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ten-billion-year-old civilization on Earth, confronted by the final cooling of the sun, which utilizes "phase velocity" as a means of going faster than light and escaping to another system. Campbell explained it this way:
    Phase velocity is due to a wave traveling along the wave chain. A man can go faster than the train he is riding on by walking toward the engine, but practically speaking he cannot reach the station before the train. Similarly, the phase velocity cannot reach the station before the light or X-rays do. But for countless ages the light has poured forth from the sun, and a message sent down that long train would be able to go many, many trillions of miles at a speed far greater than that of light.
    Utilizing this principle, earth ships, in an attempt to colo-nize planets around the star Betelgeuse, fight a series of battles with sentient force-creatures in that system. Though mindless, the force creatures adapt to a series of ever-more-potent weapons and give the earth men quite a tussle before they are exterminated. Few of the students at MIT during that period seemed to be interested in science fiction, but Campbell did secure the friendship of Norbert Weiner, professor of mathematics who is today hailed as the godfather of "thinking machines." Weiner helped the young author with the scientific back-ground of some of those early stories and may have been the inspiration of the "thinking machine" ideas. The names (Arcot, Wade, and Morey) of a group of characters in Piracy Preferred (amazing stories, June, 1930) provided the label for a major series that was to catapult Campbell to the top rank among science-fiction writers. In the world of 2126 a super criminal, Wade, with the technology to make his high-speed rocket ship invisible, uses a gas for his antisocial activities, that will penetrate metal and temporarily paralyze all who come in contact with it. He puckishly leaves stock certificates for Piracy, Inc., in the amount of money he steals.
    A team of young geniuses—Richard Arcot, a physicist; William Morey, mathematician and son of the president of Transcontinental Airways—in company with John Fuller, a design engineer, chase the pirate into an orbital trap around the earth. The culprit is permitted to join the group instead of being punished. The sympathetic handling of the "evildo-er" may have been a holdover from E. E. Smith's creation of the popular
    "villain" DuQuesne in The Skylark of Space.
    The group, in a ship powered by a new discovery which causes all molecules to move in the same direction and uses the power derived from the heat so created, takes off for the planet Venus in Solarite (amazing stories, November, 1930). There they find two warring races and side with one against the other, employing Wade's invisibility device and paralyzing gas in the process. When the enemy fathoms the secret of invisibility and uses it against them, pellets of radium paint are employed to locate them, whereupon they are finished off with a molecular-motion weapon.
    amazing stories quarterly was an 81/2 by 11 pulp pro-duction, almost 3/4 of an inch thick, featuring 130,000 words of text and plenty of illustrations for 50 cents. This magazine would sometimes run three complete novels in a single issue and publication in it was a mark of prestige. The Black Star Passes, which received the cover of the Fall, 1930, edition, focused attention on Campbell and launched him on his first high wave of popularity, which was to challenge that of E. E. Smith, whose Skylark Three was running concurrently in the monthly amazing stories.
    In The Black Star Passes, an ancient race of hydrogen-breathing creatures living on a planet circling a vagrant dead star sweeps close to our solar system and decides to transfer to a fresh planet, Earth. In thousands of words of thrilling action (and many thousand dull words of scientific gobbledy-gook) they are defeated by the team of Arcot, Wade, Morey, and Fuller and retire to their