Tag: 1947

Jerry is a Man by Robert A. Heinlein

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Jerry is a Man by Robert A. Heinlein (Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1947) starts with a wealthy businessman called Bronson Van Vogel deciding that he needs to one-up an acquaintance:

Mr. and Mrs. Bronson van Vogel did not have social reform in mind when they went to the Phoenix Breeding Ranch; Mr. van Vogel simply wanted to buy a Pegasus.
He had mentioned it at breakfast.
“Are you tied up this morning, my dear?”
“Not especially. Why?”
“I’d like to run out to Arizona and order a Pegasus designed.”
“A Pegasus? A flying horse? Why, my sweet?”
He grinned. “Just for fun. Pudgy Hartmann was around the club yesterday with a six-legged dachshund—must have been over a yard long. It was clever, but he swanked so much I want to give him something to stare at. Imagine, Martha—me landing on the Club ’copter platform on a winged horse. That’ll snap his eyes back!”
She turned her eyes from the Jersey shore to look indulgently at her husband. She was not fooled; this would be expensive. But Brownie was such a dear.  pp. 46-47

The next part of the story takes place at the ranch, where the couple see a variety of bio-engineered animals. However, after a long lecture from one of the company’s scientists about how a flying horse is an impossibility without massively changing its shape and metabolism, Van Vogel settles for one something that will look like a Pegasus, but will not fly (although this is only settled on after the scientist consults with a Martian alien called B’Na Kreeth). Meantime, Van Vogel’s wife Martha buys Napoleon, a midget elephant that can write with its trunk. Then, as the couple leave the complex, they pass through the breeding laboratories that produces the “apes”, anthropoid workers that are used for labouring.
Towards the end of their visit the couple pass an enclosure of old apes, and some of them crowd the wire and beg for cigarettes. The supervisor apologises, but Martha goes over to one of the apes and gives it a cigarette anyway. The ape thanks her and tells her it is called Jerry. Then, when Martha asks it why he looks sad, Jerry replies that it has no work, and therefore can’t get any cigarettes. Subsequently, Martha learns that the apes in this enclosure are either old, senile, or have medical conditions (Jerry has cataracts) and, when she asks the manager why other work can’t be found for them, her husband, irritated by her concern, tells her that old apes don’t retire—they are liquidated and then used as dog food.
At this point the story pivots in a couple of ways. First, the focus of the story completely switches from Van Vogel to Martha and, second, we find out that (as hinted at the end of the quoted passage above) she is the one with the money. Further to this latter fact, when the manager of the facility doesn’t agree to her request to give her Jerry and to stop the killings, she calls her business managers and begins a hostile takeover of the company.
Martha’s attempt to buy the breeding ranch eventually proves abortive (by making the call in front of the manager she has tipped her hand and others have bought up stock) and Martha ends up having to employee a “Shyster” called McCoy. He decides, after seeing Jerry sing (and lie to Napoleon), that their best bet is for Jerry to bring a lawsuit against Workers Inc. (During all this, Martha also discovers that her husband is working against her, and unceremoniously dumps him.)
The final part of the story (spoiler) sees Jerry in court. At the end of the trial he is declared a man because (among other reasons) the Martian who appeared earlier in the story is also considered a man due to an Earth-Mars treaty. The story concludes:

“We are exploring the meaning of this strange thing called ‘manhood.’ We have seen that it is not a matter of shape, nor race, nor planet of birth, nor of acuteness of mind. Truly, it cannot be defined, yet it may be experienced. It can reach from heart to heart, from spirit to spirit.” He turned to Jerry. “Jerry—will you sing your new song for the judge?”
“Sure [Mike].” Jerry looked uneasily up at the whirring cameras, the mikes, and the
ikes, then cleared his throat:
“Way down upon de Suwannee Ribber Far, far away; Dere’s where my heart is turning ebber—”
The applause scared him out of his wits; the banging of the gavel frightened him still
more—but it mattered not; the issue was no longer in doubt. Jerry was a man.  p. 60

This is an entertaining piece, if not the most convincing one, this latter perhaps partly caused by its kitchen sink quality (apart from uplifted animals used in a labour economy, we also have Martians, and some sort of dodgy legal system that requires the use of “Shysters”, etc.), and partly due to its rationale for Jerry’s humanity (he can sing, lie, and appears less monstrous than the Martian who testifies).
I’m also not sure what to make of Jerry’s song at the end of the story: I assume this, and the fact that Jerry calls everyone “Boss”, is a reference to pre-Civil War slaves and their lack of civil liberties—or was Heinlein thinking about the situation of minorities at the time he wrote the piece?
Finally, I note that this story has a powerful and rich female character at its centre, which is unusual for SF of this period (and I suppose that the reason that Heinlein started with the husband as the main character and then switched was to wrong-foot his readers).
*** (Good). 9,150 words. Story link.

