The Best of Lester del Rey - Lester del Rey(1), ebook, Temp
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The Best Of Lester Del Rey
Lester Del Rey
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A Del Key Book.
Published by Baliantine Books
Copyright (c) 1978 by Lester del Rey
Introduction: The Magnificent. Copyright (c) 1978 by Frederik Pohl
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the
United States by Baliantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York and simultaneously in
Canada by Baliantine Books of Canada, Ltd., Toronto, Canada.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 78-62267 ISBN 0-345-27336-2
Manufactured in the United States of America First Baliantine Books Edition: September 1978 Cover
art by H. R. Van Dongen
"Helen O'Loy," copyright (c) 1938 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Astounding Science Fiction,
December 1938.
The Day Is Done," copyright (c) 1939 by Street & Smith' Publications, Inc., for Astounding Science
Fiction, May 1939.
The Coppersmith," copyright (c) 1939 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Unknown, September
1939.
"Hereafter, Inc.," copyright (c) 1941 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Unknown Worlds,
December 1941.
The Wings of Night," copyright (c) 1942 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Astounding Science
Fiction, March 1942.
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 "Into Thy Hands," copyright (c) 1945 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Astounding Science
Fiction, August 1945.
"And It Comes Out Here," copyright (c) 1951 by World Editions, Inc., for Galaxy Science Fiction,
February 1951.
The Monster," copyright (c) 1951 by Popular Publications, Inc., for Argosy magazine.
The Years Draw Nigh," copyright (c) 1951 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Astounding
Science Fiction, October 1951.
"Instinct," copyright (c) 1952 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Astounding Science Fiction,
January 1952.
"Superstition," copyright (c) 1954 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Astounding Science Fiction,
August 1954.
"For I Am a Jealous People," copyright (c) 1954 by Baliantine Books, Inc., for Star Short Novels.
The Keepers of the House," copyright (c) 1955 by King-Size Publications, Inc., for Fantastic Universe,
January 1956.
"Little Jimmy," copyright (c) 1957 by Fantasy House, Inc., for Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1957.
"The Seat of Judgment," copyright (c) 1957 by Fantasy House, Inc., for Venture Science Fiction, July
1957.
"Vengeance Is Mine," copyright (c) 1964 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation for Galaxy Science Fiction,
December 1964.
TO BETTY BALLANTINE,
my long-time editor, with my deepest affection.
Contents
Introduction: The Magnificent Frederik Pohl
Helen O'Loy
The Day Is Done
The Coppersmith
Hereafter, Inc.
The Wings of Night
Into Thy Hands
And It Comes Out Here
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 The Monster
The Years Draw Nigh
Instinct
Superstition
For I Am a Jealous People
The Keepers of the House
Little Jimmy
The Seat of Judgment
Vengeance Is Mine
Author's Afterword
The Magnificent
THE UNQUESTIONED KING of-the nighttime air in New York radio is a skinny and sardonic fellow
named Long John Nebel. Long John's marathon talk show runs from midnight till dawn every night of the
week, and what it covers is everything. I don't just mean "everything." I mean everything. Politics.
Religion. Sex. Hying saucers. Bermuda triangles. War. Science fiction. Science. Art. Music. You name it,
it has been the subject of a Long John talkfest. And over the years, among his chosen nuclear guest
family who join him after midnight to chew over the topic of the day, one voice has stood out. Whatever
the subject, he has an opinion, and insights and facts to back it up. He has done the show 400 times at
least, not counting reruns on tape, and he is so well known to the insomniacs of New York (and most
other states) that he is usually introduced only as The Magnificent. He doesn't need to be given a name,
because the listeners know him so well. But he has one. It is Lester del Rey.
Of course, there are countless thousands of people who have known Lester del Rey very well for a long
time who have never heard him on Long John's show. They are people like you and me: science-fiction
readers. We've known Lester for forty years, or even longer
All
if we remember those polemical letters in Astounding's "Brass Tacks" department in the '30s.
Like most sf writers, Lester came to the field as a reader. He liked what he read. After some thought, he
concluded that he would like writing it, too. He had never written a science-fiction story at the time. That
didn't seem to matter. He reasoned that if he thought of an idea no one else had thought of before, and
told it concisely and literately, with some attention to interesting characters and colorful backgrounds,
John Campbell would buy it. So he did. And so John did; it was called "The Faithful." That was the first
story Lester sold John Campbell. It certainly wasn't the last. The Golden Age of Astounding was all the
more lustrous for "Nerves," "Helen O'Loy," and all those others from his hard-driven typewriter.
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 Once he had formed the habit, Lester did not stop with Astounding. He wrote for all the other
magazines, too, and when a few years later a couple of publishers took all their courage in their hands
and began to experiment with science-fiction books, Lester was one of the first to get his sf nicely
packaged in hard covers. He wrote a couple, then a flood, of novels especially for the book publishers.
There are grown men (and grown women, too) all over the country who cut their literary wisdom teeth
on sf juveniles by Philip St. John, Erik Van Lhin, and Kenneth Wright-all of whom were, in fact, Lester
del Rey. Scott Meredith, then a young (but obviously canny) literary agent, grabbed Lester as a client,
and shortly thereafter as an employee, and as Meredith's Number One assistant, Lester guided the
careers of scores of other writers. When the science-fiction magazine market mushroomed in the early
1950s Lester became the editor of one of the most interesting-strike that; of four of the most interesting-
magazines around. He did most of that pseudony-mously, too. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, he was
Philip St. John, editor of Science Fiction Adventures. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays he was
Wade Kaempf ert, editing Rocket Stories; and then he had the whole week-
end to himself, under his own name, to edit Space Science Fiction and Fantasy Fiction Magazine.
