Lester Del Rey - The Best Of Lester Del Rey

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A Del Key Book.

Published by Baliantine Books

Conventions. Published in the United States by Baliantine Books, a division of

Random House, Inc., New York and simultaneously in Canada by Baliantine Books

of Canada, Ltd., Toronto, Canada.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 78-62267 ISBN 0-345-27336-2

Manufactured in the United States of America First Baliantine Books Edition:

September 1978 Cover art by H. R. Van Dongen

Astounding Science Fiction, December 1938.

for Astounding Science Fiction, May 1939.

for Unknown, September 1939.

for Unknown Worlds, December 1941.

for Astounding Science Fiction, March 1942.

Astounding Science Fiction, August 1945.

Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1951.

magazine.

for Astounding Science Fiction, October 1951.

Astounding Science Fiction, January 1952.

Astounding Science Fiction, August 1954.

Star Short Novels.

for Fantastic Universe, January 1956.

Science Fiction, April 1957.

Science Fiction, July 1957.

Galaxy Science Fiction, December 1964.

TO BETTY BALLANTINE,

my long-time editor, with my deepest affection.

Contents

Introduction: The Magnificent Frederik Pohl

Helen O'Loy

The Day Is Done

The Coppersmith

Hereafter, Inc.

The Wings of Night

Into Thy Hands

And It Comes Out Here

The Monster

The Years Draw Nigh

Instinct

Superstition

For I Am a Jealous People

The Keepers of the House

Little Jimmy

The Seat of Judgment

Vengeance Is Mine

Author's Afterword

The Magnificent

THE UNQUESTIONED KING of-the nighttime air in New York radio is a skinny and

sardonic fellow named Long John Nebel. Long John's marathon talk show runs

from midnight till dawn every night of the week, and what it covers is

everything. I don't just mean "everything." I mean everything. Politics.

Religion. Sex. Hying saucers. Bermuda triangles. War. Science fiction.

Science. Art. Music. You name it, it has been the subject of a Long John

talkfest. And over the years, among his chosen nuclear guest family who join

him after midnight to chew over the topic of the day, one voice has stood out.

Whatever the subject, he has an opinion, and insights and facts to back it up.

He has done the show 400 times at least, not counting reruns on tape, and he

is so well known to the insomniacs of New York (and most other states) that he

is usually introduced only as The Magnificent. He doesn't need to be given a

name, because the listeners know him so well. But he has one. It is Lester del

Rey.

Of course, there are countless thousands of people who have known Lester del

Rey very well for a long time who have never heard him on Long John's show.

They are people like you and me: science-fiction readers. We've known Lester

for forty years, or even longer

All

if we remember those polemical letters in Astounding's "Brass Tacks"

department in the '30s.

Like most sf writers, Lester came to the field as a reader. He liked what he

read. After some thought, he concluded that he would like writing it, too. He

had never written a science-fiction story at the time. That didn't seem to

matter. He reasoned that if he thought of an idea no one else had thought of

before, and told it concisely and literately, with some attention to

interesting characters and colorful backgrounds, John Campbell would buy it.

So he did. And so John did; it was called "The Faithful." That was the first

story Lester sold John Campbell. It certainly wasn't the last. The Golden Age

of Astounding was all the more lustrous for "Nerves," "Helen O'Loy," and all

those others from his hard-driven typewriter.

Once he had formed the habit, Lester did not stop with Astounding. He wrote

for all the other magazines, too, and when a few years later a couple of

publishers took all their courage in their hands and began to experiment with

science-fiction books, Lester was one of the first to get his sf nicely

packaged in hard covers. He wrote a couple, then a flood, of novels especially

for the book publishers. There are grown men (and grown women, too) all over

the country who cut their literary wisdom teeth on sf juveniles by Philip St.

John, Erik Van Lhin, and Kenneth Wright-all of whom were, in fact, Lester del

Rey. Scott Meredith, then a young (but obviously canny) literary agent,

grabbed Lester as a client, and shortly thereafter as an employee, and as

Meredith's Number One assistant, Lester guided the careers of scores of other

writers. When the science-fiction magazine market mushroomed in the

early 1950s Lester became the editor of one of the most interesting-strike

that; of four of the most interesting- magazines around. He did most of that

pseudony-mously, too. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, he was Philip St. John,

editor of Science Fiction Adventures. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays he

was Wade Kaempf ert, editing Rocket Stories; and then he had the whole week-

end to himself, under his own name, to edit Space Science Fiction and Fantasy

Fiction Magazine.

I first met Lester del Rey when both of us were impossibly apple-cheeked

youngsters. I was editing two cut-rate science-fiction magazines for Popular

Publications, and Lester, on one of his rare visits to New York, brought to my

office a couple of stories that John Campbell had had the unwisdom to turn

down. In my youthful foolishness, I did the same. Well, you can excuse

Campbell, because he had everybody in the field clamoring to get into his

magazines. Maybe you can forgive me, too, because I was inexperienced. But how

can you excuse Lester for what he did then? Since two editors had declined the

stories, he figured there was something wrong with them. He put them aside-and

now, four decades later, they're still aside, in fact lost irretrievably.

