Martians and Madness

Martians and Madness

The Complete SF Novels of

Fredric Brown

© 2002 by the Estate of Fredric Brown

Introduction © 2002 by Phil Klass

Dust jacket illustration © 2002 by Bob Eggleton

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by

any electronic, magical or mechanical means including

information storage and retrieval without permission

in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer,

who may quote brief passages in a review.

FIRST EDITION, September 2002

Edited by Ben Yalow

Dust jacket design © 2002 by Alice Lewis

epub, May 2022 - ISBN: 978-1-61037-346-3

mobi, May 2022 - ISBN: 978-1-61037-020-2

Trade Hardcover, September 2002 - ISBN: 978-1-886778-17-7

Published by NESFA Press and printed in the United States of America.

NESFA Press is an imprint of, and NESFA® is a registered trademark of, the New England Science Fiction Association, Inc.

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Publication History

Introduction by Phil Klass

Originally appeared in the 1978 Bantam edition of What Mad Universe

What Mad Universe

First publication: Dutton 1949

First paperback publication: Bantam, 1950

A short version appeared in Startling Stories, September 1948

The Lights in the Sky Are Stars

First publication: Dutton 1953

First paperback publication: Bantam, 1955

Martians, Go Home

First publication: Dutton 1955

First paperback publication: Bantam, 1956

A short version appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, October 1954

Rogue in Space

First publication: Dutton 1957

First paperback publication: Bantam, 1957

Two novelettes, Gateway to Darkness (Super Science Stories, November 1949), and Gateway to Glory (Amazing Stories, October 1950), were rewritten and incorporated into this novel. Both of these novelettes appear in this volume.

The Mind Thing

Paperback original: Bantam, 1961

A serialization of this novel started in Fantastic Universe, March 1960. The magazine folded after this issue, and the serialization was never completed.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyrights

Publication History

Dedication

Introduction by Phil Klass

What Mad Universe

The Lights in the Sky Are Stars

Martians, Go Home

Rogue in Space

The Mind Thing

Gateway to Darkness

Gateway to Glory

Acknowledgments

NESFA Press Books

Dedicated to Bruce Pelz for too many reasons to list

Martians and Madness

The Complete SF Novels of

Fredric Brown

Introduction

by Philip Klass (William Tenn)

When you’re a young writer, you dream of certain things peculiar to young writers. You dream—in a major key, let us say—of being offered the Nobel Prize in Literature, and of turning it down: No, thank you. Not yet. Wait till next year when I’ll have completed the trilogy. Or, in a minor key, of somehow discovering the name that Achilles used when he was one of the girls, and of making that name part of the rhyme scheme of a thoroughly dirty and beautifully intricate limerick. If you dream this way, you are inevitably going to dream of being allowed to write an introduction to Fred Brown’s What Mad Universe.

And, at long last, here I go. I finally made it. I was a shade too young for Rabelais or Lewis Carroll, but now, thirty years later, I’ve managed to make it for Fred Brown.

I was crazy about the book from the moment I read it and deeply fond of its author from the first time I met him. It wasn’t only that his wit was so dry that the merest twinkle from the guy would explode a guffaw in your mind for days and days—or that God, in His infinite love for the human race, had seen to it that Fred practically never spoke above that twinkle—it was most of all, and I’m not ashamed to admit it, that Fred Brown was the only man who ever made me feel huge.

One of Fred’s editors, H. L. Gold, said of him, most conclusively, He was much shorter and slighter than anybody. I’ve always been very short myself and in those days, before prosperity and a cream-filled ulcer diet, I was positively wispy—but beside Fred Brown? I clattered and I clunked. I felt as Jane Russell must have felt when she found herself playing opposite Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: now you know from delicate.

If you add to all this the fact that Fred was the kind of person who thought best while playing a flute to the empty air, you will understand why, on those long night walks of ours, from one end of New York City to the other, I felt like an ogre shambling beside an elf. All of this happened as the forties turned into the fifties: he lived in New York for part of this time; later, when he and Beth had moved to Taos, New Mexico, and he’d come in for a few days with an editor, he’d either meet me at the Hydra Club (an organization of science-fiction professionals who, when they were not expelling each other, devoted themselves to modernizing the orgy) or show up on my doorstep. And off we’d go for a night of walking and talking and drinking.

Not that Fred was elfin in any other way. He could always outwalk me: it was I who would suggest as we came back down Broadway that it was time to settle for the steak house on 72nd Street. He could definitely out-drink me, but then, so could most people; Fred, like the girls I had steadfastly tried to seduce since the age of seventeen by plying them with liquor, would reel me in (I tend to float majestically over fire plugs when unsober) and take me home and put me to bed. I had to give up drinking for lack of talent, but Fred of course went on to the Olympics.

And, most astonishing of all, he could outtalk me. I am considered voluble by everyone who knows me—I was born, after all, in the middle of a subordinate clause—and Fred Brown was thought to be a shade reticent by most stammerers, but when we were alone together he did the talking and I did the listening. Hard talking and respectful listening.

What did he talk about? Shop, mostly. Word rates and editors’ crotchets, all kinds of narrative problems and—inevitably—how to get over writer’s block. And he talked about his bad back and his boyhood in Cincinnati, Ohio, and his special friendship with his agent, Harry Altshuler, who had sold his first mystery novel, The Fabulous Clipjoint, to Nicholas Wreden at Dutton only after an even dozen publishers had bounced it as a poor novel and an inferior mystery (it won an Edgar, the Mystery Writers of America award, that year). He talked about what it had been like up to then to have lived and loved as a proofreader on a Milwaukee newspaper, a proofreader who supported his heavy poker habit with the sale of a science-fiction story here, a mystery there, and, thank God, a regular column on proofreaders’ problems for a trade magazine, the American Printer. The poker group he belonged to in Milwaukee was composed of free-lance writers like himself, and when a man ran out of money he was allowed to bet a plot. The plot had to be reasonably original, and sometimes it showed up in game after game before a winner was able to make a salable story out of it.

