Gateways (30 page)

Admission to the Council brought many benefits and some restrictions. From beneficent members of the Council we got knowledge of metalworking and machines, charts of the nexus points of the Galaxy and the ability to launch our ships through the no-space between them, access to the vast library of information accumulated by a hundred species over the millennia, and the ability to reshape our world and our system’s other worlds. We were forbidden, however, to immigrate to worlds beyond our system or to communicate, intellectually or genetically, with vegetable species on Council worlds. This, we were told, would be a capital crime punishable by species extinction. That seemed extreme, but we recognized that we were new and different, and we had the other planets of our system to develop with our new skills, and, when that was complete, other worlds outside the Council jurisdiction.

We called upon our vegetable patience, knowing that, before the end of time, we would succeed. What we did not understand was that other species, under the leadership of the Centaurans, would be launching scientific projects to block our genetic program, that all meat creatures, no matter how seemingly benign, will defend their kind against a threat from our kind. What they did not understand was that animal species have the advantage of speed and quickness but they burn out quickly and decay, while vegetation is slow but persistent. In the end we will win before entropy finally defeats us all.

And yet—all our voyaging beyond the limits of Floran psychology, all our acceptance by the Galactic community, all our new knowledge and confidence in survival, if not as certain, of final dominance was not enough. In order to do these things, we had changed. Vegetable existence distrusts and dislikes change, and accepts it only under duress and through the long, slow swing of the cosmos. We had become great, and we hated it.

And then the humans erupted from Earth—meat inspired by hubris—and, shortly after, war began, and all that we had thought and planned was put aside. We did our part in the war, but mostly in the peace. Animals fight wars; vegetables practice peace. We delighted in the peace and the stasis that followed the war; we might even have become content with our lot, difficult as it was to reconcile with our essential being. And then word came about the Prophet and the Transcendental Machine. More change.

More threat to stasis. More damage to our sense of self. And so, once more, against every instinct, we had to change. Out of this crisis I was grown, against every Floran instinct, to assume the reviled role of individual, to act alone and through my sacrifice find salvation for my sisters. I cannot describe my desolation, my grief, my anguished separation from my fellow Florans as I joined this voyage. I cannot describe, even, what it means to refer to myself as “I.”

But I will persevere, because my people demand what only I can provide: a return to paradise. Through me the Transcendental Machine will remove the curse of sapience.

Fred told me once, “Conventions never end; they just adjourn to another venue.” That’s the way it was for Fred and me. We met at a convention, the World Science Fiction Convention of 1952, held in the old Morrison Hotel in Chicago. It was my first convention, my first meeting with SF writers and editors, and even readers, of any kind, and it was a wonderful beginning.

I’d been writing science fiction since the spring of 1948 and having my stories published since the fall of 1949. That was my first year as a freelance writer before I went back to the University of Kansas to earn my master’s degree in English. During those two years I kept writing, among other things a novella, “Breaking Point,” that I adapted from a three-act play I wrote as an Investigation and Conference project. I sent it to Horace Gold, editor of
Galaxy
, and one day I got a telephone call from this clipped New York voice saying he liked “Breaking Point” but it was too long and would I let Ted Sturgeon cut it down.

Horace also suggested my name to Fred Pohl, who was running a literary agency called Dirk Wylie and, I later discovered, was close to Horace, and Fred became my agent. He was a good agent, and he sold a lot of stories for me—some to Horace (though not “Breaking Point,” which he sold to Lester del Rey at the new
Space Science Fiction
), some to John Campbell, some to lesser markets, and one wondrous sale to
Argosy
—and a couple of novels. He didn’t make much money from all of his efforts: three cents a word didn’t add up to much and 10 percent
of that was even less; and the novels sold for an advance of $500 each, which meant only $100 for Fred. In fact, Fred was a better agent than a businessman, and the agency went broke.

Which was just as well, because Fred’s writing career took off with
Galaxy
’s serialization in 1952 of “Gravy Planet,” which became
The Space Merchants
in its Ballantine apotheosis. It was the first of a series of marvelous collaborations with Cyril Kornbluth. That, combined with a series of wittily satirical short stories, made Fred’s reputation that he embellished later, after he abandoned his dissection of contemporary culture, with his award-winning novels of the late 1970s,
Man Plus
,
Gateway
, and
Jem
. Those were also his award-winning days as editor of
Galaxy
and
If.

But this was back in 1952. I’d accepted an editing position with Western Printing & Lithographing Company of Racine, Wisconsin, which then edited and published the Dell line of paperback reprints. Lloyd Smith, an old friend of my uncle John’s, from the Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books era, expected me to create a line of science fiction novels. I did produce a few, but spent much of my time on other editing chores (including a joke book!) until I persuaded Smith to send me to the Worldcon on the pretext that I would make useful contacts.

The contacts were useful enough, though not in the way Smith expected. I met science-fiction writers and editors there: Clifford Simak, Mack Reynolds, Bob Bloch, the just-starting Richard Matheson, Willy Ley, Hugo Gernsback, Tony Boucher, John Campbell, Evelyn Gold (Horace’s surrogate), Frank Robinson, Jack Williamson (with whom I would collaborate on
Star Bridge
), and many others, including Fred. There, in a momentous meeting in a corridor, Fred told me he had sold four stories for me. On the strength of that I quit my job and went back to freelance writing!

