Four Fredric Brown SF Stories from 1942 and '43

Let's check out four stories by Mickey Spillane's all-time favorite author, Fredric Brown, that first appeared in beautiful pulp magazines in 1942 and 1943, magazines that you can read at the universally beloved internet archive for free.

"Etaoin Shrdlu" (1942)

"Etaoin Shrdlu" made its debut in Unknown Worlds in 1942.  The cover of Unknown may be boring, but the interior illustrations are quite fine, those by Frank Kramer for L. Sprague de Camp's "The Undesired Princess" in particular.

A lot of old SF stories, the kind that Isaac Asimov liked, try to teach you something about science or technology, and valorize or romanticize intelligence--the hero resolves the plot successfully via the use of superior knowledge or quick thinking or an ability to think outside the box.  "Etaoin Shrdlu" is just this kind of story, and an entertaining one.

The narrator of the tale is a retired linotype operator (Brown himself worked as a linotype operator, Barry Malzberg tells us in his introduction to the 2001 collection From These Ashes: The Complete Short SF of Fredric Brown.)  An odd character who looks vaguely "Asiatic" despite his blonde hair wants to rent the use of a linotype machine, and approaches the narrator, who sends him to a friend who edits a little country newspaper and would be willing to, for a fee, let the man at his linotype.  This weirdo, apparently a time traveller or alien of some sort, uses the machine to create type of the words to a magic spell that grants "pseudo life" to machines--this spell is used by his people--whoever they are--on their robots.

The setting of the type for the spell actually casts the spell on the linotype machine, bringing it to life.  As a living, adaptable creature, the machine becomes super efficient, lubricating its own moving parts, reading text from its clipboard and unerringly setting type itself without the intervention of an operator, generating its own electricity, etc.  At first this thrills the newspaper editor, as he can not only save time producing his biweekly newspaper, but get lucrative contracts from New York publishers.  But then disaster strikes.  The intelligent machine sets type for some socialist books, and begins demanding a shorter work schedule.  It sets type for pulp romance magazines and begins demanding that the editor buy a second linotype machine to be its girlfriend!  The editor becomes the machine's servant instead of the other way around when it achieves the ability to move and to fight, so that the editor cannot deactivate it or escape from it.     

The retired linotype operator figures out how to neutralize the machine--he has the machine set type for books on Buddhism, inspiring it to achieve Nirvana; the linotype has become so pacific it allows the two men to disassemble it and bury the parts.

This story is good, and I found it especially interesting because I had never read or even thought about linotype machines before.  A noteworthy little element of the story, considered in the context of Brown's larger body of work, is that the two main characters are so flummoxed, so agitated, to find themselves locked in a struggle with a living machine that they drink copious amounts of alcohol--the retired linotype operator hits the sauce so hard he actually ends up in the hospital!  Brown's characters (see The Far Cry and "The Night the World Ended") do a lot of drinking! 

Both "Etaoin Shrdlu" (similar to "qwerty," "etaoin shrdlu" is the nonsense word created when one reads down two of the rows of a linotype's keyboard) and "Star Mouse" were included in 1977's The Best of Fredric Brown, which was edited by Robert Bloch.

"Star Mouse" (1942)

"Star Mouse" first appeared in Planet Stories behind one of those damsel-in-distress covers we are expected to deplore nowadays and alongside stories by Leigh Brackett and Ray Cummings I have not read yet.

"Star Mouse" is supposed to be funny and cute.  A German scientist, living alone in Connecticut after fleeing the Hitler regime, talks to himself as he builds a little test rocket only three and a half feet long.  Brown writes out all his monologue phonetically: "'Vell, vell,' said the Professor, 'vot haff ve here?'"  (He talks to himself in English, you know, to practice!)  Living in Herr Doktor's poorly-maintained house is a mouse, whom he captures in a humane trap.  He decides to name the mouse "Mitkey" after "Valt Dissney"'s famous creation, and (this is the inhumane part) to send little Mitkey up with the rocket; the rocket is headed for the moon, but if it fails and crashes to Earth the mouse will help indicate if there are deadly cosmic rays in the ionosphere or whatever.

The Professor loses track of the rocket in his telescope and assumes it is lost.  In fact, it has been captured by the tractor beam of a million-year old civilization of people half-an-inch tall living on an asteroid less than half a mile wide.  These aliens capture Mitkey and use a ray to increase Mitkey's intelligence to human level so it can talk and tell them about Earth.  When Mitkey tells them how humans treat mice, they agree to give him a device to increase all mice to human intelligence level so they can protect themselves and negotiate with the humans--the aliens figure this will lead to destructive warfare that will delay human development of space travel and push back the day they themselves will have to confront us gigantic and belligerent humans.

When the talking mouse returns to Earth it provides Brown the opportunity for various jokes (e. g., the mouse talks to a drunk); Brown also gives us a complicated plot explanation for how the aliens' plan to provide the human race an equally-intelligent competitor goes awry.   

This story is OK; I'm not really the target audience for these kinds of jokey stories.  "Star Mouse" has been a hit, however, and has been widely anthologized, including in books purporting to present the best or greatest in SF stories.  isfdb indicates that in 1950 Brown penned a sequel to "Star Mouse," "Mitkey Rides Again," which I will get around to reading eventually, I suppose.

"The Angelic Angleworm" (1943)

Here's another story from John W. Campbell's Unknown, which appeared in an issue that included not only Brown's "The Angelic Angleworm" but A. E. van Vogt's "The Witch," a story about one of my favorite topics, people who try to achieve immortality by serially putting their old brains or souls into the hot young bodies innocent victims, that I read in June of last year, a story by E. Mayne Hull (van Vogt's wife) I haven't read yet, a story by Henry Kuttner I haven't read yet, a poem by Hannes Bok about a ka, one of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories, and another story by Fredric Brown appearing under a pseudonym.  This issue is chock full of enticing pieces!

Charlie Wills is assistant production manager at Hopworth Printing Company, and life is looking good--in ten days he gets married to his beautiful fiance Jane Pemberton.  But then a series of bizarre events threaten his mental stability.  He is digging up worms with which to go fishing and one of them suddenly sprouts wings and a halo and flies off.  He is yelling at a teamster for whipping his stubborn old horse too energetically and he suddenly falls unconscious, later waking up in the hospital with an impossible sunburn all over his body, even though he was fully clothed and it was raining when he was yelling at his social inferior.  (A witness tells everybody about the beating of the horse, so the teamster loses his job, in case you were wondering.)  Then Charlie is in a museum and a duck suddenly appears in a glass case full of Chinese coins.

There are a few more weird events, including another which causes Charlie to fall unconscious--the poor bastard wakees up in the hospital on the day of his wedding!  He realizes all the crazy events that have afflicted him happened exactly fifty-one hours and ten minutes apart, and another is due in half an hour!  He decides to commit suicide rather than face this next oddity, and searches the hospital for a means of destroying himself.  He finds a container marked "LYE" but when he pours its contents into his mouth those contents turn out to be a Rumanian coin.

Charlie decides not to kill himself after all.  He figures out what is happening to him--the linotype machine in heaven that is setting the type of his life has a problem with the letter "e"--the crazy stuff that is happening to him is the result of typos in his life.  For example, the angleworm became an "angelworm," and his "hate" for cruelty to animals became "heat."  (A Chinese tael became a teal, the Romanian coin was a ley, though it looks like nowadays we spell it leu or lei.)  Charlie heads to the town of Haveen, and steps across the border at the right time, so that a typo has him in Heaven, where he talks to God's head compositor and gets the errors fixed.  (Just like the dude in "Etaoin Shrdlu," Chuck here figures out the unorthodox "rules" of the insane situation he is in and uses this knowledge to solve the crisis.)

This story is quite long--19 pages in Unknown's tiny print, 36 in From These Ashes's larger type--and quite boring.  The wacky phenomena are just silly, not interesting or scary or exciting, and the gimmicky explanation for them is eye-rollingly precious, like something from a brief skit from a PBS kid's show.  At times I thought the story was supposed to be funny, but a working-class guy losing his job because he was caught beating a horse and the protagonist trying to kill himself by ingesting lye are not exactly humorous episodes.  Extraneous details about Charlie's life--like an outing with his friends that gets him so drunk he has to flee the police, and a whole thing about how annoying Jane Pemberton's little sister is--add to the length of the story without making it more interesting or entertaining.  Oy.