Why did I listen so respectfully? Not because he was an older, more experienced, more successful writer, and I was brand-new and had just begun to scratch: almost everyone I knew at the time was older and more successful, but I was working out my own version of hell and looking for my own particular handbasket to go to it in. Nor did I listen to him because he voiced my carefully submerged fears about the area of writing in which I had begun my professional career: "Remember, Phil, you’re a writer, not just a science-fiction writer. This is an exciting field, but it’s also a weird one; you won’t find anything like the science-fiction fans—the organized science-fiction fans—anywhere else in publishing. They’re already dominating the magazines through the letter columns and they’re about to move in as writers and critics and editors."

Ray Bradbury was then the only fan of which our corner of the field was fully aware; the flood from the Futurians and points south was just materializing. A change was being registered as the Blishes, the Knights, and the Merrils rose out of the amateur publications and into the paying markets, but the change would be greater yet when the likes of the Gerrolds, the Carters, and the Panshins had served out their apprenticeships on the fan magazines. It was of these fan magazines that Richard Gehman, writing in the New Republic early in the fifties, was to comment that they were the damndest combination of Screen Romances and Partisan Review.

And it was of the fans themselves, the fans behind the fan magazines and the fan-letter columns, the untalented, unpublishable ones, the wistful, dreamy, and peculiarly arrogant ones, that Fred Brown had written in what I and many others considered the publishing event of the year, the original, pulp-magazine version of What Mad Universe as it appeared in Startling Stories for September 1948.

While Fred’s company was delightful and his professional experience and advice frequently very helpful, what I wanted to study could only be called the special artistic component of What Mad Universe, the humor, the parody, the satire peculiar to magazine science fiction. I was trying to write it, and there were only a few men I recognized as masters of it: Henry Kuttner often, L. Sprague de Camp occasionally, and Fred Brown, in many of his short stories and most of all in that wacky, almost unprecedented, and weirdly straightfaced novel.

The novel was indeed special. It said something quite large and complicated both to me and to the fan for whom it was specifically written.

Let me begin by showing you that fan. And his world.

I have before me a tattered, Scotch-taped copy of the September 1948 Startling Stories (Scientification at Its Best), one of the three then-surviving pulp magazines that encouraged and printed a kind of razzmatazz correspondence from its readership, the organized fans as well as what Fred Brown called the random fandom. The cover, by Bergey, gives us a frantic strawberry blonde wearing the regulation crotch-tight shorts and metal brassiere who, in the course of fleeing from a bug-eyed monster with very grabby, grabby hands, is at this moment poised between Saturn and Earth’s moon and is about to make her last leap for safety out of the picture and into the reader’s lap.

There are two stories mentioned on the cover, Tetrahedra of Space by P. Schuyler Miller, a reprint of a piece originally published by Hugo Gernsback in 1931, and the featured novel, What Mad Universe by Fredric Brown. The Saturnian rings and Lunar craters, referred to in the last few chapters of the novel, identify the cover as relating vaguely to What Mad Universe; the leaping girl in shorts also comes from the novel, although there she appears as a parody of such covers: but the bluish, sex-mad entity with the protruding hands, teeth, and eyes comes from nowhere but the cover artist’s own warehouse.

Entities like this were a kind of spontaneous generation: they sprang into existence and lunges as soon as they detected the cuddlesome back of a frightened space heroine. They were particular pets of pulp-magazine publishers and had little to do with the interests of readers, writers, or editors of science fiction; their close relatives were the unshaven criminals on detective-story covers, and snarling rustlers or Indians on the westerns, and their continued survival on the covers of science-fiction periodicals attested to the confusion about that field felt by most of the chain-magazine publishers—after all, hadn’t Campbell’s Astounding proved years before that machines and swarms of meteors were sexy enough for this group of readers?

The other stories in the issue were Rat Race by Dorothy and John de Courcy, Sanatoris Short-Cut, a Magnus Ridolph story by Jack Vance, and a piece illustrated with a beautiful, bubbly Virgil Finlay, John D. MacDonald’s Shenadun (Travis McGee’s adventures with the spectrum still lay ahead). There was an article by R. L. Farnsworth, president of the United States Rocket Society, pleading for government funds to develop a rocket to the moon. (That was vocabulary, then—rocket to the moon—some nine years before the Russians sent up Sputnik, to Eisenhower’s utter bewilderment: Nobody ever told me about this sort of thing.)

Advertised for the next issue were Arthur C. Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night and A. E. Van Vogt’s Dormant. And an editorial note boasted of the regulars to be found in the magazine—such regulars include names like Hamilton, Leinster, Kuttner, Bradbury, St. Clair, Loomis and Tenn among others. I grinned when I came to the last name. The only reason it’s there, mentioned as a regular, is that Sam Merwin, the editor, had just bought a story from me, the first I’d ever sold to that house. Anybody to whom his boss, Leo Margulies, paid out good money¹ just had to be both a regular and famous.

Startling Stories (20¢—Published every other month by Better Publications, Inc.) was one of the very few games in town for science-fiction writers like Fredric Brown and fans like his novel’s Joe Doppelberg. For hardbound book publication you usually had to go to small specialty houses, Prime Press or Arkham House or Shasta or Gnome, whose print orders were so small that today collectors might pay more for a single, rare copy of those editions than the author got as his entire advance. The major publishers, for the most part, stayed away from science fiction; an occasional, big bumpy anthology in time for the Christmas trade was all they would touch. A Nick Wreden at Dutton might bring out a book version of What Mad Universe a year after its magazine appearance, but that was more than anything else a favor to a successful mystery novelist who happened to have a strange writing hobby on the side: the awfulness of the jacket cover and the perfunctory quality of the advertising and promotion made clear that book and magazine publishers were equally uncomfortable with science fiction. The writers and the stories were strange enough, but the fans! The scribbling, feuding, underaged, overintellectualized fans!

