The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (30 page)

But for the others—a score of them, at least—R.I.P. Their like shall not come this way again.

All was not smooth sailing for
Galaxy
, however. It did have a problem. The problem was the health of its editor, H. L. Gold.

Like Cyril Kornbluth and Dirk Wylie, Horace had come out of World War II as a disabled veteran.

For a man officially described as "disabled," Horace was fantastically able. In his dealings with writers, agents, artists, printers, and all the other fauna of the publishing environment, his problems did not slow him down for a second. What he could not accomplish by phone he managed by mail. When letters failed, he persuaded the people he needed to see to come to his apartment in Stuyvesant Town.

It did cost him. There were times when he would have five or six people visiting him at once, and abruptly they would be too many. Horace would retreat to the hall, looking into the room where everyone else was gathered; a part of the conversation, saying everything that needed to be said, but shielded by the doorframe. There were times when anxiety made decision-making unpleasant, then difficult, now and then impossible.

Editing a magazine is no easy spot for a person who second-guesses his decisions. There is a go or no-go decision to be made on every manuscript, a hundred times a week, not to mention all the serial decisions that go into the big ones.

When he could, he would ask writers and other friends for help. Groff Conklin did a great deal to assist; so did Evelyn Gold, Horace's wife. More and more he came to me. He would save up the slush-pile manuscripts until they filled every drawer of a bureau in his bedroom. Then he would ask me to deal with them, and I would take them away, a suitcase-full at a time. What I liked I would return to him with appropriate comments—"Buy this one," "Tell him it needs cutting," "The scene beginning on page nineteen kills the point of the story"—whatever. What I didn't like I stuck a rejection slip on and dropped in the mail.

It is not uncommon for an editor to have someone to do his preliminary reading for him. I've never done it myself, but then I was lucky enough to be able to read fast. In the late 1950s Horace began to go beyond that. At times he asked me to "ghost" the magazine for him: do all the reading, all the buying and bouncing, all the preparation of the magazine for the printer, all the writing of blurbs and house ads and editorials.

None of this was any sweat for me, really. If anything, I looked on the chance to edit a magazine again as a pleasant vacation from the reality of pounding the typewriter for a living.

Between times Horace functioned as always, acerbic, quick, opinionated. He had lost faith with all the orthodox procedures for dealing with his problems and began about then to devise his own therapy. At least twenty times he offered to share it with me, but I wanted no part of it. I did not see that I had any problems that needed psychotherapy at all. (Vanity, vanity!)

It is my personal opinion that
any
therapy sometimes produces benefits, probably on the analogy of kicking the Model T to see if it will start itself running. Horace's did—at least temporarily, at least now and then, at least for some people. One of them was Horace himself. He made it out of his apartment now, at first experimentally, late at night; often I would come by in my car and pick him up, and we would drive around New York, stopping now and then to let him get out and walk and stretch his limits. Then he began to go out on his own, or with others, sometimes for a weekend.

Then, on one of his excursions, he was injured in a taxi smash.

Together with the other threats to his health, his injuries were more than he could stand. He began to lose weight. Horace is medium height, normally rather solidly built. A hundred and seventy pounds would be a good weight for him. He dropped down close to a hundred. He could not eat. He was in constant pain. And toward the end of 1960 it became clear that his life was in danger, and that he was simply too ill to continue with the magazine, or indeed with any activity not directly aimed at getting him better.

With Horace's approval I went downtown to see Bob Guinn, the publisher of
Galaxy
, offering to fill in for Horace on a temporary basis until things clarified themselves.

Bob hemmed and hawed a little bit. He had had ten years of an editor who never came into the office, and if there was going to be any change, he would have liked it to be in the direction of someone who would be where he could be watched forty hours a week. Well, this is against my religion. I said, as a concession, that I would be willing to come in maybe once a week, at least for part of a day, but that was as far as I could go; Bob mulled it over for a day or two and then called me up to say he agreed.

I stayed with
Galaxy
for just about a decade. The pay was miserable. The work was never-ending. It was the best job I ever had in my life.

10 The Finest Job in the World

In the middle of the 1960s, while I was editor of
Galaxy
and its satellites, I visited one of my writers at his regular place of employment. His name was L. J. Stecher, and what he did for a living was command the United States Navy guided-missile cruiser
Columbus
. The ship was tied up in the North River, a mean-looking low gray shape with threatening projections sticking out all over the deck, and when I came to keep our appointment, the Marine guard advised me to get lost. There were no visitors, and no exceptions. I mentioned tentatively that I had been invited by the captain. The Marine came to a Parris Island brace and said no more as he sped me on my way.

Lew took me around his ship with obvious love and pride. I am no fan of armaments. I would see every navy vessel in the world at the bottom of the Pacific if I had my druthers, except for a few light gunboats to keep the dolphin murderers and whale killers in line. But the
Columbus
was a mighty impressive machine. Those sticky-out things on the decks launched nuclear missiles. Those hooded electric-fan shapes radared the world. The fire-control room was fancier and science-fictiony-er than the bridge of the starship
Enterprise
. From it, in time of battle, Lew could dispose enough muscle for his one ship, all alone, to have reversed the outcome of any sea battle in the history of the world.

We went back to his quarters, past the Marine guard. We were served a modest dinner by his mess orderly and chatted for a while, partly about the stories Lew had been writing for me, mostly about his ship. There were stars in his eyes when he talked about it. He said at last, "You know, I wouldn't change my job for any other job in the world."

I thought for a minute and said, "You know, neither would I."