Thumbs down!   

"The Angelic Angleworm" would be reprinted in the 1968 Brown collection Daymares and a 1988 anthology of stories from Unknown, among other places.  I guess there are people out there who like it!

"Daymare" (1943)

Here we have a murder mystery set in the future, on Callisto!  When the top cop of Sector Three, Rod Caquer, gets a call on the videophone and learns that a bookstore owner, William Deem, has been slain, he straps on his short sword--firearms are illegal on Callisto, even for the fuzz--and hurries to the scene of the crime.  He has no time to spare, as spores on Callisto, harmless to living tissue, devour a dead body in an hour!

Caquer gets a brief glimpse of the body before it is tossed into the incinerator; it looks like someone cleft the bookseller's skull in twain with a sword.  But when Caquer talks to the cop who found the body, he says he saw a bullet wound in the chest!  And when he talks to the doctor who did the (very brief!) autopsy, he says Deem was shot with a blaster!  When Caquer catches up with the two men who threw the corpse into the incinerator, both say the victim was decapitated, one claiming the cut was clean, as if made with a disintegrator beam, while the other says the cut was ragged, as if it was the work of multiple axe blows.

More crazy stuff happens, like when a guy falls dead out of a second-story window and everybody identifies the body as that of Deem, the bookseller we all thought had already died!  Caquer follows up on some clues, for example, the allegation that Deem was renting and selling forbidden books on political theories and other verboten topics; nine men who have been arrested for giving political speeches are also interrogated.  (This is one hell of a future we have to look forward to--no right to bear arms, no freedom of the press, no freedom of speech, cripes.)

Just like the hero of "The Angelic Angleworm," the hero of "Daymare" is in love with some chick named Jane.  This Jane's father is a college professor.  The Professor suggests that the craziness related to the bookseller's murder might be the work of mass hypnotism!  Caquer has never heard of hypnotism, because the government has banned all books on hypnotism, but the Professor was one of Deem's illegal book customers!  He explains that several hundred years ago, before colonization of Callisto, a hypnosis device was invented that could allow one intelligent man to control entire legions of people; its use resulted in a terribly destructive war on Earth, and since the end of that war the government has worked to suppress knowledge of the hypno device and of the war it was used in.

The rest of "Daymare" consists of Caquer running around the city trying to figure out who has the hypnodevice as the villain uses it to foment war between Sector Three and the other Sectors by hypnotizing everybody, turning them into racist warmongers.  The copper uses a device of his own to protect himself from the hypnotism and kills the culprit, who turns out to be the bookseller Deem; Deem learned how to make the hypnodevice from one of the forbidden books and started this story by murdering the head of the Sector Three government and hypnotizing everybody into thinking he (Deem) was the victim, while disguising himself as the chief executive.

Having saved the solar system, Jane, who has been resisting Charlie's marriage proposals for so long he has taken to calling her "Icicle," finally decides he is worthy of her hand.

This one is a little shorter than "The Angelic Angleworm," and a little less boring, so I'll call it acceptable, but it is a close one.  After first appearing in Thrilling Wonder Stories, two years later in 1945 "Daymare" was reprinted in a mystery anthology alongside other tales of "impossible" crimes by our friends Frank Belknap Long and Henry Kuttner in The Saint's Choice of Impossible Crime edited by Leslie Charteris, and would go on to be included in Brown collections and several anthologies.

**********

Brown's construction of these intricate plots shows impressive intelligence and admirable conscientiousness, but these stories are lacking in human feeling and excitement, so if they are long, they become a drag.  Who cares if the boring hero ends up marrying boring Jane?  Brown has the ability to move the reader emotionally, as we saw in The Far Cry and "Each Night He Died," but he's not doing it much here, a minor exception being in "Etaoin Shrdlu," when we see a man become controlled by his machine.

Sticking to the World War II era, in our next episode we'll read 1944 stories by Henry Kuttner.

The Far Cry by Fredric Brown

Where did you come from, Jenny?  Why did no one trace you here?  Did no one love you, care about you, in the place from which you came?  What had life and people done to you, Jenny, that made you so desperate as to write to a Lonely Hearts Club, to meet and love a murderer?

1953 Bantam paperback

On Twitter, B. C. Bell told us that Fredric Brown's The Far Cry was one of the best noir novels he'd ever read.  In ordinary times I might have just filed this datum away in the old noggin and casually looked among the "B"s on the vintage paperback and mystery shelves during my periodic visits to used books stores over the next few years.  But during this coronavirus crisis, I am not going to used bookstores--I'm not going to any stores!  And who knows when I will be doing so again?  So I went online and ordered the recent Bruin Crimeworks edition of The Far Cry, printed in the same volume with The Screaming Mimi.  I was disappointed in Brown's 1962 The Five-Day Nightmare, but, inspired by B. C. Bell and some old covers of The Far Cry which suggest the novel is about the crazy things men will do when manipulated by a hot babe*, let's give this 1951 novel a shot.

George Weaver is an unhappy businessman, a realtor whose office is in Kansas City.  When he has a nervous breakdown his doctor tells him to take the summer off, and so he goes to Taos, New Mexico, where he expects to enjoy the view of the mountains.  In Taos he isn't particularly happy, and turns to drink.

One reason Weaver isn't so happy is that he is sick of his wife, Vi.  Vi is a poor housekeeper, a bad cook, uneducated, stupid, and fat.  He had his nervous breakdown largely because he was working long hours to have an excuse to get out of the house, which he found intolerable because of Vi's incessant playing of the radio--those radio dramas and the lame music Vi adores drove him up the wall.  Everything about Vi drives him up the wall, all her little errors and solecisms, the grammatical and typographical mistakes in her letters, for example.  This is oddly appropriate, because the Bruin Crimeworks edition of The Far Cry that I am reading is chock full of missing and inappropriate punctuation that I am finding very annoying.  I want to support the work of people who are making these old books available, but I have to recommend that, if you want to read The Far Cry, you look for some earlier edition which, presumably, will have fewer printing errors.

Anyway, one reason that Weaver can't really relax in Taos is because he knows his wife will soon join him.

Soon after his arrival in Taos, Weaver runs into an old friend, Luke Ashley.  Ashley is a sort of journalist--he sells copy to true detective magazines, and spends his time driving around the country investigating murders to write up.  He tells Weaver about the murder of Jenny Ames, which took place eight years ago like twenty minutes drive outside of Taos, at an isolated house with no running water in a one-horse town called Arroyo Seco, a tiny burg where there is a lot of tension between the Hispanic population and the Anglos.  (Brown doesn't say "Hispanic" or "Latino;" I guess the politically correct term in 1951 was "Spanish-Americans"--at least that is thge term used again and again here in the novel.)  When Weaver sees the house he decides to rent it, and Ashley suggests that, if Weaver gets bored, he can investigate the Ames murder and send him any info he uncovers--if Ashley sells the story he will give Weaver half his fee.  Ashley doesn't stick around, but heads to Hollywood, having secured a gig as technical adviser on a crime documentary.

Weaver tries his hand at painting watercolors but finds he's no good and tries to read mystery novels but finds he just can't focus, so he takes up Ashley's suggestion--George Weaver, real estate man and unhappy husband, becomes George Weaver, novice sleuth!  He does the stuff people always do in these detective stories, like talking to people who had met the victim and the murderer and going to the local newspaper to read eight-year-old stories covering the coroner's report and inquest and so forth.  Jenny Ames came to Arroyo Seco to marry an artist she apparently did not realize was a homosexual, Charles Nelson, who was renting the house now rented by Weaver.  Jenny had met Nelson through the mails via a Lonely Hearts service, and the charming Nelson had, it seems, gone to see the young woman in her home town and gotten her to fall in love with him; she agreed to join him in Arroyo Seco and marry him.  But, when the excited and naive young girl arrived, there was no wedding service scheduled--instead Nelson killed her with a knife and buried her in the desert, skipping town the next day.  The cops, ignoring the claims of a ten-year-old Latino kid who witnessed Nelson raising a knife to Jenny, didn't start seriously investigating until two months later, when a hunter stumbled on a woman's body in a shallow grave.  The local cops and the local reporters had no luck figuring out where either Ames or Nelson had originally come from, nor where Nelson went after the crime.  (I know, big surprise, the government and the media let us down yet again.)

