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scientific discussion and to place in footnotes a condensed version of passages that he
could not omit without damaging the plot. This was an extraordinarily inept device, at which I
chafed at the time. 1 took the only retaliation available to me. I placed Amazing at the
bottom of the list, as far as the order in which to submit stories was concerned.
What I remember most clearly about the story, though, is Fred Pohl's remark concerning it.
The story ends with Earth and Venus at peace, with Earth promising to respect Venus'
independence and Venus destroying its weapon. Fred said, upon reading the published
story, "And after the weapon was destroyed, Earth wiped the Venusians off the face of their
planet."
He was quite right. I was naive enough then to suppose that words and good intentions are
sufficient. (Fred also remarked that the weapon that was too dreadful to be used was, in
fact, used. He was right in that case, too, and that helped sour me on titles that were too long
and elabo- rate. 1 have tended toward shorter titles since, even one- word titles, something
Campbell consistently encouraged, perhaps because short titles fit better on the cover and
on the title page of a magazine.)
If I thought that my sale to Campbell had made me an expert in knowing what he wanted
and in being able to supply that want, 1 was quite wrong. In February 1939 I wrote a story
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called "The Decline and Fall." I submitted it to Campbell on February 21 and it was back in
my lap, quite promptly, on the twenty-fifth. It made the rounds thereafter without results and
was never published. It no longer exists and I remember nothing at all about it.
On March 4, 1939, 1 began my most ambitious writing project to that date. It was a
novelette (in which I named an important character after Russell Winterbotham) that was
intended to be at least twice as long as any of my previous stories. 1 called the story
"Pilgrimage." It was my first attempt to write "future history"; that is, a tale about a far future
time written as though it were a historical novel. I was also my first attempt to write a story on
a galactic scale.
I was very excited while working at it and felt somehow that it was an "epic." (I remember,
though, that Winter- botham was rather dubious about it when I described the plot to him in a
letter.) I brought it in to Campbell on March 21, 1939, with high hopes, but it was back on the
twenty-fourth with a letter that said, "You have a basic idea which might be made into an
interesting yarn, but as it is, it is not strong enough."
This time I would not let go. I was in to see Campbell again on the twenty-seventh and
talked him into letting me revise it in order to strengthen the weaknesses he found in it. I
brought in the second version on April 25, and it, too, was found wanting, but this time it was
Campbell who asked for a revision. I tried again and the third version was sub- mitted on
May 9 and rejected on the seventeenth. Camp- bell admitted there was still the possibility of
saving it, but, after three tries, he said, I should put it to one side for some months and then
look at it from a fresh viewpoint.
I did as he said and waited two months (the minimum time I could interpret as "some
months") and brought in the fourth version on August 8.
This time, Campbell hesitated over it till September 6, and then rejected it permanently on
the ground that Robert A. Heinlein had just submitted an important short novel (later
published as "If This Goes On ") that had a religious theme. Since "Pilgrimage" also had a
religious theme, John couldn't use it. Two stories on so sensitive a subject in rapid
succession were one too many.
I had written the story four times, but I saw Campbell's point. Campbell said Heinlein's story
was the better of the two and I could see that an editor could scarcely be expected to take
the worse and reject the better simply because writ- ing the worse had been such hard work.
There was nothing, however, to prevent me from trying to sell it elsewhere. I kept trying for
two years, during which time I rewrote it twice more and retitled it "Galactic Cru- sade."
Eventually I sold it to another of the magazines that were springing up in the wake of
Campbell's success with Astounding. This was Planet Stories, which during the 1940s was
to make its mark as a home for the "space opera," the blood-and-thunder tale of
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