Early del Rey - Lester del Rey.rtf

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Early del Rey

LESTER DEL KEY

DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC. GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK

All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

To the memory of John W. Campbell, a great editor, who taught me to write.

And to Howard DeVore, who proved himself a friend.

Contents

Part I

1. THE FAITHFUL

2. CROSS OF FIRE

3. ANYTHING

4. HABIT

5. THE SMALLEST GOD

6. THE STARS LOOK DOWN

7. DOUBLED IN BRASS

8. REINCARNATE

9. CARILLON OF SKULLS

10. DONE WITHOUT EAGLES

11. MY NAME IS LEGION

12. THOUGH POPPIES GROW Part II

13. LUNAR LANDING

14. FIFTH FREEDOM

15. WHOM THE GODS LOVE

16. THOUGH DREAMERS DIE

17. FOOL'S ERRAND

18. THE ONE-EYED MAN

19. AND THE DARKNESS

20. SHADOWS OF EMPIRE

21. UNREASONABLE FACSIMILE

22. CONDITIONED REFLEX

23. OVER THE TOP

24. WIND BETWEEN THE WORLDS

APPENDIX

The Early del Rey

I never had any serious intention of being a writer until I found that I was one by a sort of slip of the lip. And for thirteen years after I made my first sale, I never considered myself a professional writer. Putting words on paper was just a (sometimes) lucrative hobby to fall back on when I wasn't doing something else. Even today, after thirty-seven years of selling stories, with about forty books and several million words in print, I can't get as compulsive about writing as I should.

I am a compulsive reader, however, and always have been. That began during my first year of schooling when a marvelous teacher taught me to read well before I could even pronounce many of the words correctly. There were no extensive magazine stands or good libraries in the little farming community of southeastern Minnesota where I grew up. But I was lucky. My father had an excellent home library. I ploughed my way happily through the complete works of Darwin, Gibbons' Decline and Fall, and the marvelous works of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. I learned to enjoy Shakespeare without really knowing the difference between a play and a novel. And I spent about equal time going through the Bible several times and reading the collected works of Robert Ingersoll.

By all the standard criteria, I should have had a miserable childhood. We often moved from one poor farm to another—acting as northern sharecroppers, if you like—and there were plenty of times when we didn't have much to eat. I was expected to do most of a man's hard manual labor in the woods and fields from the age of nine. But the truth is that I look back on it all as a very happy period. And reading had a lot to do with that, along with a deep sense of emotional security given by my father. Also, there were many times when the dollar-a-day wage I earned when working with my father was supplemented by the kind loan of some popular work of fiction from the farmer for whom we worked. I read a lot of books after I should have been sleeping, with no light other than full moonlight! People also saved their used magazines and gave them to me.

In 1927, when I was barely twelve, my father moved to a small town where I could have a chance to attend high school, and my horizons were suddenly broadened by the availability of books and magazines from quite a good local library. It was there I discovered the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, as well as quite a few early works that could be called science fiction. Then when a friend lent me a 1929 copy of Wonder Stories Quarterly, I became a total addict to that branch of literature. I left the familiar Earth behind and explored the craters of the Moon and walked the dead sea bottoms of dying Mars—and I never fully returned from those trips.

This isn't going to be a biography. I intend consistently in these introductory and commentary passages to skim over things and avoid a lot of names and events that aren't relevant to my purpose—which is to show the development of a writer of science fiction. But I have to state that my life wasn't all introverted seclusion and reading; that pattern seems to fit a number of those who did become science fiction fans and writers, but it never applied to me. I had my circle of friends, and sports were as much a part of my life as reading and working. I was always small and thin, but I managed to be chosen pitcher in baseball or quarterback in football for our informal back lot games. In winter, skating and skiing were constant sources of pleasure. And I managed to indulge in at least the normal amount of damfool youthful follies!

In the last year of high school, I began writing—but hardly for the usual reason. I had managed to save up ten dollars for an old Remington #2 typewriter—the kind that required the typist to lift the cylinder to see what was written underneath. And the company that sold it had graciously included a ten-cent manual of touch typing, which I mastered in a few weeks. That left me with the problem of finding something to do with the machine I'd coveted so long. I solved it by inventing stories to type out—including a very long novel. But I never took them seriously, or bothered to submit them. I'd read too much good fiction not to know that my results were pretty dreadful, despite what my friends dutifully told me. The stories were fun and they improved my typing. That was enough reward.

