Critical Mass

Introduction

During World War III was an Air Force weatherman, mostly in Italy. My friend and collaborator Cyril Kornbluth had a varied career. He started out as a machinist with the artillery, a safe and reasonably satisfying job, as well as one pretty useful to the war effort. Along came ASTP. ASTP was a marvelously do-gooding program whereby certain soldiers could effectively drop out of the war entirely, attending college in uniform instead of fighting or holding down posts in the United States. I have never really understood what it had to do with the job of defeating Germany, Italy and Japan, but it surely was a dream of delight to every GI, and Cyril signed up for it at once.

Catch-22 came along in 1944. The Army perceived that what it really needed was not so much well-rounded officer material as warm bodies to throw against the enemy. ASTP was canceled without warning, and everyone in it was immediately reassigned to the infantry, as a private. The rest of us in uniform-even the rest of us-could not help feeling some compassion. When I went overseas it was on a troop transport that had once been a fruit-company freighter, called the Cristobal. About a hundred of the troops on board were weathermen like myself. The other 1,800 were former ASTP students, now about to join the Fifth Army’s infantry divisions at Cassino. Some of them were still in their teens. Some of them had not been in the Army more than a few weeks. And some never walked away from Cassino.

At about the same time, in a different troop transport headed for England, Cyril was in a very similar convoy. He became a heavy machine-gunner, fought through the Battle of the Bulge and received a Bronze Star therefore. At least on paper he did. He never got the medal itself from the Army. I, on the other hand, had been given one, but it had never been made official; so a year or two after the war I gave him mine.

We both survived the war and returned to civilian life around the end of 1945. I went into the advertising business for a tune in New York. Cyril went to the University of Chicago on the GI Bill of Rights.

Old fellow - Futurian Richard Wilson was also in Chicago in those years, getting into news work with Trans-Radio Press wire service. He soon became head of their Chicago bureau, and recruited Cyril to work in the newsroom. When Dick moved on to higher things, first in the Washington bureau and then to the central headquarters office in New York, Cyril replaced him as Chicago bureau chief, quitting college to make time for that eighteen-hour-a-day job.

A few years of that turned out to be enough. In 1951 Cyril came east, determined to go back to writing science fiction.

I had just bought the house I still live in, thirteen ancient rooms on the Jersey shore, and Cyril and his pregnant wife came to stay with us while they sorted out their plans. I had begun a science-fiction novel about the future of the advertising business, and invited Cyril to collaborate on finishing it. It became the first bit of science fiction to be published under the joint by-line “by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth” (all our previous collaborations had appeared under a variety of pseudonyms) when Horace Gold serialized it in Galaxy, under the title of Gravy Planet. We were delighted. Horace paid us $1,400 for it, which was about as much money as either of us had ever seen in one lump before. A while later we managed to get lan Ballantine to bring it out in book form, and, actually, it hasn’t really done badly at all: something over ten million copies, in something like forty languages, earning something like a hundred tunes the price we wrote it for, as of even date. The book title was The Space Merchants.

Over the next half-dozen years we wrote six other novels together, three which were science fiction- Gladiator-at-Law, Search the Sky and Wolfbane and three which were not. Presidential Year was about, well, about a presidential year: about a man who sought the nomination, and what he had to go through to get nominated. It appeared in 1956 and was well enough received critically, but not very exciting in sales. We sold the film rights, but the movie was never made; and one of the many reasons why I wish Cyril-, were still alive is that I would like it if we could have revised and reissued it in the new post-Watergate political scene. A Town Is Drowning was a topical novel about a hurricane hitting the East Coast. A couple of them had, not long before/One of them had taken part, of my roof off and another had flooded Cyril’s upstate New York house out, and we viewed the novel as an attempt to get even with the elements. Sorority House was a semi-sexy ripoff novel published under a pseudonym to complete a contract Cyril had come to regret having made. All of these non-sf novels had things in them which I like and wish we had used in better books, but we didn’t.

At the same tune we were going on with our own individual writing.

Cyril’s own novels - Takeoff, Not This August and The Syndic-were appearing and doing very well (not to mention the half-dozen or so other novels, not science fiction, rather like Sorority House, which were appearing as paperback originals under pen names). We were both doing about as well as we had any reason to expect. I remember having a cup of coffee with Cyril when he had just had an editorial in the New York Daily News plugging one of his books, and I had been mentioned by Time in connection with one of mine. This sort of mass-media publicity for science fiction was not common in the fifties, and we were agreeably expectant of great things. We undertook to check with each other six months later to see what they had done for us in sales. (As it turned out, nothing we could detect.)

There was a certain amount of mutual assistance between us even on some of the stories which did not appear as collaborations. I remember specifically Cyril bogging down on his novel Takeoff, which he had originally intended to call something like The Martians Upstairs, with actual Martians in it. This proved complex and difficult to write, and we spent one long night replotting it into the published form, omitting the Martians. And I remember showing Mm the rough draft of my novella The Midas Plague, and getting from him some first-rate ideas on plotting and bits of business.

I think if Cyril had lived he would have become one of the all-tune greats of the field. He was just hitting his stride when his health began to falter.

Cyril had always been a little plumper than was strictly good for him. When the Army made him a machine-gunner, lugging a 50-calibre-heavy MG around the Ardennes forest, they shortened his life. Exertions damaged his heart, and in his mid-thirties his doctor told him that he had a clear choice. He could give up smoking, drinking, spices in his food, a lot of the food itself, irregular hours and excitement; or he could die of hypertension.

For a while Cyril tried doing what the doctor told him. He took his medicine: tranquilizers, mostly, the not-quite-perfected tranquilizers of the fifties, which had such side-effects as making him a little confused and a little intellectually sluggish. He followed his diet rigorously. He came out to visit us during that period, and my wife cooked salt-free meals and baked salt-free bread. We couldn’t do much writing. He was not up to it. But I showed him a novel I was having problems with.

He read the pages of the first draft and handed it back to me. “Needs salt,” he said, and that was all.

So I suppose Cyril made his choice. In his place, I think I might have made the same one. He went back to coffee and cigarettes, gave up the medication, went back to writing, finished the revisions on Wolfbane, wrote two or three of his best novelettes, signed on as an editor for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction -his first experiment with editing, rather than writing, science fiction, and one which he enjoyed enormously. ... And then on a snowy March morning I had a phone call from Mary, his wife, to say that Cyril had shoveled out their driveway to free his car, run to catch a train and dropped dead on the station platform.

He left a bundle of incomplete manuscripts and fragments, some of which I was later able to revise and complete. Most of the stories in this volume came out of that bale of paper, and were published after his death.