That was a good period of frequent and good sales with limited income, the publication of two novels that paid almost nothing then but kept getting reprinted later, and the foundation of a later, part-time career, combined with academics, when I returned to Lawrence, Kansas, and took a series of administrative and teaching jobs that allowed me to combine service to the university with my own writing, most of the time. Fred and I met more casually at the convention-that-never-ended—probably in San Francisco in 1953 but certainly in Philadelphia in 1954—but in another year he was out of the agent business and I was represented by others.

Our next fruitful encounter was when Fred was editor of
Galaxy
and, after a half dozen drought years while I was dealing with the student rebels of the 1960s, I was trying to get back in the game with an ambitious novelette called “The Listeners” (which would later turn into a novel). Two agents thought it was overwritten (it contained a bushel of foreign-language quotations), but I noticed that
Galaxy
was going back to monthly publication after a period in the wilderness of being published bimonthly and decided it would need more manuscripts. Fred wrote back that he would be happy to publish “The Listeners” if I would provide translations for the foreign-language parts. I said sure as long as they weren’t included as footnotes (they were). That got me an inclusion in a best-of-the-year anthology, a Nebula nomination, and eventually a book contract with Scribner’s. Later, when he added
If
to his editorial duties, I sent him the second part of my novel
The Burning
, and he published “Trial by Fire.” When I sent him the final part, “Witch Hunt,” he wrote back that he’d publish it in
Galaxy
if I could straighten out the beginning (which he figured had been garbled when my typist—I never had one—dropped the manuscript and reassembled it wrong); I told him he could put back in the eight words I’d omitted from the end of the first chapter: “And he remembered how his journey had begun.”

When I launched the Intensive English Institute on the Teaching of Science Fiction in 1974, I thought of getting some writers in to help teach the teachers, and in the second year, I brought in three visiting writers, Gordon Dickson, Ted Sturgeon, and Fred. They remained my dependable stalwarts until Gordy and Ted died, and the institute itself ran into enrollment problems. The first year that happened I offered a summer session writers workshop in science fiction. The second year I proposed to Fred that we offer a one-week writers workshop, and that went well and the institute returned—and Fred became a late second-week visiting writer for the two-week intensive writers workshop, with Betty Hull after their marriage in 1984.

In the meantime, however, one of the students in my first institute class invited me to put together a weekend conference about science fiction for a group of teachers meeting in Pueblo, Colorado. That sounded like the beginning of an opportunity to spread the word of science fiction more broadly, and I proposed to Fred that we join forces in what might be a series of such conferences. We put on a show in Pueblo that went over well (although the idea of a continuing project didn’t), and it was in Pueblo, over dinner at the Holiday Inn, that Fred told me he knew how he could publish my novel
Kampus
. Fred had become science-fiction editor at Bantam Books after a brief stint with Ace, and I had sent him a couple
of chapters. Looking back upon it, I think Fred was the only editor who could have imagined the book
Kampus
became and find a way to publish it. My later attempts to break out of the bubble never met with as much understanding.

We met in other places. In New York, for instance, I was with a group of writers from the annual Nebula Awards who happened, by chance, to come across Fred on Fifth Avenue, and because he was an editor with an expense account we dragooned him to feed us all at Mama Leone’s. And we met in Los Angeles at the World Convention of 1972, where Fred was guest of honor and I premiered the series of films on the literature of science fiction for which Fred lectured on “Ideas in Science Fiction.”

After a few years as a full-time English teacher, beginning in 1970, I got the idea for a big conference that would bring scientists and science-fiction writers together to discuss the ways in which they interact and together help shape the future. I tried it out on a number of organizations with encouraging comments but no financial support. I turned to Fred, and together we put together a more convincing proposal. But that also got everything but funding—until it got, by chance, into the hands of Dean Joseph Steinmetz of the KU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, who not only got behind it but raised some money for it. Unfortunately, Steinmetz left to become dean at Ohio State, and his departure, and recession funding cuts, canceled our plans.

There have been others. When Professor Bill Conboy proposed a team-taught course on futurism, Fred Pohl became our outside contributor for a couple of weeks. His wife, Elizabeth Anne Hull, became a member of the Campbell Award jury, where she has served with distinction, often making a graceful announcement of the winner and its merits at the award dinner. And when Orson Scott Card got too busy to organize the Sturgeon Award decision process, I asked Fred if we could do it. Together we recruited Judy Merril and later, after her resignation the year before her death, we got Kij Johnson, a previous winner, as a replacement. I haven’t even mentioned Fred’s distinguished service as president of the Science Fiction Writers of America (or the irony of his having criticized its value in earlier days), or as president of World SF, or his many invitations to speak as a futurist, or his lecturing on science fiction in Europe for the US Information Agency (he paved the way for my three later trips), or his Grand Master Award from SFWA, or his awards from other groups such as the Science Fiction Research Association, or the trends his stories and novels have anticipated. You can look it up.

We’ve all grown old together, Fred and me and science fiction, too. Conventions are not what they used to be (neither is the future). I wasn’t there at the beginning of the conventions, as Fred was, or of the Futurians, who were banned from the first World Convention but got their revenge by taking over a good part of science fiction in their day. But we’ve seen a lot of it—Fred for more than seventy years, me for only sixty. Maybe the next convention will convene in an alternate universe.

—J
AMES
G
UNN