If a professional like Fred Brown who, by 1948, had been writing the stuff for over seven years found the fans too exotic to be entirely digestible, what was a good-guy editor like Sam Merwin, with his traditional literary background, to make of them as he was suddenly plunked down to reply in print to their letters and to run a reviewing column on their incredible fan publications?

We were getting just about our usual quota of fanzines, he muses in the September 1948 Startling, and stashing them in the bottom desk drawer (the double one)… A little later, he reports on a recently received issue of Fantasy Commentator (Editor, A. Langley Searles): Livened(?) by pictures of the late H. P. Lovecraft’s maternal grandparents and of the author as a little boy (unlike Raymond Knight, he apparently failed to pose as a little girl as well), this is the usual scholarly, erudite and occasionally heavyweight fanzine entry. Sam Moskowitz’s colossal history of stfandom carries on its installment way…

The history referred to was eventually published as a book, The Immortal Storm, and Harry Warner, Jr., said of it, If read immediately after a history of World War II, it does not seem like an anticlimax.

But the What Mad Universe paraphrase of Sam Merwin, Keith Winton, had to deal with the daydreams of Joe Doppelberg,² a fan much younger and much less monumental than even the thirty-years-ago Sam Moskowitz. A sampling, then, of letters from The Ether Vibrates(!) and self-portraits of the Joe Doppelbergs in September, 1948:

From Con Pederson (the complete letter)—

Dear Editor:

PLEASE DON’T print the letter I sent you recently!!!! I just read Ray Bradbury’s AND THE MOON BE STILL AS BRIGHT—Don’t print it don’t print it don’t print it.

From Bob Tucker—

. . . I thought that the cover artist followed Sneary’s plot very well indeed and captured on canvas the pictorial essence of the drama underlying Sneary’s magnificent tale.

From Chad Oliver—

Perhaps we should turn Mr. Kuttner loose on Winnie the Pooh. I can see it all now. The bear is really a robot from Neptune, and Robin a psychiatrist . . .

From William E. Stolze—

Shall we say that stf is like a strong shot of heroin? That once consumed, it creates such a living ache in one’s heart that one cannot justifiably do without it? Or is that too strong?… At any rate, curiosity can kill even a Jovian were-cat…

From Marion Astra Zimmer—

After that long eulogy of Kuttner … one very minor gripe. Misprint or error? Jason’s tutor was not Charon; Charon was the ferryman of the Styx. The centaur who tutored Jason was C-h-i-r-o-n. Remember? Kuttner, shame on you.

From Frank Evans Clark—

I’ve been wondering just to what extent is STF reading material primarily for escapists and frustrates … STF is divorced from reality to a greater extent than any other kind of fiction and is thus ideal for anyone who is pained by reality…

From Linda Bowles—

Bergey’s cover was awful again—but then it usually is. I just looove the way his colors clash. That eye and that sickly yellow! Yipe! Well, Berg, ole man, try again next ish …

I think Fred Brown would have called this sampling a fair one. The letter-column slang is there, and the self-consciousness, the casual, substantial literacy as well as the equally casual, embarrassing illiteracy, the drive to scrutinize everything in detail, from the stories’ premises to their illustrations. No other popular fiction form has ever had an audience this articulate, this voluble, this demanding; few workers in any art form ever had the experience of so much of their audience looking over their shoulders as they worked and making so many intense—and silly—and provocative—comments about the final product.

In this respect, What Mad Universe is a story whose audience is one of its chief characters: the audience is up there on the stage, participating in the action. Its Joe Doppelberg is not merely a science-fiction fan raised to be an exponential power as Dopelle, master of a universe . . . Dopelle, superscientist, creator of Mekky, the only man who’d been to Arcturus and returned alive—he is the reader, too, watching the author pulled down from professional status and sent sprawling through the letter columns of the magazine. Fred Brown worked as an editor at this publishing house in 1948 (he only worked a couple of days, long enough to discover that Leo Margulies’s offer of seventy-five had meant seventy-five dollars a week and not seventy-five hundred a year!) so that the novel’s protagonist uses the author’s perceptions (Fred Brown’s) as well as those of the editor for whom the novel was written (Sam Merwin’s). Inevitably, therefore, the novel has to have a double conceptual spin: Keith Winton is not simply in the universe that Joe Doppelberg has dreamed up—he is in the universe that he thinks Joe Doppelberg would dream up. We are in an enormously complicated comic dialogue here, a dialogue between author and reader that occurs rarely outside of science fiction, a dialogue that Fred Brown sensed more acutely than most writers in the field and one that he told me many times that he was very much afraid of. He certainly kept warning me against it.

This is not to deny the point that Sam J. Lundwall, among many others, has made about What Mad Universe: a parody on the clichés of science fiction. It is certainly that, but the parodies are part of this complicated dialogue. Take the space-girl’s costume, for instance (Yes, there were green trunks to go with the green bra. They were very brief trunks, very well shaped. Green leather boots came halfway up shapely calves. Between the boots and the trunks, the bare golden flesh of dimpled knees and rounded thighs.). The costume, of course, comes from the bug-eyed monster covers of magazines in which Fred Brown’s stories appeared. But the language describing the costume? It’s certainly not Fred Brown’s own rather spare idiom, and it’s not someone else’s language being parodied. It’s the language he needs to enter the dialogue between a fan character he’s created and the writer-editor who has to live in that fan’s psyche.

The novel is certainly rich in parodies of science fiction, from the total innocent flung into a new and dangerous situation—complete with new kinds of secret police hunting down intriguing new crimes—to the one wonderful heroic figure who can and will save the world from the monsters and who’ll do it with that ultimate invention, the disembodied brain machine. But the brain machine itself, while a parody if there ever was one (just consider its name, Mekky—Mekky? After all!), circles right out of parody and becomes the thoughtful explainer as well as the deus ex machina (deus in machina, perhaps?). For Brown was pursuing yet another point.