I first met Lester del Rey when both of us were impossibly apple-cheeked youngsters. I was editing two
cut-rate science-fiction magazines for Popular Publications, and Lester, on one of his rare visits to New
York, brought to my office a couple of stories that John Campbell had had the unwisdom to turn down.
In my youthful foolishness, I did the same. Well, you can excuse Campbell, because he had everybody in
the field clamoring to get into his magazines. Maybe you can forgive me, too, because I was
inexperienced. But how can you excuse Lester for what he did then? Since two editors had declined the
stories, he figured there was something wrong with them. He put them aside-and now, four decades later,
they're still aside, in fact lost irretrievably.
A war came along, scattering us all for a while. And then, in 1947, there was a world science-fiction
convention in Philadelphia. We all saw each other again, met new friends, had a fine time. All in all it was
a fine weekend; and Lester and I liked it so well that we conceived the idea of making it permanent.
Lester was living in New York City by then, and so was I, and we got ourselves and a coterie of friends
together and created The Hydra Club, New York's longest-lived sf writers' chowder-and-marching
society. Long after both Lester and I had left the city and stopped attending, the club carried on of its
own momentum. One of the leading lights of Hydra was the late Fletcher Pratt, a marvelous, lovable,
feisty man who had once been a bantamweight prize fighter and converted himself into the writer who
produced the best one-volume history of the Civil War ever in print (among very much else that is
noteworthy). Fletcher and Inga Pratt owned a great old monster of a house on the New Jersey shore.
Lester and I (and our wives) were frequent weekend guests, and grew fond of the Monmouth County
area. In 1951 I moved to Red
Bank. In 1954 the del Reys came out to visit the Pohls for a weekend. They stayed seventeen years.
Oh, it wasn't roses, roses all the way! Science-fiction writers are thorny people, given to obstinacy and
adrenalin, and Lester is an archetypal science-fiction writer. He has sometimes been described as
fulminate of mercury with a beard. I am not at all like that, of course, but nevertheless we had some
rousers. We fought like wombats over astrophysics, horticulture, and whether the Bruch violin concerto
deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with the Mendelssohn. (Lester was wrong about that,
though I must admit the Bruch is still very good.) In the days before baseball teams treacherously
deserted their God-given home turfs to dally in California, Lester was misguidedly a partisan of the New
York Giants, while I, of course, loyally supported the best team in the history of baseball, the Brooklyn
Dodgers. That caused a lot of trouble. Perhaps you remember hearing about Bobby Thomson's home
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 run that cost Brooklyn a pennant? That was the closest I ever came to punching Lester out. He chortled.
But when the chips were down, when there was trouble-and there was grave trouble now and then for
both of us-what Lester was was a friend. In 1970 Evelyn del Rey was killed hi a car crash. After that,
Lester did not want to live in their house any more. He moved to New York, and so in a short time Carol
and I had lost not only Ewie, but Lester as well. It was a somber
time.
But time passed; and then, when we now and then saw Lester on a visit, it was clear that somehow he
was finding joy again. By and by it became clear that the joy had a name, and her name was Judy-Lynn
Benjamin. I wholly approved. For one thing, I would not have dared not to; I had introduced them, when
Lester was editing one of the magazines at the Galaxy complex and Judy-Lynn was the brand-new,
fresh-out-of-college junior editor who saw that everything got done for us. They were married a few
months later; and that, my children, is the story of how Del Rey Books got its name.
So I am not very objective about Lester del Rey, either as a writer or as a friend. As a writer, his
awards speak for his standing in his field, but they don't have to. The stories speak for themselves, and
what I can tell you in this short note cannot say as much for his writing as any of the works that follow.
So let me talk about him in other ways. As the person who dyed his beard green in silent protest when
his wife changed the color of her hair. As the tinkerer who redesigned the keyboard of his typewriter to
economize on finger movements. As the man who taught me so wickedly addictive a form of solitaire that
I have never since been able to play any other. As the coach, mentor, and advocate of a hundred newer
writers, some of them now in the top rank of science fiction.
Lester has spent a great deal of his time in passing on the writers' tribal lore to newcomers. One of them
was a brash young Ohio fan named Harlan Ellison. When Harlan heard I was writing these notes, he
demanded equal time.
This is what he said:
I arrived in New York in late 1955; I was notable for two qualities: a relentless determination to be a
professional writer, and squeaky-clean poverty. I had no place to live. Lester and his wonderful wife, the
late Evelyn del Rey, took me in for a couple of weeks till I could find digs in the city. Sitting at the del
Keys' dining room table, using the bartered Royal portable that had been virtually the only thing I'd
salvaged when I'd been kicked out of Ohio State University a few months previous, I wrote my first
story. Lester was unfailingly helpful. He would walk up behind me, read what I'd typed, see it was
syntactically crippled, and bat me across the back of the head. "Not who, dummy! Whoml" He provided
auctorial tips, he showed me how to cobble up the extrapolative science that would make my specious
concepts work, he edited the manuscript. Ewie fed me.
After Algis Budrys and Andre Norton, who were the first writers to take an interest in me, Lester was
the one who got me started thinking and writing as a professional. He wasn't kind, he was murderous;
and that is a brutal treasure more valuable than all the strokes given by well-intentioned and inept
amateurs who do not perceive one one-millionth as clearly as Lester did that writing is a killing craft, and
only the tough survive and prevail.
For that savaging, I will always love and honor Lester.
A decade or so ago, Lester and I were comparing notes in the
ril-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours way writers have when they suspect they may be up for the
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