Early Days: More Tales From the Pulp Era Page 2

  THE INQUISITOR

  (1956)

  I dreamed of becoming a science fiction writer all through my adolescence. I wrote dozens of stories and sent them off with high hopes to the magazines of the day (Astounding Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Startling Stories, and so forth.) They all came back, most with printed rejection slips, a few with encouraging notes from editors who urged me to keep trying. But then, in 1953, when I was 18 and a sophomore at Columbia University in New York, I began to make my first sales—an article about science-fiction fandom, then a novel for teenage readers only a few years younger than myself, and then a short story. The short story went to Nebula Science Fiction, a Scottish magazine that had only limited distribution in the United States, so that sale was not quite as satisfactory as one that all my friends in American s-f fandom would see. Before long, though, American sales came along: the first, in June, 1954, was a 1500-worder called “The Silent Colony,” to Robert W. Lowndes’ Future Science Fiction, and then, in February of 1955, a second one, “The Martian,” 3000 words, which went to William L. Hamling’s Imagination, an unpretentious little penny-a-word market that filled its pages with stories that various top-level writers (Gordon R. Dickson, Robert Sheckley, Philip K. Dick, Damon Knight) had been unable to sell to better-paying magazines. I was pleased to be joining their company. Even though these two sales had netted me a grand total of $40.50, I felt I was on my way toward the start of a career. And I was still only a junior in college, barely twenty years old, after all. There would be time later on to consider whether I could actually earn a living this way. Three more months went by before my next sale, another one to Hamling in May of 1955. But soon after that came a career-changing event for me—a life-changing event, really. I refer to the arrival in New York of a certain Randall Garrett. Garrett, a charming, roguish fellow seven or eight years older than I was, came from Texas but had been living in the Midwest, working as a chemist and writing science fiction on the side, in the early 1950s. He was a natural storyteller and had a good grasp both of science and of the traditions of science fiction, and very quickly he sold a dozen stories or so to most of the major markets, including two excellent novelets (“The Waiting Game,” 1951, and “The Hunting Lodge,” 1954) to John W. Campbell’s Astounding, one of the leading magazines of the field. But like too many science-fiction writers Garrett had an unfortunate weakness for the bottle, which led early in 1955 to the end of his marriage and the loss of his job; and then the friends in Illinois with whom he had taken refuge wearied of his wayward ways and suggested he move along. That spring he packed up his few possessions and a box of unfinished manuscripts and headed for New York to establish himself as a full-time science-fiction writer. One of the few people he knew in New York was Harlan Ellison, who had come from the Midwest a year before Garrett with the same goal in mind. Harlan and I were close friends, and at my suggestion he had taken a room next door to me in the seedy Manhattan residence hotel on West 114th Street, a couple of blocks from the Columbia campus, where I lived during my college years. It was a place inhabited by a sprinkling of undergraduates, an assortment of aging graduate students, a few aspiring writers like Harlan and me, some very old ladies living on pensions, and an odd collection of down-on-their-luck characters of no apparent profession. When he reached New York, Garrett phoned Ellison, Harlan told him about our hotel, and very suddenly we had him living down the hall from us. Almost immediately thereafter Garrett and I went into partnership as a sort of fiction factory. He and I could scarcely have been more different in temperament. Randall was lazy, undisciplined, untidy, untrustworthy, and alcoholic. I was a ferociously hard worker, ambitious, orderly, boringly respectable and dignified, and, though I did (and do) have a fondness for the occasional alcoholic beverage, I was (and am) constitutionally unable to drink very much without getting sick. But we did have a couple of big things in common: we both were deeply versed in the tropes of science fiction and we intended to earn our livings entirely by writing for the science fiction magazines. We had the same agent, too, Scott Meredith, who represented many of the best writers in the field, Arthur C. Clarke and Jack Vance and Poul Anderson and Philip K. Dick and a long list of others. Furthermore, we had complementary sets of skills: Garrett’s education had been scientific, mine literary. He was good at the technological side of s-f, and also was a skillful constructor of story plots. I, though still a beginning writer, was already showing considerable stylistic ability and the knack of creating interesting characters. I was tremendously productive, too, able to turn out a short story in a single sitting, several times a week. Garrett was also a swift writer, and when he did manage to make himself work, what he wrote was very capable stuff indeed, but only when he could stay sober long enough to get anything done. It occurred to him that if we became collaborators, my discipline and ambition would be strong enough to drive both of us to produce a great deal of work, and his more experienced hand as a writer would help me overcome the neophyte’s flaws in my storytelling technique that had kept me from selling stories to any but the minor magazines. And so we set up in business together. Right away we set out to sell stories to Astounding Science Fiction, which for nearly two decades had been the top magazine in the field, edited by the legendary John W. Campbell. We worked out an idea in great detail, and then, to my surprise, Garrett told me that we were going downtown to Campbell’s office to pitch it in person. I had never expected anything like that. I thought we would let our agent handle the marketing of the project. But Garrett, a supremely gregarious man, believed in personal contact with his editors; and so one summer morning he swept me off to Campbell’s office, where I was introduced as a brilliant new talent with whom he would be collaborating thenceforth. We pitched our story; Randall did most of the talking, but I added a thoughtful bit of Ivy League eloquence every now and then. Campbell loved the idea. He had a few improvements to suggest, though—in fact, by lunchtime he had transformed our story beyond all recognition. And he told us to go home and write it, in its Campbellized version, as the first of a series of novelets to be followed by a novel. Of course, I never thought anything was going to come out of this. Me, not even old enough to vote yet—voting age was 21, back then—selling novelets to John W. Campbell, let alone an entire novel? But we sat down and wrote the first in our series almost instantly, sticking the joint pseudonym “Robert Randall” on it, and Campbell read it in his office before our eyes and bought it on the spot, in August, 1955. I was so stunned at the idea that I had sold something to Astounding that I couldn’t sleep that night. Garrett didn’t want us to stop there. It was the personal touch that did it, he was convinced. Editors wanted to put faces behind the manuscripts. So we needed to visit all the other editors, too—Howard Browne of Amazing, Bob Lowndes of Future, Larry Shaw of the new magazine Infinity, etc. Later in August, Garrett and I attended the World Science Fiction Convention in Cleveland, where I met William L. Hamling, who had bought two stories from me in the past year and let me know now that he’d like me to send him some others. Garrett was right: in the small world that was science fiction in 1955, the personal touch did do it. On the strength of my collaborative sale to Campbell’s Astounding, coming on top of my scattering of sales to a few lesser magazines, I had acquired enough professional plausibility to find the doors of the editorial offices opening for me, and Garrett’s prodding had brought me inside. Before long Garrett and I were regular contributors to Howard Browne’s Amazing Stories and its companion Fantastic, which featured uncomplicated action tales written to order by a little stable of regulars such as Milton Lesser and Paul W. Fairman. It happened that in the summer of 1955 Browne had two vacancies in his stable, and he offered the jobs to Garrett and me the day we showed up in his office. So long as we brought him stories every month and maintained a reasonable level of competence he would buy everything we wrote, sight unseen. That struck me as almost as improbable as my selling novelets to John Campbell. Here I was, a kid still in college who had sold less than a do
