There was logic to such a collaboration, for we complemented each other admirably. Garrett had a keen sense of plot structure and a solid grounding in the physical sciences—which were two of my weaknesses as a writer. On the other hand, his style was rough and choppy, his ability to create complex characters was limited, and—most critical—he was going through a bad phase in his life in which his writing disciplines had broken down and he found it almost impossible to finish the stories he began. And there was I, ambitious, productive, already phenomenally prolific and disciplined, with a liberal-arts literary background, a good sense of character, and a smoothly flowing style. If we worked together, we saw, we would balance one another's flaws and produce work superior to what either of us was doing individually. The alternative was to go on as we had been—Garrett writing almost nothing, and I writing a great deal but selling only a fraction of it.
So we went into business together. Garrett took me downtown to visit the New York science fiction editor—Howard Browne of Amazing, Bob Lowndes of Future, Leo Margulies of Fantastic Universe, and John W. Campbell of Astounding. He introduced me as a bright young star and announced that we planned to stand the science-fiction world upside-down with a series of spectacular stories. And, very quickly, all of those editors were buying stories from us—perhaps not so spectacular, but publishable enough so that whatever we wrote found a market at once.
The editor who was the center of our attention was Campbell. Not only did he pay the highest rates in the field—30 a word, triple what most of the others offered—but he was the pivotal figure of modern science fiction, an editor of almost legendary reputation who had discovered and developed such writers as Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Isaac Asimov, A.E. van Vogt, L. Sprague de Camp, and L. Ron Hubbard. Garrett, who had written several excellent stories for Campbell's magazine, revered him. And to me he was an awesome, titantic entity, the editor of editors; though I had been published in a number of minor magazines, I felt I would not truly be a professional science-fiction writer until I had appeared in Campbell's Astounding.
In one of our visits to Campbell's office he mentioned that he was having difficulties just then finding novels to run as serials. The hint was clear; we were young men of talent, ambition, and hybris; we went home that hot summer afternoon determined to concoct a novel for Campbell.
"Concoct" is the right word. Neither of us happened to have, at the moment, an idea suitable for a major story. So we began the process from the back end, drawing on our knowledge of the sort of novel John Campbell liked to publish, then attempting to invent a story that would be similar to the usual Astounding serial but different enough to merit publication. This is not the recipe for great science fiction. In devising our prototypical Campbell novel we had to filter out all those serials with sparks of real individuality, stories like Van Vogt's World of Null-A or Williamson's ... and Searching Mind or Kuttner's Fury. We wanted to play it safe, to make the big sale. And what we came up with was this:
Earthmen are superior to alien life-forms. Earthmen ^therefore may meddle with alien cultures at will, provided they are serving some higher goal. An acceptable higher goal is to meddle with an alien culture for its own good, especially if the meddling will also serve to enhance the quality of Earth culture.
Campbell seemed to have an insatiable appetite for that theme. It was, one might say, the basic CIA story: agents of Earth (meaning the United States of America) tamper with the politics of other planets (countries) for the alleged good of everybody. Of course, we knew very little if anything about the CIA in those distant days; but the blueprint for every slick trick that agency carried out in the postwar era can be found in the crumbling pulp pages of Astounding Science Fiction, I'm certain.
All one sweltering weekend we constructed an outline for a three-part serial to our theme. The plot was intricate, the action fast and furious. Our protagonist was a Scot named Murdoch or McTavish or something like that—another example of our cunning sense of market savvy, for Campbell, of Scots ancestry himself, was known to believe that the highest forms of terrestrial intelligence had evolved somewhere north of Edinburgh. Down to his office we hurried, and with passionate intensity we told him our tale. He listened in dour silence, pausing occasionally to stuff a new cigarette in his cigarette-holder or to squirt his awesome nose with nasal spray. And when we were done he leaned back, studied our tense and earnest faces carefully , and said."Not bad. But you' ve got it all wrong.''
He proceeded to turn our story inside out—getting rid of McTavish entirely and making the aliens the protagonists, something we had rejected as too un-Campbellian an approach. He invented the technique for cultural tampering on the spot—a school of theology. He took the solar system we had invented and rearranged it to serve the theme more effectively. We gaped as in five minutes he reconstructed, and vastly improved, all that we had done.
"Now go home and write it," he said. "Oh— don't do it as a serial. I want a series of novelets."
We staggered out, hurried to the subway, and by the time we were home had the outline of our story,
"The Chosen People," what is now the section titled "Kiv" in The Shrouded Planet. I worked out the plot of the story, Garrett most of the background, and he set to work on the first draft. Which of us wrote what is now, after twenty-five years, difficult for me to say; but I have no doubt at all that the opening paragraphs, with their sly spoof of pulp magazine narrative-hook technique, was his work, and that the final page of the story, with its hint at moral ambiguities, was mine. Beyond that I'm unable to assign responsibility for individual aspects of the story.
We finished it in a few days—11,000 words—and took it to Campbell one morning in August, 1955, stopping off en route at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine so that Garrett, a devout Anglican, could improve our luck with a bit of Holy Communion. Then we delivered the story, and, twenty-four fidgety hours later, got our verdict; Campbell was sending out a check for $330 and would we please get going on the sequel? Oh, and also, didn't we think "By Randall Garrett and Robert Silverberg" was an awfully cumbersome line for the table of contents? What about a pseudonym? "Robert Randall, perhaps," Campbell suggested.
I was mildly miffed at having my name disappear from the pages of Astounding so soon after it had arrived there—but, no matter, I was bound to sell something non-collaborative to Campbell sooner or later. The important thing was that he had taken the story. I was a Campbell writer at last! (And I lay awake all that night, mulling the awesomeness of it all.)
Excited or not, we had other stories to do for other editors, and two months went by before we delivered the second "Robert Randall" story to Campbell— "The Promised Land," we called it, now the "Sindi" section of The Shrouded Planet. To my horror,