Seekers of Tomorrow (24 page)

Del Rey's opportunity to sell a longer story came with
The Luck of Ignatz
(astounding science-fiction,
August,
1939, a novelette in which an intelligent Venusian reptilian pet brings ill luck to a space pilot and anyone close to him. Originally it had been a dog instead of a Venusian, but the more Weinbaum-like creature was substituted during revision. The story line was hackneyed, but a lengthy sequence where the space engineer redeems himself by running the ship manually for sixty hours, after the automatic controls are knocked out, possessed elements of the tense drama that would later make
Nerves
a hit. The humanistic qualities of del Rey at their finest came through in
The Coppersmith
(unknown, September, 1939), as the adventures of a proud and industrious elf to find a place for himself in a world where his solder and tools are no longer effective on the modern metals used in pots are sympathetically presented. A sequel,
Doubled in Brass,
ap-peared in unknown, for January, 1940. Growing in confidence, del Rey began to experiment with themes and techniques. In
Habit,
(astounding science-fic-tion, November, 1939), he wrote a straight sports story of the future about racing rockets;
The
Smallest God
(astound-ing science-fiction, January, 1940) was an entertaining tale of a rubber doll that turns into an animated creature when stuffed with a by-product of atomic fission, and how this new intelligence yearns for and finally attains a full-sized, near-human body.
Reincarnate
(astounding science-fic-tion, April, 1940) was based on an idea suggested to Camp-bell by Willy Ley. Dealing with the transference into a mechanical body, of a man whose limbs are lost and whose body is charred, it may well have served C. L. Moore as the inspiration for her masterpiece,
No Woman Born. Dark Mis-sion
(astounding science-fiction, July, 1940) was con-cerned with a Martian who comes to earth to delay the first flight to that planet until the germs of a deadly plague have dissipated. The most successful story of that period of del Rey's career was
The Stars Look Down
(astounding science-fic-tion, August, 1940) in which two opponents, one with liquid rocket fuels, the other with atomic engines, race to be the first in space. Like Moses in the Bible, the "winner" finds that because he has a bad heart he can never pilot the ship into "the promised land." Even at that time it was recognized as a variant of Robert Heinlein's
Requiem,
and the passage of years has badly dated it. In the same issue, del Rey used the pen name Philip St. John for a short story,
Done with Eagles,
in which a blind space pilot and a four-armed mutant set a spaceship safely down on Mars without any scientific guidance. Another pen name, Philip James, was employed for
Carillon of Skulls,
(unknown, February, 1941), a weird tale of incantations and spells based on an idea supplied by James H. Beard, who had previously been responsible for feeding two ideas to Theo-dore Sturgeon. Del Rey's special magic infused the story with a touch of pathos.

Del Rey's first anthology recognition
(The Other Worlds,
edited by Phil Stong, and published by Wilfred Funk in 1941) was for his story
The Pipes of Pan
(unknown, May, 1940), in which the last disciple of the ancient god Pan dies, forcing the deity to make a living playing his pipes for a jazz band. Of this story Stong said: "Numbers of people have written modernizations of myths, or myths translated to mod-ernity; of these, the most sympathetic in immediate writing seems to me to be Mr. del Rey's 'Pipes of Pan.' " The middle of 1940 marked the end of a phase in del Rey's career. He began to lose interest in writing as he became involved in photography, spending most of his time in the darkroom. Soon he was earning his subsistence money by making enlargements of five-and ten-cent photos which he hand-colored himself. Only one story other than
Carillon of Skulls
appeared in 1941, and that was his ironic fantasy
Hereafter
(unknown, December, 1941), about a little man whose circumscribed lifelong philosophy converts his heaven into hell after death.