Two French editions--does that look like early 1950s attire to you?

Weaver is deep in the middle of his investigations when Vi joins him in the adobe house with no running water.  Weaver doesn't tell her about the murder and conducts his detective work behind her back; for example, while Vi is sleeping he sneaks around at night, digging up the ground nearby, looking for Jenny's missing luggage.  (It is like he is cheating on his wife with the dead girl, whom all the clues suggest was more charming and attractive than Vi.)

(NOTA BENE: The MPoricus Fiction Log spoiler policy.)

Weaver gathers the clues, figures out Jenny's real last name and home town, drives out to that southern California town where Jenny and Nelson first met in the flesh, and he and we learn the whole story of Jenny "Ames" and Charles Nelson.  Nelson the gay painter had tuberculosis, and tricked Jenny into falling in love with him because Jenny's father worked at a bank, and she resented her parents, committed Baptists who kept Jenny away from boys, even after she was 21!  The charming Nelson convinced the sad romantic kid to steal ten thousand bucks from the bank; when she brought the money to him in Arroyo Seco he killed her and then took the money to a T.B. specialist in Arizona.  All for naught--Nelson's T.B. was incurable, and he died after spending two years in the clinic.  As for Jenny's parents, they sold their house to pay the bank the money stolen by their daughter and to keep Jenny's theft as much of a secret as possible.

My copy; the cover image is a close replica of
that from the jacket of a British
hardcover edition from 1952

In the last few pages of the novel we get an astonishing twist that ties together our various plot threads and may or may not make much sense.  It turns out the body that was dug up eight years ago was some other young woman--Nelson had entrapped and killed at least one other girl besides Jenny.  And maybe Jenny escaped Nelson--the ten-year old witness saw Jenny pursued by the knife-wielding Nelson, but did not see an actual killing, and Nelson, with his T.B., was in no shape for long runs.  Weaver, who has been drinking increasingly heavily and has been mentally unbalanced for months, notices similarities between Jenny and Vi's ages and backgrounds and comes to believe Vi is Jenny.

Throughout the novel Brown has been giving us little hints here and there that suggest similarities between Nelson and Weaver.  Nelson is a homosexual painter, and Weaver, while not himself gay, has little interest in sex (in particular he has no interest in having sex with Vi anymore) and, while not an actual artist, Weaver has an interest in art and high culture and over the course of the novel has painted (poorly) and taken meticulous and successful photographs.  (Remember, kids, this is the early 1950s, so Weaver has to do all kinds of calculations related to light levels and shutter speeds to take decent photographs.)  Weaver has even said that he admires Nelson's paintings and wishes he could paint as well.  On the final page of the book Weaver and Vi enact the horrible scene Weaver has been playing out in his mind since he first heard about Jenny Ames as he grabs a long kitchen knife (that he used to dig up Jenny's suitcase) and murders Vi with it.  In his warped mind, at least, Vi has become Jenny and he has become Nelson.         

The Far Cry is much better than The Five-Day Nightmare.  A good story needs conflict, needs tension, and this novel is full of it.  The tension between the white and Latino communities.  The tension between Weaver and his wife Vi.  Weaver's worries about money, about his sanity, his (not exactly successful) efforts to control his drinking, to find distraction from his business problems and his marital problems by painting or reading or investigating the death of Jenny Ames, and then his worries that he is becoming obsessed in an unhealthy way with the dead girl.

All the little elements of The Far Cry are also interesting.  In The Five-Day Nightmare the protagonist had to talk to a used car dealer and then a banker in an effort to raise money--boring!  In The Far Cry the protagonist talks to a detective magazine writer and to an art gallery owner about some canvases he found in the shed behind the rented house as he endeavors to figure out if they are the work of Nelson.  I find writers and painters more engaging than used car salesmen and bankers.

As I have said on this blog a hundred times, I love stories about risky or failed or disastrous sexual and family relationships, and in The Far Cry we have three:  Jenny's betrayal of her stifling parents, Nelson's seduction and (attempted) assassinations of "Ames"and other women, and George Weaver and Vi's unhappy marriage.  In this novel love is a lie used by the evil to manipulate the innocent or an impossible dream that traps foolish people in misery.

Brown is a good writer when it comes to prose and when it comes to constructing a plot--the sentences in The Far Cry are all good and even when stuff that is crazy happens nothing feels cheap--and The Far Cry is also full of emotion and tension.  I like it.  Expect to find me reading The Screaming Mimi and some Brown SF stories published during WWII in the near future. 

*This novel is not about a woman who manipulates men, but men who manipulate women.  Don't judge a book by its cover! 

The Five-Day Nightmare by Fredric Brown

IF YOU WANT TO SEE YOUR WIFE ALIVE AGAIN YOU HAVE FIVE DAYS TO RAISE TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS IN UNMARKED BILLS NOT OVER HUNDREDS.  STAY HOME WEDNESDAY NIGHT ALONE AND YOU WILL RECEIVE INSTRUCTIONS ON DELIVERY.  IF YOU GO TO THE POLICE YOUR WIFE WILL BE KILLED....  

Joachim Boaz just reviewed a 1953 SF novel by Fredric Brown, and I just read four 1940s detective stories by Brown featuring bats, clarinets, fake news, and a guy who murders his brother.  I hope the internet is ready for more Fredric Brown content, because today I am opining about Brown's 1962 novel The Five Day Nightmare, AKA The Five-Day Nightmare.  I am reading the novel from a scan found at the internet archive of a three-book omnibus collection printed by Walter J. Black for the Detective Book Club.  My mother is a big reader of Agatha Christie-type mysteries, as was her mother (whom we always called "Nana") before her, and Nana was a member of the Detective Book Club for a period and had quite a few of these triple-book volumes on the bookshelf in her living room.  By reading this novel in this form, I feel like I am paying homage to Nana, whom we saw often and who always spoiled us with candy and cookies and ice cream, and making a gesture towards continuing a sort of family tradition!

Lloyd Johnson, our narrator, is an investment broker and partner with his wife's cousin Joe Sitwell in a small investment firm in Phoenix, Arizona.  Lloyd comes home one day to find his wife, Ellen, is gone and there is an all-caps note in his typewriter--Ellen has been kidnapped and he has to hand over $25,000 in five days or else!  Should he contact the police, Ellen will be killed!  Just two months ago, Lloyd remembers, the wife of a prominent Phoenix businessman and local politician was kidnapped; her husband contacted the cops and she was killed, so Lloyd has every reason to believe this creep ain't bluffing!

For like 95 pages (The Five-Day Nightmare takes up like 112 pages of this omnibus volume) we follow Lloyd as he travels around Arizona raising the money demanded by the murderous kidnapper.  We are privy to his negotiations with a used car dealer, for example, as he sells his Buick for $1,000.  In his quest to secure 25 grand he talks to lots of people--e.g., his partner Joe, a friend in real estate, the husband of an earlier kidnap victim who paid off the kidnapper and got his wife back in one piece--I guess to pile up lots of suspects?  We also get a lot of quotidian details about what Lloyd eats and drinks and what he feeds his cat.  (In my New York days I read the first four or five Mike Hammer novels by Mickey Spillane, and I recall scenes in which Mike cooked himself up some eggs.  I guess that is a traditional element of these hard-boiled noir stories.)

Along with Lloyd we learn all about the methods used by the kidnapper in his first two kidnapping operations as the stock broker talks to those with second-hand knowledge of those crimes.  There are various clues I suppose we readers are expected to weigh when assessing who the kidnapper might be--e. g., the kidnapper seems to know about real estate...hmm, who does Lloyd know who knows about real estate?

Lloyd has the cash in a shoe box when the kidnapper calls and tells him where to leave it, and Lloyd follows his instrutions.  Then comes the astonishing twist.  Ellen was not kidnapped!  The killer who kidnapped those two other women, who we have been hearing about for page after page, does not even appear in the story!  Ellen at no time was at risk of being beaten, tied up, drugged, raped, or murdered.  Ay, caramba!