From 1960 to 1969 I was the editor of
Galaxy
and its companion publications. Being an editor is not everyone's cup of tea. In the plate tectonics of the literary world, the place where the editor sits is right at the crunch. The Creative Integrity plate of the writer subducts under the Money-Market Morality plate of the publisher—or the other way around—and mountain ranges are thrown up, laws carven in granite are squeezed into fiery soup, and the flesh-and-blood creature who lives in the interface needs a lot of agility to keep from being maimed. An editor is a clearinghouse for pressures. The printers want their deadlines met. The publisher wants a profit. The writers want—oh, God, what do they not want? An audience. The perfect freedom to say whatever it is they want to say. Cosseting. Coddling. Respect. And money. The agents want money. (And their writers kept off their backs.) The distributors want a product that sells itself. The advertisers want customers. The readers want—well, everything; and no two of them want quite the same everything. The artists, the assistants, the space salesmen, the columnists, the local distributors, the convention committees, the pressure groupies—all of them want something, and there isn't enough of everything to go around, and it is usually the editor who has to grant this and withhold that, steal a day on a printing deadline so an author can finish his third installment, spend a dollar more on a story and take it away from a cover artist, placate a reader who thinks there's too much smut in a story and calm down the writer who thinks too much of the smut has been edited out. I have said that all editors are crazy. Now you know why. The pressures precipitate psychosis, and anyway, nobody but a crazy person would take a job like that in the first place, especially at pitiful money. Which is what most editors of science-fiction magazines get.

But I loved it. I love it still. I have grown accustomed to a lot more solvency as a writer than I ever had from editing
Galaxy
, but if some sweet-talking devil came by tomorrow with an interesting proposition for a new science-fiction magazine, I would find it very hard to say no.

The great thing about being a science-fiction magazine editor, at least for me, is that it does so feed the vanity. I am sorry to have to admit to this character flaw in myself, but there it is. Those who are repelled by the sight of a naked ego will do us all a great favor by skipping the next paragraph, because in it I propose to brag:

In the decade of the 1960s I published a lot of science-fiction stories, by a lot of writers. Among them was nearly every writer of any importance in the field. For many of the best, I published all or most of the work written in that decade: Robert A. Heinlein, Cordwainer Smith, Harlan Ellison, Larry Niven, R. A. Lafferty, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, and a lot of others. Many of the stories, including many of the best, would never have been written if I hadn't encouraged, coaxed, and sometimes browbeaten the authors. And they were mostly pretty good stories. This is, of course, my subjective opinion. But I think it's right.
*

The man I worked for was Robert Guinn. He was not really a publisher. He was a printing broker. Publishing was a sideline, operated out of one corner of his office on Hudson Street, down where the trucks line up to head for the Holland Tunnel and New Jersey.

Bob Guinn was an easy person to like. He had a salesman's professional affability, but he also had innate intelligence. He did not always use his smarts in ways that I liked, or his affability, either. What Bob was really great at was reading a balance sheet, and he kept perceiving ways in which we could pay a little less and acquire a little more, all of which it was my duty to resist. And when I came to him with proposals for paying a little more and demanding a little less, his affability took over and he would remember eight new dirty jokes to tell me. So we tangled from time to time, now and then with a certain amount of yelling. But as far as what went into the magazines was concerned, he left me alone to do what I wanted. And that
was
what I wanted.

All science-fiction magazines had been going through hard times, partly as the result of the post-American News comb-out.
Galaxy
was at a low point. It had been cut back to bimonthly publication a year or two earlier, and the word rate had been slashed. Once it had paid a three-cent minimum, averaging maybe three and a quarter. Now the average was down around a cent and a half.
If
, which Bob Guinn had picked up for small money when its Kingston publisher, James Quinn, got tired of it, had been bimonthly for a long time and was paying even less: flat penny a word, take it or leave it. Even at that, both were barely squeaking by.

I didn't like either word rates or the frequency. The proper publication schedule for a science-fiction magazine is every month, and don't argue with me, because I don't know why I am so sure of it. But I am. As to the word rates, John Campbell was paying
Galaxy's
old prices, three cents per and now and then a little more. I didn't feel I needed to be able to outbid John to get what I wanted, but I did need to be within striking distance. So my first two objectives were to get the rates and frequencies back where they belonged. When I explained this to Bob Guinn, he listened attentively, smiled comprehendingly, told me three quick dirty jokes, and gave me his considered opinion. "Forget it," he said.

If there is one thing I am sure of, it is that there is always a way to do whatever needs doing. All you have to do is find it. So I considered the options. Possibly I could cut the number of pages, and use the savings to pay more to the writers. But there was always the chance that Bob would say, sure, let's cut the pages and
keep
the savings. Besides, I liked having a lot of pages to play with. Or I might cut back on the art budget, or run a long (and free) letter column. Or—inspiration struck. I went over the inventories to see how much we already owned and how much we had paid for it. Horace and I between us, it turned out, had accumulated quite a few low-rate stories. I decided to accumulate some more. I went through all the submitted manuscripts on hand (there was a fairish backlog) and found a hundred thousand words or so that I liked reasonably well, without being in love with: the sort of story one is not ashamed to publish, but can face losing without distress. I made the authors low-rate offers on all of these, and most of the offers were accepted. Then I formally announced
Galaxy
's return to the three-cent minimum, effective at once. By diluting the three-cent material with that handsome reserve of cheaper stuff, I could maintain an average per-issue cost well within the budget and still pay competitive rates for everything new I bought. That would last six issues, I calculated, and by then I would be prepared to fight it out with Bob for a budget increase.