He liked to stand logic on its head, says Harry Altshuler, his agent of that time.

Any writer must deal with logic: it’s the invisible cement that holds a narrative together, that binds a given character to his actions within a story. But there are ways to tamper with logic. One of them is a version of the parallel-time story, the Wheel of If, as L. Sprague de Camp titled it, where you might have a present full of historical effects similar to the ones we now know but deriving from causes totally different from those in our records (Graf von Zeppelin, not the Wright brothers, invents the airplane instead of the dirigible in 1903; he has to emigrate to America because of the Kaiser’s animosity; today the world is the one we are familiar with, except for a small change in nomenclature). Robert Silverberg traces the idea back to a story by Edward Everett Hale in 1898. My own favorite ancestor of this form, however, is the last stanza of a 1916 poem by Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken:

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

A writer can alter logic much more noticeably by experimenting with an alternate universe. One of the earliest of these is H. G. Wells’s Men Like Gods, a novel about a trip to an Earth much like the one we know but which at our point in history has developed a utopian civilization. Most alternate universes, however, function according to natural laws unlike ours and thus have to be described as fantasies. The Harold Shea stories (Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp) in the old Unknown are examples of such fantasies—the hero by a kind of semantic spell projecting himself into Norse myth or the world of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Fred Brown paid his respects to the father of all these fantasies when he referred in a novel to Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, known in Wonderland as Lewis Carroll.

In What Mad Universe, however, a fusion occurs between the parallel-time story (science fiction) and the alternate universe story (fantasy). The space warp is invented early in the twentieth century, instead of the airplane, by a professor fooling around with his wife’s sewing machine. That is science fiction. But it is invented because the professor lives in a universe created by a science fiction fan’s daydreams about space travel. That is pure fantasy—about science fiction. Brown has developed a science fiction story with no limits at all. The late John W. Campbell’s distinction between science fiction and fantasy—that the first should be logical and possible and good, and that the second need only be logical and good—blurs completely here.

There are certain notes that Fred Brown struck again and again in his stories—the aliens he depicts are almost always utterly vicious; his characters drink constantly and will drink anything at the flick of a bartender’s thumb; size, as between one creature and another, is almost always an issue; the story will pause at any time, in the midst of any action, for a pun or a word game—but the one large theme to which he kept returning was the question of reality, how we really know what we know, how much of it is, as he put it in Come and Go Mad, truth under guise of falsehood.

This, the theme of What Mad Universe, was for Fred Brown the ultimate comic question, the investigation of the belief he voiced in It Didn’t Happen, that "the entire universe is the product of one’s imagination—in my case, my imagination. He carried it about as far as his master, Lewis Carroll had done, when Alice said of the Red King, He was part of my dream, of course—but then I was part of his dream, too!"

I was talking about this recently with my wife, Fruma, who never met Fred Brown, but who has read his stories and who loves the word games he plays in them. Ontology, I told her, that was his preoccupation. Ontology: the science of being or reality.

Ontology? she repeated slowly. Didn’t he know that ontology recapitulates philology?

Fred Brown died in 1972. I wish I could believe that he heard what Fruma said and that God now rests him on waves of laughter.

PHILIP KLASS

State College, PA

March 3,1978

1. A cent a word for most stories, a cent-and-a-half if you turned out a masterpiece and had an agent with good connections in the underworld.

2. There had been letters from a fan, Walt Dunkelberger, whose name fascinated Fred. He combined it with another word he liked and, in Chaper 16, played with them both: "You’re Joe Doppelberg—or Doppelberg’s Doppelgänger.

What Mad Universe

FLASH

The first attempt to send a rocket to the moon, in 1954, was a failure. Probably because of a structural defect in the operating mechanism, it fell back to Earth, causing a dozen casualties. Although not equipped with an explosive warhead, the rocket—in order that its landing on the moon might be observed from Earth—contained a Burton potentiomotor set to operate throughout the journey through space to build up a tremendous electrical potential which, when released on contact with the moon, would cause a flash several thousand times brighter than lightning—and several thousand times more disruptive.

Fortunately, the rocket fell in a thinly populated area in the Catskill foothills, landing upon the estate of a wealthy publisher of a chain of magazines. The publisher and his wife, two guests and eight servants were killed by the electrical discharge, which completely demolished the house and felled trees for a quarter of a mile around. Only eleven bodies were found. It is presumed that one of the guests, an editor, was so near the center of the flash that his body was completely disintegrated.

The next—and first successful—rocket was sent a year later in 1955.

Keith Winton was pretty well winded when the set of tennis was over, but he tried his darnedest not to show it. He hadn’t played in years, and tennis—as he was just realizing—is definitely a young man’s game. Not that he was old, by any means—but at thirty-one you get winded unless you’ve kept in condition. Keith hadn’t; and he’d really had to extend himself to win that set.

Now he extended himself a bit more, enough to leap across the net to join the girl on the other side. He was panting a bit, but he managed to grin at her.

Another set? Got time?

Betty Hadley shook her blond head. ’Fraid not, Keith, I’m going to be late now. I couldn’t have stayed this long except that Mr. Borden promised to have his chauffeur drive me to the airport at Greeneville and have me flown back to New York from there. Isn’t he a wonderful man to work for?

Uh-huh, said Keith, not thinking about Mr. Borden at all. "You’ve got to get back?"

Absolutely. It’s an alumnae dinner. My own alma mater. And not only that but I’ve got to speak; to tell them how a love story magazine is edited.

I could come along, Keith suggested, "and tell them how a science-fiction mag is edited. Or a horror mag, for that matter—I had Bloodcurdling Tales before Borden put me on Surprising Stories. That job used to give me nightmares. Maybe your fellow alumnae would like to hear about them, huh?"

Betty Hadley laughed. They probably would. But it’s strictly a hen party, Keith. And don’t look so downhearted. I’ll be seeing you at the office tomorrow. This isn’t the end of the world, you know.