You see, Ellen left to spend a week with her sister because she and Lloyd had a fight and she thought they needed a week apart.  One of Lloyd's friends (who was strapped for cash) by chance found this out before Lloyd, and stole the note Ellen left her hubby and substituted the ransom note, based on the notes left by the real kidnapper.  In minutes Lloyd figures out which of his friends is the culprit and convinces this joker to give the money back and leave town--Lloyd doesn't even beat him up or sic the police on him or anything.  And he certainly doesn't have a tense and bloody shoot out with anybody, as I thought all the scenes of Lloyd acquiring a revolver and practicing with it at the range and giving us the pro and cons of a revolver vs an automatic were leading up to.

This novel doesn't end in tragedy or in cathartic violence or the triumph of justice or any sort of explosion like that; instead of a bang we get a sputtering deflation.  Ellen and Lloyd even agree their fight was silly and they still love each other! 

Brown is a capable writer, and The Five-Day Nightmare is internally consistent and Brown presents all the clues you would, theoretically, need to predict the truth about Ellen's disappearance, but there is a strong shaggy dog element to the tale and it is hard not to think reading it was sort of a waste of time.

Barely acceptable.

Four 1940s crime tales by Fredric Brown

Recently on twitter Joachim Boaz reminded us of Fredric Brown, the respected SF and mystery writer.  I found Rogue in Space, Brown's 1957 fix-up novel, and his bizarre mystery story "The Spherical Ghoul" memorable, and decided it was time to read some more Brown.  There are plenty of stories by Brown at the internet archive from Galaxy and Astounding, but I decided to step out of the respectable SF mainstream and beat the bushes in search of something a little outre and read Brown stories from four 1940s issues of Dime Mystery Magazine.  The contents pages of the magazines announce that it is "The Magazine of Weird Mystery!" and according to wikipedia, Dime Mystery Magazine was the first of the "weird menace" or "shudder" pulps, which featured "sadistic villains" and "graphic scenes of torture and brutality."  Let's walk on the wild side! 

"Whispering Death" (1943)

"Whispering Death" is stuffed full of plot, a convoluted mystery story full of clues that has running concurrently along side it a love story.  Our narrator, Slim, is a sports reporter who next week will be leaving town for basic training.  He wants to marry his girlfriend before he leaves, but she wants to wait until the war is over.  Slim sees a dog get run over by a car--it was the dog of an old friend of his, Packy, a retired fighter with cauliflower ears and a crooked nose--scars of his career in the squared circle--whom he hasn't seen in ages.  He decides to look up Packy and let him have the bad news.

Slim meets and talks with numerous characters trying to find where Packy is currently living, including a pretty girl at a diner with whom he has a lot more in common than he does with his wedding-shy girlfriend--this waitress is friends with Packy and she loves the fights!  The waitress is worried about Packy--a contrast to Slim's girl, who is annoyed that her boyfriend associates with such low class characters as has-been boxers. 

Packy, Slim learns, is living in a crummy boarding house, in a top floor flat, spending all his time and money getting drunk and considering suicide!  He drinks, he says, because it drowns out the voice that keeps telling him to jump off a bridge!  While Slim and the waitress are visiting him, Packy complains that he can hear the bats up in the attic--Slim and the waitress cannot hear the bats.

Compiling all the clues, Slim figures out the astonishing truth: Packy can hear higher frequency sounds than us healthy people because of the peculiar way in which his inner ear was damaged in the boxing ring.  That is how he can hear the bats.  (It is nice to see bats, which have been getting so much bad press lately, getting some good PR here by pitching in and providing a valuable clue.)  Packy's dog must have left because there was a disturbing high-pitched sound in Packy's apartment.  That high pitched sound is a record played in the next apartment by a lackey of Packy's old manager--a special high-frequency recording of a guy saying "Jump off a bridge...jump off a bridge...jump off a bridge" that can only be heard by Packy and dogs and bats.  Packy's old manager is pursuing this elaborate murder scheme because he has a life insurance policy out on Packy and will collect if the fighter kills himself. 

Slim beats up the lackey, blackmails the manager, gets the insurance signed over to Packy; Packy cashes in on the policy so he has enough money to live a better life.  Slim dumps his girl and marries the waitress. 

"Whispering Death" was the title story of a 1989 collection of Fredric Brown stories, the fifteenth (!) title in the Fredric Brown in the Detective Pulps series.

"The Devil's Woodwinds" (1944)

The narrator of "The Devil's Woodwinds" is Toby Something, the head of a dance band in New York City.  As the story begins he is just wrapping up a late night gig when his friend police lieutenant Shane Pierson walks in.  Shane tells Toby that a guy was just found dead, victim of a hit and run driver, and he had Toby's address was written on a note in his pocket.  Shane takes Toby to the morgue to see the body--it's Peter Wazemes, who just sold Toby a clarinet for $500.  Wazemes recently escaped German-occupied Europe, bringing with him three top-of-the-line musical instruments, and just sold them each to individual musicians.  Toby knows the other two buyers, and he and Shane go around to their places, to find that they have been killed and their new instruments stolen.  Back at Toby's place Shane saves the band leader's life when he notices Toby's decanter of whiskey has been poisoned!

Shane (and I) assumed there was some crazy spy angle to these killings, with the plans to a new radar set inscribed in the flutes and clarinets or something, but Toby stumbles on some clues and realizes that the spy stuff is just a red herring, a camouflage.  Wazemes's death was just a normal New York traffic accident.  A musician in Toby's band who covets Toby's job and also covets Toby's girlfriend (the band's torch singer) figured if he killed Toby he would be likely to inherit both; by killing the other two musicians as well as Toby, it would look like German spies were responsible.  (It is actually more complicated than that, but that's the gist.)  Toby hints to the killer that the jig is up, and the text hints to us that the killer is going to commit suicide.

In 1988 "The Devil's Woodwinds" would be reprinted in the twelfth volume of the Fredric Brown in the Detective Pulps series, Who Was That Blonde I Saw You Kill Last Night?

"The Night the World Ended" (1945)

The man they call Johnny Gin is a war veteran and a drunk who hangs around Nick's bar, because Nick gives him booze in return for sweeping up.  A lot of journalists frequent Nick's joint; one of them, the night-side city editor of a local paper, Halloran, is a cruel practical joker.  He gets the idea of mocking up an issue of the paper with the front page headline "WORLD WILL END AT 1:45 TONIGHT" to see how Johnny Gin reacts to this alarming bit of fake news.  When shown the paper, Johnny, drunk as usual, gets the bright idea of "borrowing" Nick's .45 automatic (Johnny is intimately familiar with the weapon from his military service) to shoot off as the world ends, to sort of add to the fireworks.  Well, as you can imagine, when Nick catches the inebriated Johnny doing his little borrowing, and then the police get involved, a series of tragedies ensues.  When Johnny sobers up he proceeds to seek revenge on Halloran.

It seems like "The Night the World Ended" is one of the most successful (in terms of exposure and remuneration) of Brown's mystery stories.  Not only was it reprinted in the 1953 collection Mostly Murder and the 1985 collection Carnival of Crime: The Best Mystery Stories of Fredric Brown, but it was made into an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1957.

"Each Night He Died..." (1949)

The first three tales we have read, "Whispering Death," "The Devil's Woodwinds," and "The Night the World Ended," are competent, and I can't give them a thumbs down, but I am not crazy about them.  The stories are mechanical; the many elements of their complicated plots work smoothly, they make internal sense and Brown leaves no glaring plot holes, but the tales lack emotional impact and Brown offers no ethic or ideology or point.  (I didn't think that of Rogue in Space, which seemed to be saying something controversial about American culture and which had a striking and morally ambiguous character at its core.)  So these three pieces disappointed me, maybe because I am not really the audience for mystery stories that are about clues and schemes--if I am reading a mystery story at all I want it to be about lust and hate and fear and blood.