zen stories, and a cagy old pro like Howard Browne was offering me what amounted to a job, with a guaranteed rate of pay, to keep his two science-fiction magazines supplied with copy! But I didn’t hesitate. I had a story called “Hole in the Air” that Scott Meredith had returned to me because he didn’t think he could sell it to anyone. I handed the manuscript to Howard Browne on an August day and he bought it. The following week Garrett and I batted out a novelet, “Gambler’s Planet,” and Browne bought that also. We did another for him in September, “Catch a Thief,” and I sold two stories to Bob Lowndes’ Science Fiction Stories, too, and another novelet to Campbell, and then more to Browne, and so on. In the first five months of the Garrett partnership I made a phenomenal 26 story sales—some of them collaborations, but many of them solo stories, for with Randall’s help I had acquired the momentum for a career of my own. As 1956 moved along my new career as a science-fiction writer, and all the rest of my life as well, began to expand in ways that I would scarcely have dared to fantasize only a couple of years previously. I continued selling stories at the same torrid pace, and in May succeeded in placing one with the prestigious magazine Galaxy, edited by the exceedingly difficult, tough-minded Horace Gold. Selling one to him was a big step forward for me. In June I got my Columbia degree and set up shop as a full-time writer. Randall Garrett and I spent two weeks that summer writing the novel for John W. Campbell that we had so grandly imagined selling him the year before—The Dawning Light, it was called—and he bought it in August. Later that month I married my college girlfriend, Barbara Brown, and we found a splendid five-room apartment on Manhattan’s elegant West End Avenue, a short walk from the Columbia campus but light-years distant from the squalid hotel room where I had been living for the past three years. About ten days later I attended the World Science Fiction Convention, where I was greeted as a colleague by science-fiction writers like Edmond Hamilton and Jack Williamson who were old enough to be my father, and where to my amazement I was given the Hugo award as that year’s most promising new author. It was all pretty startling. I was getting published all up and down the spectrum of science-fiction magazines, from Astounding and Galaxy at one end to Amazing and Fantastic at the other, and by the end of the year I would have deals with two book publishers, Ace (for an original novel) and Gnome (for a two-volume reprint of the “Robert Randall” series from Astounding.) Everything was happening at once. That big year of 1956 began with a new contract for regular production of stories, growing directly out of my meeting with William L. Hamling of Imagination and Imaginative Tales at the 1955 Cleveland s-f convention. Hamling, a dapper, youthful-looking Chicagoan who, like me, had loved science fiction since his teens, had been Ray Palmer’s managing editor for the Ziff-Davis science-fiction magazines in the late 1940s, and when the Ziff-Davis company moved its editorial offices to New York in 1950 Hamling remained in Chicago, starting his own Chicago-based publishing outfit. Imagination, his first title, was a decent enough lower-echelon s-f magazine, but not even such major names as Robert A. Heinlein and Eric Frank Russell could get its sales figures up much beyond the break-even point, and in the summer of 1955 Hamling decided to emulate his friend Howard Browne of Amazing and revert to the tried-and-true Ziff-Davis formula of fast-moving action fiction written to order by a team of staffers. The lead stories for the book would be done by such veteran pulp-magazine stars as Edmond Hamilton and Dwight V. Swain. For the shorter material he turned to the same quartet that was producing most of Browne’s fiction: Lesser, Fairman, Garrett, and Silverberg. Evidently he figured that our capacity for turning out s-f adventure stories to order was infinitely expandible, and, as it happened, he was right. On January 16, 1956, I got this note from Scott Meredith:

