Айзек Азимов - Before The Golden Age

The next serial I remember is The Universe Wreckers, a three-parter in Amazing Stories, in the May, June, and July 1930 issues. This one was also by Edmond Hamilton. Considering that, and the fact that Ed is the best-represented in this anthology (three stories) of any of the authors included, I can only deduce that Ed was my favorite author in those very early days.

I have met Ed and his charming wife, Leigh Brackett—also a writer —on many occasions in my grown-up days, and I’ve never thought to tell him this. I guess I didn’t really realize it myself till I began sorting out my memories for this book.

Then, too, there was The Drums of Tapajos, by Capt. S. P. Meek, another three-parter in Amazing Stories, the November and December 1930 and January 1931 issues. Also The Black Star Passes, by John W. Campbell, Jr., published complete in the fall 1930 Amazing Stories Quarterly.

These stories, which are full-length novels, can’t be included, alas, in this anthology, which is restricted to stories of fewer than forty thousand words.

In my first couple of years as a science fiction reader, I was given an unexpected bonus of time in which to read. When my brother was an infant, I was freed of some of my candy-store chores because I was put in charge of his welfare.

Watching Stanley was much better than standing behind the counter, because virtually no work was required. Aside from giving him his bottle if he cried (or shaking the carriage) and making sure that he didn’t fall out or that no eagle swooped down to carry him off, I had only to sit there. I remember the warm summer days of 1930 when I was counting the hours till the Monday after Labor Day, when I could start the adventure of junior high school. I would be sitting next to the carriage, my chair tipped back against the brick wall of the house, and reading a science fiction magazine, dead to all the world except for my automatic response to any wail from the carriage.

Sometimes, to avoid being cramped, I would wheel the carriage sixty or seventy times around the block with the science fiction magazine propped against the handlebar.

Of course the nation as a whole was not going through my own idyllic experience that summer. The stock market had crashed in October 1929, and the economic situation had grown steadily worse ever since. The Great Depression was on. My father’s customers had less money, so less money was spent in the candy store. Things grew tighter, and the second candy store, after half a year of moderate promise, showed clearly that it was to be no more a highway to riches than the first.

The science fiction magazines suffered along with everyone else. Amazing Stories and Science Wonder Stories, which never paid their authors very much, paid them more and more slowly. (The grim joke was that they paid a quarter cent a word on lawsuit.) Astounding Stories, for all its lower quality, paid higher rates more quickly, and it began to draw the authors its way, which made things harder than ever for the large-size magazines.

Amazing Stories withstood the strain stolidly and continued without apparent alteration. The Gernsback magazines, however, underwent ominous changes.

Air Wonder Stories was simply too specialized. Its stories dealt with futurized air travel in one way or another, and that did not allow for sufficient variety. I presume its circulation suffered, and the May 1930 issue, its eleventh, was also its last. With the next issue, that of June 1930, it was combined with Science Wonder Stories and the combined magazine was given the logical name of Wonder Stories.

After five issues, however, the combined magazine found that matters were still too tight for it and it attempted to improve its competitive stance by more closely imitating Astounding Stories. With the November 1930 issue, Wonder Stories went pulp size and left Amazing Stories as the only large-size science fiction magazine.

IN 1931, I finished my first year at Junior High School 149. It gave a three-year course: seventh, eighth, and ninth grades. For the better students, it offered, however, a “rapid advance” course in which both seventh and eighth grades were completed in the first year. That was the course I took.

On promotion day in June 1931, therefore, I received my final report card and was told that I would enter ninth grade in September. This was the equivalent of first year high school. I had expected this, of course, and had arranged with my mother that I would not go directly home. I ran to the library instead and came up against the librarian’s desk with a bang.

“I want an adult library card, please,” I panted, handing her my children’s card.

I was still a week short of being eleven and a half, and very skinny, so the librarian said to me, kindly, “You can’t have an adult card till you’re in high school, little boy.”

“I am in high school,” I snarled, and slammed down my report card. She consulted another official, and I got my card.

This meant I could roam at will among the mysterious stacks containing adult books. The card was stamped “H.S.,” however, which still restricted me to two books at a time.

Science fiction helped fill the gaps, and, as it happened, that spring, three months before my exciting promotion to an adult library card, I had read the first science fiction short story (as opposed to novel) that impressed me so much it stayed in my mind permanently.

I never read it again after that first reading, never, until I got a copy of old, fading, and brittle tear sheets of the story from Sam Moskowitz for the preparation of this anthology. And then, when I read it again, after forty-two years, I found I remembered it all in complete detail.

This cannot merely be a quirk of my excellent memory, for there are hundreds of science fiction stories I read both before and after this one that I have completely forgotten, including one or two that I read last month.

No, it’s the story, “The Man Who Evolved,” by (no surprise!) Edmond Hamilton. It appeared in the April 1931 Wonder Stories.

There were three of us in Pollard’s house on that night that I try vainly to forget. Dr. John Pollard himself, Hugh Dutton and I, Arthur Wright— we were the three. Pollard met that night a fate whose horror none could dream; Dutton has since that night inhabited a state institution reserved for the insane, and I alone am left to tell what happened.

It was on Pollard’s invitation that Dutton and I went up to his isolated cottage. We three had been friends and room-mates at the New York Technical University. Our friendship was perhaps a little unusual, for Pollard was a number of years older than Dutton and myself and was different in temperament, being rather quieter by nature. He had followed an intensive course of biological studies, too, instead of the ordinary engineering courses Dutton and I had taken.

As Dutton and I drove northward along the Hudson on that afternoon, we found ourselves reviewing what we knew of Pollard’s career. We had known of his taking his master’s and doctor’s degrees, and had heard of his work under Braun, the Vienna biologist whose theories had stirred up such turmoil. We had heard casually, too, that afterwards he had come back to plunge himself in private research at the country-house beside the Hudson he had inherited. But since then we had had no word from him and had been somewhat surprised to receive his telegrams inviting us to spend the week-end with him.

It was drawing into early-summer twilight when Dutton and I reached a small riverside village and were directed to Pollard’s place, a mile or so beyond. We found it easily enough, a splendid old pegged-frame house that for a hundred-odd years had squatted on a low hill above the river. Its outbuildings were clustered around the big house like the chicks about some protecting hen.