Fortunately, today's final story, "Each Night He Died..." has the emotional oomph I like to see.  Dana Kiessling is in bed in his cell, sweating and screaming as he thinks about the electric chair--Dana, a loser who spent all his money at the track and on girls, has been convicted of murdering his successful and sophisticated brother George in hopes of inheriting forty or fifty thousand bucks.  Dana also thinks back on his life, and Brown does as good a job of constructing a believable and compelling relationship between the brothers and describing the failure of Dana's murder plot as he does of conveying Dana's frantic, pathological, fear of death.  Instead of focusing his energies on the apparatus of a Rube Goldberg plot, here Brown concentrates on human feeling and human interactions, and the allocation of effort pays off.

The twist ending of the story, foreshadowed by the title, is that while Dana thinks he is going to be executed tomorrow, and is shrieking and sobbing in anticipation of being "fried" in the electric chair, he is, not, in fact, in a prison but an insane asylum!  Every night, for six years, he has gone through these paroxysms of horror thanks to his delusion, and will presumably suffer this torture for the rest of his life!

Thumbs up!

"Each Night He Died..." was reprinted in Mostly Murder and Carnival of Crime, under the less spoily title of "Cain."   

**********

I guess Dime Mystery Magazine had cleaned up its act by 1942, because these stories have very little sadism and torture and just a taste of brutality.  I guess if we are looking for the hard stuff we should hit up some of the 1930s issues of Dime Mystery Magazine available at the internet archive.  (We got a taste of the hard stuff when, inspired by Fred Pohl, we read five 1940 horror stories by Ray Cummings a couple of years ago.)

I am not quite ready to go back to my readings in the weird or science fiction realms, and so will try one of Fredric Brown's full-length noir novels; hopefully in that longer form I can expect him to deliver both a solid plot and the emotional and intellectual stimulation I crave.

1950s stories from Galaxy of Ghouls

Not long ago I purchased the 1955 paperback anthology Galaxy of Ghouls at Second Story Books on Dupont Circle in our nation's capital, intrigued by the raven-haired beauties on the cover and the name of Judith Merril, one of SF's most innovative and influential editors.  With her famous anthologies, including the dozen volumes of Year's Best S-F, Merril strove to expand the definition of what SF was and what it could be; England Swings SF in particular was a major impetus behind the developments and controversies in the SF field that came to be called "The New Wave."

While it is not all that clear from the somewhat confusing cover, which promises supernatural terrors but also includes a picture of heavily armed astronauts, Galaxy of Ghouls takes as its theme the way that, in the middle of the 20th century, SF writers updated for the space age such traditional horror tropes as the werewolf, the voodoo doll, and the vampire.  Text on the first page assures us, "The devil's brood inside these pages is strictly up-to-date--and often as not a step or two ahead of the times."  The fact that 1959 and 1961 editions of Galaxy of Ghouls were retitled Off the Beaten Orbit and adorned with "futuristic" covers by Richard Powers and John Schoenherr more typical for  paperback SF suggests that the boys down in marketing at Pyramid Books thought this first edition from Lion Library focused a little too much on the supernatural and not enough on the space age.

Let's check out five of the stories in Galaxy of Ghouls, all from the 1950s and all by authors we have talked about before here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

"The Ambassadors" by Anthony Boucher (1952)

In her intro to "The Ambassadors," which first appeared in Startling Stories, Merril tells us Boucher's work, in particular "Compleat Werewolf" (1942), has liberated the werewolf from the "medieval horror story" and that "The Ambassadors" is a follow up that brings lycanthropy to the future.

"The Ambassadors" is a joke story with "meta" elements.  As you know, here on Earth, intelligent life evolved from apes.  Well, on Mars, the first human explorers of the red planet discover, intelligent life evolved from wolves!  Upon his return to Earth, the biologist from that first Mars expedition issues a plea to the public for help--he thinks that werewolves are real, and he requests some werewolves come out of the closet and help build good relations with the Martians!  Most people think the man has gone crazy, but it turns our werewolves are real and this step inaugurates a new period of history for werewolves, one in which werewolves need no longer hide their true nature or suffer discrimination from prejudiced non-lycanthropes.  The joke at the end of the story is when a vampire hopes that some intelligent aliens who are descended from bats will be discovered so vampires too can achieve their civil rights.

Earlier this year I called Boucher's story "Transfer Point" "weak" and his tale "A Shape in Time" "lame," and today I am calling "The Ambassadors" barely acceptable filler.  I am not the audience for tepid joke stories.

I mentioned "meta" elements.  The story's big in-joke for SF fans is a passing reference to an expert on werewolves whose name is "Williamson," an allusion to Jack Williamson, whose werewolf novel Darker Than You Think is, according to Brian Aldiss, Williamson's best novel.

At four pages this qualifies as one of those short shorts that are so popular that anthologies of them get printed in mass quantities.  "The Ambassadors" would be included in Groff Conklin and Isaac Asimov's Fifty Short Science Fiction Tales which has gone through over 30 printings according to isfdb.

"The Night He Cried" by Fritz Leiber (1953)

Merril tells us this story is about an alien shape shifter with sex appeal!  "The Night He Cried" was first published in Fred Pohl's anthology Star Science Fiction Stories.  It would later be included in the 1974 collection The Best of Fritz Leiber (I own a 1979 paperback edition of The Best of Fritz Leiber, and so own multiple printings of this story.)

This is another joke story.  (One of the best humorous SF stories of all time is actually by Leiber, the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser classic "Lean Times in Lanhkmar.")  "The Night He Cried" is a totally over-the-top spoof of a Mickey Spillane-style detective writer and his work.  Our narrator is an alien agent from "Galaxy Center."  In its natural form this creature has seven tentacles, on Earth it disguises itself as a sexy woman, and two of the tentacles take on the role of "magnificently formed" breasts.  Leiber mentions the breasts again and again, using antiseptic euphemisms like "milk glands."  The alien has come to Earth to investigate Slickie Millane, author of the popular Spike Mallet books.  The alien wants to learn about sex on Earth, and is eager to interact with Millane because his books contain lots of smoldering male-female relationships, but the sex act is never consummated because Mallet always has to shoot the woman down before closing the deal, as it were.  (In the climax of the first Mike Hammer novel, I the Jury, Hammer shoots down a woman, the murderer of his friend, as she is trying to seduce and murder him.)  The alien suspects Millane has some kind of psychological issue with sex, and would like to help him if it can.  Millane's crazy relationships with women and the many permutations of the alien's shape shifting ability fill this story with absurd and bizarre images and events.

I guess "The Night He Cried" is acceptable; it holds the attention because it is so uninhibited and berserk--Leiber really lets himself go this time.  But are all the stories from Galaxy of Ghouls jokes?  As I say all the time on this blog, I have limited interest in joke stories.

"A Way of Thinking" by Theodore Sturgeon (1953)

Here's the 1965 paperback edition of
E Pluribus Unicorn

This tale, Merril tells us, is about sympathetic magic, of which she offers such examples as the voodoo doll.  "A Way of Thinking" apparently first appeared in the hardcover collection E Pluribus Unicorn, but that same year was also printed in Amazing.  This story seems to have been a hit, appearing in multiple anthologies with "Black Magic" or "Supernatural" in their titles, and being reprinted in Fantastic in 1967 and in Amazing in 1982.  Let us pray this is not a joke story, especially since it is like 28 pages long.

Sturgeon populates this tale with three endearing characters.  There is our narrator, a writer of SF stories with a long list of unusual jobs behind him.  There's a doctor, Milton.  And there's Kelley, a sailor with whom the narrator worked years ago on a "tankship" carrying oil between the Gulf Coast and the Northeast.  The narrator admires Kelley as an intelligent if uneducated man, and provides several examples of Kelley solving problems by looking at them from an unusual angle, we might say "thinking outside the box."  After not having seen him for years, the narrator meets Kelley again at Milton's doctor's office.  Kelley's brother Hal is dying of mysterious injuries, injuries perhaps psychosomatic.  Because Merril mentioned voodoo dolls in her little intro and the first page of the story in Amazing has a picture of a guy holding a doll on it, we are not surprised to learn, fourteen pages in, that Hal's bitter ex-girlfriend has a doll from Haiti, a gift from Hal.