Campbell tried hard to get him to write more, but del Rey would only come through with a story when he needed money for a special project; otherwise he puttered happily in his darkroom. One of these infrequent stories was
The Wings of Night
(astounding science-fiction, March, 1942) con-cerning the last living moon

"man" who needs copper in order to reproduce his race. Told in del Rey's most sympa-thetic vein, it proved very effective and variations on the theme have shown up periodically since then. Del Rey was particularly fond of
My Name Is Legion
(astounding science-fiction, June, 1942) in which he thought up a hellish circle-in-time fate for Adolf Hitler, but his banner story for the year and one of the best he ever wrote,
Nerves,
grew from a suggestion of John Campbell's, who gave him a bonus for the story. The results of the readership poll which were published two issues later showed that it had been rated first in the issue by 100 per cent of the respondents. The story was lengthened from 34,000 to 57,-000

words for the Ballantine Books paperback published in 1956, the expanded version heightened by a superb character sketch of the key scientist, Jorgenson, before he is enveloped by an atomic miscalculation. The original version, however, had been reprinted in Random House's 1946 anthology
Adventures in Time and
Space,
edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas.

Ignoring the impact created by
Nerves,
del Rey traipsed from Washington, D.C., to St. Louis to be near a girl who had been transferred there. He completed
Lunar Landing
in St. Louis, on commission for the cover of the October, 1942, astounding science-fiction, in which a rescue operation for the first earth ship on the moon finds others there ahead of them. In St. Louis, del Rey went to work at McDonald Aircraft Co. as a sheetmetal worker and handformer and stayed on the job until April, 1944. The desire for anonymity must have burned bright in 1943 for of the three short science-fiction stories del Rey produced that year, two were published under pen names.
The Fifth Freedom
(astounding science-fiction, March, 1943) by "John Alvarez" was a plea for more enlightened treatment of conscientious objectors. Much more effective was
Renegade,
published under the nom de plume "Marion Henry" (as-tounding science-fiction, July 1943), a moving and tender story of the affection of a community of civilized apes in Africa for an ex-playboy who has tutored them.
Whom the Gods Love
(astounding science-fiction, June, 1943), a mystical story of a World War II Pacific fighter pilot given a second chance to justify his dead buddies, had del Rey's name attached to it.

Almost unknown is the fact that del Rey sold a short-short and a short love story to collier's in 1943, neither one a fan-tasy tale.

St. Louis was the home of Robert Moore Williams, much admired by del Rey for his story
Robot's
Return
(astound-ing science-fiction, September, 1938), in which robots return from space to a deserted earth to discover that they were originally created on that planet. Del Rey, in apprecia-tion, wrote a prelude to it titled
Though Dreamers Die
(as-tounding science-fiction, January 1944). Back east in New York in 1944, del Rey took a job as a counterman selling hamburgers in a White Tower restaurant. He succeeded in selling Campbell one story,
Kindness
(astounding science-fiction, October, 1944), which despite an unconvincing ending, is a superior effort, depicting the plight of the last normal boy on earth, raised in a world of kindly supermen.

Now 30 and lonely, he dated Helen Schlaz, a Lithuanian girl who worked in another White Tower. Repeating the pattern that led to his first marriage, he proposed on their first date and they set up housekeeping in 1945. He quit the White Tower chain to make another try at science fiction when
Nerves
was anthologized in
Adventures in Time and Space.
But six stories in a row were rejected by Campbell, reducing del Rey's confidence in his writing ability to its nadir.

His flagging spirits were raised when Prime Press contract-ed for a collection of his stories for hardcover to be titled ". . .
And Some Were Human."
The publication of the book in 1948, containing some of his best work, bolstered a fading reputation. Though the sale was modest, the book was widely hailed in science-fiction circles.

Attending the Fifth World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia, August 30 - September 1, 1947, at the invita-tion of Prime Press, del Rey was introduced to Scott Meredith, a science-fiction fan, who had set up a literary agency in New York. Meredith took him on as a client.

Shortly afterward, while aiding in the formation of the Hydra Club (an organization composed primarily of profes-sional science-fiction writers, editors, and authors) with Fred Pohl and Robert W. Lowndes, he was informed by the latter that Meredith was looking for someone to work in the agency. He applied for the job and went to work for Meredith, grinding out sports stories for the pulp magazines in his spare time. His second marriage broke up in 1949, his wife marrying another science-fiction writer, Damon Knight. The same year, the del Rey name came back into the spotlight in another manner. A 21-year old biology major at Canisius College, Buffalo, Richard I. Hoen, had sent a letter, published in the November, 1948

issue of astounding science-fiction, proposing authors and as yet unwritten sto-ries for an all-star November, 1949, issue of that magazine. Campbell surprised his readers by undertaking to make that issue a reality.