But they led to some surprising other results. I never expected to go to college. Few people from my background in those days went beyond high school. Besides, while my grades were good, they weren't exceptional. But my old friend, the librarian, had seen some of my fiction. She was determined that I must go on to further education. I have no idea how long she worked at her project, but she succeeded. She traced down a long-forgotten uncle of mine who edited a weekly labor newspaper in Washington, D.C., and secured his ready promise that I could live with him. Then she managed to secure a partial scholarship for me at George Washington University. So, in 1931, at the age of sixteen, I headed eastward in search of higher education. I never went back, as it turned out.

I'm afraid the eventual outcome must have disappointed that rather remarkable lady. Living with my uncle was an altogether happy experience, and I enjoyed being in Washington—particularly when I discovered that the Library of Congress had all those books that had been only titles to me before. There were also newsstands near me where I could get all the gaudy, marvelous science fiction magazines. But my college education fizzled out.

I simply dropped out after two years. Except for the science courses, I found most of the studies just a repeat of what I'd learned in high school. And generally, I discovered that it took me a year in school to learn what I could master by myself in a few weeks. So I quit and went to work as a junior billing clerk for a plumbing company —a decision which I still regard as one of the best I've ever made.

I wasn't exactly a success as a billing clerk. I got along fine with the use of the Comptometer, as with any machine; I wasn't as seriously devoted to the rest of the job. But I coasted along for a few years before the company caught up with me and let me go. Then I drifted along, selling magazines, working in restaurants, and so on. My major achievement was becoming a well-known science fiction fan, for whatever that was worth. I wrote long letters to the editors of the magazines, pointing out the errors in science and criticizing the stories, and had the joy of seeing them all printed and commented on by other fans. Thus I achieved my first taste of petty fame!

So we come at last to December 1937—a period of hiatus between the Great Depression and World War II. I was twenty-two years old and feeling a lot older, since my health had been miserable for some time, though it was now finally improving. I was living in a tiny rented room near Washington Circle, for which I paid three dollars a week. My closet was outside the room, the bathroom was down the hall, and my typewriter had to sit on a makeshift desk on the window-sill. My income was erratic; I made perhaps ten dollars a week on the average, mostly from research on the history of music at the Library of Congress.

But I had a lot of leisure for all the things that I most enjoyed. (I think my chief hobby at the time was working on a system of machine shorthand which would produce notes that could be read by almost any typist—unlike Stenotypy. Eventually, I perfected it, too, though I never did anything with it.) I also managed to get all the science fiction magazines as they came out.

I was busy reading one of those a few days before Christmas when my girl friend dropped by to see me. She lived a couple of blocks away, and the landlady knew her and liked her enough to let her go up to my room unannounced. So she appeared just as I was throwing the magazine rather forcibly onto the floor. I still do that sometimes when a story irritates me, though I'm somewhat more tolerant now.

I can't remember why I was so disgusted. The story was one by Manly Wade Wellman, "Pithecanthropus Rejectus," in the January 1938 issue of Astounding Stones, in which normal human beings were unsuccessfully imitated by an ape; I suspect my dislike was at the unsuccessful part of the idea. (Sam Moskowitz, in a profile of me, listed an entirely different story by the same writer, though I told him the correct title. I suspect he assumed it couldn't have been a story in the January issue if I read it in December—but he should have known that magazines normally came out long before their date of issue.)

Anyhow, my girl friend wanted to know what all the fuss was about, and I responded with a long and overly impassioned diatribe against the story. In return, I got the most irritating question a critic can receive: "What makes you think you have the right to judge writers when you can't write a story yourself?"

My expostulations on the great critics who couldn't write fiction got nowhere.

"So what makes you think I can't write?" I wanted to know.

"Prove it," she answered.

That was something of a stopper. But I couldn't back down at that stage. So eventually, I talked her down to admitting that maybe even successful writers couldn't sell every story, and that if I could get a personal letter from the editor, rather than a standard rejection slip, I would win the bet.

