Seekers of Tomorrow (7 page)

"Who goes there?"

"The whole thing began when the clock on the Metropolitan Tower began to run backwards." That was the opening sentence of
The Runaway Skyscraper
in the February 22, 1919, issue of argosy and with those words Murray Leinster began his science-fiction writing career. Already a veteran with two years of steady magazine sales behind him, young Leinster had sold argosy a series of Happy Village stories and was fed up with predigested pablum. There would be no more in that series for a while, he wrote editor Matthew White, Jr., since he was working on a story opening with the lines, "The whole thing began when the clock on the Metro-politan Tower began to run backwards."

"By return mail," recalls Leinster, "I got a letter telling me to let him see it when I finished. So I had to write it or admit I was lying."

At the time the story was written, the tower of the home office of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company was one of the tallest and most distinctive skyscrapers in New York topped by a clock that was a city landmark. Readers of argosy were enthralled to read of the building's remarkable journey in time back to a period hundreds of years before white men appeared on this continent. Some two thousand workers in the skyscraper thus find themselves confronted with the task of obtaining enough food to eat and suitable fuel to run the building's mammoth generators. Little help can be expected from the few thoroughly

"shaken" Indians that have witnessed this strange occurrence. The scientific "explanation," that the skyscraper has sunk back in time instead of down into a pool of water created by a spring beneath it, taxed one's credulity only slightly less than the unimpaired functioning of the entire elevator, telephone, and cooking systems of the building, even though outside sources of power were hundreds of years away. Leinster's characters poked around a bit, but since the author couldn't quite seem to figure out the solution of the sustenance problem, he had the hero reestablish the equilibrium of the structure in its own time by pouring soapsuds into the subsurface water. The building reappears at exactly the same moment it left, and no one believes the tale its occupants tell.

An argosy readership that was still completing Garret Smith's novel that whisked them into the future of
After a Million Years
and had accepted the revival of Aztec gods in the modern world as offered by Francis Stevens in
Citadel of Fear
only months earlier was not inclined to quibble over "details." They greeted Murray Leinster's effort with enthusi-asm and one of the most fabulous writing careers in science-fiction history was launched. Forty-three years later, in 1962, Murray Leinster was voted one of the six favorite
modern
writers of science fiction; more of his stories had been anthol-ogized than any living science-fiction writer's, including clas-sics as
First Contact, The Strange Case of John Kingman,
Symbiosis, A Logic Named Joe,
and
The Lonely Planet.

Other writers who started and achieved fame in the same period as Leinster—Ray Cummings, Garret Smith, Victor Rousseau, Francis Stevens, Homer Eon Flint, Austin Hall, J. U. Giesy—are dead and their work lives only in the nostalgic memories of a dwindling group of old-time readers. But their contemporary, Murray Leinster, is very much alive; his novelette
Exploration Team
received the Hugo* as the best story in its class in 1956, and in 1960 his novel
Pirates of Ersatz
was nominated for the best novel of the year.

*The "Hugo" is the science fiction world's equivalent for the "Oscar," a cast metal spaceship awarded annually at the World Science Fiction Convention, to the field's outstanding contributors. William Fitzgerald Jenkins was born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1896. His alter ego, Murray Leinster, would not come into being until Jenkins had passed his twenty-first birthday. His family tree has roots deep in colonial times; an ancestor eight generations back, was governor of North Carolina. Another of his roots lay in Leinster County, Ireland, inhabited by a people proud in the knowledge that the kings of Leinster were the last of that country to give up their indepen-dence.

His education terminated abruptly after three months of the eighth grade, never to be resumed. Young Jenkins' burn-ing ambition was to be a scientist, and inquiry into the nature of things prompted him to buy materials to build a glider, which he successfully flew at Sandstorm Hill, Cape Henry, Virginia, in 1909, winning a prize from fly, the first aeronautical magazine, for his achievement. The same year, at the age of 13, he placed an essay about Robert E. Lee in the Virginian pilot, making that his first published work. Technically, it was also his first "paid" authorship, for an old Confederate veteran sent him five dollars upon reading it. To earn a living, he worked as an office boy, writing at night. Every day for a year he wrote 1,000 words and tore it up. At the age of 17 he began to place fillers and epigrams with smart set, the new yorker of pre-World War I days. Such fragments did not constitute a living ($5 for 12 epigrams) so Will Jenkins set his sights on the pulps, which were replacing the dime-novel as the reading matter of American youth. The editors of smart set, George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken who included one epigram in a book and paid a five-cent beer for royalties, perfectly straight-faced, suggested that he use a pen name for argosy or all-story so as not to hurt his reputation in the "big time." Jenkins thought this was Grade-A advice and together with a friend, Wynham Martyn, concocted Murray Leinster out of his family lineage.

