Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II (43 page)

The Aldebaranian woman left quietly in response to her husband's signal. I cleared my throat. "Don't open that thing suddenly when you start unpacking, or you'll think an avalanche hit you."

He shifted uncomfortably. "I know. I've used collapsicons before." There was a silence.

"And how do you expect to live on a bare planetoid? You can't grow food where there isn't oxygen."

"Oh, we sunk our money in extractors. We'll be able to suck enough raw elements out of whatever we hit to get started. After that it's a matter of our own ingenuity."

"And the books are for your children?"

"Yeah. Elsa wants a lot of them. And I'm going to see they grow up with all the knowledge the galaxy has available."

Ragin coughed. "By the Hole in Cygnus, doctor, why couldn't you wait? A naval employee, too! Six months and the liners would be running again, and everything would be open and above-board."

"I have a son in a naval hospital on Earth," I told him. "We haven't seen each other in three years and I still couldn't get a priority. He may be dead in six months."

"Yes, that would be it. But your papers—"

"My papers refer to Dr. R. Sims, physical chemist, of naval research, Aldebaranian Project CBX-19329. Horkey, my superior, made them out for me just that way, gave me an indefinite leave of absence, and wished me luck."

He squeezed my hand in a last, friendly mangle and accompanied me to the door. "Don't worry about Ballew. He's a good kid. The only reason he mentioned his discovery at all was because he decided to go to Sol and he wanted you to know how secure he felt. He's read too many books, maybe."

Before they left, the mutineers showed Ballew and me how to set the Dendros. In the end, he worked out the charts and I tended the machinery. Just as well—I felt safer that way.

"You know," Ballew said lazily as he waited for the Solarian warpers to pull us into the system. "All I can think of is a little old bar in New York. A little old bar where I'm going to get stinking drunk."

He was cute. Personally, I was dreaming of Max's Salon in Chicago. Max's where I, Roberta Sims, Sc.D., Ph.D., Ga.D., would be getting a glorious terrestrial permanent wave.

After my hair had grown back, of course.

"A MATTER OF FREQUENCY"
"THE IONIAN CYCLE"
"HALLOCK'S MADNESS"
"RICARDO'S VIRUS"
"THE PUZZLE OF PRIIPIIRII"
"DUD"
"CONFUSION CARGO"

These stories were all written in the late 1940s and published either then or in the early 1950s. Ted Sturgeon had been my agent almost from the beginning, and he was at the time quite bitter over his relationship with John W. Campbell, Jr., the editor of
Astounding Science Fiction
(then far and away the premier magazine in the field). He felt that John had forced him to become too much of a sprocket-and-gear writer, instead of the style-accenting fantasist he started out to be. He particularly envied Ray Bradbury, who had had so much trouble selling Campbell that he had developed a good relationship with the other editors in the field and had produced such a great volume of highly personalized science fiction.

Ted also felt that being part of Campbell's stable was what was responsible for his constant financial difficulties. "John can only take so much from any one writer," he'd say, "especially these days when
Unknown
is dead and he has only a single magazine. The newsstands are full of other science-fiction magazines; there's enough market there to make a decent living. I don't want you to make the mistake I did, Phil. Now, when you're beginning, is the time to spread out and sell as many different things to as many different editors as there are."

The trouble was that for the most part I didn't enjoy reading these science-fiction magazines that were south of Campbell nearly as much as I enjoyed reading
Astounding Science Fiction
. I also couldn't be nearly as proud of being published in them as I was of appearing in Campbell's magazine. But Sturgeon was both my agent and my mentor: he had written an awful lot—an awful lot of very good stuff—and all I could point to was two or three passable stories in
Astounding
.

Obviously, Ted Sturgeon
knew
.

So I bought and read all these other markets, the so-called "BEM" magazines (after the Bug-Eyed Monsters and scantily clad females on their covers—covers hilariously described by S.J. Perelman in his classic essay, "Captain Future, Block that Kick!"). They not only had lurid covers but what you had to call lurid titles as well:
Marvel
and
Startling
and
Thrilling Wonder
. Science fiction in those days was a pulp field, and pulp magazines had to have titles that yelled at you from the newsstand.