A war came along, scattering us all for a while. And then, in 1947, there was

a world science-fiction convention in Philadelphia. We all saw each other

again, met new friends, had a fine time. All in all it was a fine weekend; and

Lester and I liked it so well that we conceived the idea of making it

permanent.

Lester was living in New York City by then, and so was I, and we got ourselves

and a coterie of friends together and created The Hydra Club, New York's

longest-lived sf writers' chowder-and-marching society. Long after both Lester

and I had left the city and stopped attending, the club carried on of its own

momentum. One of the leading lights of Hydra was the late Fletcher Pratt, a

marvelous, lovable, feisty man who had once been a bantamweight prize fighter

and converted himself into the writer who produced the best one-volume history

of the Civil War ever in print (among very much else that is noteworthy).

Fletcher and Inga Pratt owned a great old monster of a house on the New Jersey

shore. Lester and I (and our wives) were frequent weekend guests, and grew

fond of the Monmouth County area. In 1951 I moved to Red

Bank. In 1954 the del Reys came out to visit the Pohls for a weekend. They

stayed seventeen years.

Oh, it wasn't roses, roses all the way! Science-fiction writers are thorny

people, given to obstinacy and adrenalin, and Lester is an archetypal science-

fiction writer. He has sometimes been described as fulminate of mercury with a

beard. I am not at all like that, of course, but nevertheless we had some

rousers. We fought like wombats over astrophysics, horticulture, and whether

the Bruch violin concerto deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with the

Mendelssohn. (Lester was wrong about that, though I must admit the Bruch is

still very good.) In the days before baseball teams treacherously deserted

their God-given home turfs to dally in California, Lester was misguidedly a

partisan of the New York Giants, while I, of course, loyally supported the

best team in the history of baseball, the Brooklyn Dodgers. That caused a lot

of trouble. Perhaps you remember hearing about Bobby Thomson's home run that

cost Brooklyn a pennant? That was the closest I ever came to punching Lester

out. He chortled.

But when the chips were down, when there was trouble-and there was grave

trouble now and then for both of us-what Lester was was a friend. In 1970

Evelyn del Rey was killed hi a car crash. After that, Lester did not want to

live in their house any more. He moved to New York, and so in a short time

Carol and I had lost not only Ewie, but Lester as well. It was a somber

time.

But time passed; and then, when we now and then saw Lester on a visit, it was

clear that somehow he was finding joy again. By and by it became clear that

the joy had a name, and her name was Judy-Lynn Benjamin. I wholly approved.

For one thing, I would not have dared not to; I had introduced them, when

Lester was editing one of the magazines at the Galaxy complex and Judy-Lynn

was the brand-new, fresh-out-of-college junior editor who saw that everything

got done for us. They were married a few months later; and that, my children,

is the story of how Del Rey Books got its name.

So I am not very objective about Lester del Rey, either as a writer or as a

friend. As a writer, his awards speak for his standing in his field, but they

don't have to. The stories speak for themselves, and what I can tell you in

this short note cannot say as much for his writing as any of the works that

follow. So let me talk about him in other ways. As the person who dyed his

beard green in silent protest when his wife changed the color of her hair. As

the tinkerer who redesigned the keyboard of his typewriter to economize on

finger movements. As the man who taught me so wickedly addictive a form of

solitaire that I have never since been able to play any other. As the coach,

mentor, and advocate of a hundred newer writers, some of them now in the top

rank of science fiction.

Lester has spent a great deal of his time in passing on the writers' tribal

lore to newcomers. One of them was a brash young Ohio fan named Harlan

Ellison. When Harlan heard I was writing these notes, he demanded equal time.

This is what he said:

I arrived in New York in late 1955; I was notable for two qualities: a

relentless determination to be a professional writer, and squeaky-clean

poverty. I had no place to live. Lester and his wonderful wife, the late

Evelyn del Rey, took me in for a couple of weeks till I could find digs in the

city. Sitting at the del Keys' dining room table, using the bartered Royal

portable that had been virtually the only thing I'd salvaged when I'd been

kicked out of Ohio State University a few months previous, I wrote my first

story. Lester was unfailingly helpful. He would walk up behind me, read what

I'd typed, see it was syntactically crippled, and bat me across the back of

the head. "Not who, dummy! Whoml" He provided auctorial tips, he showed me how

to cobble up the extrapolative science that would make my specious concepts

work, he edited the manuscript. Ewie fed me.

After Algis Budrys and Andre Norton, who were the first writers to take an

interest in me, Lester was the one who got me started thinking and writing as

a professional. He wasn't kind, he was murderous; and that is a brutal

treasure more valuable than all the strokes given by well-intentioned and

inept amateurs who do not perceive one one-millionth as clearly as Lester did

that writing is a killing craft, and only the tough survive and prevail.

