As in “The Weapon Too Dreadful to Use,” the story dealt with racial prejudice on an interplanetary scale. I kept coming back to this theme very frequently-something not surprising in a Jew growing up during the Hitler era.
Once again my naivete shows, since I assume not only an intelligent race on Mars, where such a thing is most unlikely even by 1939 evidence, but assume the Martians to be sufficiently like Earthmen to make interbreeding possible. (I can only shake my head wearily. I knew better in 1939;
I really did. I just accepted science fictional cliches, that’s all. Eventually, I stopped doing that.)
My treatment of atomic power was also primitive in the extreme, and I knew better than that, too, even though at the time I wrote the story, uranium fission had not been discovered. The Tweenie’s mysterious reference to “a function of x2plus y2plus z2” merely means that I had taken analytic geometry at Columbia not long before and was flaunting my knowledge of the equation for the sphere.
This was the first story in which I tried to introduce the romantic motif, however light. It had to be a failure. At the time of the writing of this story, I had still never had a date with a girl.
And yet the greatest embarrassment in a story simply littered with embarrassments was the following line in the seventh paragraph: “… For it, he had become a middle-aged man at thirty-the first flush of youth long gone-”
Well, I wrote it at nineteen. To me, the first flush of youth was long gone by the time one reached thirty. I know better now, of course, since more than thirty years later, I find that I am still in the first flush of youth.
There was some reason for self-congratulation in connection with “Half-Breed,” however. My fourth published story, it was the longest to appear up to then. With a length of nine thousand words, it was listed on the table of contents as a “novelette,” my first published story in that class.
My name also appeared on the cover of the magazine. It was the first time that had ever happened.
Almost immediately after finishing “Half-Breed,” I began “The Secret Sense,” submitting it to John Campbell on June 21, 1939, and receiving it back on the twenty-eighth. Pohl could not place it either.
Toward the end of 1940, however, a pair of sister magazines, Cosmic Stories and Stirring Science Stories , were being planned, with Don Wollheim, a fellow Futurian, selected as editor. The magazines were starting on a microbudget, however, and the only way they could come into being was to get stories for nothing-at least for the initial issues. For the purpose, Wollheim appealed to the Futurians and they came through. The first issues consisted entirely (I think) of stories by Futurians, under their own names or pseudonyms.
I, too, was asked, and since by that time I was convinced I could sell “The Secret Sense” nowhere, I donated it to Wollheim, who promptly accepted it.
That was that, except that, at the time, yet another magazine, Comet Stories , was coming into existence, under the editorship of F. Orlin Tremaine, who had been Campbell’s predecessor at Astounding .
I went to see Tremaine several times, since I thought I might sell him a story or two. On the second visit, on December 5, 1940, Tremaine spoke with some heat concerning the forthcoming birth of Wollheim’s magazines. While he himself was paying top rates, he said, Wollheim was getting stories for nothing and with these could put out magazines that would siphon readership from those magazines that paid. Any author who donated stories to Wollheim, and thus contributed to the destruction of competing magazines who paid, should be blacklisted in the field.
I listened with horror, knowing that I had donated a story for nothing. It was a story, to be sure, that I had felt to be worth nothing, but it had not occurred to me that I was undercutting other authors by setting up unfair competition.
I did not quite have the nerve to tell Tremaine I was one of the guilty ones, but as soon as I got home I wrote to Wollheim asking him to accept one of two alternatives: either he could run the story under a pseudonym so that my guilt would be hidden, or if he insisted on using my name he could pay me five dollars so that if the question ever arose I could honestly deny having given him the story for nothing.
Wollheim chose to use my name and sent me a check for five dollars, but did so with remarkably poor grace (and, to be sure, he was not, in those days, noted for any suavity of character). He accompanied the check with an angry letter that said, in part, that I was being paid an enormous word rate because it was only my name that had value and for that I was receiving $2.50 a word. Perhaps he was correct. If so, the word rate was indeed a record, one that I have not surpassed to this very day. On the other hand, the total payment also set a record. No other story I have written commanded so low a payment.
Years later, the well-known science fiction historian Sam Moskowitz wrote a short biography of me, which appeared in the April 1962 Amazing . In the course of the biography, he describes a version of the above events and mistakenly states that it was John Campbell who was angry at the donation of stories without pay and that it was he who threatened me with blacklisting.
Not so!
Campbell had nothing to do with it, and, what’s more, would have been incapable of making threats. If he had known in advance that I intended to donate a story for nothing to a competing magazine, he would have pointed out my stupidity to me in a perfectly friendly way and would have let it go at that.
As a matter of fact, while I tried to keep my guilt a secret from Tremaine, I had no intention of hiding it from Campbell. On my very next visit to him, on December 16, 1940, I confessed in full, and he shrugged it off.
“Campbell, I imagine, was quite certain that no magazine that had to depend on free stories could last for long, since the only stories so available would have been rejected by everyone else. And he would be right. Cosmic Stories lasted only three issues, and Stirring Science Stories only four. “The Secret Sense” remained the only story of mine they published.
As for Comet Stories , that lasted five issues, and though Tremaine hesitated over a couple of my stories, he never bought one.
The Secret Sense
The lilting strains of a Strauss waltz filled the room. The music waxed and waned beneath the sensitive fingers of Lincoln Fields, and through half-closed eyes he could almost see whirling figures pirouetting about the waxed floor of some luxurious salon.
Music always affected him that way. It filled his mind with dreams of sheer beauty and transformed his room into a paradise of sound. His hands flickered over the piano in the last delicious combinations of tones and then slowed reluctantly to a halt.
He sighed and for a moment remained absolutely silent as if trying to extract the last essence of beauty from the dying echoes. Then he turned and smiled faintly at the other occupant of the room.
Garth Jan smiled in turn but said nothing. Garth had a great liking for Lincoln Fields, though little understanding. They were worlds apart-literally-for Garth hailed from the giant underground cities of Mars while Fields was the product of sprawling Terrestrial New York.
“How was that. Garth, old fellow?” questioned Fields doubtfully.
Garth shook his head. He spoke in his precise, painstaking manner, “I listened attentively and can truly say that it was not unpleasant. There is a certain rhythm, a cadence of sorts, which, indeed, is rather soothing. But beautiful? No!”