The work that appeared in them was paid for at very low rates—frequently on publication, rather than acceptance—and appeared beside letter columns, as I've noted elsewhere, filled with material written by raucous fans. These letters by fans, mostly juvenile, like Chad Oliver, Bob Tucker, Rickey Slavin, and Marion "Astra" Zimmer (which was what she then called herself, before becoming Marion Zimmer Bradley), ranged from strident judgments of a given "ish" of the "mag" to scholarly chidings of a writer for referring to Jason's centaur tutor as Charon rather than Chiron.

Close to the bottom, in terms of payment and cover art and general fan hysteria, was
Planet Stories
, which featured titles like "Beneath the Red World's Crust" and "Valkyrie from the Void" and "The Thing of Venus." (My all-time favorite was one particular cover story, "When Kohonnes Screamed.")

Pretty poor stuff, you might think. And you would be somewhat wrong. Because though the magazine paid poorly—and only on publication—it also featured many splendid and to-be-anthologized stories by Leigh Brackett and Poul Anderson and the young Ray Bradbury—Bradbury when he was at his powerful, most colorful best.

Now, instead of using these magazines as I had up to then, as no more than rescue markets, I tried very hard to write for them. And I did well. I actually made a fair living out of writing, which was more than Ted had ever done, and I was doing it within a couple of years after my first publication.

I felt I was earning while I was learning, and so I tried to write just about every kind of science-fiction story.

(There were some science-fiction types I never attempted, however. One of them, fortunately, was the telepathy story. I say "fortunately," because the definitive stories of that type were still to be written, the stories that were so good, that only a blind, deaf, and dumb writer would try do a science-fiction telepathy story after them. I refer, of course, to the two masterpieces of the genre—Alfie Bester's
The Demolished Man
and Bob Silverberg's
Dying Inside
.)

Ted Sturgeon never did make a real livelihood out of writing, not until there were magazines in the field with the quality and paying level of
Galaxy
and
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
, and not until he began to write novels. He was perhaps one of the best agents I ever had, but he became completely discouraged at some point and took himself and his entire client list—Jim Blish, Damon Knight, A. Bertram Chandler, Judy Merril, Chandler Davis, Ree Dragonette, me—to Scott Meredith.

Scott had started his own agency only a short time before, and was still at the period where he couldn't even afford to hire a messenger (so that he and his brother, Sidney, used to change secretly to sloppy clothes in the afternoons and deliver manuscripts to editors themselves). He was, however, already writing advertising for the agency in
The Writer's Digest
, advertising that was so effective that it almost immediately pulled in scores of reader's-fee clients and even professional writers like P.G. Wodehouse.

The
Writer's Digest
advertising also pulled in Ted, and one interview with Scott convinced Ted that he'd at last found the agent he himself should have been. He shipped all of us over to the great man, assuring us that at last we would be represented by someone capable of transforming us into
real
commercial writers, people who made a living out of what they did, instead of dabbling and starving as he, Theodore Sturgeon, had done.

Well, as I said, Ted
knew
—we all absolutely agreed on that. We all turned to and tried to satisfy this new agent by writing for as wide a range of markets as possible, everything from
Ranch Romances
to
Spicy Hockey Stories
. Jim Blish even got a job doing reader's-fee criticisms for Scott, helping would-be writers become professionals by introducing them to the Scott Meredith Plot Skeleton, a sure-fire way, it was claimed, to achieve a sale to the pulp-story magazines. Jim analyzed story after story by wannabes this way for several years until he finally cracked up and spent one long afternoon writing a very lengthy criticism on James Joyce's
Finnegans Wake
, pointing out to the verbose Dubliner all the ways the book missed out again and again on the crucial twists and turns of the Plot Skeleton.

