Read Seekers of Tomorrow for Free Online

aunt treated him with such abruptness that he was convinced she thoroughly hated him. This created a bizarre situation. The boy would come running into the house to impart something breathlessly to a woman he thought was his mother. He would be jarred by a curt rebuff from her twin. Every time his aunt visited the home, this situation posed itself until it became a continuing and insoluble nightmare. Was the woman standing in front of him "friend" or "foe?" His only "friend" was a sister, Laura, born in 1917. The two got along well, but the seven-year gap in their ages made her always too young to be much of an ally. So loneliness directed his alert and curious mind into everything. He blew up the basement with his chemistry experiments. Manually dexterous, he repaired bicycles for other kids. For their parents he revitalized electrical appliances. He read omnivo-rously, particularly myths, legends, folklore, and anthropolo-gy. He discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes and John Carter of Mars at the age of 71/2 . At 8 he was perusing Jeans, Eddington, and astronomy texts.
    At 14 he was packed off to Blair Academy, an exclusive boys' school in Blairstown, New Jersey. He succeeded in making only a few friends there, none of them instructors, whose "errors" he corrected in class. Sports did not attract him, though he developed a good game of tennis and a mild interest in intramural football.
    Despite four years at Blair, he never obtained a diploma. He was strong in physics and Spanish, but his marks ran the gamut in other subjects.
    One of the few times he and his father saw eye to eye was when the latter suggested that he be enrolled at the Massa-chusetts Institute of Technology in 1928. Perhaps his reasonableness in this was partly motivated by John's ingenuity. At 15, in order to circumvent directives, he had become so facile in the use of logic that the father found himself hard-pressed to justify himself, his ideas, or his behavior. In still another respect, a disciplinary peculiarity of his father had a direct bearing in sharpening his embryonic writing skills. The older Campbell frequently checked the boy's homework, and if he didn't approve of a phrase he would demand it be rewritten. To save revision time, John made a game of rewording the phrase in the same line. The result was increased dexterity and economy in the use of words. Though he did not mingle much socially with the other students at MIT, John became very close with his roommate Rosario Honore Trembley, who had a sense of fun and humor the teen-age Campbell found compatible. That, how-ever, was as far as he cared to go in conforming. In class, Campbell was up to his old trick of straightening out instruc-tors. In one instance, this penchant made him a friend. He challenged, before the students, a statement by Professor Blanchard, his chemistry instructor, regarding the
    "impossi-bility" of amalgamating iron. Campbell brought in an experi-mental arrangement and performed the
    "impossible" in the classroom. Instead of being angry, the professor was delight-ed and began to take a personal interest in Campbell, ex-pressing sincere disappointment when his "prodigy" did not go on to make chemistry his life's work.
    John had instinctively gravitated toward science fiction. He bought argosy fairly regularly and weird tales whenever he was certain it contained science fiction. He spotted the first issue of amazing stories when it appeared in April, 1926, and became a regular customer. When science-fiction au-thors'
    imaginations showed signs of breaking out of the confines of the solar system, Campbell was enthralled. Smith's The Skylark of Space established a lifelong admira-tion for that author and an immediate desire to emulate.
    Stemming from his awareness that science-fiction authors frequently made obvious scientific errors, his first writing attempt, a short story called Invaders from the Infinite, was aimed at correcting one of the more