He had moved to Newark, New Jersey, to work as a bookkeeper for the Prudential Insurance Company, and that city later served as the locale of a number of his stories, most notably
The Incredible
Invasion.
Clicking regularly at Munsey and other publishing houses, Leinster resigned his post with Prudential on his twenty-first birthday and, apart from a stint in the Office of War Information during World War II, has never held a salaried position since.

In 1919, Street & Smith, watching the prosperity of Mun-sey's argosy and all-story magazines, with their heavy em-phasis on science-fiction, fantasy, supernatural, and off-trail stories, decided to bring out a magazine whose fiction would stress those elements. They called it thrill book and put it under the editorship of Eugene Clancy and Harold Hersey. Before the first issue appeared, dated March 1, 1919, the edi-tors found that new fantasies were difficult to obtain, so they dropped the notion of an all-fantasy periodical and filled out the greater part of the magazine with straight adventure and mystery stories. Hersey had read Leinster's
The Runaway Skyscraper
in argosy a few weeks earlier and was also familiar with the Will Jenkins stories in smart set. He urged the young writer to try his hand at science fiction for thrill book. Three stories resulted. The first,
A Thousand Degrees Below Zero,
in the July 15, 1919, number, involved an inventor who succeeds in building a machine which will draw all heat from objects toward which it is directed, resulting in death for living things and brittle disintegration for inanimate objects. A vigorous bout with the United States government ends in the inventor's defeat, but this story pattern, with a variety of inventions, was to remain a Leinster standard for the next twenty-five years. A sequel,
The Silver Menace,
appeared in two install-ments, in the September 1 and September 15, 1919, numbers of thrill book. This time the world is threatened by a swiftly multiplying life-form that virtually turns the seas to glimmering jelly.

The final issue of thrill book, October 15, 1919, carried Leinster's third story,
Juju,
a straightforward adventure novel-ette set in an African locale. What makes this story worth mentioning is that by this time the value of the "Murray Leinster" name rated the cover illustration of the magazine. Jean Henri Fabre's books on insects inspired Leinster to write
The Mad Planet,
the first of a trilogy which, if not his finest contribution to science fiction, is among his best. A secondary purpose of the author was to confound those literary critics who claimed that stories with little or no dialogue could not retain a modern reader's interest.
The Mad Planet
was a sensation when it appeared in argosy for June 12, 1920. Depicting a world of the far distant future, where climatic conditions have made it possible for insects and plants to grow to gigantic proportions and mankind is reduced to a primitive, hunted state,
The Mad Planet
held readers in thrall. Burl, a primitive genius, slowly begins to lead man back out of savagery.
The Mad
Planet
struck a chord of universal appeal.

The sequel,
Red Dust,
in argosy for April 2, 1921, is an even better story than the original. Burl's adventures and explorations thrillingly expand the scope of man's knowledge and hopes. Each time these two stories have been reprinted—in amazing stories in 1926; in tales of wonder in 1939; and in fantastic novels, 1948-49—a new generation of readers has endorsed Leinster's artistry. Finally, twenty-two years after the appearance of the first story, Leinster completed the trilogy with
Nightmare Planet
in the June, 1953, issue of science fiction plus. It was an older, more philosophical, more thoughtful Leinster writing in this story, but the magic of the first two was still there. With the locale changed to another planet for scientific reasons, the three appeared in hard covers as
The Forgotten Planet,
a book of such appeal that it is unlikely to become a forgotten classic. From 1923 on, one of the pillars of fantasy in the United States was weird tales, a magazine which developed such favorites as H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Henry S. Whitehead, C. L. Moore, and many others during its lifetime. Leinster's initial contribution to this magazine,
The Oldest
Story in the World,
was done more as a favor to editor Farnsworth Wright than for monetary re-ward. A tale of greed and torture in Old India, it was the favorite story in the August, 1925, issue in which it appeared, receiving such wildly enthusiastic salutes from fellow writers Seabury Quinn and Frank Belknap Long as "equal to Kip-ling."

