Tag: Saturday Evening Post

The Veldt by Ray Bradbury

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Veldt by Ray Bradbury (The Saturday Evening Post, September 23, 1950)1 opens with a concerned Lydia Hadley telling her husband George about what is happening in their house’s nursery, a holographic/sensory play area for their two children, Peter and Wendy. Lydia takes George to the nursery to show him and, once there, it switches on and they find themselves in the African veldt. At first they experience the sounds and smells of the simulation, and then:

“You see, there are the lions, far over, that way. Now they’re on their way to the water hole. They’ve just been eating,” said Lydia. “I don’t know what.”
“Some animal.” George Hadley put his hand up to shield off the burning light from his squinted eyes. “A zebra or a baby giraffe, maybe.”
“Are you sure?” His wife sounded peculiarly tense.
“No, it’s a little late to be sure,” he said, amused. “Nothing over there I can see but cleaned bone, and the vultures dropping for what’s left.”
“Did you hear that scream?” she asked.

The lions move towards the couple and eventually charge, causing the pair to flee to the hall and slam the door behind them. They realise that they are running from a simulation but are badly frightened by the experience anyway. Subsequently, they tell their children to stop reading about Africa (the nursery works by reading “the telepathic emanations of the children’s minds and [creating] life to fill their every desire”), and the couple also decide to lock the nursery for a few days, even though it will cause tantrums.
The rest of the story unrolls from this episode, with George first finding he can’t change the scene in the nursery (but his daughter later does temporarily). Then, when a psychologist friend visits the room at George’s request, the lions and their unidentified prey are seen again. The friend’s blunt advice on seeing this is to shut the room down immediately and send the children to him for treatment.
George later shuts down the nursery and the rest of the automatic house devices, which causes the children to act out. However, when they plead for one final minute in the room, George relents, but (spoiler) when the couple go to retrieve the children George and Lydia are locked in the room and the lions kill them.
The story’s plot doesn’t work in a logical sense (how could a glorified video projector conjure up lions that could kill someone?),2 but I guess it works as a sort of surreal/TwilightZone-ish horror after the repeated telegraphing of the various cues (the lions and their unidentified kill, the screaming, the brattish and chilling behaviour of the children, etc.).
This is another of Bradbury’s anti-technology stories—the room is essentially a glorified TV, a device he railed against in other stories.
*** (Good). 4,650 words. Radio Drama link.

1. First published under the title The World the Children Made.

2. I didn’t like this as much the first time around but the ending is less jarring when you know what is coming.

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 Other Wife by Jack Finney

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Other Wife by Jack Finney (Saturday Evening Post, January 30th, 1960) starts with a fairly stereotypical husband-wife encounter—she’s prattling on about her knitting and he’s day-dreaming about a sports car—which eventually devolves into a mild spat. During the early stages of this encounter the husband discovers a 1958 Woodrow Wilson coin in his change: this becomes significant later.
The next part of the story sees the husband transported to an alternate world where, after seeing a “Coco-Coola” sign, he notices other changes (the cars are all black, and they are of different makes) before discovering the most significant difference on his arrival back at his apartment—which is that he is married to another woman.
He later realises that she is an ex-girlfriend of his, although this takes some time, and after some slight hesitation he picks up where he left off. He subsequently enjoys a honeymoon period with his other wife and during this also has the pleasure of finding new books that exist in this world but not in his own:

There on the revolving metal racks were the familiar rows of glossy little books, every one of which, judging from the covers, seemed to be about an abnormally well-developed girl. Turning the rack slowly I saw books by William Faulkner, Bernard Glemser, Agatha Christie, and Charles Einstein, which I’d read and liked. Then, down near the bottom of the rack my eye was caught by the words, “By Mark Twain.” The cover showed an old side-wheeler steamboat, and the title was South From Cairo. A reprint fitted out with a new title, I thought, feeling annoyed; and I picked up the book to see just which of Mark Twain’s it really was. I’ve read every book he wrote—Huckleberry Finn at least a dozen times since I discovered it when I was eleven years old.
But the text of this book was new to me. It seemed to be an account, told in the first person by a young man of twenty, of his application for a job on a Mississippi steamboat. And then, from the bottom of a page, a name leaped out at me. “‘Finn, sir,’ I answered the captain,” the text read, “‘but mostly they call me Huckleberry.’”
For a moment I just stood there in the drugstore with my mouth hanging open; then I turned the little book in my hands. On the back cover was a photograph of Mark Twain; the familiar shock of white hair, the mustache, that wise old face. But underneath this the brief familiar account of his life ended with saying that he had died in 1918 in Mill Valley, California. Mark Twain had lived eight years longer in this alternate world, and had written—well, I didn’t yet know how many more books he had written in this wonderful world, but I knew I was going to find out. And my hand was trembling as I walked up to the cashier and gave her two bits for my priceless copy of South From Cairo.  pp. 25-26 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)

This part of the story, and his realisation about what the odd coins in his change do—see below—is probably the best of it.
In a few months, of course, the shine eventually comes off his new relationship and, while checking his change one night, he finds a Roosevelt coin. He realises that it was the Woodrow Wilson one which transported him to this world—and that the Roosevelt will let him return.
The story ends with him back in his own world where no time has passed. He has a second honeymoon period with his first wife and then, later, finds another Woodrow Wilson coin in his change . . . .
I guess, overall, this story is okay, but it’s essentially shallow New Yorker froth where a bigamous husband has his cake and eats it. A pity, because there is a better story here about how the shine comes off of new relationships and marriages, and of the possibilities of the road not taken. (And hopefully a story which explains the reason there isn’t already a husband in the alternate world.)
** (Average). 5,850 words.