When she left, I sat down to do a little hard thinking. I was pretty sure I could win, partly because I knew that John W. Campbell had just been made editor of the magazine; I'd written some very nice things about his stories in my letters to the editor, and I was sure he'd remember my name, which would help. That was cheating, a bit, but I still didn't think the challenge was fair, either. Anyhow, I'd stuck my lip out, and now I had to make good: I have always enjoyed challenges, and I meant to enjoy this one.

Well, I'd read an amazing number of articles on how to write fiction in the old Writers' Digest—splendid articles by many of my favorite pulp writers. I'd read them because it helped me to enjoy their fiction even more, but I must have learned something out of them. And I'd also come up with a number of ideas for stories during the years of reading. I hadn't written any of them down, even in notes, but I remembered the best of them.

In the end, however, I decided that the best idea was to rebut the story I'd disliked by writing one in which man failed and some other animal took over. Wellman had used an ape, so I chose dogs as my hopefuls. So far as I could remember, few science fiction stories had used dogs, though a lot had messed around with the apes.

During that evening and the next day, I figured out what I hoped was a plot. Then I sat down at my old three-row Oliver and began writing steadily. It took me about three hours to finish. And looking at the results, I wasn't at all happy. It was too wordy in style, and too long. I knew that editors get too many long stories and are usually most interested in fiction that is under five thousand words in length. Mine ran to eight thousand. So I sat down with a pencil and began slashing out and shortening. When I finished, I had only four thousand words left, but the results were much better. I'd also learned a tremendous amount about the art of writing fiction—so much that I never had to resort to that business of slashing again; thereafter, I slashed mentally as I went along.

So I shoved the old 1909 Oliver under the bed and dragged out my modern four-row Woodstock. (There was something about the old machine that suited it for composing; but the Woodstock made much neater copy.) I retyped the story neatly in approved form, put it in an envelope with the required stamped, return-address envelope, and mailed it off to John W. Campbell the day before Christmas, 1937.

The story was entitled "The Faithful," and I thought it a little too simple to sell, but good enough to get a personal letter.

The Faithful

(by Lester del Rey)

Today, in a green and lovely world, here in the mightiest of human cities, the last of the human race is dying. And we of Man's creation are left to mourn his passing, and to worship the memory of Man, who controlled all that he knew save only himself.

I am old, as my people go, yet my blood is still young and my life may go on for untold ages yet, if what this last of Men has told me

is true. And that also is Man's work, even as we and the Ape-People are his work in the last analysis. We of the Dog-People are old, and have lived a long time with Man. And yet, but for Roger Stren, we might still be baying at the moon and scratching the fleas from our hides, or lying at the ruins of Man's empire in dull wonder at his passing.

There are earlier records of dogs who mouthed clumsily a few Man words, but Hunger was the pet of Roger Stren, and in the labored efforts at speech, he saw an ideal and a life work. The operation on Hunger's throat and mouth, which made Man-speech more nearly possible, was comparatively simple. The search for other "talking" dogs was harder.

But he found five besides Hunger, and with this small start he began. Selection and breeding, surgery and training, gland implantation and X-ray mutation were his methods, and he made steady progress. At first money was a problem, but his pets soon drew attention and commanded high prices.

When he died, the original six had become thousands, and he had watched over the raising of twenty generations of dogs. A generation of my kind then took only three years. He had seen his small backyard pen develop into a huge institution, with a hundred followers and students, and had found the world eager for his success. Above all, he had seen tail-wagging give place to limited speech in that short time.

The movement he had started continued. At the end of two thousand years, we had a place beside Man in his work that would have been inconceivable to Roger Stren himself. We had our schools, our houses, our work with Man, and a society of our own. Even our independence, when we wanted it. And our life-span was not fourteen, but fifty years or more.

Man, too, had traveled a long way. The stars were almost within his grasp. The barren moon had been his for centuries. Mars and Venus lay beckoning, and he had reached them twice, but not to return. That lay close at hand. Almost, Man had conquered the universe.

But he had not conquered himself. There had been many setbacks to his progress because he had to go out and kill others of his kind. And now, the memory of his past called again, and he went out in battle against himself. Cities crumbled to dust, the plains to the south became barren deserts again, Chicago lay covered in a green mist. That death killed slowly, so that Man fled from the city and died, leaving it an empty place. The mist hung there, clinging days, months, years—after Man had ceased to be.

