Read Seekers of Tomorrow for Free Online Page A

widespread misconcep-tions: that there would be a problem in heating an interplan-etary ship in space. The story, sent to amazing stories, was accepted. Elated, Campbell pounded out a longer story, When the Atoms Failed, and that, too, was accepted. His enthusiasm waned, however, as the months passed and nei-ther story appeared. Home on vacation in the summer of 1929, Campbell decided to visit T. O'Conor Sloane, the editor who had been in correspondence with him, and straighten out the matter. Now six-foot-one, with hawklike features, he presented a formidable appearance as he was ushered into Sloane's edito-rial offices at 381 Fourth Avenue, New York. Sloane had a flowing, long white beard. At the age of 80 he had finally been given the title of "Editor," following the passing of the magazine from the ownership of its founder, Hugo Gernsback, to that of The E. P. Co., Inc.
    Despite his appearance, the old man was anything but a stuffed shirt. Kindly, almost genial, he made the embryonic author at home and then owned up to the fact that the manuscript of Invaders from the Infinite had been lost. Every corner of the office had been searched but it couldn't be found. Did the author, perhaps, have a carbon?
    He did not?
    Well, his career would have to be launched with When the Atoms Failed, to be scheduled soon. In retrospect, Campbell always felt that the lost story would have more aptly been cast as an article and it was better lost.
    Sloane more than made up for the disappointment by carrying an illustration for When the Atoms Failed on the cover of the issue in which it appeared and beginning the blurb of the story: "Our new author, who is a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shows marvelous abil-ity at combining science with romance, evolving a piece of fiction of real scientific and literary value." The story did contain original ideas. First, though the idea of thinking brains in robots had been used frequently before, the concept of a stationary supercalculator, like today's Uni-vac, had not appeared in the magazines. Scientists in science fiction, never sissies, previously disdained to use even an adding machine in whipping together mathematical concepts destined to change the very shape of the cosmos. Not so Steven Waterson, Campbell's hero, who, improving on the Integraph, an electrical machine capable of calculus in use at MIT in 1930, built himself a pre-space-age electronic "brain" to aid in his problems. Secondly, it delved into the greater power to be derived from material energy—the actual destruction of matter—as opposed to atomic energy. This knowledge enables Steven Waterson to defeat a group of invading Martians, force the nations of the earth to scrap all their weapons, and set himself up as
    "president" of the planet. The issue in which Campbell's first published story, When the Atoms Failed, appeared was dated January, 1930.
    By one of those coincidences that seemed destined to gird the faith of doubting astrologers, just then a new magazine of science fiction appeared on the newsstands. The first issue of astounding stories of super science, too, was dated Janu-ary, 1930, and this was the magazine that Campbell was to make his literary monument.
    A sequel to When the Atoms failed, The Metal Horde, appeared in the April, 1930, amazing stories. This at-tempted to show what would happen if calculators were refined to the point where they could reason. Scientist Steven Waterson, in the course of the story, defeats and destroys a thinking machine (originating on a planet of the star Sirius) that has traveled through space for 1600 years accompanied by a brood of obedient mechanicals intent upon setting up a world of machines on Earth. Elements of J. Schlossel's The Second Swarm (amazing stories quarterly, Spring, 1928) are apparent in this story and in The Voice of the Void, his next appearance, in the Summer, 1930, amazing stories quarterly. This novelette tells of a