Well, no, Keith admitted. He was wrong, in a way, but he didn’t know that.

He fell into stride beside Betty as she started up the walk from the tennis court to the big house that was the summer estate of L. A. Borden, publisher of the Borden chain of magazines.

He said, You really ought to stay around to see the fireworks, though.

"Fireworks? Oh, you mean the moon rocket. Will there be anything to see, Keith?"

They’re hoping so. Have you read much about it?

Not a lot. I know the rocket is supposed to make a flash like a flash of lightning when it hits the moon, if it does. And they’re hoping it will be visible to the naked eye so everybody’s going to be watching for it. And it’s supposed to hit at a quarter after nine, isn’t it?

"Sixteen minutes after. I know I’m going to be watching for it. And if you get a chance, watch the moon dead center, between the horns of the crescent. It’s a new moon, in case you haven’t been looking, and it’ll hit the dark area. If you’re looking without a telescope, it’ll be a faint small flash, like somebody striking a match a block away. You’ll have to be watching closely."

They say it doesn’t contain explosives, Keith. What is it that will make the flash?

Electrical discharge, on a scale nobody’s ever tried before. There’s a newfangled outfit in it—worked out by a Professor Burton—that uses the kickback of the acceleration and converts it into potential electrical energy—static electricity. The rocket itself will be something on the order of a monster Leyden jar. And it’s traveling through a vacuum in space, so the charge can’t flash over or leak off until it hits, and when it does—well, lightning won’t be in it. It’ll make the granddaddy of all short circuits.

Wouldn’t an explosive charge have been simpler?

"Oh, sure, but we’ll get a lot brighter flash from this—weight for weight—than even from an atomic warhead. And what they’re interested in is a bright flash, not an explosion as such. Of course it will tear up a little landscape—not as much as an A-bomb, maybe, but more than a blockbuster—but that’s incidental. And they expect to learn a lot about the exact composition of the surface of the moon by training spectroscopes on the flash through every big telescope on the night side of earth. And they—"

The side door of the house was ahead and Betty Hadley interrupted by putting her hand on his arm. "Sorry to interrupt you, Keith, but I must hurry. Honestly, or I’ll miss the plane. ’Bye."

She put out her hand for him to take but Keith Winton put his hands on her shoulders instead and pulled her to him. He kissed her and, for a breathless second, her lips yielded under his. Then she broke away.

But her eyes were shining—and just a bit misty. She said, ’Bye, Keith. See you in New York.

Tomorrow night? It’s a date.

She nodded and ran on into the house. Keith stood there, a fatuous smile on his face, leaning against the doorpost.

In love again, only this time it was different from anything that had ever happened to him before.

He’d known Betty Hadley only three days; had, in fact, seen her only once before this marvelous weekend. That had been on Thursday when she’d first come to Borden Publications, Inc. The magazine which she edited, Perfect Love Stories, had just been bought by Borden from a lesser chain. And Borden had been smart enough to take over the editor along with the magazine. Betty Hadley had done very well with it in the three years she’d run the magazine; the only reason the Whaley Publishing Company had been willing to sell was the fact that they had been changing to the exclusive publication of digest magazines; Perfect Love had been their only surviving fiction publication.

So Keith had met Betty Hadley on Thursday and now, to Keith Winton, Thursday seemed just about the most important day in his life.

Friday he’d had to go to Philadelphia to see one of his writers, a guy who could really write but who’d been paid in advance for a lead novel and didn’t seem to be doing anything about writing it. Keith had tried to get the writer started on a plot, and thought he’d succeeded.

Anyway, he’d missed seeing Joe Doppelberg, his prize fan, who’d picked Friday to happen to be in New York and to call at the Borden offices. Judging from Joe Doppelberg’s letters, missing a chance to meet him in person had been a definite gain.

Then yesterday, Saturday, afternoon he’d come out here at L. A. Borden’s invitation. This was Keith’s third time here, but just another weekend at the boss’s estate had turned into sheer magic when Betty Hadley turned out to be one of two other guests from the office.

Betty Hadley—tall and lithe and golden blond, with soft sun-tanned skin, with a face and figure that belonged on the television screen rather than in an editorial office—

Keith sighed and went on into the house.

In the big walnut-paneled living room, L. A. Borden and Walter Callahan, head accountant for Borden, were playing gin rummy.

Borden looked up and nodded. Hi, Keith. Want to take over after this game? We’re nearly finished. I’ve got some letters to write and Walter would probably as soon take your money as mine.

Keith shook his head. Got to do some work myself, Mr. Borden. I’m smack against deadline on the Rocketalk Department; I brought along my portable and fan letter file.

"Oh, come now; I didn’t bring you out here to work. Can’t you do it at the office tomorrow?"

Wish I could, Mr. Borden, Keith said. But it’s my own fault for getting behind, and the stuff has to go to the printer tomorrow morning at ten sharp. They’re closing the forms at noon so there isn’t any leeway. But it’s only a couple of hours’ work and I’d rather get it done now and be free this evening.

He went on through the living room and up the stairs. In his room he took his typewriter out of its case and put it on the desk. From his brief case he took the file folder that held the incoming correspondence addressed to the Rocketalk Department or, in the less inhibited cases, to The Rocketeer.

Joe Doppelberg’s letter was on top of the stack. He’d put it there because it had said Joe Doppelberg might be coming to call in person and Keith wanted to have the letter handy.

He worked paper into the typewriter, put down Rocketalk as a heading, and dived in.

Well, fellow space pilots, tonight—the night I’m writing this, not the night you’re reading it—is the big night, the big night, and the Ole Rocketeer was out there to see it. And see it he did, that flash of light on the dark of the moon that marked the landing of the first successful missile ever launched through space by man.

He looked at it critically, then yanked the paper out of the machine and put in a fresh sheet. It was too formal, too stilted, for his fans. He lighted a cigarette and wrote it again, and it came out better—or worse.

