlie Dickens. Fellows like Alex Dumas who wrote swords and sorcery are writers. And if I am asked about such as Winston Churchill or John F.