Among the stories requested was one by Lester del Rey to be titled
Over the Top.
Del Rey wrote this story to order and, though it was a rather mediocre tale of the first space explorer stranded on Mars, it proved professionally impor-tant by placing del Rey's name in the company of Robert A. Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon, L. Sprague de Camp, and other prominent authors in the issue. There was a "boom" in science fiction underway. Del Rey dug his rejects out of the trunk and began offering them around. They sold with astonishing speed. Encouraged, he decided to leave Scott Meredith and try his luck again at free-lance writing.

Some of his old skills began to return. Among the stories he sold in 1951 was one to argosy,
The
Monster,
a remark-ably effective statement of the mental agony endured by an intelligence that discovers it is actually a robot which is to be animated for a brief period of usefulness and then elimi-nated. That year he sold the first of a series of science-fiction teenage novels to Winston,
Marooned on Mars,
which won the 1951 Boys Award for Teen-Age Fiction.

A New York publisher, John Raymond, asked del Rey to write a story for a projected new science-fiction magazine, space science fiction. When del Rey delivered the story in person, Raymond offered him the editorship of the magazine and del Rey accepted. The first issue (May, 1952) carried del Rey's
Pursuit,
a "chase" fantasy involving wild and unbelievable psi powers. Soon three other magazines, science fiction adventures, rocket stories, and fantasy magazine, were added to the Raymond group. Del Rey wrote a great deal for the magazines he edited, his most controver-sial story proving to be
Police Your
Planet
(under the pseudo-nym Eric van Lihn), an attempt to capture grim realism in depicting the social and economic life of early Martian city dwellers.

He proved to be a very fine editor, but conflict with the publisher over payment policies resulted in his resignation in late 1953. He was replaced by Harry Harrison, a continuity writer for the comic magazines who would later win distinc-tion for the novel
Death World,
serialized in astounding science-fiction in 1960, which received a Hugo Award nomination.

Del Rey's third marriage, on July 23, 1954, was to Evelyn Harrison, the former wife of Harry Harrison whose ac-quaintance he had made at meetings of The Hydra Club. She was to prove the greatest stabilizing influence of his life, standing by him through a series of financial crises and several major illnesses. A few years after their marriage they bought a small home in River Plaza, New Jersey, only blocks away from the residence of Fred Pohl, with whom del Rey had maintained an unbroken friendship since the formation of The Hydra Club.

At this time, galaxy science fiction had announced a contest in conjunction with book publisher Simon & Schuster for a prize of $6,500 for the best science-fiction novel by a new author submitted to them within the next year. As the months passed, galaxy's editor H. L. Gold became sicken-ingly aware that his problem was not going to be getting a good novel by an unknown. His problem was to get
any
novel at all. Even though the amount offered was the largest in the history of the science-fiction magazines, it was becom-ing obvious that there would be no takers.

Since Fred Pohl had scored one of the really big hits of the magazine's history with
Gravy Planet
(in collaboration with Cyril Kornbluth) in 1952, Gold commissioned him to be "discovered" again in 1955. Pohl, in turn, asked Lester del Rey to assist him with the writing. The result was
Preferred Risk,
which ran as a four-part serial beginning in the June, 1955, galaxy science fiction under the name Edson McCann and was published in hard covers by Simon and Schuster the same year.

Few saw through the deception, despite the fact that the basic concept of
Preferred Risk,
insurance companies run-ning the world endangered by bankruptcy when a cobalt bomb threatens the life of a major part of the earth's population, was very similar to the idea of
Gravy Planet,
in which advertising agencies run the world.

A major reason for the ruse's not being uncovered was that del Rey wrote the greater part of the text, the style thus being quite different from that of
Gravy Planet,
even to the point of greater dependence upon action to carry the story.