Exit the Professor by Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Exit the Professor by Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore (Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1947) is one of “Hogben” series,1 a handful of tales about a mutant hillbilly family in Kentucky. Saunk is the narrator (and Gallagher-like inventor2 of extraordinary devices), and his relations are Paw (who is invisible), Maw, Uncle Les (who can fly), Little Sam (a baby who has two heads and lives in a tank), and Grandpa (a monstrosity who lives upstairs). They have a wide range of paranormal powers.
In this story we see the family pestered by a Professor Thomas Galbraith, a biogeneticist who has heard rumours about the family after the Hogben’s recent altercation with the Hayley boys ended up in the news (the brothers said Little Sam had three heads, so Saunk rigged up a shotgun gadget that “punched holes in Rafe as neat as anything”—the coroner’s verdict was that the Hayley boys died “real sudden”).
Although Saunk tries to get rid of Galbraith, the professor becomes insistent after (a) Little Sam’s sub-sonic crying knocks him out, (b) he sees Uncle Les fly away, and (c) he examines the shotgun-gadget. Saunk reluctantly agrees to go to New York with Galbraith if he will keep the family’s secret.
The night before Saunk is to meet Galbraith in town, the family get together:

That night we chewed the rag. Paw being invisible, Maw kept thinking he was getting
more’n his share of the corn, but pretty soon she mellowed and let him have a demijohn. Everybody told me to mind my p’s and q’s.
“This here perfesser’s awful smart,” Maw said. “All perfessers are. Don’t go bothering him any. You be a good boy or you’ll ketch heck from me.”
“I’ll be good, Maw,” I said. Paw whaled me alongside the haid, which wasn’t fair, on account of I couldn’t see him.
“That’s so you won’t fergit,” he said.
“We’re plain folks,” Uncle Les was growling. “No good never came of trying to get above yourself.”
“Honest, I ain’t trying to do that,” I said. “I only figgered—”
“You stay outa trouble!” Maw said, and just then we heard Grandpaw moving in the attic. Sometimes Grandpaw don’t stir for a month at a time, but tonight he seemed right frisky.
So, natcherally, we went upstairs to see what he wanted.  p. 85

The next passage is hugely entertaining, and hints at the family’s extraordinary backstory:

He was talking about the perfesser. “A stranger, eh?” he said. “Out upon the stinking knave. A set of rare fools I’ve gathered about me for my dotage! Only Saunk shows any shrewdness, and, dang my eyes, he’s the worst fool of all.”
I just shuffled and muttered something, on account of I never like to look at Grandpaw direct. But he wasn’t paying me no mind. He raved on.
“So you’d go to this New York? ’Sblood, and hast thou forgot the way we shunned London and Amsterdam—and Nieuw Amsterdam—for fear of questioning? Wouldst thou be put in a freak show? Nor is that the worst danger.”
Grandpaw’s the oldest one of us all and he gets kinda mixed up in his language sometimes. I guess the lingo you learned when you’re young sorta sticks with you. One thing, he can cuss better than anybody I’ve ever heard.
“Shucks,” I said. “I was only trying to help.”
“Thou puling brat,” Grandpaw said. “ ’Tis thy fault and thy dam’s. For building that device, I mean, that slew the Haley tribe. Hadst thou not, this scientist would never have come here.”
“He’s a perfesser,” I said. “Name of Thomas Galbraith.”
“I know. I read his thoughts through Little Sam’s mind. A dangerous man. I never knew a sage who wasn’t. Except perhaps Roger Bacon, and I had to bribe him to—but Roger was an exceptional man. Hearken.
“None of you may go to this New York. The moment we leave this haven, the moment we are investigated, we are lost. The pack would tear and rend us. Nor could all thy addle-pated flights skyward save thee, Lester—dost thou hear?”
“But what are we to do?” Maw said.
“Aw, heck,” Paw said. “I’ll just fix this perfesser. I’ll drop him down the cistern.”
“An’ spoil the water?” Maw screeched.
“You try it!”
“What foul brood is this that has sprung from my seed?” Grandpaw said, real mad.
“Have ye not promised the sheriff that there will be no more killings—for a while at least? Is the word of a Hogben naught? Two things have we kept sacred through the centuries—our secret from the world, and the Hogben honor! Kill this man Galbraith and ye’ll answer to me for it!”  p. 85-86