  “We sent one of your yarns to Bill Hamling. While he couldn’t use this yarn, he’s going to write you directly to tell you what he wants in the way of plotting, etc. He does like your stuff and will want to see a lot more of it in the future. You’ll know better what to expect when you get his letter, and then you can get right to work.”

  Hamling’s letter followed a month or so later. What he wanted was short, punchy stories with strong conflicts, lots of color and action, and straightforward resolutions. And he made a very explicit offer: the Garrett-Silverberg team was invited to deliver 50,000 words of fiction a month, all lengths from short-shorts up to 7500 words or so. We would be paid $500 for each monthly package.

  At that point we were each writing a couple of stories a month for Browne and doing our novelet series for Campbell, and I was sending out solo stories to such editors as Robert W. Lowndes, Larry Shaw, and Horace Gold as well. And I still had my college work to think about. But Columbia would soon be behind me and by this time I had dauntless confidence in my own prolificity. We accepted the deal. The first package, six stories, went off to Hamling in June, 1956. Early in July we sent him five more, and toward the end of that month another six, and seven in August before I took time off to get married. And so it went, month after month. The $500 checks—$5000 or thereabouts in modern purchasing power—arrived punctually and we split them fifty-fifty regardless of who had written the stories in each package.

  Much confusion surrounds the authorship of the individual stories. Long after the fact the bibliographer Norm Metcalf asked me who had written which, and I gave him a series of guesses, trying to remember which had been entirely Garrett’s work, which were exclusively mine, and which were true collaborations, begun by one of us and finished later the same day by the other. The names under which the stories were published provide no clue, because Hamling ignored the pseudonyms we put on the manuscripts (“T.H. Ryders,” “William Leigh,” “Eric Rodman,” “Ray McKenzie,” etc.) and randomly stuck bylines of his own choosing on them—“Warren Kastel,” “S.M. Tenneshaw,” “Ivar Jorgensen,” and many another. Sometimes he put my name on a story that Garrett had written, sometimes Garrett’s name on one of mine. I was able to identify some of these switched stories: I know my own stylistic touches, and I also know the areas where Garrett’s superior knowledge of chemistry and physics figured in the plot of a “Silverberg” story that I could not possibly have written then. But a lot of my guesses were wrong, and not until I was preparing this collection and discovered the carbon copies of the stories themselves, which showed the original bylines we had attached to them and provided other evidence of the actual authorship of each story, was I able to correct the attributions.

  My ledger for those early years showed that the first story in this book, “The Inquisitor,” was part of the initial Garrett-Silverberg package for Hamling. I wrote it in May, 1956, a few weeks before my graduation from Columbia, and put my own byline on it, but when Hamling published it in the December, 1956 issue of Imagination it was credited to Garrett, and so it has remained in bibliographies to this day. It’s my work, though: a compact synthesis, in 2500 words, of the themes of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” two classic works of fiction that would have been very much on my mind as I rounded out my days as a literature major at Columbia.

  ——————

  When Conway Kroll reached his office that morning, there were three prisoners waiting to be interrogated. He smiled coldly at the sight of them, standing in the large bare room awaiting their fate.

  “Good morning,” he said, with steely politeness. “My name is Kroll. It is my job to conduct the interrogation to which you three will be subjected today.”

  One of the three—a tall, youthful-looking man—glared up at him bitterly. “Interrogation? Torture, you mean!”

  Kroll brought his eyes to rest on the man who had spoken slowly, almost scornfully. “You have the wrong idea completely, my friend. It is necessary to persuade you to divulge certain facts. The State requires it of you. If you refuse—” He gestured sadly—“we must compel you. But you are all so determined to make things hard for us. I don’t want to hurt you, you know.”

  “But you will hurt us,” said another of
the prisoners. She was a girl, no more than twenty, slim and darkhaired. Even in the dreary prison garb, thought Kroll, she retained her beauty. “You’re going to torture us!”

  Kroll shrugged: “I repeat: I don’t want to.”

  He looked at his watch. “Come; we are wasting time, and the Inquisitor is waiting. Miss Horniman, you must be first.”

  The girl shrank back behind the bitter-eyed young man. The third prisoner, a resigned-looking, balding man of fifty or so, did not change his expression.

  “Take me first,” the man said. “Leave her alone.”

  Again Kroll shrugged. “The Inquisitor would like Miss Horniman first, Mr. Leslie. This is the preferred order, and this is the order that will be.”

  A guard stepped forward and shoved the sobbing girl up and ahead, toward the door. The man named Leslie clashed his manacles impotently together and spat. “Butchers! Torturers!”

  “Please, Mr. Leslie,” Kroll said gently, a pained expression on his face. “You make our job even harder than it is.”