In the pause while he read it over he heard a door open and close and the sound of high heels clicking down the stairs. That would be Betty, leaving. He got up to go to the door and then sat down again. No, it would be anti-climactic to say good-bye again, now, with the Bordens and Callahan around. Much better to leave it on the note of that quick but breathless kiss and the promise that she would see him tomorrow evening.

He sighed and picked up the top letter. Joe Doppelberg’s. It said:

Dear Rocky-Tear: I shouldn’t ought to write you atall, because your last ish stinks to high Arcturus, except for the Wheeler yarn. Who ever told that mug Gormley he could write? And his space navigation? The big bohunk couldn’t peelot a rowboat across Mud Creek on a sunny day.

And that Hooper cover—the gal was okay, more than okay, tho what gals aren’t on covers? But that thing chasing her—is it supposed to be one of the Mercurian devils in the Wheeler story? Well, tell Hooper I can think of scarier Bems than them, cold sober, without even a slug of Venusian sappy-sap.

Why don’t she just turn around and chase it?

Keep Hooper on the inside—his black and white stuff is okay—and get somebody else for covers. How about Rockwell Kent or Dali? I’ll bet Dali could make a dilly of a BEM. Get it, Rocky? Dali-dilly.

Lookit, Rocky, get the Uranian bug-juice ready and iced because I’m going to beard the lyin’ in his den, some day this week. Not coming to Spaceport N’Yawk just to see you, Rocky, don’t flatter yourself on that. But because I got to see a Martian about a dog-star anyway, I’ll be in town, so I’m going to see if you’re as ugly as they say you are.

One recent idea of yours, Rocky, is tops. That’s running half-col pix of your best and regularest correspondents with their letters. So I got a surprise for you. I’m sending mine. I was going to bring it, but this letter’ll get there before I do and I might miss an ish going to press in between.

Ennahoo, Rocky, kill the fatted moon-calf, because I’ll be seeing you soon, if not sooner.

JOE DOPPELBERG

Keith Winton sighed again and picked up his blue pencil. He marked out the parts about the trip to New York; that wouldn’t interest his other readers, and anyway he didn’t want to give too many of them the idea of dropping in at the office; he could waste too much time that way.

He penciled out a few of the cornier phrases in the other parts of the letter, then picked up the snapshot that had come with the letter and glanced at it again.

Joe Doppelberg didn’t look like his letter sounded. He was a not unhandsome, rather intelligent-looking kid of sixteen or seventeen. He had a nice grin. Probably, in person, he’d be as shy as his letter was brash.

Sure, he might as well run the picture. Should have sent it to the photoengraver before but there was still time. He marked the copy to be set with a half-column runaround for a cut and wrote ½-col. Doppelberg on the back of the photograph.

He put the second page of Joe’s letter into the typewriter, thought a moment, and then typed at the bottom:

So okay, Doppelberg, we’ll get Rockwell Kent to do our next cover. You pay him. But as for having the glamour-gals chasing the bug-eyed monsters (Bems to you), it can’t be done. In our stories the gals are always chaste. Get it, Doppelberg? Chaste-chased. And that ain’t half as bad as your Dali-dilly, either.

He took the page out of the typewriter, sighed, and picked up the next letter.

He finished at six, which left him an hour before dinner. He took a quick shower and dressed and there was still half an hour left. He wandered downstairs and out the French doors that led to the garden.

It was just turning dusk and the new moon was already visible in the clear sky. The seeing would be good, he thought. And, dammit, that rocket flash had better be visible to the naked eye or he’d have to write a new opening paragraph for the Rocketalk Department. Well, there’d be time for that after nine-sixteen.

He sat down on a wicker bench beside the main path through the garden and sniffed deeply of the fresh country air and the scent of flowers all about him.

He thought about Betty Hadley, and just what he thought about her need not be recorded here.

But thinking it kept him happy—or perhaps happily miserable would be a more apt phrase—until his mind wandered to the writer in Philadelphia and he wondered if the so-and-so was actually working on that story or was out getting plastered.

Then he thought about Betty Hadley again and wished that it was twenty-four hours later, Monday evening in New York instead of Sunday evening in the Catskills.

He glanced at his wrist watch and saw that they’d be ringing the dinner bell in a few minutes. That was good news because, in love or not in love, he was hungry.

And being hungry made him think, for no reason at all, of Claude Hooper, who did most of the covers for Surprising Stories. He wondered if he could keep on getting covers from Hooper. Hooper was a swell guy and a fairly good artist, and he could draw women who made your mouth water, but he just couldn’t draw sufficiently horrible-looking monsters to pursue them. Maybe he just didn’t have enough nightmares or had too happy a home life, or something. And most of the fans were kicking. Like Joe Doppelberg. What did Doppelberg—

The moon rocket, falling back to Earth, was traveling faster than sound and Keith neither saw nor heard it, although it struck only two yards away from him.

There was a flash.

The Purple Monster

There was no sense of transition, of change or of movement, no lapse of time. It was merely as though, simultaneously with a bright flash, someone had pulled the wicker bench out from under him. He grunted from impact with the ground and, because he had been leaning against the back of the bench, went over backward full length. There he was lying flat on his back, staring up at the evening sky.

And it was seeing the sky that was the most amazing thing; it couldn’t have been merely that the wicker bench had collapsed under him—or even merely vanished from under him—because the bench had been under a tree and there was now no tree between him and the dull blue dusk.

He raised his head first and then sat up, for the moment too shaken—not physically but mentally—to stand up. Somehow he wanted his bearings before he quite trusted his knees.

He was sitting on grass, smoothly mowed grass, in the middle of a yard. Behind him, when he turned his head around, he saw a house. A quite ordinary-looking house, not nearly so large or well designed as Mr. Borden’s house. And it had the look, somehow, of a vacant house. At least there was no sign of life, no light at any window.