I, too, went out to war, driving a plane built for my people, over the cities of the Rising Star Empire. The tiny atomic bombs fell from my ship on houses, on farms, on all that was Man's, who had made my race what it was. For my Men had told me I must fight.

Somehow, I was not killed. And after the last Great Drive, when half of Man was already dead, I gathered my people about me, and we followed to the North, where some of my Men had turned to find a sanctuary from the war. Of Man's work, three cities still stood— wrapped in the green mist, and useless. And Man huddled around little fires and hid himself in the forest, hunting his food in small clans. Yet hardly a year of the war had passed.

For a time, the Men and my people lived in peace, planning to rebuild what had been, once the war finally ceased. Then came the Plague. The anti-toxin which had been developed was ineffective as the Plague increased in its virulency. It spread over land and sea, gripped Man who had invented it, and killed him. It was like a strong dose of strychnine, leaving Man to die in violent cramps and retchings.

For a brief time, Man united against it, but there was no control. Remorselessly it spread, even into the little settlement they had founded in the north. And I watched in sorrow as my Men around me were seized with its agony. Then we of the Dog-People were left alone in a shattered world from whence Man had vanished. For weeks we labored at the little radio we could operate, but there was no answer; and we knew that Man was dead.

There was little we could do. We had to forage our food as of old, and cultivate our crops in such small way as our somewhat modified forepaws permitted. And the barren north country was not suited to us.

I gathered my scattered tribes about me, and we began the long trek' south. We moved from season to season, stopping to plant our food in the spring, hunting in the fall. As our sleds grew old and broke down, we could not replace them, and our travel became even slower. Sometimes we came upon our kind in smaller packs. Most of them had gone back to savagery, and these we had to mold to us by force. But little by little, growing in size, we drew south. We sought Men; for fifty thousand years we of the Dog-People had lived with and for Man, and we knew no other life.

In the wilds of what had once been Washington State we came upon another group who had not fallen back to the law of tooth and fang. They had horses to work for them, even crude harnesses and machines which they could operate. There we stayed for some ten years, setting up a government and building ourselves a crude city. Where Man had his hands, we had to invent what could be used with our poor feet and our teeth. But we had found a sort of security, and had even acquired some of Man's books by which we could teach our young.

Then into our valley came a clan of our people, moving west, who told us they had heard that one of our tribes sought refuge and provender in a mighty city of great houses lying by a lake in the east. I could only guess that it was Chicago. Of the green mist they had not heard—only that life was possible there.

Around our fires that night we decided that if the city were habitable, there would be homes and machines designed for us. And it might be there were Men, and the chance to bring up our young in the heritage which was their birthright. For weeks we labored in preparing ourselves for the long march to Chicago. We loaded our supplies in our crude carts, hitched our animals to them, and began the eastward trip.

It was nearing winter when we camped outside the city, still mighty and imposing. In the sixty years of the desertion, nothing had perished that we could see; the fountains to the west were still playing, run by automatic engines.

We advanced upon the others in the dark, quietly. They were living in a great square, littered with filth, and we noted that they had not even fire left from civilization. It was a savage fight, while it lasted, with no quarter given nor asked. But they had sunk too far, in the lazy shelter of Man's city, and the clan was not as large as we had heard. By the time the sun rose there was not one of them but had been killed or imprisoned until we could train them in our ways. The ancient city was ours, the green mist gone after all those years.

Around us were abundant provisions, the food factories which I knew how to run, the machines that Man had made to fit our needs, the houses in which we could dwell, power drawn from the bursting core of the atom, which needed only the flick of a switch to start. Even without hands, we could live here in peace and security for ages. Perhaps here my dreams of adapting our feet to handle Man's tools and doing his work were possible, even if no Men were found.

We cleared the muck from the city and moved into Greater South Chicago, where our people had had their section of the city. I, and a few of the elders who had been taught by their fathers in the ways of Man, set up the old regime, and started the great water and light machines. We had returned to a life of certainty.

And four weeks later, one of my lieutenants brought Paul Kenyon before me. Man! Real and alive, after all this time! He smiled, and I motioned my eager people away.

"I saw your lights," he explained. "I thought a...

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