The narrator and Kelley independently try to deal with this whole doll issue, the narrator in a sort of straightforward way and Kelley in his characteristic counter-intuitive way, and the story ends in shocking tragedy.  The ending actually was surprising, with Sturgeon coming up with a new way to look at voodoo dolls that isn't a goofy joke like Boucher's new way of looking at werewolves but something actually scary.  "A Way of Thinking" is quite good--I strongly recommend it.

Half the strength of this story is Sturgeon's success in depicting friendship and love between men in a way that is not sappy or maudlin but believable and even touching.  Life being how it is, it is nice to spend a little time in a fantasy world in which people are genuinely kind to each other and not just trying to exercise power over each other and squeeze money or sex out of each other.  (The thing Heinlein wrote about Sturgeon that appears in my edition of Godbody also gave me this warm pleasant feeling.) 

I quite enjoyed "A Way of Thinking;" it works as a story about people and as a black magic story, and Sturgeon's pacing and style and all that technical stuff are spot on.  But if I had to play progressive's advocate I'd say it depicts a world in which white men band together in a perpetual struggle against the inscrutable "other"--women and blacks--so let the 21st-century reader beware!

According to isfdb, Literature of the Supernatural was a textbook designed for high school use--
I went to the wrong high school!

"The Triflin' Man" by Walter Miller, Jr. (1955)

According to Merril, one of a witch's or warlock's most "enviable" powers is the ability to transform into a sexier version of her- or himself, and a character with just such an ability shows up here in Miller's story.

Lucey is an obese impoverished woman living in a shack in the swamp with her son, Doodie.  She only saw Doodie's father once, a large man who "made love like a machine."  Doodie is subject to spasms and fits, and as the story's dozen pages progress, we learn that Doodie's father was a scout from outer space who put on human guise in order to impregnate Lucey and so doing create a half-human intelligence asset on Earth!  Those fits of Doodie's are a side effect of Doodie exchanging telepathic messages with his father and with his half brothers across the world!  While Lucey cooks up a 'possum for dinner, Doodie arrogantly explains that his father will soon return with an alien military force to conquer the world!

The second half of the story details what happens when the alien deadbeat dad returns, and is equally effective as the first half.  This is a good one, solid SF that exploits the uneasiness (or worse) many of us feel over our sexual relations and our relations with our parents and/or children.  I might even go out on a limb and suggest it is a feminist story about a single mother who tries to do the right thing despite all the exploitation and abuse she suffers from all the men in her life.

"The Triflin' Man" is apparently this story's "deadname;" after first appearing in Fantastic Universe and here in G o' G under that name, it has been going by the name "You Triflin' Skunk!" in Walter Miller collections since 1965, though it does show up once as "A Triflin' Man" in a 1991 anthology of "Florida science fiction."  (Is there an anthology of New Jersey science fiction?  Barry Malzberg has been living in the greatest state in the union for decades!  I know there must be others!)

"Blood" by Fredric Brown (1955)

Remember when Anthony Boucher told us Fredric Brown was the master of the short short?  Well, here is another of Brown's short shorts (or as Brown calls them, "vignettes" or "vinnies.")  Brown keeps this story down to one page and Merril keeps her intro down to four lines that tell us Brown is "irrepressible" and this story is about vampires.

Mankind in the 22nd century finally realizes the vampire menace is real, and the blood-sucking fiends are hunted down and exterminated!  Only two of the parasitic monsters are left, and they hop in their time machine and travel to the far future, hoping to arrive at a time when their diabolical race has been forgotten and they can begin their depredations anew!  They use up the last of their time machine fuel, and emerge--unable to procure more fuel, they will be stuck in this time period forever.  To their dismay, animal life has died out and only vegetable life has endured--there are intelligent plants, but will a person descended from a turnip provide the blood a vampire needs?

Even at one page, a waste of time.  "Blood" first made the eyes of readers of F&SF roll, and has since appeared in many Brown collections and anthologies of vampire stories.

**********

Boucher and Leiber and Brown offered flat joke stories that inspired no feeling and no laughs, but Sturgeon and Miller made this excursion into Galaxy of Ghouls worthwhile.  I don't read these books looking for smartalecky jokes, I read them looking for human feeling and human relationships, for violence and excitement, and today it was Sturgeon and Miller who delivered.  Maybe copies of E Pluribis Unicorn and The View From the Stars are what I should be asking Santa for this year.

Cosmic Engineers by Clifford Simak

"My Lord," said Gary, "think of it!  Imagination saving the people of another universe.  The imagination of a little third-rate race that hasn't even started really using its imagination yet."

"You are right," declared the Engineer, "and in the aeons to come that imagination will make your race the masters of the entire universe."

My copy

Recently I was in South Carolina to visit in-laws and the art museum in Columbia.  I stopped by Ed's Editions and found, way in the back, three cardboard boxes of paperback SF books that had yet to be priced.  There were many I already owned, many I wasn't interested in, and a few I'd red when I borrowed them from libraries.  But I found one with a fun Jack Gaughan cover that I was curious to read and willing to pay two dollars for--a 1964 edition from Paperback Library of Clifford Simak's Cosmic Engineers.  I have been kind of off Simak for a few years, but I recently read a good story by him, 1952's "The Fence," so it seems a good time to read some work by this SF Grandmaster who was important to me in my youth because the local library had a lot of his books.

Cosmic Engineers originally appeared as a serial in Astounding, spread across three issues in 1939.  (It looks like all three issues are available at the internet archive--I will resist the urge to check out the illustrations until I have finished reading this 1964 printing!)  In 1950 Gnome Press put out a hardcover edition (the Wikipedia page on Simak suggests this edition was somewhat expanded from the magazine version), and since then many paperback editions have been produced.  Here is a piece of work which has achieved market success, won a vote of confidence from SF fans who have voted for it with their hard-earned pay.  Let's hope I will enjoy it as much as they did.

It is the future, the year 6948!  Mankind has colonized the solar system!  Travelling from one planet to the next in their little ship, looking for scoops, are journalists Herb Harper and Gary Nelson.  (Remember, Simak worked as a journalist himself in the Midwest for decades.)  En route to Pluto they spot an odd-looking derelict and investigate.  Within the inert vessel lies Caroline Martin, a scientist from a thousand years ago, kept alive in suspended animation.  Gary revives her by following the instructions she left, and she joins the journalists in their ship.

Caroline wasn't asleep while she was in suspended animation--she was awake the entire time, like the hunter in Poul Anderson's 1951 "Duel on Syrtis."  So, she had 1,000 years to train her brain and develop new theories about the physical nature of space.  So, when on Pluto the boffins there tell Herb, Gary and Caroline that they have been receiving undecipherable psychic messages from outside the Milky Way, Caroline is able to decipher them and even respond to them.  Goody-Two-Shoes aliens (these are the Cosmic Engineers of the title) who have taken up the task of defending the universe are sending the messages, requesting help; it seems some threat from beyond the universe, from beyond space and time, has appeared and the C.E.s need help in dealing with it.  They send Caroline plans for a teleporter terminal, and she builds it and our cast of characters (now including some scientists from Pluto) fly their spaceship through a warp tunnel, reappearing almost instantaneously at the city of the Cosmic Engineers on a planet with three suns on the very edge of the universe, a city, we are told, that "would have put a thousand New Yorks to shame."

1950 hardcover

Here the protagonists meet the C.E.s, metal men who have high technology but lack imagination and creativity--they never invented painting and are amazed to discover the concept of painting in the humans' minds, and it is hinted that they are merely the artificial robots built millions of years ago by a now-extinct organic race.  The Cosmic Engineers explain the monumental challenge which has led them to summon the humans, as well as representatives from other alien races from throughout our universe.

Our universe is just one of many universes that floats around within the next level of reality, just like the Milky Way is but one of many galaxies floating around within our universe.  An alien universe is about to collide with ours, a very rare but natural occurrence that will cause a cataclysm--energy generated by the two universes touching will cause both universes to contract until they are reset and begin to expand anew.  The process of contraction will kill every living thing within the universe.  The Engineers need the help of more imaginative beings to figure out what to do about this impending collision that will total two universes and make traffic fatalities of all passengers.