He stared at what should have been Mr. Borden’s house, but wasn’t, for several seconds, and then turned to look the other way. A hundred feet in that direction, at the edge of the lawn on which he sat, was a hedge; at the other side of the hedge were trees—two orderly rows of them, as though on either side of a road. They were tall and very beautiful poplars.

There was no maple tree—it had been a maple under which he had been sitting—anywhere in sight. Nor was there even a splinter of a wicker bench.

He shook his head to clear it and stood up cautiously. There was a momentary touch of dizziness but, outside of that, he was all right. Whatever had happened to him, he wasn’t hurt. He stood still until the dizziness passed and then started walking toward a gate in the hedge.

He looked at his wrist watch. It was three minutes of seven and that was impossible, he thought. It had been three minutes of seven, just about, when he’d been sitting on the bench in Mr. Borden’s garden. And wherever he was now he couldn’t have got there in nothing flat.

He held the wrist watch to his ear; it was still ticking. But that didn’t prove anything; maybe it stopped from—from whatever had happened, and had started again when he had stood up and started walking.

He looked up again at the sky to judge the time lapse; he could detect none. It had been dusk then and it was dusk now. The silver crescent moon was in the same place; at least it was the same distance from the zenith. He couldn’t be sure here—wherever here was—about his bearings and directions.

The gateway through the hedge led to an asphalt-paved three-lane highway. There were no cars in sight.

As he closed the gate he looked again at the house behind him and saw something he had not previously noticed; there was a sign on one of the porch pillars that read: For Sale. R. Blaisdell, Greeneville, N.Y.

Then he must still be near Borden’s estate, for Greeneville was the nearest town to Borden’s. But that was obvious anyway; he couldn’t have gone far. The real question was how he could be anywhere at all out of sight of where he’d been sitting only minutes ago.

He shook his head again to clear it, although it felt all right. Could he have suffered sudden amnesia? Had he walked here without knowing it? It didn’t seem possible, particularly in a matter of minutes or less.

He stood looking uncertainly up and down the wide asphalt roadway between the tall poplars, wondering which way to walk. The road ran straight; he could see almost a quarter of a mile, to the next rise, in either direction, but there was no sign of human habitation. Yet there had to be a farmhouse somewhere near, as cultivated fields lay just beyond the far row of poplars. Probably the trees themselves blocked his view of the farmhouse that must be near by. If he walked to the fence that bounded the field across the road, he’d be able to see it.

He was halfway across the road when he heard the sound of an approaching car, still out of sight beyond the rise to his left. It was a very noisy car to make itself heard at that distance. He went the rest of the way across the road and by the time he turned, the car was in sight. Information from the driver of the car would be as valuable as information from a farmhouse; better, for perhaps he could persuade the driver to give him a lift to Borden’s, at least if he was going in that direction anyway.

The car was a Model T of ancient vintage. A good omen, Keith knew. He’d done quite a bit of hitchhiking in his college days and he knew that the likelihood of getting a lift in a car was in direct proportion to its age and condition of decrepitude.

And there was no doubt about the decrepitude of this vehicle. It seemed barely to have made the rise it had just climbed; it chugged and labored to gather speed.

Keith waited until it was near enough and then stepped out into the road and waved his hand. The Ford slowed down and stopped beside him.

The man at the wheel leaned over and lowered the window on Keith’s side—for no reason that Keith could see, for there wasn’t any glass in the window anyway. Want a lift, mister? he asked.

He looked, Keith thought, almost too much like a farmer to be one. He was even chewing a long yellow straw, just the color of his hair, and his faded blue overalls matched his faded blue eyes.

Keith put a foot on the running board and leaned his head into the car through the open window, so he could make his voice heard above the chugging of the engine and the tinny rattle that came from all parts of the body even when the car was not in motion.

He said, I’m afraid I’m lost. Do you know where L. A. Borden’s place is?

The farmer rolled the straw to the opposite corner of his mouth. He thought deeply, frowning with the effort.

Nope, he said, finally. Never heard of him. Don’t have a farm on this road. Mebbe over on the pike; I don’t know all the farms over there.

It isn’t a farm, Keith told him. It’s a big country estate. He’s a publisher. Where does this road go? Into Greeneville?

Yep. It’s ahead, the way I’m going, ten miles or so. Back t’other way it hits the Albany Highway at Carteret. Want a lift to Greeneville? Guess you can find out there where this Borden lives.

Sure, Keith said. Thanks. He got into the car.

The farmer gravely reached across him and turned a crank that raised the window that hadn’t any glass in it. Rattles, he explained, if I leave it open.

He stepped on the clutch pedal and the gear pedal and the car groaned and started. The body rattle of the car sounded like hail on a tin roof. It reached its top speed and Keith estimated that it would take at least half an hour to reach a ten mile distant destination, if the car got there at all.

Well, if he got to Greeneville, he’d at least know where he was. He’d be plenty late for dinner, so maybe, he thought, he’d better phone Borden to reassure him, eat in town, and then hire a taxi, or some sort of vehicle, to drive him to the estate. He could be there by nine at the latest, plenty of time to be ready to watch the fireworks on the moon at sixteen minutes after. That was something he wasn’t going to miss.

How was he going to explain to Mr. Borden? About the only thing he could say was that he’d taken a walk and had got lost; that he’d had to get a lift into Greeneville to get his bearings. It was going to sound rather silly, but not so silly as the truth. And he didn’t want his employer to think he was subject to spells of insanity or amnesia.

The old car chugged along the long, straight road. His benefactor didn’t seem to want to talk and Keith was glad of that. They’d have had to yell at each other anyway. And he’d much rather think and try to figure out what had happened.

Borden’s estate was a big one and certainly must be well known in its immediate neighborhood. If the driver of the ancient jalopy knew everyone along the road, he couldn’t possibly not have heard of Borden’s if it were close. Yet it couldn’t possibly be more than twenty miles away, because Borden lived ten miles from Greeneville—although Keith couldn’t remember what direction it was from that town—and the spot where he’d been picked up along the road had also been about ten miles from Greeneville. Even if those two ten-mile distances were in diametrically opposite directions, he couldn’t have gone over twenty miles—and even that far was silly, considering the short lapse of time.

