Since I am frequently called on to discuss the future of man, I can't help using EVEREST to point out what an expert futurist I am. After all, I predicted that Mount Everest would never be climbed, five months after it was climbed.

Nowadays it is quite fashionable to publish anthologies of original science fiction stories, and I rather disapprove of this. It drains off some of the stories and readers that might otherwise go to the magazines. I don't want that to happen. I think that magazines are essential to science fiction.

Is my feeling born of mere nostalgia? Does it arise out of the memory of what science fiction magazines meant to me in my childhood and of how they gave me my start as a writer? In part, yes, I suppose; but in part it is the result of an honest feeling that they do playa vital role.

Where can a young writer get a start? Magazines, appearing six or twelve times a year, simply must have stories. An anthology can delay publication till the desired stories come in; a magazine cannot. Driven by unswervable deadlines, a magazine must accept an occasional substandard story, and an occasional young writer gets a start while he is still perhaps of only marginal quality. That was how I got my start, in fact.

It means, to be sure, that the reader is subjected to an occasional amateurish story in the magazine, but the amateur writer who wrote it gets enough encouragementto continue working and to become (just possibly) a great writer.

When the anthologies of original science fiction first appeared, however, they were novelties. I never really thought they would come to much, and had no feeling of contributing to an impending doom when I wrote for them. In fact, since they paid better than the magazines usually did, I felt good about writing for them.

The first of the breed was New Tales of Space and Time, edited by Raymond J. Healy (Henry Holt, 1951),

and for it I wrote In a Good Cause-a story that was eventually included in NIGHTFALL AND OTHER STORIES.

A few years later, August Derleth was editing an anthology of originals, and for it I wrote THE PAUSE.

The Pause

The white powder was confined within a thin-walled, transparent capsule. The capsule was heat-sealed into a double strip of parafilm. Along that strip of parafilm were other capsules at six-inch intervals.

The strip moved. Each capsule in the course of events rested for one minute on a metal jaw immediately beneath a mica window. On another portion of the face of the radiation counter a number clicked out upon an unrolling cylinder of paper. The capsule moved on; the next took its place.

The number printed at 1:45 P.M. was 308. A minute later 256 appeared. A minute later, 391. A minute later, 477. A minute later, 202. A minute later, 251. A minute later, 000. A minute later, 000. A minute later, 000. A minute later, 000.

Shortly after 2 P.M. Mr. Alexander Johannison passed by the counter and the comer of one eye stubbed itself over the row of figures. Two steps past the counter he stopped and returned.

He ran the paper cylinder backward, then restored its position and said, “Nuts!”

He said it with vehemence. He was tall and thin, with big-knuckled hands, sandy hair, and light eyebrows. He looked tired and, at the moment, perplexed.

Gene Damelli wandered his way with the same easy carelessness he brought to all his actions. He was dark, hairy, and on the short side. His nose had once been broken and it made him look curiously unlike the popular conception of the nuclear physicist.

Damelli said, “My damned Geiger won't pick up a thing, and I'm not in the mood to go over the wiring. Got a cigarette?”

Johannison held out a pack. “What about the others in the building?”

“I haven't tried them, but I guess they haven't all gone.”

“Why not? My counter isn't registering either.”

“No kidding. You see? All the money invested, too. It doesn't mean a thing. Let's step out for a Coke.”

Johannison said with greater vehemence than he intended, “No! I'm going to see George Duke. I want to see his machine. If it's off-”

Damelli tagged along. “It won't be off, Alex. Don't be an ass.”

George Duke listened to Johannison and watched him disapprovingly over rimless glasses. He was an old-young man with little hair and less patience.

He said, “I'm busy.”

“Too busy to tell me if your rig is working, for heaven's sake?”

Duke stood up. “Oh, hell, when does a man have time to work around here?” His slide rule fell with a thud over a scattering of ruled paper as he rounded his desk.

He stepped to a cluttered lab table and lifted the heavy gray leaden top from a heavier gray leaden container. He reached in with a two-foot-long pair of tongs, and took out a small silvery cylinder.

Duke said grimly, “Stay where you are.”

Johannison didn't need the advice. He kept his distance. He had not been exposed to any abnormal dosage of radioactivity over the past month but there was no sense getting any closer than necessary to “hot” cobalt.

Still using the tongs, and with arms held well away from his body, Duke brought the shining bit of metal that contained the concentrated radioactivity up to the window of his counter. At two feet, the counter should have chattered its head off. It didn't.

Duke said, “Guk!” and let the cobalt container drop. He scrabbled madly for it and lifted it against the window again. Closer.

There was no sound. The dots of light on the scaler did, not show. Numbers did not step up and up.

Johannison said, “Not even background noise.” Damelli said, “Holy jumping Jupiter!”

Duke put the cobalt tube back into its leaden sheath, as gingerly as ever, and stood there, glaring.

Johannison burst into Bill Everard's office, with Damelli at his heels. He spoke for excited minutes, his bony hands knuckly white on Everard's shiny desk. Everard listened, his smooth, fresh-shaven cheeks turning pink and his plump neck bulging out a bit over his stiff, white collar.

Everard looked at Damelli and pointed a questioning thumb at Johannison. Damelli shrugged, bringing his hands forward, palms upward, and corrugating his forehead.

Everard said, “I don't see how they can all go wrong.”

“They have, that's all,” insisted Johannison. “They all went dead at about two o'clock. That's over an hour ago now and none of them is back in order. Even George Duke can't do anything about it. I'm telling you, it isn't the counters.”

“You're saying it is.”

“I'm saying they're not working. But that's not their fault. There's nothing for them to work on.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean there isn't any radioactivity in this place. In this whole building. Nowhere.”

“I don't believe you.”

“Listen, if a hot cobalt cartridge won't start up a counter, maybe there's something wrong with every counter we try. But when that same cartridge won't discharge a gold-leaf electroscope and when it won't even fog a photographic film, then there's something wrong with the cartridge.”

“All right,” said Everard, “so it's a dud. Somebody made a mistake and never filled it.”

“The same cartridge was working this morning, but never mind that. Maybe cartridges can get switched somehow. But I got that hunk of pitchblende from our display box on the fourth floor and that doesn't register either. You're not going to tell me that someone forgot to put the uranium in it.”

Everard rubbed his ear. “What do you think, Damelli?”

Damelli shook his head. “I don't know, boss. Wish I did.”

Johannison said, “It's not the time for thinking. It's a time for doing. You've got to call Washington.”