As if this wasn't enough, there is a little complication.  It turns out that our galaxy isn't just home to nice people like you and me!  There is a collectivist and belligerent race in our universe, a society about as high tech and powerful as the C.E.s themselves, but instead of being goody goodies is devoted to taking over the universe.  These creeps, known as "The Hellhounds," have figured out a way for a small elite of their race to survive the cataclysm by shifting outside the universe just before the crash; after our universe has finished contracting they will be able to return to it and direct its new expansion to their specifications, dominating all the new life that develops.  The Hellhounds are more than willing to obstruct any efforts of the C.E.s to save our universe.

"For many millions of years they have been educated with the dream of universal conquest.  They have been so thoroughly propagandized with the philosophy that the state, the civilization, the race is everything...that the individual does not count at all...that there is not a single one of them who would not die to achieve that dream.  They glory in dying, glory in any sort of sacrifice that advances them even the slightest step toward their eventual goal."       

There are a lot of SF stories in which the human race is shown to be inferior to aliens, but in Cosmic Engineers Simak celebrates human heroism and ability and suggests that our people are equal or superior to any people in all the universes!  The C.E.s dismiss the representatives of all those other intelligent species, because only the thought processes of the Earth people are on the C.E. wavelength--only the human race is in a position to foil the Hellhounds and save the universe!

Caroline comes up with a way to create in the region between the universes new miniature universes.  These can, perhaps, be used to absorb and generate and direct energy on a cosmic scale--these miniature universes could perhaps be used to power, move, or destroy entire star systems and civilizations.  To really get this idea up and running, Caroline needs more info, and she needs it fast because the Hellhound space navy has just started its attack and the Cosmic Engineer space navy is hard pressed--it looks like the C.E. city might get destroyed before Caroline can finish building her universe-preserving devices!

The info sweet Caroline requires, the C.E.s suggest, could be found on the Earth of the future, so the metal men set up a warp tunnel through which Gary and Caroline's ship travels to the dying Earth of millions of years in the future.  (I lost track of why the C.E.s needed a terminal at both ends to facilitate travel between present Pluto and the C.E. city but don't need a terminal on future Earth to send our heroes there; maybe one of Caroline's many theories has been applied to improving the warp tunnel system?)

Only one man is left on future Earth, but luckily he has the info Caroline needs.  He also gives a speech about how great mankind has been.  There's always time for a pep talk, even when our universe is about to croak!  Gary and Caroline head back into the warp tunnel, but it has been diverted to a creepy planet and they are forced to land there.  A Hellhound vessel has also been diverted to this planet, and a scenario somewhat like that in Fredric Brown's famous 1944 story "Arena" ensues--a mysterious voice explains that it has contrived to put two humans and two Hellhounds on the same planet and deactivated their ships and weapons so they will fight a duel to the death with their bare hands and their wits!

(A quick look at the issues of Astounding at the internet archive suggests that this interlude was not part of the original 1939 version of Cosmic Engineers, but added in 1950, so if anybody was copying anybody, Simak was inspired by Brown.  This section does nothing to advance the plot and is resolved via deus ex machina, one of the less satisfying literary devices.  I keep discovering reasons to believe the magazine versions of Golden Age SF stories are better than the book versions.)

Gary and Caroline make a bow and arrows from odds and ends and Gary shoots down the two reptilian bipeds that are the first Hellhounds they have ever seen.  (Did the 1939 version not reveal the Hellhounds at all?  Even in this book version the Hellhounds are underdeveloped, with no speaking parts.)  The voice reveals itself to be the millions-of-years-old collective mind of a race which abandoned first machines and then individuality and physicality.  It has god-like power, but acts in a childish way, setting up this little fight for its own amusement and then stranding the winners on its uncomfortable planet.  (Isn't Star Trek full of these kinds of mischievous and mentally unstable deities?)  Luckily, it has a moment of sanity and during that lucid moment restores the humans' equipment and allows Gary and Caroline to escape to the C.E.s' world.

Back at the edge of the universe Caroline's system of manipulating the power of the region between universes is used to wipe out the Hellhound fleet.  (This reminded me a little of AKKA in Jack Williamson's 1934 The Legion of Space.)  Then her system is used to transport entire civilizations from the other universe to safety within ours (their universe was old and worn out anyway) and to destroy that old universe before it can crash into ours and cause it to contract.  Then we get a ten-page denouement in which the Cosmic Engineers explain their origin and the origin of the human race, as well as the human race's astonishing destiny.

I want to like Cosmic Engineers, but I have to grade it merely acceptable.  The thing lacks personality and emotion, the characters and the action are flat and boring--there is no tension, no fear, no thrills, things just plod forward.  The only character with any personality is Herb, "the dumpy little photographer" who serves only as superfluous and anemic comic relief, making the most feeble jokes possible and contributing zilch to the plot.  There need have been only two human characters, Gary and Caroline, and instead we get five.  Cosmic Engineers feels not like a fun space opera like something by Edmond Hamilton, but something grey and bland, like one of John W. Campbell's space operas in which indistinguishable eggheads build a better machine every few chapters until they build one powerful enough to end the story.  The novel's real "character" is the human race, which Simak presents in a hopeful and optimistic light, painting humanity as bold and adventurous and imaginative, conferring on us the distinctive attitudes of youth--all the alien races are depicted as old and tired, either hopelessly set in their ways or actually insane.

While not terribly entertaining, Cosmic Engineers is interesting for the student of SF.  Not only is it full of elements that we see in other SF works, as I have pointed out, but it contains elements characteristic of Simak's later, more mature work, like an Earth abandoned by the majority of the human race and robots who outlive their creators but maintain a dogged devotion to them.  And here's a list of three other things about Cosmic Engineers that struck me as noteworthy (I've been told that people on the internet love lists):

1. Positive attitude about The Crusades:  Nowadays it is conventional to denounce the Crusades as racist imperialism, but Simak offers up the Crusades as a paradigmatic exemplum of mankind's courage and eagerness to make sacrifices and take risks; he repeatedly compares the efforts of Gary, Caroline and the rest of the human cast to the Crusades.  Simak was not an outlier in his day; for example, Eisenhower's memoir of his service in World War II was titled Crusade in Europe.        
2. Female protagonist:  It is interesting, and counter to the stereotype of women in Golden Age SF being mere damsels in distress, that the lead scientist of the story is a woman, and that she saves not only our universe, but saves the people of another universe and actually creates universes.
3. Pro-individualism/anti-government/anti-collectivist vibe:  Several times in this story we see demonstrated the superiority of the individual over the state or the collective, and witness people standing up to the government or the collective.  Caroline was imprisoned in that derelict because she had disobeyed the government, and she came up with the process of suspended animation all by herself.  The police come to stop our heroes from teleporting from Pluto to the edge of the universe, and Caroline and her friends don't even consider following the law and obeying the fuzz--one of the men actually cries out "No government is going to tell me what I can do and what I can't do."  The villainous Hellhounds, who hold that the individual is nothing and the collective everything, are obviously an allegory or caricature of Soviet Socialism and/or German National Socialism, while the god-like being that sets up the duel is a product of radical collectivism.

Cosmic Engineers is frustrating because if you told me there was a book about a space war in which a genius woman wakes up after a thousand years to prove herself the greatest scientist in the universe, a book that celebrates human achievement, focuses on the good side of the Crusades, and is for the individual and against the collective, I would have said, "That sounds awesome!"  But here it is, and it is lukewarm and bland because Simak fails to write the characters or action scenes with any feeling.  I am 100% on board with the spirit of Cosmic Engineers, but as a literary construction I cannot endorse its component parts nor the way they were put together.  Too bad.

**********

The last page of my edition of Cosmic Engineers is an ad for four Paperback Library SF titles, four titles that sound pretty good!  There's Eric Frank Russell's 1939 Sinister Barrier, which I would definitely like to read.  (Remember when I read The Best of Eric Frank Russell from cover to cover and learned that Russell was--according to Lester Del Rey, at least--SF icon John W. Campbell's favorite SF writer?)  Next on the list is A. E. van Vogt's The Book of Ptath, under its alternate title Two Hundred Million A.D.-- that was a good one!  Edmond Hamilton's Battle for the Stars I read and enjoyed back in 2012, long before this blog wriggled free from my grey matter to infest the world wide web.  The Roger Elwood anthology Alien Worlds has stories by Simak, Hamilton, Russell, Campbell, Poul Anderson and Robert Bloch that I would definitely read.  This might be the most attractive selection of books I have ever seen in a single ad!   