This initial setup is the best of the story, and the rest is more formulaic fare that sees Saunk alter the shotgun-gadget (which Galbraith has taken away with him) before the professor test fires the device. When he does, everyone in town who has a gold filling gets a toothache. Galbraith gets arrested. The now-invisible Saunk modifies the gun again, and on the next firing the sheriff’s toothache disappears. Saunk modifies the gun once again, and then, when all the townpeople are assembled in the town hall to have their toothache cured, their fillings disappear—along with everything else non-natural in and on their bodies, including their clothes.
The story ends with Uncle Les rescuing Galbraith from the mob. In return he agrees to leave the family alone—but Grandpa reads his mind and sees he is lying, so Paw puts Galbraith in a small bottle which he never leaves.
A weak end to a story that has a highly entertaining first half.
**+ (Average to Good). 5,550 words. Story link.

1. There are five stories in the Hogben series but the first appears to be a mainstream piece only loosely related to the others. See ISFDB for more details.

2. See ISFDB for details of Kuttner’s solo series of stories about Gallagher, an inventor who often can’t remember the purpose or operation of the creations he makes while drunk.

Child’s Play by William Tenn

Posted on by Paul Fraser

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.

The Thirteenth Trunk by Vida Jameson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Thirteenth Trunk by Vida Jameson (Saturday Evening Post, 8th February 1947)1 starts with Lynn, who is working as a switchboard operator for a New York company called Courlandt Coal on a busy winter’s day. During the rush she gets a call on a disconnected line—but nonetheless hears a strangely accented caller called Van Kieft saying that he wants coal from Riven Hill. She quickly passes him on to a salesman called Jack Blake (who she has a crush on).
Later, Blake arrives at the order room with a coffee for Lynn, and he tells her about the conversation with the “screwball” that she put through to him. Apparently Van Kieft told Blake that he arrived in New York with a shipment from Riven Hill (an anthracite mine in Pennsylvannia) and that he needs a piece of that coal to get home. Blake concludes his story by saying that Van Kieft is obviously a drunk, a homesick miner . . . or a lost gnome!
The rest of the story develops two subplots: the first is a problem at the local hospital, which has been sent the wrong kind of coal and is having a problem with its heating, and the second is Lynn’s discovery, after another call with Van Kieft, and then having him turn up at the office, that he really is a gnome.
These two threads resolve in the remainder of the story (spoiler), which sees Blake identify the problem at the hospital (too fine a grade of coal is falling through the grates of the boilers before it can burn) and organise a replacement shipment of coal for them. The company can’t deliver, however, partly because of a carbon monoxide incident that puts several drivers out of action, and partly because the streets are snow- and ice-bound. Step forward Van Klieft, who says he is an elemental being and—if given a piece of his native Riven Hill coal—will be able to “do anything in the earth”. When Van Klieft finally gets the coal he needs, he takes Blake and the shipment directly to the hospital:

Five minutes later a truck was on the scales, loading for the hospital.
Ginger, seeing Lynn’s uneasiness, relieved her at the switchboard. Lynn seated herself with a good view of the window, pretending to sort orders. She saw Jack come out and climb into the cab. He saw her and blew her a kiss.
A few seconds later a tiny brown-and-green figure scuttled past and sprang up beside Jack. Lynn saw with relief that Van Kieft was too little to be seen, once in the truck.
At that, it turned out to be impossible to fool the yard laborers completely. The truck rolled off the scales and turned down the street. Presently an excited and gesticulating group of workmen was gathered out in front of the office. Grant strode out and restored order. But all that afternoon the gossip filtered into the office. One of the men swore that “t’at crazy salesman, he jus’ drive across Lenox Avenoo and disappear into t’at hill. So help me. Miss Dawson, I saw wit’ my own eyes!”  p. 123

The hospital get their coal, Blake gets a promotion from sales to engineering and, presumably, Lynn gets her man.
Although this sounds like a fairly lightweight Unknown-type fantasy, I’d make two observations: first, it’s an amusing and polished piece, especially for a debut story and, second, it has a very realistic setting (Jameson must have worked in this kind of office at some point in her life). This latter not only grounds the frothier fantasy part of the story, but it’s also pretty interesting account of a lost time and almost lost trade.
*** (Good). 5,400 words. Story link. Saturday Evening Post Archive Subscriptions.

