Child’s Play by William Tenn (Astounding, March 1947) opens in Mimsy Were the Borogoves territory when a struggling lawyer called Sam Weber accidentally gets a Christmas present from the future. When Weber finally manages to open the package (it eventually responds to his voice commands), he finds that it is a children’s “Bild-a-Man” kit:
Bild-a-Man Set 3. This set is intended solely for the use of children between the ages of eleven and thirteen. The equipment, much more advanced than Bild-a-Man Sets 1 and 2, will enable the child of this age group to build and assemble complete adult humans in perfect working order. The retarded child may also construct the babies and mannikins of the earlier kits. Two disassembleators are provided so that the set can be used again and again with profit. As with Sets 1 and 2, the aid of a census keeper in all disassembling is advised. Refills and additional parts may be acquired from The Bild-a-Man Company, 928 Diagonal Level, Glunt City, Ohio. Remember—only with a Bild-a-Man can you build a man.
After this the story switches to the law office where Weber works, where we find out that Weber has a crush on Tina, the office secretary, but so has the more successful Lew Knight. We also see Tina tell Weber that a strange-looking old man has been enquiring about him.
The rest of the story runs along the twin tracks of (a) Weber experimenting with the Bild-a-man set (he creates various malformed creatures which he eventually disassembles, and then a copy of a baby he is minding for the parents—which he eventually drops off at an orphanage); and (b) Weber watching as Tina goes out with Lew and eventually gets engaged. This latter event makes Weber decide to create a copy of Tina (who he convinces to scan herself in the office on the pretence of getting a wedding present for her), but he then makes a copy of himself first to make sure he has perfected the method.
The climactic scene (spoiler) sees the duplicate Weber wake up and destroy the dissassembleator. There is then some back and forth between the pair just before the strange old man arrives at Weber’s flat (Weber’s landlady mentioned earlier that the strange old man has been looking for him). The man reveals that he is the census keeper for the twenty ninth oblong, and explains why he took so long to arrive at Weber’s flat even though he knew that Weber had accidentally been sent the Bild-a-Man kit from the future (procedures, etc.).
The old man then scans the two Webers and decides the most coherent personality (the Bild-a-Man kit is supposed to produce neurotic, unstable individuals) is the duplicate Weber and proceeds to disassemble the original.
This piece rather feels like a run-of-the-mill Henry Kuttner story with a standard ironic ending1—but, although it is competently executed, the office relationships rather date the piece, it tends to plod along, and it doesn’t have the sense of wonder of Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore’s Mimsy Were the Borogoves, or the darkness of Cyril Kornbluth’s The Little Black Bag.2
*** (Good). 10,550 words. Story link.
1. Coincidentally, I later found this passage in Josh Lukin’s interview of Willian Tenn, A Jew’s-Eye View of the Universe, reprinted in Dancing Naked: The Unexpurgated William Tenn by William Tenn, 2004:
WT: And then I went to sea as a purser on a cargo ship. A purser is a staff officer, head of administrative matters on board a ship. And the reason I went to sea was that I was still living at home at the time, and I had to write on the train going to and from my job. So I found out that on a cargo ship, when the ship is at sea, the radio operator is very busy, and he has nothing to do when the ship is in port, so he takes off The purser, on the other hand, is very busy when the ship is in port, but has litde to do while the ship is at sea. So I figured I would make enough money to support my family and have time to write. And while at sea, I wrote “Child’s Play,” which was my second published story, and of which I was for a long time reasonably proud. I’m not ashamed of it now, but it’s a story by a juvenile: I’m not as proud of it as I was at one time. But it was a tremendous success.
JL: It’s been dramatized for radio at least twice…
WT: Oh yes, for radio, for television—it was anthologized about fifty times, at one point more than almost any other story, all over the world. Clifton Fadiman wrote a nice mention of it for The New Yorker.
JL: I see Kuttner’s influence…
WT: At a given point, I became aware that I was writing what I thought was a Lewis Padgett story. This story is, in a sense, a “Mimsy Were the Borogoves.” I began feeling that I was writing a story that Padgett would have written, and since I loved Padgett, I now had the pleasure of finding out what was going to happen next! It was definitely a Kuttner story. I didn’t know then of Henry Kuttner: I knew Lewis Padgett. I didn’t know that Lewis Padgett was Kuttner or C.L. Moore or anything of those people.
That sold very well. All kinds of New York science-fiction magazine editors wanted stories by me. Ted Sturgeon became my agent. I had met him before the war, in a cafeteria in 1939 on 57th Street. He was the first professional writer I met. He had just been beached: he was a sailor at the time. He had sold two stories to Campbell: one to Unknown, “A God in a Garden,” and one to Astounding, “Ether Breather.” I got to know him, and he was the only professional writer I knew for a long time. I looked him up after I came out of the Army and he came back from the tropics. I’d read his work in the meantime. And when I wrote “Child’s Play,” he told me that he was then functioning as an agent for Damon Knight, Jim Blish, Judy Merril, Chandler Davis, and a whole bunch of other people. He was a very good agent. So he became my agent and helped me get published in all sorts of magazines: Campbell’s Astounding, of course, as well as those of lesser stature. pp. 258-259
2. According to Robert Silverberg’s introduction to The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, this story was supposed to be included in that volume but the rights could not be obtained. I think it would have been shown up by the Kuttner & Moore and Kornbluth stories mentioned above and, apart from that, it would have been the third story in the book using the same basic gimmick.