   

1961 stories from Julian F. Grow, Reginald Bretnor, Robert F. Young and Fredric Brown

I've talked about how much I like my copy of Judith Merril's seventh edition of The Year's Best S-F before, the book's size and shape and fonts and illustrations.  And I've written about a bunch of the stories it presents, including the Fritz Leiber, Cordwainer Smith and John Wyndham pieces and the selections by Rome, Bone, Feiffer, Glaser and Russell as well as, in a different book, the story by Mack Reynolds. Today let's delve further into this volume for which I paid 35 cents in Davenport, Iowa and look at stories by Julian F. Grow, Reginald Bretnor, Robert F. Young, and Fredric Brown.  (I have gotten a lot of mileage out of those 35 cents!)  All four of these tales were first published in 1961.

"The Fastest Gun Dead" by Julian F. Grow

Grow has only seven credits at isfdb, and five of them, including "The Fastest Gun Dead," are in the "Dr. Hiram Pertwee series."  The story at hand today is the first in this series, and appeared in If.

A humorous story that is played more or less straight and has technology at its core, I'm calling this one marginally good, a little better than "acceptable."

Our narrator for "The Fastest Gun Dead" is the aforementioned Hiram Pertwee, a physician in the Wild West.  Our hero is Jacob Niedelmeier, who moves to the little western town in which the tale is set from New Jersey, the greatest state in the union!  Why would anyone leave the Garden State for the land of six-guns and scalpings?  Well, our man Jake has come to make his fortune prospecting gold.  Unfortunately, as Doc Pertwee tells us, Jake is a "boob" and a "ninny" who finds no gold and gets a job as a store clerk.

Years go by, and one day Jake, out on a walk in the hills, stumbles on a skeleton...of a space alien!  The alien was armed with a laser pistol, a weapon that detects the brainwaves of those who would seek to kill the bearer, and aims and shoots all by itself!  By carrying this self-directed weapon around, and talking like the big man he actually is not, Jake becomes the best gunfighter in the territory, killing many tough galoots with funny names like "Fat Charlie Ticknor" and "Redmeat Carson."

The weakest element in the story is how Jake's career as top gunslinger comes to an end.  I guess the pistol's brainwave detectors can only detect aggressive thoughts in the left side of a brain, so when a left-handed cowboy tries to kill Jake the space gun doesn't work.  I wish Grow had come up with something better with which to end his story, as "The Fastest Gun Dead" cruises along very smoothly all the way to the last page and then hits this pothole and one of the wheels flies right off into the ditch.  Perhaps because of this problem the story has not been anthologized outside of Merrill's anthology here and its British equivalent, which is somewhat confusingly entitled Best of Sci-Fi Two. 

"All the Tea In China" by Reginald Bretnor

In her little intro to the story, Merril praises Bretnor for being one of the members of the respectable intellectual elite and literary mainstream, like Anthony Boucher, who has been working to improve the reputation of SF; Merril tells us that until recently "s-f reading was something almost everybody did, and practically nobody talked about."  (The relationship of SF to mainstream culture is one of Merril's themes throughout these intros.)

"All the Tea In China," from F&SF, is a kind of shaggy dog story, a bunch of meandering details that add up to little, in the form of a piece of rural folklore.  When, as a poor New England farm boy, our narrator's grandmother caught him blackmailing another kid, she scares him straight by telling him the story of one of his no-good great-great-uncles, a Jonas.  Jonas was a successful man of business but had few friends because he was malicious and made much of his money by blackmailing people.  A series of events involving a shipment of goods from the Far East and Jonas's attempts to strong arm a woman into marrying him lead to Jonas negotiating with Satan himself.  The narrator and Jonas both commonly utter the cliche "not for all the tea in China," and the climax of this story is when Satan offers Jonas "all the tea in China" in heavy wooden chests.  When Jonas accepts the deal the multitude of chests falls from the sky and crushes Jonas.

I can't recommend this thing.  The final joke is lame and doesn't have any connection to the story's theme that you shouldn't blackmail people.  Endorsing my dim view of it, no editor has anthologized it since Merril did.

"The Dandelion Girl" by Robert F. Young

Here is a story that first appeared in a mainstream publication, The Saturday Evening Post, complete with a Norman Rockwell cover celebrating diversity.  When we last saw Young he was lamenting America's automobile and TV-obsessed culture; let's see what he sold to what was once one of America's most influential publications.

The title of "The Dandelion Girl" immediately made me think of the hyacinth girl from T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, but the first line of this story name checks Edna St. Vincent Millay.  Forty-four-year-old Mark is on a vacation in the woods without his wife (she has jury duty!) when, on a hill with a picturesque view,  he encounters a beautiful woman of twenty-one with "dandelion hair" who reminds him of Millay.  Young tries to get a poetic vibe going in the story's first paragraphs, telling us about the autumn leaves ("burning gently with the first pale fires of fall") and the wind in Mark's face and all that.  We also get to hear again and again about Mark smoking his pipe and how his hands are trembling or tingling, depending on what Young is trying to convey.  After his first meeting with Julie we learn that one of Mark's favorite poems is Millay's "Afternoon on a Hill."  (Go ahead and read it--it is very short.)

The woman, Julie, claims to be from the future when all these woods are part of a huge city.  Her father invented a time machine and she comes back to this hill every day.  Mark and Julie meet on the hill over three successive days, talking about Bishop Berkeley and Einsteinian relativity, and Mark falls in love with her.  Julie fails to appear for two days, and when she reappears tells him her father has died.  Also, she doesn't know how to maintain her father's illegal unlicensed private time machine and it probably only has enough juice for one more trip and maybe not even that!  The last thing she says to Mark is that she loves him.

Anyway, Julie doesn't appear again, and Mark is depressed and starts neglecting his wife.  Then a few weeks later he finds a clue and realizes that his wife is Julie, that she must have used her last time trip to go back to the 1930s when he was her age so she could meet him and marry him.  Somehow Mark didn't recognize his own wife's face or voice or personality because she was twenty years younger, even though he knew her when she was that age.

I have to give this thing a thumbs down; it is sappy, overwritten, and tries too hard to appeal to an educated mainstream audience with all that extraneous Millay and Berkeley and Einstein business, and the idea of a guy not remembering what his wife looked like or sounded like when he met her 20 years ago has me rolling my eyes.  If you'll allow me to put on my feminist hat, I'll tell you that "The Dandelion Girl" appeals to the desire of the typical man to have sex with a woman half his age, and to the common man's lament that his wife doesn't look like she did when he met her--the problem with this aspect of the story from an entertainment point of view is that Mark is absolved of all guilt for having these anti-social thoughts, so the story has no tension or edge, there is no meaningful interpersonal conflict or interior psychological conflict, none of the risk or nastiness which makes stories of sexual impropriety compelling.   

Despite my groans, people, foreigners in particular, seem to like this story, and it has appeared in Young collections (including as the title story of a Japanese Young collection) and anthologies of stories about time travel.

"Nightmare in Time" by Fredric Brown

You guessed it, another teeny tiny story from Brown.  This one is the teeniest, taking up just like a third of a page!  "Nightmare in Time" first appeared in a men's magazine, Dude ("the magazine devoted to pleasure"), I guess a sort of Playboy knock off.  At time of writing, the internet archive provides free access to three issues of Dude from the late '50s; these offer pictures of topless young ladies, off-color cartoons, and fiction, including stories from people we have talked about a little here at the blog, Harlan Ellison and Michael Shaara.

Anyway, this story is something akin to a palindrome, the few dozen words that make up the tale's first half being repeated in reverse order to create the second half; Brown does this to simulate the operation of a machine that can make time run backwards.  I don't appreciate these kinds of technical tricks. 

"Nightmare in Time" has appeared in many places and in many languages, often under the title "The End."

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Not the best batch of stories, but it's all part of our SF education.  More SF short stories in our next episode!