1. I ended up reading this story as the result of a daisy chain of links and comments, which started with a review of the Summer 1950 issue of F&SF by Rich Horton. This led to a discussion of some of the contributors, one of whom was Cleve Cartmill: when I looked up his Wikipedia entry, I discovered that he was at one point married to Vida Jameson, the daughter of SF writer Malcolm Jameson. I recognised her name as Vida was mentioned by Alfred Bester in Hell’s Cartographers, where Bester stated that, at informal writer’s lunches he attended in the late 1930s, “Now and then [Malcolm Jameson] brought along his pretty daughter who turned everybody’s head.” (Malcolm Jameson’s ISFDB page is here, and I recommend reading his fantasy story—later turned into a Twilight Zone episode—Blind Alley).
My comment about Cleve Cartmill and Vida Jameson led to the posting of another link, which not only had a photo of her, but also provided the information that, while she was temporarily living with Robert and Virginia Heinlein, she published a story in the Saturday Evening Post (the same issue that published Heinlein’s The Green Hills of Earth)—which led me to finding that copy on the Internet Archive.
I also note in passing that Malcolm Jameson’s wife, Mary McGregor, also published a fantasy story, Transients (Unknown Worlds, February 1943), which is also worth a look.
Finally, there is a Jameson genealogy blog here, maintained by Wendy McClure, Malcolm Jameson and Mary McGregor’s great-granddaughter.

The Man Who Never Grew Young by Fritz Leiber

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Man Who Never Grew Young by Fritz Leiber (Night’s Black Agents, 1947) has a narrator who stays the same age as time flows backwards around him. Various events are described, and the most striking of these is a passage where a grieving widow waits for her husband to be disinterred and come back to life:

There were two old women named Flora and Helen. It could not have been more than a few years since their own disinterments, but those I cannot remember. I think I was some sort of nephew, but I cannot be sure.
They began to visit an old grave in the cemetery a half mile outside town. I remember the little bouquets of flowers they would bring back with them. Their prim, placid faces became troubled. I could see that grief was entering their lives.
The years passed. Their visits to the cemetery became more frequent. Accompanying them once, I noted that the worn inscription on the headstone was growing clearer and sharper, just as was happening to their own features. “John, loving husband of Flora. . . .”
Often Flora would sob through half the night, and Helen went about with a set look on her face. Relatives came and spoke comforting words, but these seemed only to intensify their grief.
Finally the headstone grew brand-new and the grass became tender green shoots which disappeared into the raw brown earth. As if these were the signs their obscure instincts had been awaiting, Flora and Helen mastered their grief and visited the minister and the mortician and the doctor and made certain arrangements.
On a cold autumn day, when the brown curled leaves were whirling up into the trees, the procession set out—the empty hearse, the dark silent automobiles. At the cemetery we found a couple of men with shovels turning away unobtrusively from the newly opened grave. Then, while Flora and Helen wept bitterly, and the minister spoke solemn words, a long narrow box was lifted from the grave and carried to the hearse.
At home the lid of the box was unscrewed and slid back, and we saw John, a waxen old man with a long life before him.
Next day, in obedience to what seemed an age-old ritual, they took him from the box, and the mortician undressed him and drew a pungent liquid from his veins and injected the red blood. Then they took him and laid him in bed. After a few hours of stony-eyed waiting, the blood began to work. He stirred and his first breath rattled in his throat. Flora sat down on the bed and strained him to her in a fearful embrace.
But he was very sick and in need of rest, so the doctor waved her from the room. I remember the look on her face as she closed the door. I should have been happy too, but I seem to recall that I felt there was something unwholesome about the whole episode.  pp. 233-235 (The Dark Side, edited by Damon Knight, 1965)

There is then reference to the reversal of world events, starting with what may be a nuclear holocaust (which may have caused time to start flowing backwards in the first place), before the narrator describes the unwinding of time back to the Egyptian era. The story concludes with the narrator and his wife setting out with their flock, as he reflects on what lies ahead:

Maot is afire with youth. She is very loving.
It will be strange in the desert. All too soon we will exchange our last and sweetest kiss and she will prattle to me childishly and I will look after her until we find her mother.
Or perhaps some day I will abandon her in the desert, and her mother will find her.
And I will go on.  p. 241 Ibid.

This brief piece has some striking passages, but I’m not sure it’s much more than a very well written notion.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 2,650 words.