They were coming to the outskirts of a town now and he looked at his watch again; it was seven thirty-five. He looked out of the window of the car at buildings they were passing until he saw a clock in the window of a store. His watch was right; it hadn’t stopped and started again.

A few minutes later they were in the main business district of Greeneville. The driver swung into the curb and stopped. He said, This is about the middle of town, mister. Guess you can look up your party in a phone book and you’ll be all right. And there’s a taxi stand right across the street to get you wherever you’re going. Charge you a hell of a price, but they’ll get you there.

Thanks a lot, Keith told him. Can I buy you a drink before I phone?

Nope, thanks. Got to get back quick. Mare’s about to foal; I come in to pick up my brother. He’s a vet and I want him there.

Keith thanked him again, and went into the drugstore on the corner just beyond where the farmer had let him out of the car. He went to the phone booth at the back and took up the slender Greeneville phone book hanging by a chain from one side of the booth. He leafed through it to the B’s, and to—

There wasn’t any Borden listed.

Keith frowned. Borden’s phone was on the Greeneville exchange. He was sure of that because he’d phoned Borden several times on business from the office in New York. It had been a Greeneville number.

But of course it could be an unlisted number. Could he remember it? Of course he could—it had been three numbers all alike—ones. That was it: Greeneville 111. He remembered wondering if Borden had used pull with the phone company to get a number as easy to remember as that.

He pulled the door of the booth shut and fumbled a nickel out of the change in his pocket. But the phone was a type he hadn’t seen before. There didn’t seem to be any slot for a coin to go into. He looked all over and around it before he decided that maybe they didn’t have coin phones in these little upstate towns and that he was probably supposed to pay the druggist for the call.

He picked up the receiver and when an operator’s voice asked Number please? he gave it. There was a minute’s pause and then the operator’s voice came back on the line. There is no such number listed, sir.

For a second, Keith wondered if he was really going insane; it didn’t seem possible that he could be wrong on that number. Greeneville one-one-one; you couldn’t forget a number like that, or remember it wrong.

He asked, Will you please, then, find out the number of L. A. Borden’s phone? I thought that was the number. I can’t find him listed in the phone book, but I know he’s got a phone. I’ve called him.

One minute, sir... No, there is no such name on our records.

Keith said Thanks, and put the receiver back on the hook.

He still didn’t believe it. He stepped out of the booth so the light would be better, taking the phone book with him as far as its chain would let it go. He looked under B, and there still wasn’t any Borden listed. He remembered that Borden called his estate Fouroaks, and he looked under that. There was no listing for Fouroaks.

Suddenly he snapped the book shut and looked at the cover, it read Greeneville, N.Y. A momentary suspicion that he was in the wrong Greeneville died a-borning; there could be only one Greeneville in New York State. Another and fainter suspicion died almost before he realized its existence when he read the smaller type under the name of the town: Spring, 1954.

He still didn’t believe that L. A. Borden wasn’t in that book; he had to fight the impulse to look through it page by page to see if the name was not there but out of alphabetical order.

Instead, he walked forward to the soda counter and sat down on one of the old-fashioned wide-legged stools. Behind the counter the druggist—a little gray-haired man with thick spectacles—was polishing glasses. He looked up. Yes, sir?

A Coke, please, Keith said. He wanted to ask questions, but for the moment he couldn’t think what questions to ask. He watched while the druggist mixed the coke and put it on the counter in front of him.

Beautiful night out, the druggist said.

Keith nodded. That reminded him he’d have to remember to watch for the flash of the moon rocket, no matter where he was at the time. He glanced at his watch. It was almost eight o’clock; another hour and a quarter and he’d have to be in a clear space outdoors where he could watch the moon. It didn’t look, now, as though he’d be back at Borden’s by that time.

He drank the coke almost at a gulp. It was cool and tasted good, but it made him realize that he was getting hungry. And no wonder, if it was eight o’clock; dinner was over by now at the Bordens’ place. Besides, he’d eaten a light lunch and played quite a bit of tennis since then.

He looked around back of the soda fountain for signs indicating that the druggist served sandwiches or other food. Apparently he didn’t.

Keith took a quarter out of his pocket and put it on the marble top of the soda fountain.

It rang metallically and the druggist dropped the glass he had been polishing. Behind the thick spectacles the druggist’s eyes got wide and scared; he stood there with his body rigid while his head turned back and forth as he looked from one end of the store to the other. He didn’t seem to notice or to realize that he had dropped and broken a glass. The towel, too, fell from his fingers.

Then his hand went forward gingerly, covered the coin and picked it up. Again he looked both ways as though making sure that he and Keith were the only people in the store.

Then and only then did he look at the coin. Shielding it deep in cupped hands he stared at it, moving it close to his eyes. He turned it over and studied the other side.

His eyes, frightened and yet ecstatic, went back to Keith’s face.

Beautiful! he said. Hardly worn at all. And a nineteen twenty-eight. His voice dropped to a whisper. But—who sent you?

Keith closed his eyes and opened them again. Either he or the druggist must be crazy. He wouldn’t have doubted which had it not been for the other things that had happened—his sudden teleportation from one place to another—the absence of L. A. Borden from the phone book and the records of the phone company.

Who sent you? the druggist asked again.

Nobody, Keith said.

The little druggist smiled slowly. You don’t want to tell. It must have been K. Well, never mind that, in case it wasn’t. I’ll take a chance. I’ll give you a thousand credits for it.

Keith didn’t say anything.

Fifteen hundred, the druggist said. His eyes, Keith thought, looked like a spaniel’s eyes—the eyes of a hungry spaniel seeing a bone just beyond his reach.

The druggist took a deep breath. He said, Two thousand, then. I know it’s worth more, but that’s all I can give you. If my wife—

All right,