And I? Under Scott's direction, I not only wrote for the lower-level science-fiction magazines, but I branched out for publications all over the newsstands of the day. Scott had a number of what might be called captive editors—editors of western, sport, detective, and love-story magazines, paying a cent a word or a half-cent a word, who bought their entire table of contents from Scott with the understanding that he would never, never fail to fill up one of their issues. You had to write a lot to do well. I wrote a lot.

You might say I had become a hack. You would be wrong.

You would be wrong because I failed. It turned out that I just didn't have the utterly necessary talent of a hack. I don't think anyone ever tried harder to become a hack writer, or failed more miserably. You had to be born with the genes of hackhood. So I made a very good living for a couple of years, then I suddenly stopped. I mean
stopped
—end of action,
fini
, no more and nothing. I found I couldn't even sit at the typewriter and write a love letter or a note to my grocer. I hated the act of writing. I hated trying to think of a story. I hated the very idea of stories so much that for several months I even stopped reading anything but the daily newspaper.

I felt that I had spent the last two years drinking my own vomit.

I left Scott, who was becoming a major literary agent: he represented the likes of Norman Mailer and Arthur C. Clarke and, to the best of my knowledge, they swore by him. To support myself, I worked at a number of odd jobs (and I do mean "odd"—everything from department-store cookware demonstrator to disease specialist in a tropical fish hatchery to stickman in a nickel-and-dime gambling joint on Times Square).

When at long, long last I began writing again, I swore I would never put typewriter key to paper again unless I
meant
it, meant it in some important way that had to do with either learning or stating something that counted. I really took an oath before God; I was that grateful for the interesting words that were coming out of me once more.

Most of these stories, however, were written when Ted Sturgeon, rather than Scott, was my agent (I wrote little science fiction in my Scott Meredith days). I did not make a lot of money with Sturgeon, I just got by. But I
was
getting by—paying the rent regularly, for instance. And above all, as I said, I felt I was earning while I was learning. I suspect that Ray Bradbury and Poul Anderson also felt at the time that they were earning while they were learning. I read them today and feel they learned one hell of an esthetic lot.

Not that I would say that any of the pieces by me in this section were of a quality comparable with their best work—not at all. But my editors and publishers here wanted a
complete
collection and, after much argument, I've let them have it. What the hell, these pieces are still mine, and once I was even quite proud of them.

I started "A Matter of Frequency" immediately after Fred Pohl told me that the phrase "entropy gradient" was Cyril Kornbluth's all-time favorite and that Cyril was determined one day to find out what if anything it meant. The phrase struck me as a science-fiction version of
"Twas brillig..."
and I felt it fitted the story I was writing just then. I just went ahead and lifted it from Cyril. And then Cyril, when we met, was nice enough to tell me that he had enjoyed the story and that he felt it complemented his brilliant novelette, "The Marching Morons," published just about the same time. It made me feel a shade less guilty.

Now, "The Ionian Cycle" (I've no idea where the title came from: it's the magazine editor's, not mine; I've long ago forgotten what my title was) was a piece that, except for the "great galaxies" language and the somewhat enforced love interest, I know I thought was pretty good when I wrote it: it's really a Campbell solve-the-problem story, though Campbell never had the opportunity to accept or reject it.

I was never exactly proud of "Hallock's Madness." As I read it now, I see it as heavily influenced by writers like H. Rider Haggard, and somehow not quite making it. I picked up the idea later, however, in a story that I think was much better and that I sold to Horace Gold's
Galaxy
—"The Malted Milk Monster."

"Ricardo's Virus" is a pure
Planet
story. For it, I borrowed the Venusian landscape and fauna I used in the much more original "Venus and the Seven Sexes." And it and "The Puzzle of Priipiirii" were written as I was coming out of a totally unrewarding (and unrewarded) love affair: nothing was making much sense to me at the time—I was lovelorn, and every popular song seemed to have been written with the intention of making me wince as much as possible. I still had to pay the rent, though.

Another Campbell kind of story,
Dud
, gets the ship out of a jam in the manner, if not the quality, of a Malcolm Jameson piece. I liked Jameson then and read every one of his stories in
Astounding
at least two or three times as soon as I got the magazine. Today, however, I can't remember the details of a single one of them.