A three-part novel,
The Strange People,
about a group of foreigners held in bondage in a New England valley because of an artificially induced skin condition that resembled lepro-sy, beginning in the March, 1928, issue of weird tales, scored very high with the readers and kept the name of Murray Leinster before the readers in the fantasy field at a time when most of his efforts were concentrated elsewhere. In 1929, Leinster submitted a novelette entitled
Darkness on Fifth Avenue
to detective fiction weekly, along with sketches of three sequels. Howard Bloomfield, the editor, returned the story and recommended a try at argosy, noting that though it might qualify as a detective yarn on a techni-cality, its suggested sequels could make no similar claim. The editors of that magazine gave the cover of the November 30, 1929, issue to this story of a detective who, using nothing but common sense, hunts down and defeats a brilliant scientific criminal who has built a device which will absorb all light from any area in which he desires to function. This carefully wrought story deserved the bouquets it received from its readers. The sequel,
The City of the Blind,
went into print in the December 28, 1929 issue. This time the evil genius extends the radius of his machine so it will keep New York in perpetual impenetrable darkness until it pays ransom and delivers up or destroys the men who are fighting against him. A side effect of the process of drawing light from the atmos-phere is the generation of heat. This heat, over so large an area, rises, permitting cooler currents to sweep in beneath and resulting in tremendous storms that accompany the blackness.

This second attempt is overcome, and the storm-creating effect becomes the focus of the third story in the series,
The Storm That Had to Be Stopped
in argosy for March 1, 1930. Winds of many times hurricane force devastate New York State and the arch-criminal demands power and money to stop them. U. S. tanks and science foil this plot, only to fall into a fourth and final situation in
The Man Who Put Out
the Sun,
in argosy for June 14, 1930. In this one, the Heaviside layer is impregnated with an electrical field which renders the air no longer transparent to the sun's rays. If the problem is not quickly solved, the world will freeze to death. In the corniest action of the group of stories, the errant scientist is destroyed and all's right with the world.

In most of Leinster's stories, the basic theme is that of man battling against nature.
The Runaway
Skyscraper
finds men desperately striving to wrest subsistence from the wilderness.
The Mad Planet
and
Red Dust
play weak and ignorant men against savage and powerful insect life. Even though a man technically has created the problem in
Dark-ness on Fifth Avenue,
the emphasis is never on the villain (who does not appear in any of the four stories until the final pages of the last one), but always on the battle of men against the physical manifestations of the mad scientist's actions. In
Darkness on Fifth Avenue
the battle of men against darkness is almost allegorical and much of the story's appeal lies in the link between darkness and evil.
The City of the Blind
under-scores both man's helplessness and his ingenuity in combating and overcoming a condition of perpetual darkness;
The Storm That Had to Be Stopped
chronicles the effort against wind, rain, and darkness;
The Man Who Put Out the Sun
pictures man fighting against killing cold.

A majority of Leinster's stories emphasize that it is the battle, not the ultimate victory, that is important. Man coura-geously, sometimes magnificently, fights a mindless, implaca-ble creature, phenomenon, or condition. Even if some man has caused the situation, he is rarely the fundamental antago-nist. This principle reappears in many of the more recent Lein-sters, specifically
Sand Doom
(astounding science fiction, December, 1955) where man is confronted by death from frightful heat and shifting sand;
Exploration Team
(astound-ing science fiction, March, 1956), in which a new plane-tary colony is almost destroyed, then ingeniously works to stay alive against the viciousness of alien beasts;
Critical Difference
(astounding science fiction, July, 1956) depicting the struggle to keep an entire planet from freezing over after its sun's heat output has fallen off;
The Swamp Was Upside Down
(astounding science fiction, September, 1956), in which men on a watery planet exert desperate efforts to prevent the sea from overwhelming them and to keep their land from sliding into the ocean.