For that savaging, I will always love and honor Lester.

A decade or so ago, Lester and I were comparing notes in the ril-show-you-

mine-if-you-show-me-yours way writers have when they suspect they may be up

for the same prize.

Each year the World Science Fiction Convention selects some figure from the

field to be its official Guest of Honor. Neither Lester nor I had ever been.

The convention that would vote on it was coming up. The committee for the city

that gets the convention picks its GoH, and they keep it secret until, and

unless, they win the bid.

And it turned out that, in fact, we were competing for the honor that year.

What I told Lester at the tune was true: I surely would enjoy being it. But if

I had to lose, there wasn't anybody in the field I'd rather lose to.

Of course, I confess, I felt pretty easy at being generous about it. The odds

were on my side. Several cities were bidding for the convention. Two of them

had asked me to be their Guest of Honor, and only one had asked Lester.

The trouble with betting with the odds is that the odds don't always pay off.

Lester's people won. He got the honor, and I had to skulk in darkness for

several more years before emerging into glory in Los Angeles. But that's

Lester for you. He makes a liar of the odds-layers every time.

He beat the odds for his own life some years back, against all the wisdom of

medical science. The name of what happened to him is thromboeytopenia purpura.

is a disease, and an uncommon one. When it happens at all, it happens to tiny

babies. When babies do develop it, the victims are usually female. I will

attempt to describe this for you, if you will pardon the use of technical

medical terms: For some reason or other, all the platelets in the blood say,

"Ah, screw it," at once. They stop clotting. The victim bleeds to death.

When grown male Lester del Rey's platelets did this he was in his forties, and

the local doctors competed vigorously for the chance to attend this medical

marvel-right away, because they didn't think a lot of his chances of

surviving. They said, "Don't cut yourself, don't bump yourself, and, above

all, for God's sake, don't sneeze." Lester humored them to that extent. He

didn't sneeze. But he didn't die, either. He was one of the vanishingly small

number of male adults who contract the disease in the first place, and the

even tinier number who survive it to make a full recovery. Doctors don't know

how he managed this, but I do. It was his stubbornness. He just didn't feel

like dying then.

Let me give you an example of what a person like Lester can do against the

odds when he sets his mind to it. I swear every word of this is true.

You know that the Apollo Project, which put the first man on the Moon, began

shortly after the inauguration of President John Kennedy in 1961.

Well, there is a novel by Lester del Rey (under his penname Philip St. John)

called Rocket Jockey. It was published in 1951.

The space program had hardly begun when he was writing it, and Commander Neil

Armstrong, who was to take that first great step for mankind a few years

later, was still just another Navy pilot with the hope of someday sailing

space. More than that. Sputnik and Vostok had made the American space program

look pretty silly, and as far as anyone could tell, when that first man did

walk on the Moon it was likely that the first message he would radio home

might be in Russian.

Nevertheless-

Nevertheless the first sentence of that novel is fascinating. Many science-

fiction stories have predicted fu-

ture events. Few have been as uncannily exact,* even to names, as this opening

sentence:

"The first spaceship landed on the Moon, and Commander Armstrong stepped out."

Now do you understand why they call him The Magnificent?

FrederikPohl Red Bank, NJ. Christmas, 1977

*See Author's Afterword.

Helen O'Loy

I AM AN old man now, but I can still see Helen as Dave unpacked her, and still

hear him gasp as he looked her over.

"Man, isn't she a beauty?"

She was beautiful, a dream in spun plastics and metals, something Keats might

have seen dimly when he wrote his sonnet. If Helen of Troy had looked like

that the Greeks must have been pikers when they launched only a thousand

ships; at least, that's what I told Dave.

"Helen of Troy, eh?" He looked at her tag. "At least it beats this thing-

K2W88. Helen . . . Mmmm . . . Helen of Alloy."

"Not much swing to that, Dave. Too many unstressed syllables in the middle.

How about Helen O'Loy?"

"Helen O'Loy she is, Phil." And that's how it began-one part beauty, one part

dream, one part science; add a stereo broacast, stir mechanically, and the

result is chaos.

Dave and I hadn't gone to college together, but when I came to Messina to

practice medicine, I found him downstairs in a little robot repair shop. After

that, we began to pal around, and when I started going with one twin, he found

the other equally attractive, so we made it a foursome.

When our business grew better, we rented a house out near the rocket field-

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTSADelKeyBook.PublishedbyBaliantineBooksCopyright(c)1978byLesterdelReyIntroduction:TheMagnificent.Copyright(c)1978byFrederikPohlAllrightsreservedunderInternationalandPan-AmericanCopyrightConventions.PublishedintheUnitedStatesbyBaliantineBooks,adivisionofRandomHouse,Inc.,NewYorkandsimult...

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